How To Influence An American Election
You Don’t Necessarily Need The Russians.
The main thing that separates a democratic state from a totalitarian one is not a caring government or freedom of speech. It is the government’s ability to meddle in the elections. There are countries where the idea of an election is a mere luxury, for power is handed over not by the choice of the people, rather by the birthright. There are countries that despite being constitutionally democratic, hold elections only as a ceremony, for the people already know they have been stripped off their right to elect their leaders long ago. Yet, there are countries like the United States of America, which has been practicing mostly fair elections since birth.
One of the most defining features of American Democracy is its Elections. A general election occurs every two years with a Presidential Election between four years. It has been the same since the first Presidential Election in 1788. Fair elections are being ensured for more than two centuries. This tradition ensures the reflection of people’s choices in their Government and a peaceful transaction of power. But on the very last Presidential Election, there had been allegations of Russian interference in the favor of a certain candidate through social media. It is debatable whether this “interference” influenced the result in any way, but I want to talk about completely legal ways used by parties for many years to favor any side.
Now let’s get something clear. I am not talking about election rigging. If a registered voter comes to the poll and casts his/her vote, it cannot be undone. The voting will be recorded and there are so many safeguards that it is nearly impossible to change the vote count or mess with the numbers by any means. The registry of voter list, the voting system and the vote-counting are extremely foolproof. Even if it is somehow messed with, the chances that it would be noticed are incredibly high.
US elections cannot be rigged, yet there are parameters that can be influenced to sway the results.
There are ways that are particularly illegal but they had been done in the past and even now done in almost every election in the shadow of other legal terms. Let’s see the ways to make these work and get away.
The Forgettable Past
In the past, when African Americans first got the voting rights by the 14th amendment of the constitution, the southern states made laws for the blacks to make voting harder. These infamous Jim Crow laws included literacy tests, poll taxes and grandfather clause. The laws were made specifically targeting the newly liberated African American citizens.
Poll taxes were enacted to the people as a sum to pay to enjoy all the privileges of a US citizen. It meant that the citizens had to pay a certain amount of money to be registered as a voter. As most of the African Americas were poor, it had been a luxury to most of them to pay money to vote.
Another discriminatory law was the literacy tests which suggested that the voters must pass a literacy test conducted by the state to vote. As most of the black voters had been deprived of education as slaves, it had made most of them ineligible voters.
Where it becomes mostly unfair is that some states waived some of the citizens of the burden of poll taxes and literacy tests by “Grandfather Clause” which stated that citizens whose ancestors were voters before the civil war were exempted from these laws. Unfortunately, the blacks had not been citizens of the United States by law before the civil war and slavery was yet to be abolished.
These laws were made with a single notion. That is racial discrimination and segregation towards the African Americans. Most of the southern states were not ready to see blacks with citizenship privileges or voting rights. As both of them were constitutionally enforced, the only viable solution was to create strict laws so that there were little incentives for them to come to vote booths.
The constitution did not recognize women as voters before the 19th amendment of the constitution which was passed in 1920. That means half of the population was not eligible to elect their representatives even before the First World War.
Fortunately all these discriminatory voting laws were abolished by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, prohibiting all the racial discrimination used in voter suppression.
Lawful Suppression
Even after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, new loopholes are being used as ways of suppression. One of them is Voter Purge. It is done in the name of obliterating voter fraud. To ensure that the voter list doesn’t have any discrepancy due to the enlistment of any deceased voters or duplicate names, the list is checked constantly. As the election is held by the state, the state itself decides how strict the voter regulations would be. Sometimes state legislatures make laws targeting a certain group. For example, some states require that their voter information be exactly the same as their identification. Any simple mistake in even punctuation is enough to make voters disqualified. During 2014–2016, States removed 16 million voters from the list in strict voter purge, many of whom were eligible to vote.
One fine example of voter purge is in Georgia’s Gubernatorial Election. Republican Brian Kemp ran against Democrat Stacey Abrams. As Secretary of State of Georgia, Kemp was in charge of voter registration. He purged 1.5 million voters over strict voting law of which 70% was African American. It is no secrets that most African Americans and other minorities tend to lean toward a particular political party and interestingly, Stacey Abrams herself was an African American. She lost the election.
Another example of voter suppression is required voter IDs. Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin are the ten states that require voters to have government IDs to vote. The precedence of needing a government-issued photo-ID is a rather new concept in the election history of more than two centuries. It was only in 2006 that the state of Indiana established new laws requiring it. The problem is that sometimes acquiring a photo ID is expensive and many of the poor voters choose not to have one and cannot vote. What is interesting is that the ten states with strict photo ID rules, almost all of them are considered to be Republican bases. Again this law mostly targets poor African Americans.
