Trump and a rigged election

He was a lousy winner, so there was no reason to suppose that Trump would be anything other than a lousy loser.

In fact, he was a lousy businessman, a mediocre TV celebrity, and an appalling president, so no presumption of any kind of ability applies to Trump in any field. As a result, it’s no surprise to see that he’s taking things badly as the presidential election seems to be swinging against him now. Not that he’s actually lost yet, just that he seems on the way to losing.

In Michigan, where Biden might be building a big lead,
Trump supporters at an election counting centre chant “stop the count”

Meanwhile, in Arizona, where there’s a small chance he might catch up,
Trump supporters, many armed, are chanting “count the votes”

It’s already apparent how bad a loser he’s going to be. He claimed victory with absolutely no basis to do so. And he called for vote counting to be stopped, as though democracy only requires votes to be counted up to the point that it becomes inconvenient for the candidate with the biggest mouth. And, of course, he’s launching a series of lawsuits to challenge results he doesn’t like.

A lot of people are saying that this won’t work for him, and I hope they’re right. But I keep thinking of the election of 1876, when the Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote and got to within one vote of winning the electoral college. In other words, he needed just one more vote from the four states remaining, all of them with results that had been challenged.

In the end, the matter was decided by a commission especially appointed by Congress. It ruled against the Democrats on every one of the challenges. Every remaining electoral college vote then went to Rutherford Hayes, the Republican candidate, who therefore won the election by a single electoral college vote.

The message in this story is not that Tilden was ill-treated. A lot of his support came from the Southern States, and there’s no doubt that a great many black voters who supported the Republicans were prevented from voting by intimidation or downright violence. A Tilden victory wouldn’t have been any cleaner than Hayes’. 

No, the message is that even a candidate that has practically won can be denied by political chicanery. And we know that Trump is certainly not above any of that. As we know that, at the time of writing these words, Biden needs another 6 or 17 votes (depending on which news organisation you believe) to secure victory.

Both figures are seriously higher than the one vote Tilden required, and that election was stolen from him.

Trump been preparing the ground for that kind of a challenge for months. So have his supporters. For instance, his son and adviser Eric Trump has been spreading misinformation, in particular by tweeting a video showing a man apparently burning Trump votes in a wood somewhere. 

It’s a fake. The ballot papers are samples. Having seen the video, I suspect that it was made by someone who somehow got his hands on the samples and knowingly used them to fabricate his propaganda.

Twitter took action against the post, but by then the video had already been viewed 1.2 million times. Eric Trump himself, by the way, refused to take it down despite being asked to. The Trump camp doesn’t care that the charge is fabricated. They know the video’s been viewed a lot and some mud will stick, and that’s all that matters to them.

This deliberate hoodwinking of the public is deeply depressing, though hardly surprising. What I find more painful is how members of the public aren’t just hoodwinked, but getting sucked into spreading fake news themselves. One Tweet I saw claimed that more people had voted in Wisconsin than are registered to vote. This is shocking news, and I’d have expected it to be all over the media if it were true. But, of course, it isn’t true.

What’s saddest about this particular story is that it’s so easy to establish that it’s false. It takes little effort to consult the Wisconsin Electoral Commission site and discover that there were 3,684,726 registered voters on 1 November. Apparently 3,278,963 votes have been cast as I write these words. That's an astonishingly high turnout (89%) but it’s hardly impossible.

What’s more, Wisconsin is a State that allows Same Day Voter Registration. So we don’t know the actual number of eligible voters on Election Day itself – some may have registered as they turned up to vote, making the total higher than the number registered on 1 November.

What we’re up against is another lie. One that’s easy to debunk. But Trump supporters simply can’t be bothered to debunk them. Indeed, the person who put up the Tweet has ignored my request to correct the misinformation. Presumably, like the Trump campaign itself, she welcomes a dishonest advantage as much as an honest one.

This simply underlines a point that has already been made by many people, that even with a Biden victory, if it happens, the US and many other nations are by no means out of the woods. The Trump approach, the Trump disdain for truth, are deeply ingrained and widespread. We’ve got a long battle ahead of us.

Still. A Biden victory would at least be a first and important step on the road. Being denied his win would be particularly galling. Trump keeps claiming the election is rigged. If he succeeds in stealing it, I’d have to agree that he was right.

Let’s hope that, unlike Samuel Tilden, Biden can avoid that fate.