US Election: ‘This Fraud Controversy Is Permanent’

A few hours or days from the U.S. election results, Didier Combeau, essayist and specialist on the United States, dissects a complex electoral system that can elect the president of the largest democracy in the world with a minority of votes. He also looks back on the four years of Trumpism that exacerbated the fractures of American society, increasingly focused on identities.

What Are the Stakes of the US Election?

Everything that separates Democrats from Republicans is at stake in this election. In other words, questions of race, immigration, health insurance, the environment, foreign policy with an eventual return to the Iranian nuclear agreement, to the World Health Organization or to the Paris Climate Agreement are all important issues. If Joe Biden wins, it is also a question of reforming institutions in general and the Supreme Court in particular. Donald Trump has had the opportunity to appoint three conservative Supreme Court justices during his presidency. These justices are appointed for life, and since the new appointees are young, the Supreme Court, composed of nine members, risks being conservative for a long time to come. Democrats are talking about increasing the number of Supreme Court justices in order to restore balance. These institutional questions are not often brought up, but they will arise if Biden wins the election. He himself is a centrist, an establishment Democrat, but the left wing of his party will try to influence these issues.

With Hours To Go Before the Results, Would You Risk a Prediction?

Biden has been in the lead for most of the campaign, but ever since Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016, everyone is now fairly cautious about any predictions. The U.S. election process is very complex since it is done state by state. Sometimes, it only takes a few hundred votes to tip an election. In 2000, for example, the state of Florida was the determining factor and George W. Bush won over Al Gore by just 600 votes. This is why polls cannot always predict the outcome of an election.

What Voting Mechanism Can Allow a Candidate To Be Victorious Without Having a Majority of Votes?

The Electoral College is very different from our direct universal suffrage. This system allows the president to be elected without having a majority of votes. There are a total of 538 electoral votes distributed across all states. Two of them are assigned automatically to each state, large or small, and the others are assigned according to the demographics of the state. So there are 55 electoral votes for 40 million people in California, one for every 700,000 people, but there are only three for Wyoming, which is one for every 200,000 people. The vote of a voter in Wyoming, therefore, counts more than that of a Californian, and the system favors smaller states.

In the United States, citizens vote directly in each state for a candidate. Trump and Biden are in the lead, ahead of other anecdotal candidates. Whoever comes out on top wins all of the state’s electoral votes. This is the system in place in 48 states. Only Maine and Nebraska have a slightly more proportional system. Some states are traditionally acquired by Republicans and others by Democrats. For example, California and New York are regularly won by Democrats. Whether they win the election with 51% or 99% of the vote does not change the result; they will win all the electoral votes. To become president of the United States, one needs an absolute majority of the electoral votes, that is to say, 270. Texas is traditionally Republican, but observers were wondering if it might switch due to recent demographic upheavals, because of more young citizens and Hispanics than before. That was not the case. However, Texas has 38 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the election. For all these reasons, polls are difficult to interpret and the margin of uncertainty is large. I’d venture to say that chances are it will be Biden, but you can never be safe from a turnaround.

How is this Election Peculiar?

This election is unlike any other. First, there is Trump’s personality. We were talking about the stakes of this election, but in fact, it quickly turned into a referendum for or against Trump. And this year is marked by COVID-19, which upsets the deal. Trump, who intended to rely on his economic record before the health crisis, must give it up since the U.S. economy, like all others, is plunging. Because of this pandemic, all states have favored mail-in voting. However, this is an important issue. The demographics that abstain from voting — including African Americans and young people — are also the demographics that most often are Democrats. It is in Democrats’ interest to push these people to the polls, while it’s in Republicans’ interest is to not encourage good citizenship!

Many controversies appear with mail-in voting. For example, the question arises as to whether the ballots that arrive after Tuesday — but with a postmark dated Nov. 3 — will be counted. Pennsylvania, with its 20 electoral votes, has called for ballots received through Nov. 6 to be considered valid. So it’s hard to imagine that the results will be certain before that date unless the score between the candidates is not tight and that this “swing state’s” 20 electoral votes are not indispensable. The Republicans took the decision to court, but the Supreme Court refused to hear the case so soon before the election, which doesn’t mean it won’t take it up afterward!

