Fearing the Voters

 

By David K. Shipler 

            A paradox of dictatorship is its vulnerability. The pinnacle of power feels precarious. The people must not be allowed to gather force.

            In full-blown dictatorships, such as China and the Soviet Union, the autocracy is preserved by outright oppression: sham elections, imprisonments, political assassinations. In democracies evolving into autocracies, such as the United States, the methodology is more complex. Alternative power centers—the press, the judiciary, the legislature, the universities—are undermined and tamed, often by twisting legal tools into political weapons.

A key target is the voting process.

So it is that Donald Trump attempts to rule the United States, with the upcoming midterm elections a special project of manipulation and intimidation.

In a term less than half over, he has already grown the executive branch into a semi-dictatorship. Practically alone, he decides how taxes are spent, how wars are fought, how foreign trade is conducted, how allies are treated, what scientific research is pursued, which opponents are prosecuted. He tries to decree what history is taught, what data is collected, what genders exist, what vaccines are administered, what art portrays, whom law firms defend, what vocabulary is banned. Even in the private sector, the noble aspirations of diversity, equity, and inclusion are forbidden under penalty of funding loss and investigation. 

Trump rarely defers to Congress or the courts. He evades both the legislature’s budgets and many rulings by federal district judges. His Republican majority in Congress is cowed, and his Republicans on appeals courts and the Supreme Court usually acquiesce. As a result, in the face of the Trumpists’ zealotry, the Framers’ ingenious mechanism of checks and balances among government’s three branches has sputtered practically to a halt.

And now comes an election. It is a danger point for the fearful at the top. Their totalitarian mindset, which seeks ideological conformity throughout society, risks repudiation. Trump’s aura of power, wielded with mafia-like threats, confronts the curse of obsolescence. A dirty fight is in the offing.

Although bullies like Trump are also cowards, he has surrounded himself with acolytes who worship his authoritarianism, who are ruthless and contemptuous of democratic norms. How American constitutional culture produced such people is a confounding question, but now that they govern, they have tasted blood and are poised to slash the electoral process with every available means. Do not expect retreat from merciless characters who are backed into a corner.

They began immediately in Trump’s second term. His Justice Department dropped ongoing lawsuits challenging restrictive election laws that worked against Black voters. The department’s voting-rights unit was decimated, from about thirty officials to fewer than ten. Security protections against Chinese, Russian, and Iranian hacking and internet deception were downgraded or demolished: the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency gutted, the FBI task force to counter foreign influence dismantled, the system of intelligence-sharing with local and state officials on cyber threats terminated.

Trump now seeks to intimidate local election workers by threatening criminal prosecutions if any ineligible voters cast ballots, although hardly any such fraud has been identified. He calls for federal control of elections whose conduct the Constitution explicitly assigns to the states.

Like a massive drone attack, some of his weapons get through while some are repelled by the corroded shield of checks and balances. His executive order requiring proof of citizenship to vote was blocked by a judge, and his attempt to curtail mail-in ballots (used by more Democrats than Republicans) has been stymied in the courts. Nor has he been able to get Congress to pass his proposed law mandating those and other restrictions.

His Justice Department has sued 30 states for personal details on their registered voters; judges have dismissed 26 of the suits, while 16 Republican-led states have complied by providing driver’s licenses, Social Security numbers, and other information on individuals. He wanted the Postal Service to refuse to deliver any ballots in states that did not comply with his data demand, but a preliminary injunction against the draconian step was upheld by the Supreme Court.

Trump’s campaign to sow distrust in elections has continued unabated. Adherents of his lie that he won in 2020 now populate the highest reaches of his administration, from attorneys general Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche to head of the civil rights division Harmeet Dhillon to FBI director Kash Patel. Driven by Trump’s obsession to prove his fantasy of victory, officials slavishly mobilize prosecutorial powers: The FBI seized ballots from 2020 in two Georgia and Arizona jurisdictions. The Justice Department is seeking the names of all 2020 election officials in Fulton County, Georgia. And anyone who wants to be nominated for a federal judgeship must not speak the truth and say that Joe Biden was duly elected.

The purpose is not just to rewrite the past but to lay the groundwork for the future, one that opens the public’s minds to false claims of vote-rigging and election corruption. Barrages of Trumpist lawsuits are inevitable following narrow Republican defeats in House races next month. Both parties are enlisting battalions of lawyers for protracted court cases that will probably rise to a Supreme Court that has been Trump-friendly on most election issues. Close election results tied up in court challenges could delay seating newly-elected Democrats.

            In a nightmare scenario sketched by the conservative former appeals court judge Michael Luttig, “even a decisive victory for Democrats and a resounding repudiation of Trump and the MAGA Republicans at the polls in November will not guarantee that a Democratic majority-elect will be seated in the 120th Congress on January 3,” he writes in The New Republic. House Speaker Mike Johnson could orchestrate a refusal to seat Democratic members, Luttig warns. He outlines the procedure Johnson might use, noting that the Constitution makes each house “the Judge of the elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members.” He calls it Trump’s “final unlawful rampage,” which would ultimately be settled by a Supreme Court that has facilitated Trump, granted him broad immunity from prosecution, and permitted most of his swaggering lawlessness.

            This Court has already assaulted the electoral system by neutering the venerable 1965 Voting Rights Act, which broke down many obstacles to Blacks’ political representation. Since many more Blacks vote Democratic than Republican, the Republicans in state legislatures and the courts have worked assiduously to restore their power to discriminate by gerrymandering and other means.

In 2013, the Supreme Court overturned the law’s longstanding provision requiring states and districts with a history of racial discrimination to pre-clear with the Justice Department any change in its voting laws and procedures.

Then last April, the Court dealt the act a fatal blow by ruling that it was no longer enough to document the discriminatory effect of a districting map. Now, intent would have to be shown, a virtually impossible proof when legislators are canny enough not to say so out loud. Several states rushed to redistrict in favor of Republicans, with California and Virginia doing so to favor Democrats. (The new Virginia map was thrown out by the state’s supreme court on a procedural technicality, leaving the Republicans with a net gain thanks to the Republican-dominated Supreme Court.)

Dire predictions are being made. Trump might declare a state of emergency and seize ballots and voting machines. Trump might deploy troops to polling places. He might station ICE agents there, intimidating even US citizens whose complexions are not snowy white. After all, being detained by ICE, even mistakenly, has been less than delightful.

Whether all these methods, taken together, will undermine the integrity of the elections is the question. Whether they are a dry run for the 2028 presidential election is the larger question. They are forms of defensive aggression, prompted by fear at the top of the voters at the bottom.

 Experts who have studied transitions from democracy to autocracy see what Steven Levitsky of Harvard calls “competitive authoritarianism” taking shape in the US—where an opposition exists but cannot overcome a rigged system to gain political power. Does that describe the United States? A tentative answer—but not the final one—will come on November 3 and its aftermath.