Nothing in our history prepares Americans for what’s likely to arrive this November

While much attention has been paid to Donald Trump’s continuing fixation on denying the results of the 2020 presidential election and the possibility of a repeat in 2024, a more immediate threat to democracy is looming: an alarming number of Republicans across the country are now gearing up to cast doubt on the outcome of the midterm elections this November.

The New York Times reports that “six Republican nominees for governor and the Senate in key midterm states … would not commit to accepting the November outcome.” Five others refused to answer the question. The Washington Post found a similar thing in its own survey of candidates running for governor and Senate in battleground states.

Allegations of chicanery in state and local elections are almost as old as the Republic, as are false claims about election integrity.

But candidates announcing in advance that they will not accept election results is unprecedented.

It is an alarming reminder of the growing authoritarianism in many parts of the Republican Party and the threat it poses to American democracy.

Even as today’s election denialism sends the message that voting will be a waste of time, the future of democracy requires that voters turn out in massive numbers to repudiate any candidate who embraces denialism.

Let’s start by looking more closely at what the Times found about the forthcoming elections. The newspaper “contacted Republican and Democratic candidates or their aides in 20 key contests for governor and the Senate” and asked whether they would commit to respecting the results of their electoral contests. All of the Democrats told the Times — or have previously said — that they would respect the November results. 

There was no such unanimity among the Republicans.

The Times found that “among the party’s Senate candidates, Ted Budd in North Carolina, Blake Masters in Arizona, Kelly Tshibaka in Alaska and J.D. Vance in Ohio all declined to commit to accepting the 2022 results. So did Tudor Dixon, the Republican nominee for governor of Michigan, and Geoff Diehl, who won the G.O.P. primary for governor of Massachusetts this month.”

This rogues gallery of extremists all carry Trump’s endorsement for their uncritical embrace of his own election lie.

They justify their stance by saying that Democratic election officials won’t honestly count the votes. They say that their opponents will cheat to ensure that they win.

Is their doubt credible?

Cheating to win elections for long had been the American way, but it’s extremely rare today.

Historians report that in “the 1800s, United States elections were rife with fraud.” And there was nothing subtle about it. Parties at the state and local level enlisted violent gangs to “kidnap voters, feed them alcohol or drugs and force them to vote multiple times dressed in various disguises.” The victims of such intimidation often were immigrants. As the journalist Natalie Zarrelli notes, “Americans born in the U.S. viewed the immigrant votes as a threat, and would coop immigrant voters in undisclosed locations to keep them from voting — or force them to vote for candidates supported by the gang.”

In Northern cities, mid-nineteenth century elections were dominated by party machines that organized and offered various social services — and in return expected the people they helped to vote for the machine’s slate of candidates. If necessary, they used violence and the threat of violence to secure the votes they needed.

Another journalist, Erin Blakemore, writes that in New York City the Tammany Hall machine “encouraged residents to vote multiple times by shaving their beards a little each time they went to the polls in order to hide their identities. The machine also registered voters under fake names — and Tammany thugs threatened to beat voters who did not comply.”

In the nineteenth century American South, election chicanery had a distinctly racial cast to it. It was an important tool of Jim Crow political organizations, which used it to tamp down the threat posed by newly enfranchised black voters. As Blakemore notes, “Black voters throughout the South attempted to exercise their new voting rights, they were often subject to mob violence and lynching.” She says that common tactics included “theft of ballot boxes; removal of polls to unknown places; burning ballots before elections; illegal arrests on election day; importation of voters who did not live in the precinct; calling off names wrongly; fabricating reasons to refuse to hold elections in precincts populated with blacks; the voting of dead or fictitious persons; ensuring that poll watchers and ballot counters became drunk while votes were counted; and organizing ‘disorderly demonstrations’ to intimidate voters.”

In the twentieth century, Chicago became notorious, spawning the phrase “vote early and vote often.” The people who led the political city’s machine perfected electoral manipulation. As Kelly Bauer puts it, they “didn’t just cheat to win.” They “cheated so they could get major victories that could give their candidates a ‘mandate’ and discourage potential opponents from rival parties from running for office.”

Eventually there was powerful pushback from civil rights and voter rights organizations and other watchdog groups.

Even so, if we look at the worst examples from our history, at no point in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did candidates try to discredit elections in advance or announce that they would only accept the results if they won.

This was even the case in the 1960 presidential election. Throughout that campaign, suspicions ran deep in the Republican Party that the Chicago machine would deliver enough votes in the city to make sure that the Democratic presidential candidate, John F. Kennedy, won the state of Illinois and prevailed over Republican Richard Nixon. On election day it delivered a 450,000-vote advantage for JFK, which was enough to beat Nixon in Illinois by 9,000 votes.

In the aftermath, as Politico notes, “Nixon’s top aides and the Republican Party, almost certainly with Nixon’s backing, waged a campaign to cast doubt on the outcome of the election, launching challenges to Kennedy’s victories in 11 states.”

However, unlike Trump in 2020, Nixon eventually accepted his defeat and conceded to Kennedy. He called on his supporters to “unite behind our next president in seeing that America does meet the challenge which destiny has placed upon us.”

And, as suspicious as they were, neither Nixon nor the Republican Party fueled the kind of effort to discredit upcoming electoral contests that we are seeing in the run up to 2022.

The willingness to do so now should remind us not to assume that electoral democracy will survive this year’s elections. Imagine the toll on faith in our system of government that will be exacted if losing Republican candidates across the country cry foul and refuse to accept defeat.

Americans would do well to keep in mind President John Adams’ dire warning that “democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

Democracy will be on the November ballot. Voters need to overcome their usual midterm election lethargy to turn out in large enough numbers to repudiate those who would lead us down the path the future that Adams foresaw more than two centuries ago.

Austin Sarat (@ljstprof) is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is author of numerous books on America’s death penalty, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty and  Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Humane Execution. The views expressed here do not represent Amherst College.