After a week which has threatened the integrity of our national elections, many of us should now have a clearer sense of potential flashpoints in America’s ongoing primaries and its forthcoming elections. Not only the fragility of the institutions which administer and guarantee the outcome of the election itself, but the speed at which tendentious, incomplete or deliberately misleading information can provoke unrest, foster conspiracy theories, and undermine the credibility of independently verified facts.
Many of us would like to think that America has resolved most of the issues that have caused such confusion here, but that simply isn’t true. In “Democracy in Danger”, published last year, President Obama’s former National Deputy Field Director, Jake Braun recalls that “elections in Detroit and many other places were managed terribly in 2004. It was particularly bad in places where minorities and students lived. Lines at the polling place stretched for hours and blocks, keeping thousands of students and minorities from voting. In Ohio, mismanagement led to so many people voting provisionally and such long lines it may have cost Kerry the election.”
Braun writes that little has been done to rectify the system’s known vulnerabilities. As a result, America’s “election infrastructure is maintained with miniscule security budgets and operated by officials who have no background in technology, cybersecurity, or geopolitics.” Furthermore, absent “the help of the U.S. national security establishment” those who oversee this infrastructure “are wholly incapable of protecting themselves from a cyberattack by a nation-state with the determination, sophistication, and resources of Russia.”
Even without foreign interference, few US states are adequately prepared for mass voting. The results of the first Democratic primary were prematurely announced, disputed and subsequently revised, and the Super Tuesday polls clearly showed that at least a dozen states struggle with the logistics of getting enough people into voting booths. Thousands of Democratic voters had to queue for hours – a likely reason for the disappointing returns of the youth vote which heavily favours Bernie Sanders – and many who voted early, for candidates who had withdrawn by polling day, were effectively disenfranchised.
An additional challenge is the needless complexity of the intra-party delegate voting which determines the Democratic nominee. The party seems determined to repeat the folly of its 2016 manoeuvring to sideline a popular insurgent in favour of an establishment candidate. Not only does this risk alienating the Sanders voters – again – but it has artificially narrowed a diverse field to two fairly predictable options. Elizabeth Warren and other plausible contenders, like Kamala Harris, could not compete against Michael Bloomberg’s money, nor could they survive the party’s rush to consolidate around a centrist candidate. So instead of converging on someone who has performed well in the debates, or offered the sharpest contrast to the incumbent, the Democrats seen fated to gamble on Joe Biden’s “decency”, presumably in the hope that voters will overlook his thin and largely incoherent policies, his gaffe-prone speaking style, and his worrying propensity for irrelevant rambling.
Further pitfalls await the Democrats after the nomination, not least the permanently inflamed political culture which Trumpism has entrenched. In her prescient 2018 book “Democracy and Truth” the historian Sophia Rosenfeld writes that the Trump administration’s “antitruth stance goes beyond a stylistic choice; it has been translated into a mode of governance” in which “indifference to the boundaries between truth and falsehood, information and know-nothingism, has led to an actual turn away from the cultivation of institutional expertise in areas like macroeconomic policy, foreign affairs, and climate science.” Rosenfeld argues that the dismantling of impartial fact-gathering institutions “constitutes a form of opposition to the research protocols and evidence-based knowledge that has long informed democratic procedures and policy in practice.” In a memorable sentence, she adds: “Lying to cover up a culture of self-dealing—traditionally known in politics as corruption—seems to be another, closely related effect.”
As recent events have shown, one hard truth about democracy is that, to a large extent, it is as much a cultural as a political ideal; one that needs to be constantly defended, often at great cost and in discouraging circumstances. Elections in several parts of the world have recently shown the dangers of surrendering this responsibility and accepting the cultural erosion that Rosenfeld describes. As Winston Churchill memorably observed in 1947: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time …”
