There is a rise in authoritarianism sentiment in the United States. A Morning Consult poll found that 26% of Americans are highly right-wing authoritarian. Of that 26%, 85% are white while 76% have no college degree, 76% are over the age of 45 and 55% of them don’t believe President Biden won in 2020.
In 2020 voter turnout was 67%, still not great but the highest turnout since 1900. I taught American History in the Mitchell school system for thirty-six years and did some teaching at the college level as well. I always told my classes, “If you don’t vote, don’t complain.” There is talk in Congress of making Election Day a national holiday to make it easier for people to get out and vote, especially for those who have to wait in long lines to cast their ballots.
In the presidential election of 2020 Joe Biden received 81,268,924 popular votes (53.3% of the total) and 306 electoral votes to Donald Trump’s 74,216,154 popular votes (46.9% of the total – various third party candidates split the remaining popular votes) and 232 electoral votes. Several States held statewide recounts and portions of some other States held recounts of specific precincts. As a result of all of those various recounts President Trump gained 2,343 votes. Even Republicans ultimately recognized the legitimacy of the election; for example the Republican Secretary of State of Georgia conducted numerous recounts and pronounced them accurate and fair even though Biden won Georgia. According to a new book Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency; Rupert Murdock, the owner of Fox News, instructed his news people to call Arizona for Joe Biden because it was clear Biden had won the State despite President Trump’s groundless claims to the contrary.
There has been scurrilous talk that the election wasn’t fair or was even “stolen”. Those who say or think that have no grasp of the mechanics of American elections. First of all there are 3,106 counties in the United States with well over 100,000 individual polling places. There are hundreds of thousands of people involved in elections in this country from statewide elected officials to county officers and local poll workers. The level of fraud and conspiracy necessary to swing a presidential election would have to be mind bogglingly massive and involve people from across the country who would have to hornswoggle the observers present from the other party under their very noses, violate oaths of office and be ruthlessly dedicated to the downfall of democracy and eager for the rise of tyranny in America. Of course there are some cases of “voter fraud” every election but usually those cases turn out to be honest mistakes by voters (in most cases first time or seldom voting people and often after election laws were changed after a previous election) or errors made by volunteers running polling places on the ground. The idea that there is widespread voter fraud and manipulation of American elections is a myth. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be on guard against it, especially with the rise in popularity of electronic voting, but currently voter fraud is a straw boogey man and not a real threat to the integrity of our electoral process.
Those who stormed the Capitol on January 6th in an attempt to commit treason and perpetrate a coup on the United States of America should be investigated and punished, as should those who lied to them about the legitimacy of the election. President Trump’s team filed 62 lawsuits in various jurisdictions around the country challenging the results of the election. Sixty-one of them were dismissed out of hand and often by judges that Trump had appointed to the bench. The only lawsuit he won was in Pennsylvania where a judge ruled that it was impermissible to allow a voter who had not had identification when voting to be allowed as much as three days to produce sufficient documentation. It ultimately made no difference in Pennsylvania as Biden won that state by 81,660 votes. The Supreme Court twice rejected appeals by President Trump regarding the election.
There is the fiction that President Trump will be returned to office on August 13th. He will not be. Instead of fighting the lost battles of the past, look to the future. Carve out a positive, forward-looking agenda and then recruit dedicated, capable candidates to take those positions to the voters in the next election. That’s the American way, so is recognizing that all elections in this country are free and fair rather than just the ones your side wins.