(Dobbs) Cheating in Elections for a Generation to Come

With the next elections less than a year away, the clock is ticking.

I have written ten times this year about the slow death in many states of voting rights. Ten times.

It’s not nearly enough.

But I don’t blame that slow death only on the Republicans who, in most of the states they control, have passed laws to corrupt the concept of free democratic elections. I blame the Democrats too, because although Republican subversion has been hiding in plain sight, the Democrats haven’t treated it as the existential threat it is.

Instead, they have been fixated on other issues: infrastructure, Build Back Better, the January 6th Commission, pandemic relief. Make no mistake, they’re all important, even crucial for the health of this nation. But voting rights go beyond crucial. They influence not just the health of our democracy, but its very survival. If you were to read about Republican-style voting laws in another country, you’d conclude that democracy there already was dead.

So I fear for our future, because voting rights are existential, and with the next elections less than a year away, the clock is ticking. Then comes 2024. As Michigan’s top election official, the secretary of state, recently wrote, “This is a five-alarm fire. If people in general aren’t taking this as the most important issue of our time and acting accordingly, then we may not be able to ensure democracy prevails again in ’24.”

That’s why the Democrats need to face reality. What they need to do is spend more capital to convince their own reluctant members to carve out an exception to the Senate filibuster so they can supersede those corrupt state laws with federal voting rights laws that the Republicans so far have unanimously stymied. Otherwise, it’ll be a generation (or more) before they get another chance, because between the new laws that make it harder for poorer and minority Democrats to vote, and more new laws that actually would oust election officials who don’t toe the Trumpworld party line, today’s Republicans have shamelessly shown that they are willing to cheat.  

Wisconsin’s senator Ron Johnson, in the spirit of autocratic governments abroad, has even gone so far as to suggest that the power to run elections be taken away from his state’s bipartisan commission and handed over to its legislature which, thanks to gerrymandering, is reliably in the hands of his party. “I think it’s imperative,” he declares duplicitously, “that we restore confidence in our election system for everybody.”

Confidence in our election system? Let’s examine that for a moment. The Associated Press just reported on an exhaustive review of every potential case of 2020 voter fraud in the six swing states that the Trump team says stole his election.

A few examples of what they found: in Arizona, out of nearly 3.4 million votes cast, the number of possible cases of fraud was 198 (remember, even the Republican state senate’s bogus “audit” by the equally bogus Cyber Ninjas went quietly into the dark night). In Georgia, a total of 64 potential voter fraud cases were identified. In Michigan, just 56. And in Senator Johnson’s Wisconsin— whose bipartisan commission announced after an audit that there was no election-altering fraud, period— there were 31. What’s more, in 26 of those, prosecutors declined to even bring charges.

By the way, most of the fraudulent votes that have been confirmed were cast for Trump.

This is not the stuff of which stolen elections are made.

Yet if the Republicans have their way, then the validity of a future "Stop the Steal" movement will be moot. They’ll be able to literally nullify election outcomes that they don’t like, and cement their power to win elections despite a minority of voter support.

But that draconian vision isn’t the only fear I feel for our future. The other is the kind of people who would then govern us for years to come, and define our democracy.

What kind of people would that be? The kind who do not accept a loss and persist in the lie that an election was stolen, even after virtually every court and every commission has declared the election honest. The kind who use non-partisan federal departments like Justice and Defense to pursue their partisan political aims, and advocate measures as militant as martial law to achieve them. The kind who support a president who in his personal life alone appears to be among the most unprincipled in American history. The kind who do not condemn and in some cases actually condone a violent insurrection against our government, against our democracy. And the kind who would cover that up.

This isn’t unfounded finger-pointing. This is fact.

Last week in The Atlantic, writer Barton Gellman summed up the threat we face. “Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence… Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect.”

Yet as Gellman says, “Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real.”

They must understand not only that it’s real, but that it’s existential. From the president on down, they must act with more urgency than they’ve shown. And we must equally urgently push them in that direction. American democracy, as we’ve known it up until now, depends on it. Time is running out.

For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Some of his writing also appears on a website he co-founded, BoomerCafe.com.