Voter suppression has a long history in America. In the Voting Rights Act of 1965, any racial discrimination was banned from elections. It had provisions of “Federal Preclearance”, which meant, states that have a history of voter suppression had to consult with the Federal Government to make any changes to any election laws. But in 2013, the Supreme Court abolished those provisions which allowed Southern states to strict voter laws targeting blacks.
The excuse given by the states for strict voter laws is nothing but voter fraud. After the 2016 election, Trump claimed that 3 million people voted illegally. But there was never any evidence of any wide spread voter fraud that can attract attention, let alone influence an election. In a paper by David Cottrell, Michael C. Herron and Sean J. Westwood called “Evaluating Donald Trump’s Allegations of Voter Fraud in the 2016 Presidential Election” they concluded that there was no widespread fraud against Trump that swayed the election in any way.
In the history of America, there had never been any claims of nation-wide voter fraud. To show how ridiculous it is to perform extreme voter purge to stop voter fraud, a study performed by The Washington Post shows that there had been only 31 instances of credible fraud between the years 2000 to 2014, although in this time more than a billion votes were cast. Another research shows that in the rare cases of voter fraud, most of them are clerical errors. But the most interesting one is presented by a report by Brennancenter which says that it is far more likely for a voter to be struck by lightning than engaging in voter fraud. It is clearly an overkill to deprive millions of people of voter right because of something that is so unlikely.
The Art of Division
It is easy to influence the result of the election in another way called Gerrymandering. It means drawing the congressional district lines in a biased way so that the opposition party is at a disadvantage. Let me explain how this works.
In every state, there are several congressional districts. Each district represents a seat in the congress. And whichever party gets most seats, controls the state legislature. In most states, it is up to state legislature to redraw the district lines every ten years. Which gives them a certain advantage. The state legislature can redraw the districts in their favor. Here Gerrymandering comes to work like magic.
There are mainly two ways of gerrymandering. Either keeping the overwhelming majority of the opposition supporters in a single district or to break an opposition majority district and in a way that the newly formed districts that the opposition supporters are a minority.
Suppose, a district is drawn in such a way that 80% of the voters are Democrat. It is already a lost cause for the Republicans but it serves another cause. It only takes more than 50% votes to win an election. This district has 30% more voters who serve zero outcomes in swaying the election. But if they were distributed in other districts, it could change the result there. So, they are packed in a single district. Even though the Democrats win that district, they are winning with 80% votes where they can literally do with 50.01% of them.
Another process is to redistribute the voters in a way that the districts have a slightly more republican voters than democrats. As I said earlier, winning needs only a majority. This means even if the newly formed districts have 50.01% republicans, it will go to republicans.
To show how Gerrymandering affects the election, let me give you a recent example. In the 2018 Congressional Election in North Carolina, Democrats won only 3 of the 13 Congressional seats, with 48% of the votes. They won 55 seats in state senate out of 120 with 51% of popular votes. (source: Vox) District lines were drawn mainly focusing on the Democrat voters, packing them in a single district or breaking a previously Democrat majority district in multiple ones. Both the Congressional map and State Senate map was drawn in favor of the Republicans, disrupting the level playing field.
Voter suppression and gerrymandering are something that damages the very core of an important part of democracy. People’s representation is what makes democracy work and influencing the election in any way and makes the whole process questionable.
Big Money, Bigger Campaign
In 2010, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that individuals or corporations can contribute unlimited money to a political campaign. Although the law clearly set some restrictions to money directly channeled to the candidate himself, it creates a loophole. Here comes the term “Super PACs”.
Super PACs are just basically organization that work as middle grounds between the corporations and the candidate himself. Why this middle ground needed? Well, the Federal Election Commission has some limits on how much an individual or corporation can pay money directly to a political campaign, but it has no limit on donating money to a Political Action Committee. The committee or super PACs must run independently from the political campaigns but still, can make unlimited donations. Which means is that the wealthy donors or corporations cannot directly send a check addressing the candidate, but they can send the check through another organization.
Before the term super PACs, only the term PAC existed which could donate only 5,000 dollars to a candidate or 15,000 dollars to a party directly. None could contribute more than 5,000 dollars though a PAC. In the rule of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, Supreme Court basically lifted all these restrictions and made way for unlimited contributions.
But how does this influence elections in any way?
According to a research by Center for Responsive Politics, in 2014 elections, 29% of the total political donations came from only 31,976 people, which is less than 0.01% of the entire US population. It is true that in modern elections, it takes huge amount of money to run a campaign. In 2016 election, Hilary Clinton’s campaign cost 1.4 billion dollars and Trump’s 957.6 million. Of Clinton’s campaign, almost 15% of the donations came from the super PACs. The problem is, most of the donations come from a very small proportion of the voters which mostly consist of super wealthy donors. The more money a campaign has, the more it can reach out to the voters by political advertisement. That means, if a candidate has more donations, he can run a bigger campaign.
