Two sentences uttered by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump during Wednesday night’s debate reaffirm that he is unfit to serve as president. Asked if he’d accept the outcome of next month’s election, he said: “I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense.”
The U.S. is a 240-year-old democracy built on the foundation of a peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next, from one party to another, as chosen by the people (and the Electoral College). It is not a game show or reality TV show in which you leave the audience in suspense so they’ll tune in next week.
The comments were so outrageous that even Gov. Paul LePage, who earlier this week was spinning tales of voter fraud, condemned them.
“Not accepting the results, I think is just, it’s a stupid comment,” LePage told Portland radio station WGAN Thursday morning. “I mean, come on, get over yourself.”
However, LePage perpetuated the myth that the election system is rigged and that there will be voter fraud this year. But he said Trump should get over it if he loses.
These allegations of election rigging are demonstrably false, and worse, at a time when some are suggesting violence is the answer if their favored candidate doesn’t win the White House, it is dangerous. It certainly is not patriotic.
“I am not confident that we are going to have a clean election in Maine,” LePage said during his weekly radio rant on Tuesday.
When LePage was re-elected in 2014, he bragged that he received more votes than any gubernatorial candidate in Maine history. So, what changed between that election, when he touted the results, and next month’s, which he warned wouldn’t be “clean”? Absolutely nothing.
The fact is voter fraud is exceedingly rare.
“[B]y any measure, voter fraud is extraordinarily rare,” Jason Leavitt, a Loyola Law School professor, wrote in a 2007 report for the Brennan Center for Justice. Most instances of alleged voter fraud are instead clerical errors made by election officials.
More recently, Leavitt did a comprehensive analysis of voter fraud allegations between 2000 and 2014 and found 31 instances nationwide with credible evidence of potential fraud that may have been addressed through voter ID laws and another 13 cases of potential voter impersonation that such laws would not have stopped. That’s out of over 1 billion ballots cast.
Maine elections are secure, in part, because they rely more on pens and paper than new technology and because they are administered at the local level, where clerks and volunteers know many of the voters.
When mistakes happen, local and state election officials are well equipped to handle them. During a recount for Senate District 25 in 2014, 21 “mystery ballots” appeared, prompting speculation about voter fraud. A closer evaluation found that the questioned ballots weren’t new, but they had inadvertently been counted twice.
This reality hasn’t stopped Republicans from trying to rig elections by reducing voter turnout. In his radio call-in on WGAN, LePage said the state needed to require IDs for voting. Otherwise, he said, “people from the cemetery” and non-citizens will be voting, which he blamed on Democrats. This echoes comments from former Republican Party Chairman Charlie Webster in 2012 that “ dozens of black people” who were unfamiliar to local election clerks had cast ballots in Maine. In June 2011, Webster also accused Democrats of stealing elections and busing people to the polls to sway outcomes. Investigations yielded no convictions.
A commission empaneled by former Republican Secretary of State Charlie Summers, a staunch supporter of voter ID, found no evidence of voter fraud and recommended against stricter voter ID laws in 2013.
“A voter ID law is unnecessary as there is little or no history in Maine of voter impersonation or identification fraud,” the panel wrote in its report. It said such a law would make it more difficult for homeless, African-American, elderly, poor and rural voters to access the polls.
As a result, Maine lawmakers have repeatedly rejected attempts to institute voter ID requirements in the state — because they aren’t needed.
There have been many bitterly contested presidential elections in American history, but the nation has never turned its back on the tradition, since 1796, of accepting the results of an election and watching peacefully as a new president replaces his predecessor.
