You probably play this mind game, perhaps routinely. You take an event or situation from somewhere and transplant it to another place. Then you mentally compare the probable outcome there with the outcome in reality. President Donald Trump’s desperate manoeuvres to circumvent Joe Biden’s electoral victory certainly beg for this game. And if you played it, you probably came up with some harrowing scenarios.
Place it in Nigeria, and you might have the post-election havoc of 1965 that ultimately led to a civil war. Place it in Kenya, and you get the bloodletting that happened there in 2007/2008. Place it in most emerging democracies and what you get is the rigged re-election of an incumbent — and the usual turmoil that follows.
In the US, a peaceful transition is already underway. Trump has finally conceded—even while refusing to concede. After initially forbidding his staff to engage with Biden’s in any way, he relented and allowed the transition to begin, even as he has paradoxically vowed that he has not conceded. Come January 20, Biden will be sworn in, though with less than the usual fanfare. But that will result not from Trump’s attempted subversion, but from the realities of a surging pandemic.
While Trump’s gritty attempt to remain in office failed, his manoeuvres shed considerable light on why incumbents in our part of the world easily entrench themselves. Those leaders are probably expressing solidarity with Trump, at least in the privacy of their thoughts. They are certainly ruing the day the values and institutions of democracy are so set in their countries that such manoeuvres will similarly fail.
Indeed, the difference between the probable outcome in our mind game and the reality in the US harkens to a matter that has divided political scientists in the past half-century or so. On the one hand, are those who theorise that strengthening democratic institutions — such as the legislature, the judiciary, the press and civil society — is the primary means of consolidating democracy. Let’s call this the structural perspective.
On the other side are those who insist that there can be no democracy without democrats. In other words, democracy cannot be consolidated in places where people lack democratic values such as commitment to fair play, reciprocity, compromise, and the rule of law. Let’s call this the values perspective.
One is tempted to say that what just transpired in the US vindicates the structuralists. But then, a closer examination shows that the values argument may have played an even more pivotal role.
Throughout his tenure, Trump made it clear that he isn’t well disposed towards the niceties of democracy. He vilified all of its institutions: the press, the judiciary, and even the legislature. He also made clear his envy of autocrats such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, and Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman.
Any wonder then that during the campaigns, reporters repeatedly asked Trump whether he would concede an electoral defeat. It is a question that is otherwise out of place in a country where refusal to concede has rarely ever happened in centuries of democracy, certainly not in our lifetime. Yet over and over, Trump confirmed the improbable premise of the question by responding, “It depends. We will see.”
When then the election results pointed decisively in Biden’s favour, there were no surprises that Trump did everything he could to reverse it. First, he repeated a charge he had made even before the first ballots were cast: that the election was rigged against him. Then he summoned his followers to protest in his support. And they turned out in their thousands in Washington to do exactly that.
Then he filed an avalanche of lawsuits to challenge the results in decisive states that Biden won. He claimed fraudulent voting and that mail-in ballots and extended counting were illegal. Trump wanted the courts to invalidate accommodations states made to address the exigency of the pandemic. He was well aware that mail-in ballots heavily favoured Biden because Democrats — eager to defeat him — used the earliest opportunity to vote. Whereas the election-day ballots were automatically read by computers, the mail-in ballots had to be manually processed.
Unfortunately for Trump, the judges could see through the political machinations. So, in state after state, judges ruled against him, often with stinging rebuke for attempting to subvert the electoral process. One of the most stinging rulings came from a federal judge in Pennsylvania, who is known to lean towards the ideology of Trump’s Republican Party.
“This court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence,” Judge Matthew Brann ruled on one of Trump’s cases. “In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.”
Trump’s next manoeuvre was to put direct pressure on state officials to toss the unfavourable ballots. In one case, one of his allies, a powerful Republican senator representing South Carolina, called the top election official in another state, Georgia, to pressure him to discount those ballots. Though a fellow Republican, the Georgia official rebuffed the senator and went public with the matter. To him, the sanctity of the democratic process took precedence over party loyalty.
And then Trump’s ultimate –- and most dangerous manoeuvre — was to attempt to rig the ballots at the electorate college level. As readers of this column probably know, US presidents are not directly elected by popular vote. Rather, each state is allotted a number of “Electoral College” votes in approximate proportion to their population. And in most cases, the winner of that state gets all its Electoral College votes. The president is formally elected when states send delegates to the Electoral College to cast the allotted votes.
This is usually a formality, but Trump sought to rig it. His scheme was to persuade Republican-controlled state legislators in states he lost to send delegates who would vote for him against the norm. To press the case, he invited such legislators in Michigan to the White House. Though two accepted the invitation, they returned to Michigan vowing to remain faithful to the will of the electorate.
You must have noticed both the structural and values elements in this process. Structuralists would point to the independence of the states, their electoral units and the judiciary. They would also note the factor of transparency in the balloting and ballot-counting processes, realities that make unfounded allegations hard to sustain — even by a determined president.
But then, values theorists would note that all of this would be meaningless without people who are committed to the principles of democracy. Republican judges, legislators and election officials stood firm against their party’s candidate.
Evidently, structures and values have to work in tandem to have an enduring and wholesome democracy. Trump’s manoeuvres didn’t panic anyone because there are enough of both factors in the United States.”
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