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“Chaos” in the Air: Five Ways Voting Could Be Disrupted on Election Day

As Americans head to the polls on Tuesday, voting experts are watching to see how the Trump administration’s unprecedented efforts to assert more federal control over elections will play out.

Since President Donald Trump retook the White House, his administration has tried to force states to turn over their unredacted voter rolls and to restrict mail-in voting. The Department of Homeland Security has used its resources to identify and prosecute noncitizen voters, an effort that has unfolded alongside the agency’s massive crackdown on immigrants.

The president has justified these steps by claiming, without evidence, that American elections are beset by fraud and that illegal voting is tipping the scales in favor of Democrats.

Courts have thwarted most of the administration’s plans to date, but Trump and his top deputies have kept up the pressure. Most recently, they’ve threatened to prosecute election officials who don’t reject ballots from people that the federal government has identified as likely noncitizens.

The administration hasn’t explicitly ruled out sending federal agents to the polls or seizing ballots or voting machines.

Election experts say the cumulative effect has been to ramp up anxiety about the midterms and to erode voters’ trust in the system.

“The administration has been creating a lot of noise, a lot of confusion, a lot of doubt,” said Ben Hovland, whom Trump fired as a commissioner for the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission earlier this year. He said he worries that this will make voters “sit it out” and “throw their hands up.”

In an emailed response to questions, a DHS spokesperson said Immigration and Customs Enforcement “is not planning operations targeting polling locations,” adding that the agency would only arrest people at the polls to address a safety threat as part of “intelligence-driven targeted enforcement.”

The DHS and the Justice Department “are laser focused on identifying, prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and dilute the votes of U.S. citizens,” the spokesperson added. “Our message to aliens who vote in American elections is clear: we will find you, arrest you, and you will face the consequences — including criminal charges and deportation.”

Before and on Election Day, it’s typical for the major political parties to mount poll-watching operations, but both Democrats and Republicans say they’ve expanded these activities in this pressurized midterm.

Republicans will focus on issues such as voter eligibility and voter-roll accuracy, according to Ally Triolo, the Republican National Committee’s election integrity communications director. Democrats will concentrate on voter intimidation and other hurdles to voting, Angelo Fernández Hernández, a Democratic National Committee spokesperson, said.

Here are five issues that voting rights experts say they’re watching as this year’s election unfolds:

1. Will There Be Federal Interference?

An incident in Leon County, in the Florida Panhandle, illustrates the widespread anxiety about law enforcement at the polls.

Mark Earley, the county’s supervisor of elections, told ProPublica he was “furious” when two marked U.S. Customs and Border Protection vehicles parked outside the county’s busiest early voting location last month, after he’d been repeatedly reassured by the administration that agents would not do this.

He reported the sighting to the FBI, then learned that the agents, who were headed out of state, had just stopped by to try to vote themselves. The episode generated a flurry of news coverage.

“Given the negative media coverage regarding federal agents at the polls, it shows pretty bad judgment that they showed up in their official vehicles,” Earley said.

It’s against the law for federal law enforcement to be near polling places.

Nick Brown, Washington’s attorney general, leads a group of Democratic state officials and voting rights advocates who have been planning how to respond if, indeed, there is real federal interference. The group has “war-gamed” how to react if government agents attempt to commandeer voting equipment or ballots.

“We’ve seen the tension and chaos that’s in the air,” Brown said. He called the federal government “the biggest challenge to smooth elections right now, which is not the way it’s supposed to be.”

A DOJ spokesperson said “the best preparation for any election official is following federal law.”

It’s routine for DOJ monitors to watch over polling places, and the agency has assured states that, in the midterms, its observers will follow the law and not interfere with voting or election administration. Still, state officials remain concerned. During Wyoming’s primary election, poll workers said they felt uneasy when DOJ monitors asked about their training and to inspect voting systems. The state’s governor criticized these actions as “a bit aggressive” and “irregular.”

2. What Effect Will Noncitizen Voter Challenges Have?

The Trump administration’s multipronged effort targeting alleged noncitizen voters has already led to eligible voters being improperly removed from the rolls. Voting rights groups fear this will block some U.S. citizens from being able to vote when they show up on Tuesday.

Federal officials have made clear they plan to go after anyone they think is committing voter fraud.

On the first day of early voting in Texas, Aaron Reitz, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, posted a YouTube video announcing his intentions. “If you violate federal election law,” he warned, “I will hunt you down and prosecute you.”

This threat came days after the DOJ sued California, seeking to block the state from counting mail ballots from more than 20,000 voters it claims are “likely” noncitizens. The administration had obtained the state’s public voter rolls, which the DHS had blended with its own immigration information and third-party data.

