What If Votes Don’t Matter?
Terry H. Schwadron
Aug. 5, 2024
After all the politicking, the maneuvering, the enormous campaign money and endless talk of deciding a direction for the country, what if the vote doesn’t count?
What if even the craziness trying to lay a majority lineup of Electoral College delegates over a suppressed popular vote doesn’t make a difference because Republicans are trying to change the rules to guarantee a favorable outcome from November?
With less than four months before the start of voting, the dimensions of a quiet, but apparently vast campaign to suborn the vote already are tying up courts and other legal avenues and pointing to a rather more bloodless Republican campaign to use all the legal tools at hand to affect who votes, how the votes are counted, and whether to certify any results they don’t like.
Rather than the meaningless, constant horse race numbers, how about more reporting on the scheming that apparently is underway even before the election? Rather than debating “democracy,” how about looking at plans to monkey with the vote itself?
There have been scattered reports all summer about the other campaign being run by right-leaning forces, a methodical, multi-pronged attack to squash voting, whether by mail or drop boxes or in person, to intimidate vote counters with over-the-shoulder close observation, and specifically to withhold certification of vote results. A well-reported New York Times investigation by Jim Rutenberg and Nick Corasaniti, in particular, outlined a scary prospect that basically taking the vote out of the hands of voters and leaving outcomes to partisans who want to use certification processes to declare their preferred outcome. Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show and Rolling Stone, which interviewed dozens of newly elected local election officials in five states, have featured work on this issue as well.
After 2020’s election denialism led finally to the violence of an attempted coup at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Republicans got busy challenging local election officials across the country, replacing many with MAGA adherents, boards of elections, election overseer positions and the like. Republican-majority state legislatures made voting more difficult, threw thousands of voter rolls, and have filed well over 90 lawsuits about aspects of voting and vote-counting.
As The Times said, “Unlike the chaotic and improvised challenge four years ago, the new drive includes a systematic search for any vulnerability in the nation’s patchwork election system.”
How the Game is Played
With all the public attention on Donald Trump’s statements of the day, Kamala Harris’ transformation of the Joe Biden campaign into her own, and the oddities involved in choosing vice presidential candidates, less attention clearly is being focused on the rules that govern how to play the elections game.
All the focus on Winning and Momentum is skipping a basic truth — that an already tight election outcome may be forced legally through these certification fights to be settled in the House of Representatives where the process already would guarantee mathematically that a one-vote-per-state election would elect a Republican president.
We’ve seen efforts to control voting registration for many unhappy decades. Republicans persuaded that there must have been fraud in 2020 now are attacking mail ballots and drop boxes and passing laws to create long voting lines by eliminating many polling places in districts seen as Democratic strongholds. Under the leadership of people including Steve Bannon, Republicans are massing a national army of local poll watchers to be on guard for counts they believe to be fraudulent.
What has been added this year are post-vote certification fights, in which results are not officially registered if officials from groups like the Heritage Foundation and any number of Republicans, including Trump, believe the voting had not been fair.
The Washington Post notes that officials in 3,000-plus counties must sign off on vote results, followed by a similar process at the state level. Certification does not preclude lawsuits, but it does allow the electors for a state’s winning presidential candidate to cast their Electoral College tally towards a joint certification session of Congress affirming that vote on Jan. 6. Delaying certification at any step could hold up or halt the process, potentially preventing the rightful winner from taking office, or resulting in states sending more than one elector slate to Washington.
That, of course, opens the door to sending the mess to the House, where the outcome is assured.
According to the Post, Times and the AP, since 2020, county-level election officials in five key battleground states — Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania — have tried to block the certification of vote tallies in both primaries and general elections. So far, none of the efforts have succeeded. Some failed because of strict state rules or because of court decisions or threat of prosecution. But they are sowing chaos and confusion.
We have been forced to be accustomed that our presidential contests may result in a president who wins a minority of popular vote because of the Election College distribution of state votes. But this certification challenge route looks to possibly disenfranchise voters wholesale.
What are the Expectations?
Bottom line, outside of a small mass of election lawyers for the major parties and some assorted journalists, there probably is little attempt to add up the individual cases. But the contradictions of seeing oodles of enthusiasm and new vote registrations from a reenergized Democratic Party while Republicans are seeking to restrict voting in half the states seems problematic.
The idea that in Georgia and Arizona, Republicans have filed lawsuits that, if successful, would effectively give local election board members the right to hold up certification and even conduct their own personal investigation into the vote seems worse.
Sure, the reasoning is an attempt to build trust that the voters are who they say they are. But Republican candidates and lawmakers have filled the airwaves with allegations that Democrats are seeking to harness the votes of migrants, for example, and insisted on pushing through a bill to halt non-citizen voting — which already is illegal.
Republicans have named a “senior counsel for election integrity,” choosing Christina Bobb, a lawyer indicted in Arizona on election interference charges, and has lawyers who were part of the Stop the Steal campaign now running the party’s Election Integrity Network that advises on how to challenge voter eligibility.
In 2022, Joe Biden signed legislation to make it harder to challenge vote certification, but it lacks hard rules and does not say what will happen if states miss the Dec. 11 deadline.
Each of the parties insists that its way is the only path to uphold democracy, to preserve voting in which we say we are giving our citizens a say in the direction-setting for the nation. The evidence with each passing election cycle, however, says something quite different.
We already insist on candidates who look like what we want presidents to emulate rather than what their agenda says, we are swayed by the worst that advertising has to offer, and we run to slogans when the problems we face are much more complicated. But we vote. And we expect that there is some relationship of that vote to the outcome. Using delay and resist tactics to turn blue votes red will not do.
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