Trump’s attacks on California elections endanger democracy, repeating a pattern 

The Trump administration’s attack on California’s ongoing elections is merely one episode in a long and dismal series of efforts to undermine confidence in the integrity of the American democratic system. And it’s an attempt to manufacture a rationale for attacks still to come.

For context, it might be helpful to catalog Trump’s previous evidence-free and often outright disproven allegations that elections were “rigged” against him, either by crooked local and state election officials, crooked voting machine manufacturers, crooked reporters or thousands upon thousands of crooked Californians who aren’t lawfully allowed to vote but do so anyway.

For the present, though, and just as a refresher, let’s recall Trump’s denial that he had lost the 2020 election, his demand that Georgia officials “find” him enough votes to deliver a different outcome, his demand that Vice President Mike Pence not certify the election results and the shameful Jan. 6, 2021 mob attack on the Capitol that Trump egged on.

Recall that four years earlier, when he won the electoral vote and therefore the presidency in 2016, Trump was so incensed that he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton that he declared he’d actually won it and that evidence to the contrary was fake. 

To “prove” it he established the Voter Fraud Commission, or more formally the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. There was a brief period in which observers thought a productive and bipartisan effort was possible, and that the panel could ferret out improper voting and get to the bottom of allegations that Russia and other adversaries interfered with the election.

But the commission produced nothing.

And recall that even before that, when asked whether he would respect the 2016 election outcome, Trump responded, “If I win.” It was vintage Trump — a headline-grabbing statement that committed him to no particular position and could be taken either as a jest or a warning, or both at the same time.

It has been widely asserted that Trump sees no distinction between statements that are true or false and considers only whether a statement will or will not serve him.

If that’s the case, he may not care whether there was any fraud or misconduct at the polls.  He may see no difference between that position and the conviction that there absolutely must have been fraud or misconduct — because how else could he possibly have lost? 

That belief — we can only lose if the system is rigged — has roots in California, 2008, and redistricting reform.

Moderate Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor after defeating Gray Davis in the historic recall five years before, but Republican candidates were making no headway in state legislative or congressional races. 

It’s because of your politics, the governor told the party. Candidates had to move toward the center if they wanted support from California voters. “We’re dying at the box office,” he famously told them.

But others in the party said that there must be some other reason they weren’t winning. Many sincerely believed Democrats must be cheating, or at least gaming the system when they use their majority legislative power to draw district lines. Why else could Republicans possibly be losing?

Good-government advocates from inside and outside both major parties agreed it would be best for a nonpartisan, or at least bipartisan, panel to draw district lines. Together they wrote Proposition 11, which changed redistricting in both houses of the Legislature, but not Congress.

Former Democratic Assembly Speaker Willie Brown warned his party’s leaders that the measure was dangerous. Defeating Proposition 11 and electing Barack Obama were equally important, he told the state’s delegation at the Democratic national convention in Denver.

Republicans up and down the state embraced the measure as a way to bring fairness, and perhaps some Republican-controlled seats, to the Legislature. Two years after Prop 11 passed  backers returned with Proposition 20, a measure to apply the same redistricting commission process to congressional elections.

But Republican candidates continued to die at the box office. Schwarzenegger, who supported a range of reforms in a quest to break a toughening partisan stalemate, had been right that candidate positions needed to change as well. But they didn’t.

Redistricting reform went the other way in Texas, which last year altered its rules in an attempt to award congressional Republicans more seats in the current midterm election. California Gov. Gavin Newsom responded with Proposition 50, which (ahem) “temporarily” suspends Proposition 20 to allow midterm redistricting to favor Democrats, because of the emergency created by Texas.

No doubt we will face continuing partisan emergencies in future elections, and California voters will be asked to repeatedly suspend Proposition 20. If that’s the case, we may return permanently to a scenario in which control of Congress is no longer seen merely as a contest between political and policy rivals and will become instead a permanently Trump-flavored electoral civil war. 

The Department of Homeland Security’s recent demand that California election officials set aside some 20,000 ballots cast by voters on a list that supposedly names people who registered but are ineligible to vote, and the Department of Justice’s follow-up lawsuit, may be shots — or perhaps just blanks — in that war.

Also armed troops already gather around ballot dropboxes in the District of Columbia. The director of the FBI won’t rule out sending armed agents to polling places. And Trump supporters openly talk of martial law as the only response to an election that does not go their way. 

Like Trump’s 2016 answer about accepting the election outcome, it’s hard to know whether to take these things as very bad jokes or very serious warnings. Either way, they serve to dissuade people from voting at all, which is likely the point.

Surely there were people who stormed the Capitol in the sincere belief that Trump had won the 2020 election, and that they were standing up against Democratic Party cheating and for the truth. And surely at least some of them now see they were duped into destroying a formerly shared faith in the system and the truth, and the conviction that we could and would unite after the votes are counted.

And there certainly are some Americans who believe California and Democrats are engaged in a criminal conspiracy to get noncitizens and other ineligible voters to the polls — despite the long list of evidence to the contrary, the court rulings that repeatedly reject such allegations, Trump’s previous lies about election fraud, the 2020 pressure on Georgia officials, the Supreme Court’s ruling last month rejecting a similar assault on Nevada’s election and the fact that the attack on California’s vote is taking place in the middle of the election, for maximum impact on public opinion.

That’s the darkness of Trump’s assault on California’s elections. Losing Congress on Nov. 3, by his reasoning, supplies proof that the state is cheating, because how else could he possibly be defeated? 

We need not worry if he actually believes that. The tragedy for American democracy would be if a substantial number of voters also believe it.