GOP’s bogus claims of fraud pose a dire threat to democracy

We should have known what was going to happen all the way back in 2016 when Donald Trump won the election after refusing to say, during a debate with Hillary Clinton, that he would accept the results. Trump had made so many outrageous comments that it just seemed like another example of his hyperbolic showmanship. When he said a few days later that he would accept them, but only if he won, most people assumed he was joking. After winning in the Electoral College, Trump kept insisting that he’d actually won the popular vote, even creating a commission to prove it. Again, I think the country was in such shock that it just seemed like another surreal moment among hundreds of them.

Looking back, that sequence of events was the first clue that Trump represented the greatest threat to American democracy in its history. Four years later, he proved that he meant every word when he perpetrated the Big Lie and incited his followers to storm the U.S. Capitol to prevent the transfer of power. Six years on from that, the entire Republican establishment now reflexively claims that if they don’t win, the system is rigged and that Democratic victories are, by definition, illegitimate. Furthermore, most of their voters seem to believe it. At this point, it’s hard to imagine what it will take to restore faith in the election system.

The right has been undermining the integrity of the vote for decades, long before Trump came along. It’s one of their defining characteristics. Groups like True the Vote have been calling elections into question for years, focusing specifically on non-citizen voting and spurring the demand for voter I.D., despite the fact that multiple studies have shown that it’s not actually a problem.

The Trump era has taken all of this to a new level by simply declaring that the Democratic Party is corrupting the entire election process on an institutional level. When Trump was confronted with the fact that he’s shown no evidence for any of this by Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press” last weekend, he had a full-blown temper tantrum and stalked off the set. If anyone thought that humiliating performance might cause the Republicans to back away from their spurious claims, they were disabused of that this week.

Trump has his own reasons for pushing this nonsense, separate from the GOP’s long-term goals. He is a malignant narcissist who has established himself as the greatest sore loser in world history. It’s all about his ego, nothing more or less. But his childish inability to accept defeat under any circumstances has shown other Republicans that their long-standing goal of degrading the electoral process in their favor, through vote suppression, racial gerrymandering and other tactics, has a new future. They’ve attached themselves to Trump’s campaign to persuade half the public that the system is rigged despite all evidence to the contrary.

Needless to say, there is no consistency to these claims. If Republicans win, the system was fair. If they lose, it wasn’t. They will even make claims in both directions about the same election. As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye noted last week, the extended vote count in California, which is actually designed to ensure that every citizen can vote and to make fraud nearly impossible, has right-wing media now wringing its hands over how it’s supposedly undermining democracy. Republicans are simultaneously crying fraud over the Los Angeles mayoral race, where reality-show clown named Spencer Pratt didn’t make the runoff against incumbent Karen Bass, while celebrating that the GOP’s candidate for governor, British-born Fox News commentator Steve Hilton, made the cut and will face Democrat Xavier Becerra this fall. 

Republican pundits and talking heads are running with the concept. As Tesfaye observes, podcaster Megyn Kelly has been saying that voting should be made much more difficult but went even further this week, declaring that “No one is going to trust this outcome if Steve Hilton and Spencer Pratt are eliminated from the general election.” Conservative writer Rod Dreher claimed to find it “unlikely” that progressive Democrat Nithya Raman made the runoff in L.A., an overwhelmingly Democratic city, and wrote on X, “The problem is that many, many, MANY of us simply cannot believe it. It seems for all the world like fraud. This matters, & is going to matter more.”

So we have now reached the point when a Republican finishes third in a “jungle primary” in a deep blue city in a deep blue state, during a midterm election under a massively unpopular president, and that makes these people believe the election was rigged. (Voters in deep red states voting for GOP slates across the board in every election is, of course, perfectly fine.)

Top-level Republican elected officials are on board as well. House Speaker Mike Johnson said the California vote “stinks to high heaven” and, when asked for proof, replied, “Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream that it’s impossible to prove. But I think everybody knows instinctively that something is wrong here, and that’s a concern. We need people to believe in the integrity of our election system.”

Following Trump’s lead, his deputy, Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., fatuously proclaimed that the problem was that “you had wide changes after election night in the results” and that “whether you can prove fraud or not, it does undermine voter integrity in the vote.” It’s hopeless to unpack that word salad, but he seemed to be saying that there may not have been any fraud, but that somehow counting the votes undermines the integrity of the vote.

What a neat trick. These folks perpetuate the myth that there is rampant voter fraud, push the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen and now that their lies and propaganda have made people doubt the integrity of elections, they demand that the rules be changed to make it more difficult to vote and more likely that legitimate votes will be discarded.

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California’s process of counting votes, by the way, is just fine. There is no evidence of fraud, people can vote easily and conveniently, and everything is totally transparent. Who cares if it’s slow as long as they get it right? What’s the damn hurry? The real problem is that that Republicans have created a psychological dynamic in which their voters and supporters just “feel” the system is corrupt because it’s unthinkable that they could lose. They’ve turned nearly half the people in the country into clones of narcissistic sore loser Donald Trump. Making it harder to cast votes and count them accurately isn’t going to solve that problem.

It is worth noting that Steve Hilton, the London spin doctor turned California Republican who officially advanced to the general election this week, told CNN that the count was clean. “We’ve been very vigilant,” he said. “We’ve seen nothing that would give us cause to intervene.” Republicans can “instinctively know,” now, in Mike Johnson’s words, that the election was legitimate.

We’ll be seeing more of this in the fall and undoubtedly a great deal more of it in 2028. Unshackled from logic and running solely on “vibes,” the GOP has found a way to win even when they lose. As a result, American democracy is now on life support.