Although it does not necessarily mean that bigger campaign means winning, the contributions come at another cost. It is foolish to think that the billionaires donating millions expecting nothing. One of the largest donors of the Republican Party is the Koch Industries, a multinational company mostly based on non-renewable energy sources like petroleum or oil. Republican candidates have been vocal against the renewable energy sources and climate change. Moreover, The billionaires are given enormous tax breaks by both of the parties in the past years. This cannot be a coincidence.
Liar Liar
During his 2016 Presidential Campaign, Trump repeatedly made false claims about Obama’s US citizenship stating that Obama was born in Kenya. Another absurd claim of his was suggesting that another Republican Primary candidate Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Once ascending to Presidency, Trump immediately suggested that he won by popular votes, despite the election result showed otherwise. He also claimed that his inaugural crowd was bigger than Obama’s which was another absolute lie. Trump alleged Obama wiretapping Trump Tower to favor Clinton in the 2016 election which was firmly contradicted by his own Department of Justice.
When you hold the most powerful position in the world, every one of the lies has devastating consequences.
The problem is that despite some of the lies are often even discredited by Trump’s own government, it was not instantly fact-checked by the right-wing media. Most of his incredulous claims were supported by the conservative outlets despite being absolutely untrue. But every one of his lies were backed by the right-wing media and most of his supporters believed that discrediting the lies is just a ploy of the liberals to undermine Trump. As a results, the voters are making decisions on who to vote based on completely false information.
“It has long been a truism that politicians lie, but with the entry of Donald Trump into the U.S. political domain, the frequency, degree, and impact of lying in politics are now unprecedented. […] Donald Trump is different. By all metrics and counting schemes, his lies are off the charts. We simply have not seen such an accomplished and effective liar before in U.S. politics.”
- Carole McGranahan in American Ethnologist
What is most concerning is that, we almost expect the politicians to lie. We know that the people we elect often give us misinformation and it has become such a norm, we don’t seem to notice them until they cross a threshold limit.
Business First, Privacy Second
It was no secret that the social platforms sell personal information for advertisement purposes. But things got dirty with Cambridge Analytica when it was unveiled that it harvested data of millions of Americans without consent to create a psychological profile. These data were sold to Donald Trump and Ted Cruz campaign. It accessed the personal data of 87 million people of which only 270,000 gave the data knowingly, giving these campaigns an unethical edge as these psychological profiles helped the campaigns to identify swaying voters and target them with special political ads. Every app that we use or every page that we visit on the internet keeps track of our personal information and we cannot know who gets hold of it or be sure that someone would not use it for illegal purposes.
On a congressional hearing, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that Facebook would not take down politically targeted lies. What this means is even if some candidate spread false information to selected people targeting his/her opponent in the largest social media site, they would not be taken down by Facebook and come across voters. Actually, this is what happened in the 2016 Presidential Election. A Russian Troll farm named Internet Research Agency created thousands of fake accounts and shared information against the Clinton campaign. Even though Facebook has an independent fact checker to prevent this kind of situations, these pieces of information were not taken down.
How They Get Away
Although the suppression of voter rights in the name of voter fraud and rigging the electoral map is done under a legal cover, often the actions are pretty self-evident. But yet, these things are being done in every election. How?
The answer is the cancerous division that has split the nation into two different ideologies. Instead of mending it, the politicians take advantage of it. They know as long as the curtain of mistrust hangs between the conservatives and the democrats, anything that angers the liberals would be appreciated by the conservatives and vice versa. For this very reason even if the politicians are caught with any skeletons in the closet or do something unethical, it is firmly supported by the fanbase.
We often underestimate the power of misinformation, what damage it can do. It is constant lying and the propaganda that made Hitler who he was. Comparing American politicians lying with German propaganda is an overstatement and I am not doing that. But it is certainly worrying to see how it has engulfed the politics as a normal occurrence. Yet, due to deep political polarization even in media, the outlets are labeled as liberal or conservative and are only watched by people with the same ideologies. That means, even if a conservative politician tells an absurd lie about his/her opponent or of a matter of national security or even debunk an established scientific fact in a conservative channel, the chances that he will be corrected by the same channel are very low. No matter how much it is debunked in a liberal channel, it won’t be seen by conservatives. This is how politicians get away with lies.
Funny thing is that we often see the truth right in front of our eyes yet we refuse to believe it. We would rather take shelter in something that we subconsciously know is lie and choose to believe it. It is not that we fear the truth because it is ominous, we refuse the truth because it would mean accepting answers from the ideologies that we hate. Some Americans are subconsciously so proud yet so insecure about their beliefs that they treat anything that contradicts them as some sort of infectious disease. This sense of denial has been feeding the politicians for years.
There had been talks of political reforms. But it is highly unlikely that this effort would ever come from the politicians. If Americans choose to bat their eyes and let happen the influencing, there is really no way of a completely fair election any time soon.