Other controversies also arise. The Postal Service could have trouble delivering the ballots. Democrats point to the head of the U.S. Postal Service, who is also a donor to Trump’s campaign. So the controversy is that the Postal Service may not be doing everything it takes to deliver ballots on time.

Why Do Suspicions of Fraud Arise in Each Election?

ThIS fraud controversy is permanent in this complex and decentralized electoral system. Since 2000, Republicans have wanted IDs to be presented in order to vote, which seems natural to us, but is not the case in the United States, quite simply because there is no such thing as an identification card there. You would have to present a passport, driver’s license or even a license to carry weapons in order to vote. But these licenses require tuition and cost money, like issuing a passport. Democrats believe that would make those less motivated to vote even more discouraged from participating in elections.

How Do You Vote Without Any Form of Identification?

Here again, it depends on each state, and even on each county. There are places like Nevada, where you sign on a register and they just verify the signature. In New York, there is also a physical description of the citizen, while in California, all you have to do is enter your name and address in a register. Assessors just verify that the coordinates are on the electoral register. The systems are therefore more or less reliable In general, Republicans —Trump in particular — denounce widespread fraud, while their opponents tend to say it’s negligible. The truth is no doubt somewhere in between! But that is what Trump will use to contest the election if he is defeated by a narrow margin. If the election is very close, the Supreme Court could decide the winner, as was the case with Bush in his duel with Gore.

Trump Has Already Stated that He Will Challenge the Results if He Is Defeated. What Does this Mean to You?

What gives legitimacy to a democratic election is that the loser accepts having lost. Here, Trump is openly contesting the rules of the game. It is true that Trump always says what goes through his mind, unfiltered. But there is nothing to say that the Democrats would not contest the election if the question arose. You’re never safe from a surprise.

Even a Bad Surprise! How Do You Qualify the Trump Years?

Four chaotic years, of course. We must, however, distinguish Trump’s personality from the substance of his program. Trump had no political experience when he came to the White House and ran the United States like a business. Pretty much everyone was taken aback. This power grab was possible because the American electorate is very segmented, much more than in France for example, simply because they have the right to compile statistics on categories of people. In the United States, we know how Blacks, Hispanics, women, Hispanic women, and Black men vote, and suddenly politicians seek votes among women, among Blacks, among white men with diplomas, among white men without diplomas. And Trump did the same; he went to get the votes of white men without degrees.

Riots and Violence By the Trumpian Militias Were Evoked in the Event of a Biden Victory. What Do You Think ?

As long as one state is enough for the election to tip, the risk of anger, riots and violence cannot be ruled out, especially in a very fractured country. This kind of fracture is a problem; the parties find it very difficult to provide a universalistic offer. The Democratic Party has become, since the Reagan years, the party of minorities. Democratic academic Marc Lilla is very critical of his own party, which has become the party of communities, with no other substance than an agglomerate of identities. He himself observed that, when he now initiates a debate at the university, his students begin their argument by saying: “As a woman, as a gay person, as a Hispanic person … I think that …” The fact that identity is now the be-all and end-all of political argumentation is not a good thing. This patchwork cannot produce universalism.

The Democratic Party has become the party of everyone except straight white men with little education. Trump was able to exploit this part of the population’s feeling of being left out. They allowed him to come to power, along with another section of the electorate, the millionaires to whom he promised tax cuts, which he achieved. It was this unnatural alliance that brought Trump’s character to power. But with the crumbling of American society, the fractures run deep and will persist after him. The clans clash very violently, at least in rhetoric and slogans, although physical violence is not as great as one might think. Of course, we see weapons in meetings and demonstrations, which can give the impression of extreme violence, but those who bear these weapons are more often in an ideological posture. It is about showing everyone that they are the descendants of revolutionaries and pioneers. In the U.S., crime rates have been dropping for years. But of course, what I am saying at the moment may no longer be correct in a few days because, in such a context, one cannot exclude riots between supremacist militias and antifa or Black Lives Matter militants.