An Arizona elections office recently received a letter that goes like this:
“I am returning this ballot to you, because I no longer have confidence that your organization can conduct a legal, democratic and unaltered election …. To conclude, I demand that you remove my name from the voter rolls of Maricopa County. I will no longer play the game, you win!”
(See story here.) The letter, from a Trump supporter, was laced with references to false conspiracy theories and grievances about the 2020 election.
With the 2022 midterm elections approaching, Arizona Democrats might cheer one less Republican vote for a slate of extremist GOP candidates. But I’d be cautious about celebrating someone refusing to vote anymore because they’ve become that alienated from our democratic system.
Biden won Arizona’s 11 electoral votes by 10,457 votes (details here). He would’ve won without Arizona, but a closer result likely would’ve made the aftermath even more incendiary than it was.
He got his winning margin in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, and has roughly two-thirds of the state’s population and voters. The rest of Arizona is mostly rural with large parts of the land area in Native American reservations (see map here).
Maricopa County was counted and recounted, then “audited” by a GOP-commissioned second (and nonbinding) recount run by a Trump supporter and election conspiracy peddler that came up with even more votes for Biden than the official results (see details here), although almost certainly in error due to flaws in the “auditing” procedures and process.
Even that couldn’t persuade this ex-voter the Arizona results were legit. His letter “listed off a litany of false claims … about the 2020 election in Arizona, and even threw in claims that the Arizona County Sheriff is a ‘George Soros’ acolyte who helped tip the race to President Joe Biden.” We can’t reason with people like that, and have no duty to try.
In July 2021, an Arizona TV station reported that shortly after the 2020 election state GOP chair Kelli Ward texted the Maricopa County Board chairman that “we need you to stop counting” (see story here). That text message probably was a criminal act. At the very least, she was asking him to violate Arizona election laws and the constitutional rights of the voters whose ballots she wanted shelved. There’s no way on earth we can or should cater to demands like that.
But it’s not a good thing when people get so angry over an election result they give up on democracy and quit voting. Why? Because they’ll still demand to be heard, and try to get their way, but they’ll do it by different means.
Politics is simply a mechanism through which groups and individuals in a society thrash out their differences. Conflicts and frictions exist in all societies, and internecine violence is an ever-present danger. The best way to keep the peace is by giving everyone a stake in the political system through participation, so they buy into the system and process if not the result.
That’s what the Constitution and our laws designed to ensure fair elections attempt to achieve. When people feel, however wrongly, they’re not getting a fair shake they become frustrated and angry. When they give up on the system, and no longer participate, they become outsiders who no longer have a stake in maintaining the system and are strongly motivated to overthrow or replace it with one they believe is more likely to satisfy their demands. And that’s when a society is in danger of tearing apart.
I don’t think any acceptable changes to election laws can mitigate this. What these people want is to win, and get their way, even if the majority aren’t on their side. Democracy is based on the majority-rule principle, and if we give that up, we’re not a democracy anymore.
We can go only so far in trying to accommodate disgruntled individuals who embrace falsehoods and disdain our right to also participate in the political system. At some point our focus must shift to protecting the system; and, in large part, that’s where we are today. To prevent dictatorship in our country, we must prosecute political violence, enforce our election laws, count all the votes, and demand respect for election results.
It’s to be expected that some people will go beyond disappointment with election results. But the toxic alienation that exists in some societies, where picking up a gun replaces voting,* is nothing for anyone here or anywhere to celebrate. I’d much rather see individuals like this ex-voter stay in the system we have.
* There are signs we may be getting close to that; in Minnesota, a GOP talked about “voting with bullets” if his faction doesn’t get its way at the ballot box (see story here).