At the time of this writing, Russia has invaded Ukraine. They’ve gotten their asses kicked pretty soundly up to this point, scaling back their full scale take over plans to a region in eatern Ukraine known as the Donbass. Their eyes got a little too big for their stomachs, it truns out. And even now, Russia is losing ground as the international community has poured out a strong backing for Ukraine, attempting to learn its lesson from the last world war. So to make it seem like he’s something other than a land grabbing megalomaniac, Vladimir Putin is staging elections in the Donbas region, where Russian troops roam the streets as a standing army in the midst of an active conflict.
We seem to have no problem describing these elections as illegitmate. Ukraine isn’t going to recognize them, and neither is any other NATO country. It seems a little odd that we can know automatically that these elections are bogus, not because the fact isn’t obvious, but because we seem to have no vocabulary to describe what makes an election legitimate or illegitimate. What’s the rule that’s been broken in this situation that’s so heinous that it has us ready to throw the results out sight unseen, before a single contaminated ballot or fraudulent poll worker is brought forward? It seems safe to say that where there’s a hostile standing army with a vested interest in a citizenry voting one way or another, that nobody could cast a vote that authentically reflected their own wishes, and even if they could, who would count them but a bunch of people with guns who know the answer they want already? But if that’s enough to disqualify an election without a single piece of evidence, then Americans are im some serious trouble. There are cities in the United States with homicides that are as high as those in war zones, and we have not been shy about giving military surplus gear to our police departments. From the perspective of the people with ballots to cast in those cities, this makes their tank riding police forces an occupying army in an active warzone, and the perspective of voters is the one that counts. By our Donbass region standard, that’s enough to throw their elections out the window before we take a single shifty poll worker in for questioning.
“To date, the US has spent over $15 billion on the militarization of police” – From Business Insider
And that’s only one rule we seem ready to recognize about how the legitimacy of an election might be determined: Elections can’t be conducted while an occupying army threatens the electorate. How many rules like it might we suppose there are? One that seems fairly safe to rely on is that an election in which the majority of people are prohibited from voting, can’t be a legitimate election. If elections are a means of reflecting the will of the people, and most people aren’t allowed to vote, well then that election doesn’t do what elections are supposed to and we can’t accept its results. But if we stick by that rule then the first possible legitimate election in the US didn’t take place until 1920, when women were granted the right to vote. Anyone familiar with the Voting Rights Act of the 1960’s or the cofessions of electoral fraud surrounding the staff of former President Lyndon “Landslide” Johnson would hardly say that voting hit the ground running as soon as women walked through the door. Yet in the modern day and age, the idea that we might suggest that there are still some very serious problems with voting is somehow seen as the least democratic thing we could possibly do.
The left has railed mercilessly aginst Trump supporters who’ve dared to question the legitimacy of our elections, as though anyone who would even dream of contestting the results of a major election can have no possible goal besides the overthrow of democracy itself. It’s very difficult to accept the acute case of amnesia that this fairly flagrant propaganda effort has, in light of the fact that George W. Bush’s first election to the presidency had liberals decrying the shifty vote counting tactics of Florida’s political machine. When their man lost, well then it was purely the good old boys fault. Ballots were confusing, machine counts were flawed. What a crime.
Protestors of the Bush-Gore 2000 election at Capitol Hill. What a bunch of wingnuts right?
If we’re really supposed to swallow whole the idea that questioning the integrity of the vote somehow undermines democracy, then we never could have become the more democratically enlightened society we are today. Elections in which women vote are clearly more legitimate than elections in which they’re banned from voting, but in order to get women the right to vote, a bunch of men had to raise their hands and open that door. Free societies come into the world by breaking free from more oppressive visions of the world. If no social decision could be accepted until the society that made it was perfectly free, then democracy could literally never have begun.
Right now there is an enormous amount of controversy around the results of the 2020 election. Let me say right now that I believe Trump lost and that something authentically democratically threatening happened on January 6, 2021 when protestors allegedly overpowered a capitol hill security that has been equipped to handle the prospect of a nuclear apocalypse for the better part of a century. The idea those protesters did something that an invading army would have failed to do, is ridiculous on its face. Anyone who, willfully or not, went to sleep on the job so that these protesters could storm the halls of Congress and legitimately threaten the functioning of democracy needs to get hit with every kind of book we have to throw at them.
With that said, there’s something very important that we’re missing about this conversation, which is that Trump supporters are American citizens, and no small amount of American citizens, who have lost trust in the integrity of the vote. I’m not sure when or how it suddenly became the liberal thing to do to suggest that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with voting in this country, and in fact very recently democrats were up in arms when the Supreme Court pulled back voting protections for communities of color that had been put in place under the Voting Rights Act. The point here is that we can’t have our cake and eat it too. There was a much bigger problem than just racism at play in states that had come under federal receivership in the conduct of their elections. That is to say, the problem wasn’t that officials in those places were throwing away black votes, but that nothing stops them from throwing away votes period. If we solve racism in those places, which the Supreme Court seems to think we have, we still very much haven’t solved the prospect of them throwing away votes for whatever other set of prejudices they might be inspired with, money being the biggest candidate on that list.
If you think it matters who is being denied the right to vote, you’re doing it wrong.
This is a democracy and that means it’s the job of our leaders to convince us to follow them. When we tell Trump supporters that they’re a bunch of mouth breathing simpletons for not following our leaders, we flirt with reversing that formula in a dangerous way. We don’t have to agree with these people to acknowledge that there are serious problems with voting. We don’t have to agree with them to recognize that their lack of confidence in voting is a collective national failure. We have a government that’s getting more difficult to consent to and our suddenly, miraculously unimpeachable ballots have for some reason not been correcting that state of affairs for us. This is not something we’re going to fix by making fun of our political opponents when they raise what should be a bipartisan issue about the integrity of voting. We have to accept our elections like the women who voted for the first time had to accept the government they’d never once consented to as one that was worth voting for on that first full gendered election day. The left is digging themselves a hole right now that’s going to be very awkward to stare out of when the next George W. Bush comes along.
Yes there are political machines in this country. Who they back is not what’s wrong with them. Being a machine that squeezes the life out if people behind the veil of an election is what’s wrong with them. Sitting Democratic senator Cory Booker had his campaign headquarters broken into and paid fake political crowds storm his rallies while he fought the New Jersey political machine to get into office. That’s an incredibly democratically positive story that’s a progressive force in our government right now, and it’s a story that we’ll lose the ability to tell if we keep up the short sighted charade that says elections can only have problems when our guy loses. Like the suffragettes, we need to keep pushing through a broken government until we find ourselves standing behind real power, in a real ballot, in the first real election.
Trailer to the 2005 film Street Fight about Senator Booker’s campaign for mayor in Newark New Jersey.
Princess Fantastic 