There was George Kelly, on his lawn mower, met last week in Wayne County, northern Pennsylvania, who confidently claimed that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by Democrats. “They made the dead vote,” he dropped, repeating an erroneous assertion that former President Donald Trump and his entourage have been percolating for a year in the conservative ranks. “Georgia. Arizona. Everything was fraudulent. And we need tougher laws to prevent that. “
In truth, the judicial recount of the votes in Maricopa County, Arizona, by a company paid for by Republicans, last September brought up 99 more votes for Joe Biden – they had not been counted the first time around. – and invalidated 261 votes wrongly counted for the former US president. In Georgia, the same exercise confirmed the reliability of the initial results and demonstrated the absence of massive fraud fabricated by the populist.
There was also Bobby McClintock, a computer engineer from Richmond, Virginia, who said “no longer trust the electoral process”. “There is too much fraud, especially by post, and it’s a real scandal”, hammered the man, on the sidelines of a political rally for the Republican candidate for governor. On Tuesday, this process, solid and liberal in Virginia, nevertheless led its candidate, Glenn Youngkin, to power.
And then there was this poll this week: just a third of Republicans say they have confidence in the validity of the last federal ballot, compared to 82% of Democrats and 68% of independent voters, according to Marist College. A mistrust fueled on purpose by the elected members of the opposition and influential conservative groups which, one year from the next legislative elections and the approach of the 2024 presidential election, are now doing everything to take advantage of it. Among other things, by modifying the electoral rules across the country to better avoid a future defeat. In contempt, often, of democracy.
“We have entered one of the most dangerous periods for American democracy since the Civil War,” said Rick Hasen, professor emeritus of law and political science at the University of California, in an interview. He is the author of the essay Cheap Speech (translation: Low-end speech), to be published next March, which dissects the way in which disinformation is rotting the political climate in his country. “Social networks have become the ideal vehicle for demagogues to convince millions of people of a fraud that never existed. “
This week, in the pages of the scientific journal PNAS, a team of researchers from Stanford University and the University of Chicago has also invalidated not one, but all allegations of systematic fraud after statistical analysis of the results of last year’s vote.
“These lies tend to put the next election paradoxically at greater risk of fraud, because people who think the last election was stolen will be more likely to cheat for revenge and ‘equalize the score ”, continues Hansen.
Change the rules
The process seems to be well and truly underway in nearly ten American states, where Republican legislations have campaigned to officially “restore the integrity of the electoral process”, repeating ad nauseam their slogan: “easier voting and more complicated fraud”. To the problem invented from nothing for a year, they now oppose laws aimed at reducing access to the vote, the registration of voters on polling day and the exercise of postal voting.
Texas has just adopted a new division of its electoral map which has the effect of diluting the Latin vote in the regions of Dallas and Houston in order to prevent them from reaching majorities in certain counties. Elsewhere, laws seek to oust non-partisan election officials and replace them with more politicized actors and to give local laws the power to overrule election results on the basis of suspicion of fraud.
“It’s extraordinarily undemocratic,” says Alex Keena, a political scientist at Virginia Commonwealth University, “because it gives elected officials the power to oversee elections. Which is the obvious conflict of interest. “
At the same time, Republicans blocked in Washington in the last few days the passage of the Freedom to Vote Act, a bill designed to protect Americans’ right to vote uniformly across the country and to prevent piecemeal rule changes. by states for political purposes.
“The laws currently in place in the states will make the electoral system more vulnerable, not less,” assures Rob Yablon, professor of law and keen observer of the American electoral process at the University of Wisconsin. In a highly polarized political climate, this opens the door to embezzlement for 2022 and 2024. ”And this worries the Democratic deputy of Virginia Mark Levine, who, for a year, has been seeking to mobilize his camp against a drift which now threatens according to him the foundations of the United States.
“There have always been two parties in the United States that did not agree on the issues, but agreed on one thing: respect for democracy,” said the man we met last week in Alexandria, in the north. of State. However, now we have a party that no longer believes in democracy and that is ready to do anything to gain power. “
“The Republican Party knows that its ideas are no longer in the majority in this country and instead of changing its ideal, convincing people that it is right, it prefers to steal the right to vote from citizens, to sacrifice democracy for power. And it is very dangerous ”, he adds, stressing that in history,“ many dictatorships have imposed themselves in countries where democracy was nevertheless in place ”.
Plausible scenario
A democracy held back by an eroding foothold in the United States, where, in 2022, Republicans only need to overthrow five seats in the House of Representatives and one in the Senate to take control of the legislative apparatus of the United States. countries, block the policies of the Biden government and impose other electoral laws that will benefit them.
The execution of this scenario could also be simplified by the rules they have just changed in several states, and this, during a vote where traditionally, the party in the White House naturally loses its feathers after two years of exercise of power.
“We are facing a crucial moment in our history,” summarizes Ema Rodriguez, spokesperson for the organization Future Coalition, which brings together around a hundred young activists around the defense of various social and political issues. The duty met her this week in Washington. “What is happening is not reassuring, and that is why we must fight to protect our freedoms and social justice that some seek to take away from us. “
“Americans are not paying enough attention to the current threat,” says Mark Levine. They are presumptuous and have too much confidence in a democracy which today turns out to be too fragile in the face of what is happening in this country, ”he worries.
This report was partly funded with support from the Transat-Le Devoir International Journalism Fund.