If I would say to you, ‘I don’t want to do it,’ I’d get my house bombed tonight.
— Christine Ward, Republican Pennsylvania State Senator, about signing a letter supporting Donald Trump’s scheme to steal the state’s electoral votes.
Trumpists have revealed that American democracy is horrendously vulnerable, because it has many more pressure points than was customarily understood. Squeeze hard enough in the right place, and you can drop the body politic in its tracks.
Almost nothing in our elections happens automatically, routinely, by sheer force of algorithm; rather, practically every significant step of every process requires human intervention, decision, and action. There are poll workers, clerks, county election officials, secretaries of state, state legislators, attorneys general, governors, federal electors, judges, etc., all of whom are potential targets for bullying, coercion, bribery, power plays, public threats, gun-toting “protests,” fantasies and deception, intrigue, etc., to drive them away from their duty, away from facts and truth, and into the land of fascist fables about fraud. The election of 2020 was merely Trumpist Putsch v. 1.0. Imagine when version 2.0 arrives in 2024, after the GOP brownshirts have learned whom best to pressure, and how.
There are participants in the electoral process whose jobs are the functional equivalent of licking envelopes with results and dropping them into the mail. They’re not supposed to have discretion, and before 2020, most of them didn’t really think they had any. “I just get the election results and send them along, officially. I don’t decide who won or lost. Not my job.” Oh, but what happens if you don’t send them along next time — if someone with more fame and clout than you promises that big trouble will follow if you simply conduct business as usual? Or if you yourself are a right-wing partisan who suddenly realizes that if you want to boycott your little, envelope-licking task in the election, it will be hard for anyone to stop you? It’s easy to concoct or accept a boldly preposterous cover story if the public, or one’s dimming conscience, still demands it: “Well, since these so-called election results were procured through massive fraud — according to us, of course — then they really aren’t valid election results, so you don’t have to send them along after all! You’re actually doing your duty by not doing it!” Hey, certification is not a matter of mere counting, but of political loyalty, right?
The human cogs in the electoral dynamo powering our democracy are weak and fragile, because they’re human. This year has seen the Republicans probing for the soft spots, and they’ve come closer to outright success than many of us would like to believe. Appeals to voters may fail, and litigation may be laughed out of court, but it’s now clear that we can’t put an entire country’s worth of election workers and state official into witness protection simultaneously. When the permanently Trumpist GOP attacks with full ferocity next time around, don’t be surprised if the cogs collapse, the dynamo sputters and dies, and the national machine crashes violently.