In a court filing, California called the claim that there are 20,000 noncitizens on its voter rolls “specious.” Los Angeles County analyzed a sampling of the likely noncitizen voters that the federal government claimed were registered there. Many weren’t registered in the county or had never voted, the analysis showed. Some said on their voter registration forms that they were born in the United States.

Asked about the case, the DOJ told ProPublica, “Federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and the Department has a duty to enforce it.”

A federal judge has rejected the DOJ’s motion for an emergency order that would have barred California from counting the 20,000 voters’ ballots. (A federal appeals panel later backed that decision.) On Thursday, the administration sent grand jury subpoenas to California officials demanding records about their response to allegations of noncitizens on the state’s rolls. Late Friday, a federal judge issued a restraining order blocking the DOJ’s demands, calling them an “intimidation plan” that would interfere with legal voting.

Last week, the DOJ wrote a letter threatening to sue Washington state if officials there refused to review a list of 400 voters it believes to be noncitizens within 24 hours. U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters late last month that the department was considering additional actions, saying there were “a number of states that we’re looking at.”

In a letter responding to the DOJ, Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs called the government list of 400 names “not reliable,” saying it included U.S. citizens, people who aren’t registered to vote and duplicate entries. “Time and time again,” Hobbs wrote, “DHS claims about noncitizen voter registration turn out to be greatly exaggerated or false.”

Sam Trepel is Rule of Law program director at States United Democracy Center and a former attorney for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. She said the agency’s actions involving California and Washington were a “disturbing use of prosecutorial authority.”

Trepel worries that the DOJ may try to seize ballots cast by voters identified as likely noncitizens, before or after the election, which would “put their votes at risk and undermine trust more broadly.”

Voting rights advocates also worry that the government’s efforts to target noncitizen voters could frighten eligible voters to the point that they won’t show up.

A federal judge recently put limits on a multistate effort by the DHS to go door-to-door in search of suspected noncitizen voters, at least through Election Day, saying it was illegally intimidating legal voters.

“A voter could say, ‘Well, maybe I don’t want to put myself on the target list here, maybe I won’t register, or maybe I won’t vote,’” said David Janovsky, acting director of The Constitution Project at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight.

3. Will There Be Problems at the Polls?

States often change laws and rules related to voting.

Since 2024, Republican-led states have taken a number of steps that experts say will make it more difficult for some of their residents to cast ballots and have them count.

A North Carolina law, for example, requires voters to provide proof of identification when sending mail-in ballots. Under new rules, ballots now come with two envelopes, both of which must be sealed. Ballot rejections have skyrocketed, Democracy Docket reported, because voters aren’t sealing the inner envelope.

Texas and other states have cut back on the number and location of polling places, especially in areas favoring Democrats. In hotly contested Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth, the number of polling sites was slashed by almost a third. This could increase the risk of long lines and voter confusion on Election Day.

Voting rights groups such as the Texas Civil Rights Project are tracking two issues involving the state’s voter registration systems. A software error at the Texas Department of Public Safety stopped several hundred thousand new voter registrations from being forwarded to local election officials, preventing them from being added to the rolls. A separate state system for updating registration information wasn’t processing changes for several weeks, leading to more backlogs. Counties say they’ve been able to address these problems.

Every election features some issues with voting equipment.

So far, there have been isolated complaints involving touch-screen voting machines — including one from Dolly Parton’s sister in Tennessee — spawning fears that machines have been “rigged” to switch votes.

ES&S, the company that makes the machines garnering the complaints, told ProPublica that the company hadn’t received widespread reports. Election experts say occasional problems with touch-screen machines don’t signify tampering or manipulation. Any attempt to tamper with programming would surface during testing by election officials and be corrected, they said.

4. How Secure Will the Election Be?

Incidents in the run-up to the midterms have ratcheted up election officials’ concerns about the potential for both cyber and physical attacks.

Last month, officials in several states, including Arizona, received envelopes with an unknown white powder. Arizona eventually deemed the material nontoxic, but Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said “the fear it caused was real.”

In 2024, false bomb threats, thought to be from foreign actors, caused widespread evacuations of vote-counting sites across the country. The disruptions were brief, however, in part because a message board funded by the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, alerted election officials that the FBI had deemed the threats not credible.

Trump, however, has dismantled CISA since retaking the presidency, leaving states and local election officials to grapple with both physical and cyber threats on their own. Election nonprofits have stepped up to try to fill the gap, and states, with CISA’s help, have enhanced their own cyber defenses.

Derek Tisler, counsel and manager for the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said the federal government’s absence has weakened the defenses.

“States acting on their own just do not have the same power,” he said.

5. Where Will Postelection Challenges Come From?

Election lawyers fear that actions by the Trump administration in the run-up to the midterms suggest the government will aggressively pursue postelection challenges if the results are not to the president’s liking.

