The last two years have seen a great deal of handwringing about the future of democracy. Scores of commentators, left and right, have claimed America’s democratic institutions are under siege. Some, mostly on the left, advocate a variety of changes to the Constitution in order to make our electoral system more “representative,” i.e., more conducive to Democratic victories. Others, especially those on the populist right, have a newfound enthusiasm for playing dirty, urging Donald Trump and other Republicans to secure victories at any cost. Still others, believing that Trump’s election signaled a disease at the heart of democracy itself, have proposed moving from democratic republicanism to some form of rule by a technocratic elite.
American political traditions and institutions are stronger than any of us realizes. Our ideological divides are gaping and growing, and yet elections in America are orderly, transfers of power are peaceful, and seriously disputed results are rare. Even so, partisans on both the left and right are doing their part to undercut American confidence in our elections—and by extension in our democratic institutions and government.
The populist right’s obsession with voter fraud, encouraged by the grossly irresponsible claims of the president, plays a role. With elections in Arizona and Florida too close to call on November 10, Trump blabbed on Twitter about supposed conspiracies. “Trying to STEAL two big elections in Florida! We are watching closely!” When Kyrsten Sinema passed Martha McSally in Arizona’s cumbersome vote-counting process (which is always slow thanks to the legal requirement to check the validity of every absentee ballot and, further, confirm that the absentee voter didn’t also show up at the polls), the president grumbled to reporters that “all of a sudden, out of the wilderness, they find a lot of votes.” He was wrong. It wasn’t something “out of the wilderness”; the race was always too close to call and has now been settled correctly. But a lot of people on the right think McSally conceded unnecessarily and ergo that her victory was stolen.
In Florida, the election-night leads of Senate candidate Rick Scott and gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis, both Republicans, have diminished as vote counting proceeds. The situation is more problematic in Florida than in Arizona thanks to incompetence in Miami-Dade County and at least the appearance of fraud in Broward County. Both counties lean heavily Democratic. Broward’s election board, led by supervisor Brenda Snipes, has fallen afoul of laws and regulations again and again—results being posted before polls closed, ballot misprints, discrepancies between official voter turnout numbers and the number of votes cast, and so on. Since election night, Snipes and company have failed to report ongoing return tallies, as state law requires, prompting a lawsuit from the Scott campaign.
These problems are serious and deserve the scrutiny of the courts and the news media. But Trump’s blundering, fact-free responses seem calculated to keep fair-minded people from taking Florida’s genuine irregularities seriously. “Large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere,” he tweeted on November 12, “and many ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible—ballots massively infected.” Sounding for all the world like your conspiracy-theorist Uncle Clyde at Thanksgiving dinner, Trump said in an interview with the Daily Caller on November 15: “When people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again.”
All this recalls Trump’s preposterous preelection warnings of massive vote-rigging in 2016 and postelection claim that “millions” had voted illegally. “I won the popular vote,” he claimed, “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Who were these millions, and where were their votes cast? Early in his presidency, Trump set up a panel to investigate these claims, but it was quietly disbanded in January, perhaps because it couldn’t produce stories of “millions” voting illegally. To say voter fraud doesn’t happen would be to say electoral politics is exempt from the human propensity to cheat—of course it happens, as the aforementioned Brenda Snipes reminds us. But the president’s grossly irresponsible claims only renew the media’s license to dismiss voter fraud as a partisan “myth.”
On the left, meanwhile, the idea has circulated since 2016 that the nation’s political institutions are rigged in favor of Republicans. In this mindset, on display in a raft of books by left-liberal authors and throughout the op-ed pages, the Democrats have consistently underperformed at the polls not because their message is out of step with many American voters but as a result of outmoded constitutional and statutory mechanisms. The Electoral College is a “counter-majoritarian” institution designed to give an advantage to low-population rural states over large, populous ones. The GOP’s decade-long ascendancy in the House of Representatives is explicable mainly by gerrymandering—the drawing of district lines in ways favorable to Republicans. The New York Times recently editorialized that the House should add 158 new members in order to make it “proportionally similar to most modern democracies”: that is, more Democratic. The Senate is said to be an “unrepresentative” body: California has 39 million residents, Wyoming only half a million, but both send exactly two senators to Washington—two Democratic senators in California’s case, two Republican senators in the case of Wyoming. Liberals have seriously floated the idea of giving an extra senator to more populous states.
The GOP, they claim, even has an unfair advantage over the judiciary: Thanks to the Electoral College’s giving us presidents without majorities and senators from states where there are tiny numbers of people, judicial nominees do not represent the wishes of the country. Washington Post columnist Philip Bump summed this argument up just before Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote: He “will be the first justice nominated by someone who lost the popular vote to earn his seat on the bench with support from senators representing less than half of the country while having his nomination opposed by a majority of the country.”
Such objections are silly—a more sophisticated version of the we-wuz-robbed grousing one associates with the populist right. Our constitutional order is as old as our country and has long been the envy of the world. Nobody forced people of liberal dispositions to congregate in highly populous urban areas where their votes are diluted. And in any case, unless the critics are advocating for direct democracy, electoral power must always be distributed geographically and thus unevenly. If the voters of Wyoming are to be granted any representation at all in Congress, that representation must be disproportionately potent.
Liberals see a system rigged against them. Trump and his acolytes complain that they’ve been robbed. Both mindsets, though proceeding from immensely different ideologies, arise from a similar un-American impulse—the desire to blame others for one’s own failures. The most obvious lesson of November 6 is that our country’s electoral system is vibrant and strong. Candidates, both good and bad, won across the country, and those who lost gave way to the winners. Concession speeches are often painful to watch, but they remind us that we are a magnanimous and law-abiding people. Martha McSally knew this when she conceded the race to Kyrsten Sinema. “I wish her all success as she represents Arizona in the Senate,” McSally said. “I am convinced Arizona is the best state in the country and our best days are still yet to come.”
