As final vote counts are being certified in states across the country, confirming President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory, President Trump continues to baselessly attack our democratic institutions and election officials with a “firehose of falsehood,” as Brookings’ Jonathan Rauch has described it.
This disorienting information warfare strategy could have profound negative effects in the years ahead.
There’s much to discuss. Today, I will share two thoughts:
First, many Republicans down the ballot won this year with safe, secure voting procedures — including absentee voting — in place. Republican orthodoxy says that restricting access to voting is good for the party, but it is not at all clear that that is true. This is a point I raised with Axios earlier this year.
President Trump received 11 million more votes in this election than in the previous one. He received the most votes ever for a sitting president. Millions of Republican voters voted by mail. President Trump did well in some states that had high rates of absentee voting, such as Florida and Utah — a state where he significantly improved on his numbers from four years ago.
Yet President Trump did not win a second term, and it has been argued that his attacks on mail voting depressed his vote in key states. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said in an interview that 24,000 Georgia Republicans who voted absentee in the state’s primary did not vote in the general election. Raffensperger suggested Trump cost himself the election in Georgia by sowing distrust in absentee voting: "he would have won by 10,000 votes[;] he actually suppressed, depressed his own voting base".
The White House’s messaging on mail voting was often at odds with Republican state officials, many of whom supported changes to make voting accessible during the pandemic. Perhaps this contributed to Republicans doing better than expected in down-ballot races.
Some members of the Pennsylvania state legislature hosted a conference in Gettysburg last week attacking absentee voting. What they weren’t highlighting was the fact that Republicans in the state legislature supported and voted for no-excuse absentee voting in Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvania Republican Party saw big wins in the state this year, maintaining their state House and Senate majorities among other victories for them.
Republicans in the U.S. Congress did better than expected, too. Republicans should recognize that helping voters can help their own party. The Republican Party would benefit strategically from embracing expanded access to voting, rather than criticizing it. Our democracy is stronger when every citizen votes, and there is no reason this principle should be at odds with any party’s strategy.
Second thought: it has been a longstanding view of experts on voting technology that voting machines must have paper trails that can be reviewed, along with official audit processes to check them. While the Trump campaign’s Dominion conspiracy is based on false allegations of compromised software — now debunked by multiple agencies and election officials — it is clear that many Republicans would like the ability to accurately audit ballots after an election, and that is only possible with a paper trail.
In Georgia, the full, by-hand audit of votes cast on the state’s new machines confirmed that the machine tabulation was correct. Today, there are still counties in this country that do not have sufficient systems and procedures in place. Moving forward, there should be bipartisan consensus on the need for checks on voting machines — this is an issue that impacts both parties. Some states perform automatic partial post-election audits as a security measure — a good practice. The democracy community should continue to lead the way on these issues.
Campaign Legal Center is continuing to educate Americans and share insights about the legal processes impacting the finalization of election results. We’ve appeared regularly in online and broadcast media, and I hope you’re following our social channels to stay on top of the latest news.
Our democracy is being tested, but my hope is that the 2020 general election has created opportunities for lasting reform that will help all voters in this country.
The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center advances democracy through law at the federal, state and local levels, fighting for every American’s rights to responsive government and a fair opportunity to participate in and affect the democratic process.