Late last month, the DOJ sued Alaska, seeking to block the state from certifying the result of its Senate race if the Republican incumbent doesn’t win. A federal judge threw out that lawsuit on Sunday, but the administration is expected to appeal.

Trump has said he personally ordered the lawsuit to be filed. It claims the system is unfairly rigged against Sen. Dan Sullivan, because another Alaska man named Dan Sullivan also qualified for the general election ballot. The New York Times reported last week that campaign aides to Democratic Senate nominee Mary Peltola orchestrated the candidacy of the second Dan Sullivan after a monthslong, statewide search to recruit someone with the same name.

Nonetheless, the DOJ’s case is unusual, both because federal law prohibits the government from interfering with an active election and because challenges typically come after voting is complete. Postelection challenges are most often brought by losing candidates in state courts.

“This is using the federal government to interfere with our election process in a way that I think is pretty troubling on multiple levels,” said Brown, the Washington attorney general.

In response to ProPublica’s questions, the DOJ pointed to Blanche’s statement about the lawsuit on social media, which said the agency “does not seek to stop any ballot from being cast or to stop the certification of Alaska’s election.” (The lawsuit calls it “vital” that the state not certify “any election result that may be impacted by voter confusion” and asks the judge to prevent Alaska from doing this.)

Some election lawyers have suggested that if the GOP suffers significant losses, Trump could try to pressure Republicans in Congress to block new members from being seated. Several lawyers, including Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, say that the incoming Democratic majority would be able to fend off such an effort; courts, too, are likely to stymie it, though it might cause a short delay, according to Muller.

Brown said he and other attorneys general are also planning how to respond if local election officials or boards refuse to certify election results, based on their own claims of fraud or claims by the administration.

“I worry tremendously about what they might do,” Brown said.

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica

How Often Are Congressmen Elected?

The daily work grind and family responsibilities have the potential to make the average United States citizen woefully uninformed about politics and elections. In particular, most Americans are unaware of the timeline for election schedules, including that of the country’s lawmakers, collectively referred to as Congress.

What is the Timeline for Congressional Elections?

Contrary to what some think, members of Congress are not elected once every four years in unison with the President of the United States.

The Truth About the Timing of Congressional Elections

Search the web for terms similar to “how often are congressmen elected?” and you’ll find some potentially confusing results. The straightforward answer to this question is that the lawmakers of the United States are elected once every two years or six years.

Congressional Elections Distinctions of Note

Congress, consisting of 100 lawmakers in the Senate and 435 members in the House of Representatives, has two distinct election cycles. Seats in the House of Representatives are voted on every two years in years that are even-numbered. Such elections that occur at the midpoint of a presidency are referred to as the midterm elections. Alternatively, seats in the Senate portion of the legislative branch are re-elected once every half dozen years.

Congress Member Term Lengths

The term lengths of members of Congress parallel their distinct election cycles. As an example, Senators in the United States Senate serve as lawmakers for six years. In contrast, members of the country’s House of Representatives serve two-year terms as lawmakers.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Are members of Congress up for reelection during a president’s term?

Indeed, elections for congressional House of Representatives seats occur two years into each president’s term in office and also at the culmination of the president’s four-year term.

What is the logic in holding frequent congressional elections?

The purpose of forcing members of Congress to run for reelection is to hold public officials accountable to their districts’ constituents. If members of Congress were permitted to serve terms that last a decade, several decades or a lifetime, they would be less inclined to propose and pass laws that benefit their constituencies.

Are there any nuances to the election of senators?

Indeed, there are. If there is not a presidential election, 33% of the Senate is up for reelection in years that are even-numbered.

Do senators and representatives do the same work?

No. Representatives serve the purpose of sponsoring bills. If those bills pass with a majority of the vote, they transition to the Senate for another vote, presenting an opportunity for passage into law.

Is everyone living in the United States allowed voting for Congressional candidates?

No. You must be 18 years of age to register to vote and cast a vote for a politician running for a Congressional seat. Furthermore, some states have restrictions on the voting rights of felons.

Bottom Line

Every voting-age individual living in the United States is encouraged to voice his or her political opinions at the ballot box. Cast your vote for members of Congress every two years and you will help shape public policy.

Is Iowa’s ‘First Primary’ Franchise About To Expire?

The jockeying has begun over which mix of states might take part in a series of coordinated opening primaries for 2024’s Democratic nominee.

In the past half-century since the Iowa caucuses have led off the presidential nominating season, only one Democratic candidate who was not already president — a U.S. senator from the neighboring state of Illinois, Barack Obama — went on to win the White House. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Joe Biden all lost in Iowa in their first bid for the presidency, even though they went on to win the nomination and the election.

The record for Democratic presidential candidates in New Hampshire, the nation’s first presidential primary election, isn’t much better. In the same time period, only Carter — in his first campaign for the presidency in 1976 — won the state’s primary, Democratic nomination, and White House.

