As mentioned I get the NYT's morning newsletter. Today's is a true classic. It is a meditation on 'why the anti-democracy movement' is going on. The obvious problem is that there isn't, in fact, an anti-democracy movement in the United States. But let's not let that bother us!
“What is striking about the movement around the supposed theft of the 2020 election,” Charles writes, “is how much of it — the ideas, and rhetoric, and even the people involved in it — predated Trump’s presidency, and in some cases even his candidacy.”
Indeed, except the newsletter never mentions the name "Stacey Abrams" even once, nor the controversy she engendered about whether the election in Georgia was stolen by then-Secretary of State now-Governor Brian Kemp. As a consequence, they make two key errors that lead the whole piece into paranoid musings about anti-democratic fascists endangering America.
1) That suspicion of elections is per se an anti-democratic expression, and,
2) That it is only the right wing that does it.
Because of these errors, they never get around to asking whether there might be something about the nature of our elections that might be causing people not to trust the results. Abrams had a pretty good case that the Georgia election was extremely suspect: I know, I voted in it and wrote about it at the time. The voting machines did not produce printed receipts that might be used for an audit. Ballots were a plastic card with a magnetic strip on the back, which allegedly recorded your votes but had no visible signs of having done so -- and which were immediately wiped and re-used all day after they were swiped in the 'counting' machine.
The process was thus completely opaque and impossible to audit, but no worries: one of the candidates for the office being voted on was in complete charge of the election, and swore that he would oversee any recount efforts as well.
That doesn't mean Abrams won, of course. It does mean that suspicion of the election being dishonest was extremely well-grounded. If this is a terrifying prospect, there are easy things we could do to ensure that elections were more trustworthy. Having a print-out ballot so you can see that your votes were correctly recorded, and which can be compared against electronic returns in an audit is a good start. Voter IDs are a good start. Real IDs are connected to proof of citizenship centrally maintained, so that voting officials can check the ID both against your face and signature in person, and then verify that your birth certificate or passport is on file.
On the left people worry that these are voter-suppression efforts (and occasionally on the right as well), but there is no need that should be true. We could embark upon a campaign to make sure that all eligible voters have proper IDs and their proofs recorded in the system. We could establish -- pre-election -- independent bipartisan bodies tasked with auditing the returns. We could do the sorts of things we would do, in a system that was designed to be carefully audited to prevent abuse.
If we did those things, a lot of this would evaporate.
Finally, 'anti-democracy' is arguably a bipartisan impulse (if not on either side a movement). Democrats are working very hard right now to try to prevent democracy from informing abortion laws, leveraging courts, bureaucracies, and executive orders to derail efforts by actual democratically-elected legislatures. The Republicans do, certainly, benefit from the Senate and the Electoral College to some degree, but until this very year Democrats benefitted from the Supreme Court being willing to strip the democratic branches (and direct democratic votes, as in the case of California Propositions passed by referenda) of the power to rule on major questions. There's no anti-democracy movement, but there is a real impulse on both sides to try to set one's preferences beyond question.
