Specter

Since Donald Trump first claimed that he won the U.S. presidential election in 2020, the idea has spread among millions of his supporters. It motivated a chaotic and violent attack on the U.S. Capital in 2021, and it holds still today—with two-thirds of Republican voters and nearly three in 10 Americans. The idea is that the 2020 election was “stolen,” through phony voters, rigged voting machines, and corrupt election officials and judges.

While there’s no evidence supporting this idea, and an abundance of evidence to the contrary, Trump’s supporters don’t trust these conclusions, believing they’re based on a coordinated campaign of lies and manipulation. Independent election officials, and one high-profile court case after another, however, have affirmed it—now to the considerable expense of Trump, a number of his associates, and even Fox News, which had to pay US$787.5 million in a settlement with Dominion Voting Systems for claiming their machines had been rigged.

And yet Trump is now alleging that the Democrats plan to steal the coming election, too. Democrats, meanwhile—who recall Trump’s own efforts to interfere with the 2020 election—worry that he could potentially steal next week’s election, himself. In the last two weeks alone, The New York Times has run a series of articles titled, “In case of an election crisis, this is what you need to know,” “What to know about the looming election certification crisis,” and “The army of election officials ready to reject the vote.” Earlier this week, someone seems to have burnt ballot boxes in Washington and Oregon, damaging hundreds of votes. How vulnerable is the U.S., then, to a presidential election being stolen?

Richard H. Pildes is a professor of law at New York University. Pildes says that if the election is close, there’ll likely be partisan attempts to affect the outcome—but the safeguards in the American electoral system make that a daunting challenge, if not effectively impossible. The U.S. election system does have some vulnerabilities. But they’re not, Pildes says, where the real risk to the legitimacy of the election is; the real risk to the legitimacy of the election is in the social reality that so many people, Republicans and Democrats, are now so ready to believe that it could be stolen …

Gustav Jönsson: Theoretically, what would be the main points of vulnerability in America’s election system?