These awkward facts, coupled with criticism that both states’ voters do not reflect a sufficiently diverse cross-section of the national electorate, and a technical meltdown during Iowa’s 2020 caucuses that led to its results being delayed, have led the Democratic National Committee to open its first review since 2005 to reassess which states will open the 2024 presidential nominating season.

“Our party is best when we reflect the people we are trying to serve,” DNC Chair Jaime Harrison told the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC) on March 28. “I want folks to understand that this process, like all of the processes that we have gone through time and time again after each election cycle, will be open. It will be accessible. And it will incorporate the diverse perspectives that make our party strong.”

Harrison’s language, like much of the RBC meeting, was cordial, and emphasized transparency and inclusiveness. But it was clear, from the comments made by several RBC members, that Iowa’s days as the nation’s first contest, a party-run caucus, may be numbered. If the state kept an early role, it would be conducted as a party-run primary — not a party-run caucus — which, in itself, would be a major change inside the state and nationally.

More pointedly, the jockeying has begun over which mix of states might take part in a series of coordinated opening primaries on the same day in different regions of the country. While it is impossible to predict what will emerge from the RBC’s review, which it hopes to present this August, voices have suggested that Michigan, New Jersey or Wisconsin should replace Iowa, amid concurrent elections in Nevada, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

“As things stand right now, the first state to hold a delegate selection process in 2024 would be Iowa, whose 80 percent white electorate hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in a decade,” wrote Morley Winograd, a former RBC chair and top party official who oversaw the creation of the party’s opening primary schedule, in a March 25 blog at the Washington-based Brookings Institution. “The second state would be New Hampshire, which may have more of a historical and legal claim [since 1920] to be ‘first in the nation’ but whose electorate is even whiter, 90 percent, than Iowa’s… Most importantly, neither state voted for Joe Biden’s candidacy in 2020.”

Morley was welcomed at the March 28 meeting by James Roosevelt Jr., RBC co-chair, who said that the panel looked forward to hearing from him. At the meeting, Harrison announced that the RBC would be holding “three national virtual listening sessions” in coming months to gather input from the public and stakeholders. RBC members also suggested that state parties, unions, political scientists, and past and future presidential candidates should all weigh in.

But the groundwork was already being laid for reconfiguring what the RBC committee refers to as “the pre-window period,” which are the nominating contests before the numerous primaries held on the first Tuesday in March, called Super Tuesday, and the final contests in mid-June.

As Roosevelt summarized, the RBC is envisioning a process where state parties would apply and make their case for an early slot. The panel is looking at several criteria, which are priorities but not inflexible. States should commit to a primary election, not a caucus. States should also play a competitive role in the fall’s general election. And they should have a diverse electorate.

New Priorities, Led by Diversity

At the meeting, some RBC members began to press various constituencies’ cases, starting with a push for choosing early states that have a more racially diverse electorate.

“We know that we can engage more diverse groups that we need to help us win in the general election,” said Donna Brazile, a former DNC chair, presidential campaign manager and recent Fox News analyst. “It’s time for us, Mr. Chairman, to take a hard look at this.”

“We cannot be stuck in a 50-year-old calendar when we are trying to win 2022 and 2024,” said Leah Daughtry of New York. “This idea of considering the changing electorate is so important. Our country is very different than it was when we first set up the [pre-Super Tuesday] window… African Americans comprise 25 percent of rural America, and when you add [in] Latino Americans and Native Americans, rural America is nearly 40 percent people of color.”

But other members countered that the presidential campaigns prefer smaller states.

“[What] presidential candidates have always wanted from us… is that the early states be small states, and I do not see that listed in this framework,” said Carol Fowler of South Carolina. “And presidential campaigns have very good reasons for that. It has to do with cost. It has to do with a candidate who is not well known being given a benefit about campaigning in small states before they move onto larger states. I do hope that will be something that we can consider.”

“Carol’s right,” said Scott Brennan of Iowa, speaking several minutes later. “I think it would be very helpful to hear from presidential campaigns, folks like that, because, again, well, I think the touchstone is electing Democratic presidents.”

Art Cullen, editor of the Storm Lake Times in northwest Iowa, recently wrote a Washington Post opinion piece where he said the DNC was poised to bypass and disrespect rural America, and, with that, extinguish the prospect of another candidate like Obama emerging and triumphing.

“Yes, the Democratic National Committee is holding its quadrennial ritual of lashing us deplorables because, its notables believe, the two early-voting states do not represent the electorate and because politicians hate having discerning voters run the show,” he said.

“The caucuses are misunderstood—they were never meant to pick a winner,” he continued. “Their role is to winnow the field—down from 10 or 20 candidates sometimes to five or six viable campaigns going into New Hampshire. In 2020, the Democratic winner was picked by Black women turning out in droves for Joe Biden in South Carolina.”

