No matter who wins this year’s presidential election, nearly half of the country will believe he did so unfairly.
This sentiment is particularly present among President Trump’s supporters, 86% of whom believe Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden “did not legitimately win the election,” according to a recent YouGov/Economist poll. However, these same voters lack confidence in Trump’s ability to change the election’s outcome. Only 62% of Republican voters said the Trump campaign’s legal challenges would help the president keep the White House.
Even more worrisome, fewer than half of Americans expect there will be a peaceful transition of power if Biden becomes the next president. And 73% of Trump’s supporters said they do not trust the election system anymore and that we will probably “never know the real outcome of this election.”
These numbers represent a total lack of faith in the system upon which our government depends. If the public cannot trust that their votes will be counted accurately, or that the election officials in charge of the process will act honestly, why would they keep voting? Why participate in politics at all if the process is rigged?
Biden’s supporters would feel the exact same way if Trump were the projected winner. Indeed, the behavior exhibited by Democrats such as Stacey Abrams and Hillary Clinton, when each of them lost their respective elections in 2016 and 2018, prove the Democratic Party is not above crying foul play when the results are not in its favor.
So what are we to do about a country so divided that it refuses to see the other side as legitimate? I would argue the solution is more cultural than political. But there are several political steps we could have taken to prevent much of the uneasiness Americans are now experiencing.
For starters, the states could have passed election laws allowing their mail-in and absentee ballots to be counted as they were returned. This would have streamlined the process, as it did in Florida, and would have prevented unnecessary delays that led to speculation, which ultimately led to conspiracy theories. The longer the vote-counting took in states such as Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, the more suspect it appeared to the many Americans who were already skeptical of mail-in voting.
But, above all, election officials could and should have been more transparent about this process. Given the massive volume of mail-in and absentee ballots, some delays in counting were understandable. But did any state provide a coherent explanation as to why they stopped counting in the middle of Election Night? Not really. And when hundreds of thousands of new ballots appeared the next morning, election officials did not even attempt to explain the vote-counting process to concerned voters. A little bit of communication would have gone a long way in assuaging fears and dispelling misinformation.
If Americans are to have confidence in the system moving forward, government leaders need to do several things: Pass election laws that streamline the process, assign strict cut-offs, so batches of ballots don’t continue to pop up five days after the election, and communicate with voters throughout every step of the process. This year’s mess was entirely preventable, and the states need to make sure it does not become the new normal.
