I received my official 2024 vote by mail application today from the Mass. Elections Division, and it reminded me of the systems, checks, and balances that make sure our elections are free and fair. The application requires that I swear that I am a qualified voter and that the address listed is my legal residence.
The people who have made that system work for almost 250 years have widely varied political beliefs, but they are devoted to certain core principles. And they are under attack.
In the July/August issue of The Atlantic, George Packer writes about Rusty Bowers, the former speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives. He’s a conservative Republican whose rise to the most powerful position in the legislature was helped by support from Donald Trump, for whose reelection in 2020 Bowers campaigned. Following that election, in which President Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes, Trump himself called Bowers and asked him to convene a committee to investigate election fraud and to set in motion the replacement of Biden’s Arizona electors with a pro-Trump slate. Rudy Giuliani, who was also on the call, later admitted that they had no actual evidence of fraud.
“Mr. President,” Bowers said, “I campaigned for you. I voted for you. But I will do nothing illegal for you.”
It was the end of his political career. Bowers was viciously attacked by his colleagues in the legislature. Mobs surrounded his house with Trump flags and “loudspeakers blasting to his neighbors that he was corrupt, a traitor, a pervert, a pedophile,” Packer writes. Obscene, threatening emails filled his inbox. The state Republican party censured him.
The efforts to decertify the election results in 2020 in the absence of any evidence of fraud failed. But the stage is being set for a very different outcome this year. The New York Times reported on Sunday that Trump’s allies are conducting “an unprecedented legal campaign targeting the American voting system.” The strategy involves “short-circuiting the process of ratifying the winner afterward, if Mr. Trump loses…. In Georgia and Arizona, they have filed lawsuits that, if successful, would effectively give local election board members the right to hold up certification.”
Reading this news, it’s impossible not to reflect on the Truro voting rights story of the past year. After conducting a clandestine campaign to get nonresidents to register to vote in Truro, “even temporarily,” the leaders of the Truro Part-Time Resident Taxpayers’ Association argued that their members were the victims of “voter suppression.” Now, those same leaders are denying that their campaign existed, claiming that they “educated” potential voters but did not “encourage” them to register (see page A9).
The campaign and the phony outrage that followed when voters were called before the Truro registrars show how effectively Trump’s lies have corrupted faith in an honest system. The TPRTA campaigners say voting is “sacred,” but they approached it as a contest to be gamed.
“What do you do?” asks Rusty Bowers. “You stand up. That’s all you can do.”