But even South Carolina, despite Biden’s debt to that state’s Democrats, might not make the RBC’s final cut, as it hasn’t elected a Democratic presidential candidate in the fall since Jimmy Carter in 1976 and is not a battleground state. (The DNC, however, historically follows an incumbent president’s preferences.)

Nevada, despite its diversity, has other problems. The state party has internal leadership fissures after Democratic Socialists swept all the positions, prompting Nevada’s top elected Democrats to create a “shadow party.” In 2020, the state party ignored the RBC and used untested software to tally its caucus votes, causing delays in announcing the winner that were longer than Iowa’s breakdown weeks before. (Because Bernie Sanders won by a large margin, the press ignored the technical snafus.) In 2021, Nevada passed legislation making it the earliest presidential primary state in the West.

In contrast, Iowa, which has become an increasingly red-run state in recent years, has not passed legislation to replace its caucuses with a government-run primary. That means Iowa’s Democratic Party would have to stand up another entirely new voting system in 2024 — if it preserved its early role — after the high-profile failure of its new voting system in 2020.

And Winograd, who led the RBC decades ago and had a major role in shaping the party’s current schedule, apart from pushing for Michigan to replace Iowa (he was that state’s Democratic Party chair in the 1970s) also noted in his recent blog post that New Hampshire might have to change its primary rules to satisfy the committee’s new requirements.

“There is, however, one thing New Hampshire can do to assure their first in the nation status, at least for 2024,” he wrote. “To deal with the state’s lack of diversity, the party should permit only registered Democrats to vote in its primary in 2024, abandoning their tradition of allowing voters from one party to vote in the other party’s contest.”

The RBC is heading into stormy waters. The politics, voting rules, and election administration details quickly become complicated. For example, other states, such as South Carolina and Virginia, have open primaries where voters who are not registered Democrats can participate. The RBC is unlikely to pursue a rule change that would upend more states than necessary.

No matter what the RBC decides, some states will not be pleased, which raises another possibility. The earliest nominating races, while high profile, only involve a small number of the delegates needed to win the nomination. Thus, small states might ignore the DNC and proceed no matter what, even if the RBC sanctions them after the fact—as it did in 2008 when Florida and Michigan moved their primary dates. (The RBC stripped both states of half of their delegates, but restored them before the national convention.)

Meanwhile, the competition to be first only promises to become more heated.

“Why not end the early primaries with the most bitterly contested swing state in the nation — Wisconsin?” wrote the New Republic’s Walter Shapiro, a veteran political journalist who first covered the Iowa caucuses in 1980, endorsing yet another Midwestern state.

“What matters more than anything is that the Democrats retain for 2024 and beyond the most democratic aspect of running for president,” he wrote. “And that is creating a system under which candidates do not view most of America as flyover country as they race from major media market to major media market. Even in a nation of 330 million, personal campaigning should matter.”

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, The American Prospect, and many others.

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The Crisis Of Democracy Is Already Here

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

We can stop waiting for the big constitutional crisis, the cataclysmic electoral breakdown, the fracturing of democracy that many have long feared in the United States of America.

The crisis is already here, and we've been living with it for years.

It's become conventional wisdom among many political observers that the Electoral College system for picking our presidents is an anti-democratic relic that we're nevertheless forced to work around. And yet the significance of this fact is far too easily elided. We hear warnings that the Electoral College may one day trigger a disaster, but we've yet to properly take stock of the world of crisis we've already made for ourselves. And American political discourse still hasn't accommodated the fact that, because of the Electoral College and the winner-take-all state rules that decide our presidential elections, our form of government is not as democratic and morally admirable as we like to think.

Within the last two decades, there have indeed been, arguably, four distinct crises in the Electoral College that have profoundly shaken our democratic ideals and even warped the course of world history. Lives have been lost and ruined; blood has been shed as a result. The Electoral College is not just an outdated institution. It's a shambolic mess. The wheels have completely come off, and the train is off the tracks. And there's no sign it's headed for any smoother terrain.

The first of the modern crises, of course, came in 2000. The presidential election came down to Florida, and that state came down to 537 votes. A wave of irregularities and clear errors in the process easily swamped that margin, but as the fight over a recount dragged on, the Supreme Court was asked to intervene. Its decision essentially gave George W. Bush the presidency over then-Vice President Al Gore, despite the fact that Gore had won nationally by about half a million votes.

Gore conceded graciously, but a disaster was set in motion. The 9/11 Commission cited the delayed transition as a potential factor in the failure to foresee the coming terrorist attack mere months down the road. Had the Clinton administration smoothly transitioned into a Gore administration as most American voters wanted, perhaps that calamity could have been avoided — along with the disastrous wars of choice that followed. The country might have started taking climate change seriously at a crucial point in history, rather than ignoring it for far too long. The legitimacy of the 2000 election's outcome has never been broadly accepted, as many Democrats were outraged that the Supreme Court had sided with Bush and resented a system that let a contested 537 votes hold more sway than the hundreds of thousands more Gore could boast in his total.

