But delaying the announcement of election results is typically seen the world over as evidence of fraud. US officials once saw it that way, too, at least up until the 2020 election when contesting election results became grounds for indicting Trump, his lawyers, and other top aides.
For instance, delays in announcing the results of the first round of Peru’s 2000 election — which included three days for the presidential race, more than a month for congressional contests, and a “mysterious” lapse in the transport of ballot boxes to vote count centres — caught the Clinton administration’s attention. A State Department spokesman warned the Peruvian government “to take every possible measure to ensure that the next round of voting fully meets democratic standards of openness, transparency and fairness”.
The Peruvian campaign was marked by other irregularities, too, as watchdog groups found evidence that incumbent Alberto Fujimori’s operatives had manipulated the media, forged voter registration signatures, and transported pre-marked ballots. The reason those sound like the irregularities identified in the 2020 US elections is because the distinguishing characteristics of election fraud are always the same. There are not that many ways to rig an election, and it does not take a professional election monitor to recognise fraud.
Delayed election results are correlated not only with fraud but also with violence. According to a study of African elections from 1997 to 2022: “The length of time between elections and the announcement of the official results acts as a signal of possible voter fraud, thereby increasing incentives for post-election violence.”
Likewise, paused ballot-counts and lengthy delays in announcing results in Honduras’s 2017 presidential elections led to widespread violence and 17 deaths. Here again, the US State Department took note. The irregularities, said US diplomats, indicated that “much-needed electoral reforms should be undertaken”.
Could the promised delays for this election cycle provoke further political violence? With two attempts on Trump’s life already, Kamala Harris raised the stakes when she compared him to Hitler. In a recent Atlantic article, former Trump administration officials allege that their ex-boss spoke favourably of the Führer, claims that the Harris team rolled into a press conference essentially warning against a Hitler presidency. Only Harris, her campaign promises voters, is capable of “defending democracy” — effectively the central plank in the party’s platform — against your Nazi neighbours.
The idea that Trump is a tyrant in the wings is of course absurd. But it is no more dangerous than Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign propaganda claiming that Trump was controlled by Vladimir Putin. US intelligence services used that fabrication as a predicate to investigate Trump during the second year of his presidency.
Through three election cycles, from 2016 to the present, the Democrats have sought to present Trump, a political outsider, as somehow fundamentally un-American. At best, the Democrats dismiss Trump’s supporters as unwitting accomplices of a foreign agent; at worst, they denounce them as collaborators in a fascist plot to undermine democracy. This has proven to be the most destructive propaganda campaign in US history. No foreign power has ever divided the American public so successfully.
The catch is that Harris doesn’t have many options. Some say the Hitler ploy is evidence that her campaign has run out of steam, but the problem is more fundamental: owning the Democratic Party’s signature policy initiative from the last four years would be disastrous. Since Biden took office in January 2021, the administration has ushered millions of illegal aliens across the southern border. Because no one is stopping the migrants from crossing and record-keeping is deliberately careless, no one knows how many have entered, though estimates range between seven and 25 million.
Even officials in Democrat-run polities such as New York, Boston, and Los Angeles are starting to have second thoughts about their status as “sanctuary cities” now that illegal aliens are exhausting their resources while also spiking crime rates. The proliferation of cheap, undocumented labour has suppressed the wages of working-class Americans or pushed them entirely out of the workforce. And because no Democrat in their right mind wants to take credit for burdening taxpayers with billions of dollars in public services for non-citizens, no one dares look into the future when automation will make millions of illiterate foreigners redundant.
Trump’s plan, the cornerstone of his campaign, is to send them back. If they want to move to America, they have to go home and start the process lawfully. In the meantime, Republicans are worried that illegal migrants are being registered to vote and their harvested ballots may help Harris win battleground states.
However, some GOP officials I’ve spoken with say there’s little evidence yet of mass registration of the Biden-Harris administration’s illegal migrants. At present, say my sources, the migrants are largely being relocated to Democrat-run states and cities, replacing Americans who vacated these areas in the last few years, driven out by draconian Covid lockdowns and mandates. These millions of Americans have left the Democratic enclaves on the East and West coast and moved to the sunbelt and other Republican-dominated regions to free themselves from the policies that have made life more dangerous and expensive. To win elections and hold power, so the theory goes, the Democrats need to keep the borders open, maybe forever.
This is why Trump supporters believe that the election will decide whether America remains a real country, with secure borders and secure elections, or is destined rather to become a tax farm for oligarchs in a geographical zone ruled by a single party. It’s no wonder Americans are on edge — Harris voters are worried that Hitler will be re-elected, and Trump supporters fear a repeat of 2020 that will lead to an unrecognisable America. Accordingly, voters are more galvanised by the electoral process than ever before, watching polls like political professionals.
Americans aren’t accustomed to this level of political urgency. For much of US history, most voters assumed that regardless of the outcome, the ship of state would rest in relatively steady hands whether it was a Democrat steering it slightly left or the Republicans charting a centre-right course. After the eight-year campaign targeting Trump, his aides and supporters, hardly anyone believes that anymore. Today, there’s little voters are willing to take for granted, including evidence of Trump’s growing lead as we head into Tuesday’s election.
Main Edition
US
FR
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeTrust in US democracy has been steadily eroded by a series of much contested results in the last several elections Bush/Gore, Trump/Clinton, Biden/Trump.
