Liam Rue ‘21
November 2020
The Trump Administration has continued to refuse to accept the victory of Democrat opponent and president-elect Joe Biden, and the result may be irreparable harm to America’s democratic institutions.
Although Biden’s win is by no means a landslide against Trump, election officials from every state have reported little to no voter fraud, much less any that would change the results of the key states that Biden won.
Despite this, misinformation alleging that Democrats have stolen the election -- spread by Trump and his supporters through fabricated videos and baseless claims of fraud -- has been readily picked up by an alarming majority of his supporters.
These challenges to the election results are not only unfounded but dangerous to American democracy, as Trump supporters are likely to no longer trust the results of any election that a future candidate they don’t like wins, with the belief that it was “rigged” against their preferred candidate.
A November 9 Politico/ Morning Consult survey found that 70 percent of Republicans did not think the election was “free and fair”.
The deep mistrust that the Trump Administration has sown extends to the press, as the president and his supporters have called mainstream media outlets’ election projections fake once they projected Biden as the winner. Now, according to Trump and his supporters, the media is not supposed to make any calls for elections. “Since when does the Lamestream Media [sic] call who our next president will be?” Trump tweeted on November 8, a claim that does not carry much weight given the president only discredited the media’s projections once they said he lost.
The Associated Press, the authority on U.S. election results, has called them accurately since the election of Zachary Taylor in 1848. Discrediting unbiased media organizations such as the AP, which declared Trump the winner in 2016 as it has Biden in 2020, further threatens election integrity it creates unwarranted uncertainty about the election and in turn more room for non-credible groups to push election narratives in their interests.
The implications of these events in the worst-case scenario are grim: if the president were to outright refuse to step down and effectively compromise the country’s democratic process, he would likely be enabled to do so by nearly half the electorate.
Alongside a Supreme Court that is highly partial to Trump and more conservative than it has been in 80 years, the Justice Department’s support of Trump’s election challenge is yet another blow to the integrity of American democracy.
Historically, the Justice Department has abstained from legal disputes of national elections until after the results are certified. This is because they are partial to the sitting president: at best, the DOJ intervening presents a possibly unconstitutional conflict of interest; at worst, as in the current case, it presents the threat of a coup. “There is no place for the Attorney General in elections”, legal expert Wendy Weiser of NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice told the New Yorker.
The current Trump appointee who runs the DOJ, Attorney General Bill Barr, has already shattered a variety of norms to help the president.
This has included reducing the sentences of convicted Trump allies such as Roger Stone as well as removing the head of the Southern District of New York after they charged other Trump associates.
In the policy realm, Barr’s most alarming overreach has included baselessly attacking mail-in-voting, investigating the FBI probe of Russia’s collusion with Trump, and insisting that the census have a citizenship question to profile undocumented immigrants. (Barr’s attacks on mail-in-voting are themselves a violation of the DOJ’s long standing policy to not make any judgments that would affect the election outcome in the final 60 day leadup.)
Barr has backed Trump’s challenges to the election results by calling for the DOJ to investigate voter fraud claims. The result has been both private and public backlash from within the Department of Justice, as prosecutors have accused Barr of compromising the Department’s non-partisanship.
Most recently, Trump has shown signs that his refusal to concede is more of a way to save face. Privately, he has considered running again in 2024, and people close to him reported to Bloomberg that he is “increasingly aware” he cannot change the election results.
On November 13, Trump almost admitted defeat when he began to say he hoped Biden would not put the nation on lock-down before catching himself, instead saying “time will tell”. Trump and his supporters in the GOP have also continued to challenge the election results to energize the Republican base for the upcoming Georgia runoff elections, which will decide who controls the senate.
Even though these challenges from both the president’s administration and his campaign have failed to sway the election in his favor, the damage has arguably been done. The growing mistrust in voting systems and the press, along with the politicization of the DOJ and a hyper-partisan Supreme Court, are poised to compromise the integrity of future elections if not addressed by Trump’s successors.