And it wasn't just Democrats who could see the problem with the Electoral College's structure outweighing the collective voice of the voters. Contemporary news reports suggested that if, as had seemed possible before the election, Bush had won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College, his team would have fought fiercely in favor of letting the popular vote control. They would have argued for the plausible view: For the only two nationally elected officers — the president and vice president — the nation's vote as a whole should be what matters.

But as we all know, that's not how the world works.

"There is no constitutional right to vote for the president," Jesse Wegman, a member of the New York Times editorial board and author of the book, "Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College," told me. "You and I and every other citizen have no right at all to play a role in choosing the president. It's just the state legislators' decision to let us do that."

In the American system, state legislators wield enormous power, though they tend to attract much less attention than the U.S. Congress. Under the Constitution, they get to decide how electors are selected every four years to join the Electoral College, which then gets to pick the president and the vice president. Because most states have elections with winner-take-all rules, giving all of the state's electors to a single candidate, it's possible for the winner of the national popular vote to fail to win a majority of the Electoral College votes.

After the 2000 election highlighted this glaring flaw, many demanded change. But amending the Constitution to reform or abolish the Electoral College is extremely difficult because the people who benefit from the current system have the power to veto any reform. And the unique circumstances of the 2000 election — such a narrow margin in Florida, and botch election administration that included hanging chads and butterfly ballots — could almost be dismissed as a fluke.

And then it happened again.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton decisively won the popular vote. She won by more than 2 points and nearly 3 million votes. But despite winning 48.2 percent of the vote, she lost in the Electoral College to Donald Trump, who won a mere 46.1 percent of the vote.

That, on its own, should've been considered a crisis. Once again, the candidate with much more support from the voters was denied the presidency in favor of her less popular — not to mention clearly unfit — opponent. But Clinton herself avoided such language, conceding graciously the day after the election.

Those were the rules of the game, of course, and Clinton and Trump knew that going in. Had the results been reversed, Clinton would have happily taken office while losing the popular vote. But that doesn't mean the result was acceptable or right. The fact that we don't set up any other important election to function in this way shows that this arrangement doesn't have any intuitive appeal or inherent moral legitimacy. It's just what we've come to accept. Wegman persuasively argues that it wasn't an ingenious solution developed by the American Founders, either — it was a last-minute agreement by deeply flawed men that no one was ever really satisfied with.

Because Clinton was widely expected to win in 2016, and Trump was such an outlandish character, much of the media coverage in the days after the election focused on the fact of the stunning upset. Many urged Democrats and Clinton supporters to re-evaluate their own assumptions about the electorate and to question why the country had found Trump so appealing.

But the country hadn't found Trump so appealing. Millions more voted for his opponent. The odd quirk about the Electoral College, though, is that despite the fact that everyone knows it doesn't adhere to our traditional assumptions about democracy, the political establishment implicitly assumed there's something inherently just about the winner's claim to office and that they represent the will of the voters.

Trump didn't represent the will of the voters, though, as the numbers made clear. For a second time since 2000, democracy failed for the single most important office in the country. And this failure was massively consequential. The winner picked three Supreme Court justices, completely reshaping the balance of the court. He rewrote the tax code, started trade wars, defied Congress, tormented immigrants, ordered assassinations and executions, manipulated the tools of justice. And he oversaw mass death and misery during the COVID-19 pandemic as public experts pleaded with him to stop lying and do more to stop the virus.

His foreseeably catastrophic and plutocratic presidency was forced upon the country and the world, even though a majority of Americans thoroughly rejected him and more voters cast their ballots for his opponent.

American democracy broke down, and it hasn't yet been fixed. Some people tried to implement a last-ditch solution in 2016 to his unjust rise, after all the votes were cast, as Wegman recounts in "Let the People Pick the President." A group of faithless electors tried to break with the expectation that they cast their votes in line with their states in an effort to deny Trump the presidency.

It didn't work, of course. Only seven electors voted out of turn — five from Clinton and two from Trump. It was nowhere near the number that would've been required to deny Trump the presidency.

But it was, on its own, a mini-crisis of democracy. It was a serious effort to undo the outcome that had been set in motion on Election Day. It was itself a response to an emergency, an attempt to set right a grave wrong. But had the effort been successful, it could have unleashed unprecedented chaos, and it's far from clear that would have been a preferable outcome.

When Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, some pointed to the 2016 faithless electors plan — which wasn't supported by Clinton, who had conceded — as evidence that the Democrats were hypocrites and had been just as unwilling to accept the verdict of the voters.

