Why Trump’s Election Results Answer Matters
The final Presidential debate of the 2016 cycle is over. As most of America crawls out of bed with a hangover, whether literal or figurative, the media has gripped instantly onto one of the most striking moments of last night’s debate: Donald Trump refusing to commit to accepting the outcome of the election on election day if he loses.
Here’s the transcript if you prefer to read.
Wallace: Mr. Trump, I want to ask you about one last question in this topic. You’ve been warning at rallies recently that this election is rigged and that Hillary Clinton is in the process of trying to steal it from you. Your running mate Governor Pence pledged on Sunday that he and you, his words, will absolutely accept the result of this election. Today your daughter Ivanka said the same thing. I want to ask you here on the stage tonight, do you make the same commitment that you’ll absolutely accept the result of the election.
Trump: I will look at it at the time. I’m not looking at anything now, I’ll look at it at the time. What I’ve seen, what I’ve seen, is so bad. First of all, the media is so dishonest and so corrupt and the pile on is so amazing. “The New York Times” actually wrote an article about it, but they don’t even care. It is so dishonest, and they have poisoned the minds of the voters. But unfortunately for them, I think the voters are seeing through it. I think they’re going to see through it, we’ll find out on November 8th, but I think they’re going to see through it. If you look —
Wallace: But, but —
Trump: Excuse me, Chris. If you look at your voter rolls, you will see millions of people that are registered to vote. Millions. This isn’t coming from me. This is coming from Pew report and other places. Millions of people that are registered to vote that shouldn’t be registered to vote. So let me just give you one other thing. I talk about the corrupt media. I talk about the millions of people. I’ll tell you one other thing. She shouldn’t be allowed to run. It’s — She’s guilty of a very, very serious crime. She should not be allowed to run, and just in that respect I say it’s rigged because she should never —
Wallace: But, but —
Trump: Chris. She should never have been allowed to run for the presidency based on what she did with e-mails and so many other things.
Wallace: But, sir, there is a tradition in this country, in fact, one of the prides of this country is the peaceful transition of power and no matter how hard fought a campaign is that at the end of the campaign, that the loser concedes to the winner. Not saying you’re necessarily going to be the loser or the winner, but that the loser concedes to the winner and the country comes together in part for the good of the country. Are you saying you’re not prepared now to commit to that principle?
Trump: What I’m saying is that I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense, okay?
This statement, which is unprecedented in American politics, has sent the media and the elites of both parties into orbit. As Mark Halperin noted this morning on MSNBC, elites in both parties don’t like Donald Trump, and they will view this statement as fundamentally damaging to democracy. It is. Halperin also noted that the vast majority of the country will not care because this statement, in and of itself, doesn’t really impact them. He’s also correct. The problem, though, is that most of these elites are not reacting to what Trump said, but to what they think he said.
The media, in typical fashion, has jumped to the incorrect conclusion about what Trump said. They have already begun spinning this story to make it sound like Trump was saying he would not accept the results of the election unless he wins. Trump has said a lot of things, but this is not one of the things he’s said. To be fair, he did not say he wouldn’t accept the results of the election. He said he would “wait and see” and he would tell us at the time. “I’ll keep you in suspense,” were his words.
So let’s dispense with the claim that he’s saying he wouldn’t abide by the results of the election, because that’s not what he said.
What he did say – the claim that there are millions of people registered to vote shouldn’t be, and the insinuation that the election could be stolen and he has to wait until election day to know if it has been – is just as bad, if not worse, than the media’s inaccurate portrayal of his comments. Trump is continuing to undermine the legitimacy of our electoral system for his own personal gain, and that’s the real problem.
Trump continually mischaracterizes a 2012 Pew Report that talks about how flawed voter registration systems are across the country. Pew notes that millions of voter registrations are out of date, 1.8 million deceased individuals have not yet been removed from the poll books, and 2.75 million people have registrations in more than one state. This is one of the reasons why election administrators, including former ones like me, have been pushing for adequate funding to replace voter registration databases throughout the country, and find a way to link them into a national system that can make the process of changing your registration when you move easier and more accurate.
We’ve seen the damage a lack of resources and outdated systems can have on voter registration first hand – Virginia’s own VERIS system went down on Monday, the final day by law to register to vote for the November election, and it caused massive problems across the Commonwealth.
The problem, however, is that this – alone – does not mean the election is rigged. It means that there are many registrations that are screwed up and need to be fixed. Ask any registrar in any county in America and they will agree that this stuff needs to be fixed, and our elected officials continually short change election systems when it comes time for budgeting. Harping on this as Trump does, however, creates the impression that these millions of deceased individuals are voting, that the millions who have uncancelled registrations in former states where they lived are voting those registrations, and this is having an impact on national election outcomes. That’s just not true.
To be clear: voter fraud and election fraud are real. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, I’ve investigated it with my own eyes, and I’ve forwarded examples of it for prosecution. But the one thing I learned through this process is that fraud is not endemic, and it is not partisan – in my investigation of a small number of apparent double voters, there were Democrats, Republicans and Independent registered voters (we were looking specifically at double voting between Virginia and Maryland, and Maryland registers people by party). Fraud happens on both sides of the aisle. This year, we saw a Democratic operative trying to register dead people to vote in Harrisonburg. Three years ago, we had a Republican operative destroying voter registration applications, also in Harrisonburg. Both sides don’t have clean hands in this debate.
The Constitution leaves the manner of choosing electors for President up to the states. It also leaves the time, place and manner of elections for federal office up to the states. This has resulted in a patchwork quilt of laws and traditions, voting systems, hours, and the like across the country. This patchwork quilt, where almost no two localities have the same systems and practices, is the best defense against a rigged national election. Someone wishing to rig the election would need to target specific counties in specific battleground states, figure out how to cheat the specific systems in place in those counties, get past all the security and the multiple layers of observers in those counties, and pray that every election watcher is looking the other way. It’s next to impossible in the modern era, where everybody has a phone in their hands and a camera on their phone.
Trump does not need to wait until election day to know that the results on election night will be proper. Even saying that he has to wait is bogus, because he doesn’t. This is not 1960. It’s not the old days where political parties could stuff ballot boxes because there weren’t pre-printed ballots. It’s not even 2000, where the results were so close as to justify a recount and active litigation. The chances of this race coming down to a handful of Florida counties – or a handful of counties anywhere – is relatively low. Even then, Gore never said before the election that he would have to wait and see before he accepted the results. It was assumed, as it has been in every presidential election since 1864, that the candidates would accept the results without waiting to confirm there was no fraud.
Trump doesn’t need to “wait and see” to know that the results of the election will be proper. This election will be fair, but it will not be error free. No elections ever are. We should strive to make our elections as free from error as we can, but this is a human endeavor, so you can guarantee mistakes will be made. That does not mean the election results will be invalid and the system has in place multiple layers to catch errors and correct results. All voters, including Trump, should be confident that the process will work and the election will be fair. And he should say so.
Every time somebody calls the fairness of an election into question, blows up machine problems into allegations of tampering, turns human error into the harbinger of voter fraud, it has a negative impact on the legitimacy of our institutions. Today, when government itself is one of the most hated institutions in the country, and when faith in our system is at all time lows, we cannot afford to have a major party candidate taking his machete to an already tattered political fabric.
Trump did not say he wouldn’t accept the outcome of the elections. What he did say, however, was yet another insinuation that this election could be stolen through voter fraud and corruption.
That’s just as bad.