Faith needs to be restored in the electoral process, it’s absolutely critical, and there are some fairly simple steps that would have achieved that.
Every voter should be able to be verified – the matter of every voter’s eligibility is fundamental. Anyone who doesn’t have a Driver’s Licence should have been able to request another form of ID, issued free of charge by the Govt. Every voter should be made to produce ID before being allowed to cast a vote.
The practice of Ballot-harvesting – “gathering of completed absentee or mail-in ballots by third-party individuals rather than submission by voters themselves” should have been banned altogether.
Voter Rolls should have been integrated and made uniform across the country. If a voter changes address, including moving State, that should be updated to a national database. Every US voter should be informed that IF YOU ARE NOT ON THE ELECTORAL ROLL, YOU CAN NOT VOTE.
It is noticeable that it has been the Democrat Party who’ve been vociferously opposed to the introduction of any new Voter ID laws or election security mechanisms, all whilst condemning Republicans for the threat they supposedly pose to democracy. The Democrat Party claim that any Voter ID laws discrimate against ethnic minority communities, but polling has shown that there is 70% support for their introduction among Dem voters of all races. In California is is ILLEGAL to ask someone to produce ID to vote – no paper trail, nothing to stop illegal immigrants from voting.
So what is the real reason Dems push back against any measures to ensure Election integrity? Who knows, but maybe another Old Joe had the answer….
“Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.” ― Joseph Stalin
Audit random districts every election. Match a person with every ballot.
Well said. Observers outside of the U.S., who may simply be informed by the NYT, WAPO, and rags like The Atlantic must be particularly aggrieved by what they perceive to be witnessing over here.
I’m sure everything about this election will proceed regularly. I mean, it’s not like the Democrats have been constantly denigrating Donald Trump as the second coming of the by-word for supreme political evil, thus justifying any and all methods to keep him out of office, whether legal or illegal. Everything will be fine!
Deleted comment… What? Am I not allowed to say, “absolutely barking mad”?
I am a Brit, with absolutely no axe to grind. Who the American people choose for their next president is their business, and absolutely nobody else’s.
But this piece is off-the-scale barking mad. It’s a wild conspiracy theory, in which the Democrats, the judges, the Department of Homeland Security, numerous officials in the states, and God knows who else, have entered into a vast conspiracy to stop Trump winning.
I’m surprised only that he doesn’t accuse the CIA of masterminding the whole operation. After all, the CIA is the default bad guy for conspiracy theorists in the rest of the world.
It is naive David to dismiss the idea that the CIA might be involved in domestic election interference. There is a reason the CIA is the default bad guy for conspiracy theories in the rest of the world. They have been pretty much openly involved in color revolutions since their inception. It’s not a big step from intervening to make sure democracy is preserved in Ukraine, to name but one example, to intervening to make sure democracy is preserved at home. And that it is how the debate is openly framed in the NYT, the Atlantic the WaPost and other elite communication channels. What used to be called democracy — the populace choosing their preferred representative — has been redefined as populism. Democracy has been reframed as the maintenance of the policies and ideals of the elites. The idea that a large fraction of the population are misinformed and cannot be trusted have a say in choosing their leaders has become mainstream.
Trump has announced his intention to clean house. Along with Bobby Kennedy, he has announced openly that he will declassify the Kennedy assassination files and his foreign policy goes against every tenet of the globalist policies that have been followed for decades by Republican and Democratic Presidents. He is an existential threat to the actors who benefit from the defense establishment and the arms industry not to mention the pharmaceutical industries. So yes… I’m pretty sure the CIA has their collective finger in the pie.
Ya. This essay is pretty partisan. However, it does outline some serious issues with the machinery of American elections. It’s 2024. America is the most advanced nation in the history of the world. Yet it can’t seem to run elections efficiently and timely. It’s mind boggling if you think about it. These delays at least create the perception of cheating, and weakens the bonds between voters and the state.
Maybe this is what late-stage democracy looks like – a sclerotic administrative state incapable and uninterested in performing even the most essential and basic functions of democracy. Ironically, the incompetence of the political and technocratic elite gave birth to Trump, and similar populists across the globe.
I’ve been skeptical, and remain so, of the rigged election narratives.
But it’s not a conspiracy theory to claim that, when other countries’ elections in the past saw delayed releases of counts these were seen as very suspicious, so it is prima facie fair to be suspicious when the same is true of ballots at home.
And when no proof of ID is required to vote, or to prove one is eligible to do so, it seems extraordinarily loose. When it is literally not allowed to ask for ID, one can only conclude it is deliberately so. If one party benefits from this, and campaigns for this, it is prima facie fair to be suspicious.
And postal voting, with not even a signature required, is so obviously open to abuse that in the past both parties avoided it. Should one party suddenly start supporting it, it is prima facie fair to be suspicious.
So what the author is doing isn’t peddling conspiracy theories, what he’s doing is identifying a number factual matters that each on its own could be suspicious. And saying that when lots of them apply, and it’s one party (the ruling one at that) which seeks to promote what are typically seen as poor practice, it’s natural for people to be suspicious.
Why on earth, if it was a free and fair election, which everybody could accept as such, that you wanted, would you actively seek to promote practices that are suspicious and undermine acceptance of the result by a large proportion of the population?
It would seem self-defeating. Unless of course…