There are, however, two key differences in the faithless electors' plan and Trump's efforts to undo the 2020 election. First, the faithless electors' plan is actually in accordance with the constitutional design of the Electoral College — it says nothing about electors being pledged to certain candidates. The electors could argue that becoming faithless to block Trump's win was both in accord with the original vision for the Electoral College and an appropriately democratic representation of an electorate who had rejected him. This is the second key difference with the 2020 crisis: the faithless electors were trying to stop a person who had clearly lost the popular vote from taking office.

When Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, he was doing the opposite. He was trying to stop Joe Biden — who not only won the popular vote but a substantial majority of American voters — from rightfully becoming president.

The crisis Trump triggered was not just a crisis of democracy, but a revolt against democracy. By pushing to have state legislatures overturn the result of the election procedures they had already put in place, and pressuring election officials to reject the proper results of those procedures, Trump undermined the bedrock of electoral governance. It was a rejection of the principles of democratic progress and an effort to install autocratic rule.

"It was outrageous that Trump and his allies were trying to do this," Wegman told me. "First of all, the election had already happened. Second of all, there was literally no evidence of fraud or irregularities at all, let alone on the level that they were claiming there was. So there was nothing to overturn."

He added that though it was "terrifying," the events were also "clarifying and illuminating" for the country. "Because it let the American people see just how contingent this whole process is on the state legislatures playing along."

He continued: "And while it was absurd and anti-democratic to try to force their hand after Nov. 3, in fact, at any point before then, the Constitution gave them free rein to change their rules about awarding electors. They didn't have to do it the way they did, which was a popular vote in their state. That's how every state does it, and that's how every state had done it since 1876, but they don't have to. They could change it in a day if they wanted to. And they could change it and say 'We're going to decide for ourselves.'"

Trump took it even further than that, of course. After his gambit with state legislatures failed, he tried to convince his vice president, Mike Pence, to intervene in Congress's counting of the Electoral College vote. Pence refused, and Trump, in response, sent a riotous mob after him and the nation's lawmakers. The violence was a predictable outcome of Trump's rejection of democracy and his cult-like following. Perhaps such an attack would have occurred even if the former president had lost under a pure national popular vote system, but the baroque nature of the existing process created many more opportunities for mischief that someone like Trump would be desperate to exploit. That gave his supporters hope he could remain in office if they just pushed hard enough.

At the same time, the Supreme Court is poised to give state legislatures even more power in setting the terms of elections, unconstrained by popular referendums or courts.

And even though Biden won the election, and Trump's efforts to overturn the outcome failed, he came much closer to winning than he should have.

David Shor, a data scientist for the progressive group Open Labs, which works on progressive causes, stressed how bad the skew of the Electoral College has become for Democrats.

"We got 52.2 percent, and if we had gotten 52 percent, we might have lost," he told me, referring to Biden's share of the two-party vote. "That's what the breakeven point was. The bias of the Electoral College went up. I think a lot of people forecast that it would go down. So that's bad. I think that's really bad. I think it's really under-remarked about."

He continued: "And it makes me think we're probably favored to lose in 2024. We barely scraped 52.2 against the most unpopular Republican incumbent to run in decades. And we still barely scraped by, so I think it's quite bad."

It's been a difficult truth for the media coverage to capture. On the one hand, Biden's Electoral College victory and his national popular vote share were substantial, so his win can be regarded as giving him a significant mandate and a rebuke of his predecessor. But the collective margins of victory in the decisive states that made Biden the winner are actually quite small, less the 50,000 votes. So it's not hard to imagine a very similar world where Trump had legally held on to power — even though he oversaw a world-historical disaster that made an overwhelming and record-setting 81 million voters turn out against him.

But because Trump's efforts to change the rules after Election Day and throw out votes was so outrageous, shameful, and potentially criminal, much less attention was paid to the institution that allowed it to happen at all.

In the wake of Trump's threat to democracy, some observers have boasted that the country's institutions held firm against the threat of autocracy, as they were designed to. But the Electoral College, a central pillar of our constitutional order — didn't protect us — it exacerbated the threat and made it possible to begin with.

Trump never had a hope of flipping any of the states that voted against him after the 2020 election — the margins were just too wide, unlike Florida in 2000. But even this hopeless and corrupt effort rested on a premise that should never be accepted in the first place — that it would be acceptable for Trump to hold on to the presidency even if he lost nationally by 7 million votes.

Wegman argued that there might nevertheless be an upside to Trump's post-election crisis.

"I actually hope it pushes us further in the direction of reforming what is so clearly a system that is not built for the 21st century and Americans' expectations of what it means to live in a modern democracy," he said.

