The American Election: A Democracy in Danger

Donald Trump declared himself the winner of the presidential election before all the votes had been counted, announcing that he wanted to have the Supreme Court put a stop to the vote count. To do so is to show complete disregard for universal suffrage.

Donald Trump has acted on his threat. Watch out! The Democrats, as he warned during his election campaign, are looking to “steal the election.” This presidential election, as he said numerous times during rallies, was at risk of being rigged. The threat to stop the vote hid another: using chaos as a strategy. This is exactly the strategy the president of the United States chose to implement on Wednesday, Nov. 4, a few hours after the polls closed. This is very dangerous to American democracy: Trump is playing with fire in a situation that is quite explosive.

With a clenched jaw and a tense face, Trump spoke at the White House, accompanied by Vice President Mike Pence, Pence’s wife and the first lady. The results of the election had still not all been compiled, but showed a tight race between the incumbent president and his Democratic adversary, Joe Biden. Vote counting was continuing in many constituencies and there was still a while to go before it was complete, likely a few days given the complexity of the voting options during the pandemic. This did not stop the president from claiming victory — “We won!” — or from announcing that he was going to ask the Supreme Court to stop the vote count on the grounds of some “major fraud” that he did not specify.

This is what the Supreme Court did back in 2000, when the Florida Supreme Court was unable to determine the winner in the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore, where there was a a difference of only a few thousand votes. But in 2000, the Supreme Court intervened after a month in favor of Bush, even though the national vote had already been counted and all other courses of action had been exhausted. Even with an overwhelming majority of conservative justices nominated by Trump, it is difficult for the Supreme Court to interrupt an ongoing election without proof of irregularities affirmed by the lower courts.

An Unprecedented Situation

The president, it seems, was irritated by the premature announcement from Fox News that Biden had won Arizona, a state that Trump won in 2016, information that was then confirmed by other media sources. Trump was also certainly annoyed by Biden, who, two hours earlier in his home state of Delaware, made sure to reassure his supporters by letting them know they were “on track” to win the election and victory was in sight. Trump accused his opponent of claiming victory in several states before the official results were announced, but he did the exact same thing himself when he spoke at the White House.

One of the oldest democracies in the world, the United States, finds itself in an unprecedented situation, one in which the current president deliberately disrupts a federal election, claims victory in the middle of the vote count and threatens to stop it using a court that he should not have influence over.

To do so is to blatantly ignore universal suffrage. It is to deny the role of an election, an important element of a democratic system. For four years, Trump has disregarded the norms when it comes to respect in politics, violated the rules about the primacy of facts and truth, insulted American and foreign allies, and pitted his compatriots against each other.

He had not yet risked throwing the voters’ decision overboard. Hopefully he will renege on this threat to halt voting. This kind of maneuver is common in authoritarian regimes. It is not worthy of the United States of America.