Pearl River Reading the papers and following the news wherever you find it, there’s a long of handwringing and clutching of pearls over whether or not Trump and the administration are planning to try to steal the upcoming US midterm elections. Not being able to read minds, I won’t say, but even if some might have that plan, let’s agree, it’s not easy. I had this conversation recently on Wade’s World with David Walbert, an experienced voting rights and election lawyer, based in Atlanta, who has argued a number of cases there and before the US Supreme Court. His experience moved him to take a deep dive on the subject with a new book, Stealing Elections, American Style. The hot take on his book is simple. You can’t say that “it can’t happen here”, because in fact, it has happened here in the US.
Elections in the 1800s were freewheeling affairs to say the least. In the earliest days, it wasn’t just a matter of stealing ballot boxes or stuffing them with dead or repeat voters. Voting wasn’t by secret ballot and often took place in local pubs. The few women who could qualify to vote in some places, like New Jersey, if they owned property in their own names, had to be able to cast their ballots in saloons filled with very partisan and drunk men. Maybe that’s not stealing, but it’s certainly intimidation. Walbert of course looks at the famous Tilden-Hayes contest in 1876, which involved both hanky-panky with the ballots as well as blatant horse-trading on various issues to resolve the contest in Congress, when members were elected by legislators, rather than the public. More recently, he mentions the controversial votes from South Texas that put Lyndon Johnson in the Senate and on his path to the presidency, as elaborately excavated by Robert Caro. He includes a similar story from his home base in Georgia that could have derailed Jimmy Carter’s path to the White House as well.
In these elections, he quotes an old time political boss discussing the key factor in those times was the fact that others might determine the votes, but they determined the count. Despite all of Trump’s talk about voting machines, it’s very hard to steal an election at the count in the 21st century. This has switched the strategy of anti-democratic parties and politics to “stealing” elections before voters pull the lever using voter suppression, voter purges, gerrymandering and other techniques to tilt elections towards predetermined outcomes.
The other technique that animated Walbert even more was the court-enabled voter suppression. As an attorney, Walbert minces no words in eviscerating the role of the Supreme Court in the George W. Bush versus Al Gore contest. In his law office he displays framed copies of the dissents in that case, signed personally by the individual justices. Similar decisions by the court have gutted the Voting Rights Act and its enforcement provisions in Section 5 and Section 2, which he accurately sees as enabling minority voting strength to steal the will of the majority of voters by allowing disenfranchisement.
Admittedly, Trump’s efforts to seize control of the voting lists and procedures from states, as explicitly mandated in the Constitution, have been thwarted by numerous lower, federal court decisions. His ridiculous attempt to get the US Postal Service to block mail ballots has been routinely blocked, even as he continues to rant and rail about these issues. State mischief is bad enough without letting Trump intrude in these procedures.
Still, it’s hard to steal an election, especially, if we make sure on the frontend that voters get to the polling stations and let their will be known. We all have a role to play by getting out to vote.