In "Let the People Pick the President," Wegman endorses the idea of the National Popular Vote Compact. Under this scheme, already adopted by many legislatures in blue states, states agree to give their Electoral College votes to the winner of the national popular vote as long as enough other states representing 270 electors have agreed to do so, too. Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, recently famous for his role as the lead impeachment manager in Trump's Senate trial, introduced the legislation in 2007 as a state lawmaker that allowed Maryland to become the first to adopt the compact.

It's a clever pathway to get around most of the problems with the Electoral College without needing to pass a constitutional amendment on the matter, which is widely regarded as politically impossible. The hope is that, if it were ever in effect, Americans would get used to the process and the right to pick the president by popular vote, so amending the Constitution to make it permanent would become feasible.

Getting there, though, is the tricky part. Republicans in state legislatures resist the idea because they're aware that their party currently benefits from the Electoral College. And swing states — which, by definition, are necessary to reach 270 electors — have the strongest incentives to keep the current systems in place because they benefit from it enormously.

Wegman suggested that red state legislatures who see their states trending Democratic in the future might be persuaded to adopt the popular vote compact. The winner-take-all system would, if the opposite party takes control, completely nullify any Republican votes for president in their state. So they may see the compact as a way to preserve their relevance and protect their voices.

But Shor is not so optimistic about the national vote compact, calling the plan a "dead end."

"You can only get solidly blue states to pass this thing," he said. "And we're not going to have trifectas in Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin, or Michigan, or any of these other places."

Shor said one plan that helps the Democratic position a bit would be making Puerto Rico a state — a change many have called for on separate grounds. He estimated that adding the island as a state "would erase something like 10 percent of the Electoral College bias." (D.C. statehood, on the other hand, makes no difference in the Electoral College, since it already selects electors.)

In his work, Shor spends more time thinking about how Democrats can cope with the structural bias against them, rather than whether the problem can be fixed. His main answer is that Democrats have to hone their messages to compensate for the game being rigged against them.

"The source of this Electoral College bias as it exists is that as education polarization goes up, generally speaking, that leads to a lot of wasted votes," he said. "Roughly speaking, who does well in these large midwestern states determines the presidency. As those places trend more Republican, unless we do better and reverse education polarization, it's unlikely to go away any time soon."

Basically, the problem for Democrats is that white people without college degrees — who are increasingly favoring Republicans — are overrepresented in swing states.

"We have to turn around and try to appeal to voters in these states that matter more. Which really sucks," he said. "We just have to care more about what midwestern white people think."

Of course, the fundamental idea in a democracy should be that nobody's vote counts more than anyone else's. That's the egalitarian commitment that underlies the system and gives it moral and popular legitimacy. The Electoral College as it's currently set up undermines all that — it says that the rational thing for politicians to do is to care more about certain voters than others, just as Shor advises.

That's the crisis we're living with. And it could easily get worse. Not only is the institution that picks the presidency skewed against the popular will, one of the two major parties is increasingly authoritarian and opposed to democracy. And now, Trump has blazed a path for future challenges to election results, even if has failed.

"Now the sharks are circling, because now they know there's blood in the water," said Wegman. "The party that refuses to try to appeal to more people in a representative democracy has only one way to power, and that's through the manipulation of existing mechanisms to entrench minority rule. And that will kill American democracy. And that will kill the republic."

The GOP has been working hard at this for years. While it's widely known that Republicans heavily gerrymandered congressional districts to their advantage in 2010, Shor argued that even more significant is what happened to state legislatures — the bodies with the ultimate authority over how we pick the president.

"I think this is one of the most under-remarked things in politics," Shor said. "State legislative lines are substantially more gerrymandered than congressional ones. They have more districts to work with. People's intuitions on this are totally wrong. The more districts you have, the easier it is."

With Republicans in control of many key state legislatures, gerrymandering in Republicans' favor is likely going to get worse as we head into another round of redistricting. That means the people who control elections, including the Electoral College, will likely become even more disconnected from the voters and even more extreme. This week, the Arizona legislature even considered a proposal that could potentially let it override the way its people vote in a presidential election, if the legislators so chose.

What's most remarkable to me is that throughout all these crises, the leadership of the Democratic Party seems to lack all urgency. There's certainly a time for calm, stately leadership. But Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Biden have rarely made the point that there is something fundamentally broken in American democracy. That encourages the media to treat the grossly skewed system of the Electoral College, which keeps throwing the country into chaos and corrupting politicians' incentives, as an acceptable part of the country. And the lulls the public into thinking this is just the way things are, and we have to learn to live with it.

At least until the next crisis.

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The National Memo is a political newsletter and website that combines the spirit of investigative journalism with new technology and ideas. We cover campaigns, elections, the White House, Congress, and the world with a fresh outlook. Our own journalism — as well as our selections of the smartest stories available every day — reflects a clear and strong perspective, without the kind of propaganda, ultra-partisanship and overwrought ideology that burden so much of our political discourse.
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