There will be attempts to undermine and delegitimize the midterm elections, but those attempts will fail, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research said last week.
In a forum sponsored by the League of Women Voters of the Hamptons, Shelter Island, and the North Fork, David Becker confidently predicted that the Trump administration’s unprecedented attack on the democratic process, including his effort to cast doubt on the legitimacy of any election in which the Republican candidate loses, is in fact “a story of resilience of our election system, a resilience of our institutions, because we have never seen this kind of attack on our systems.”
He and Jerry Goldfeder, director of the Voting Rights and Democracy Project at Fordham Law School and chairman of the American Bar Association’s Election Law Committee, acknowledged that there are genuine threats, that the president and his allies will try to interfere in the vote and perhaps the certification of results. With the president’s approval rating in freefall, polls indicate that Democrats are likely to regain a majority in the House of Representatives and perhaps the Senate.
Mr. Becker and Mr. Goldfeder urged voters to remain calm in the event of disturbances at polling stations but, above all, to take advantage of early voting. In New York State, early voting begins on Oct. 24 and concludes on Nov. 1. Election Day is Nov. 3.
Andrea Gabor, who heads the league chapter’s government committee, served as moderator.
The nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research supports election officials across the country, “which of course in the last 10 years has gotten a lot more challenging,” Mr. Becker said, “as we’ve had election losers, and at times the president of the United States, slander their work, essentially, and spread lies and disinformation about how much voters should trust our elections.”
People are understandably worried about the upcoming elections, he said, as “for nearly two years now, we’ve seen this administration throw everything it can at the election” via “executive orders that would radically alter election policy in the states,” efforts to seize states’ voter data, investigations of past elections, an effort to pass the so-called SAVE America Act, and even the president hosting “a prime time speech where he tried to insinuate that we could not trust our elections.”
“We have never seen before the federal government, which used to be a partner for the states and localities as they ran elections, become a potential adversary,” Mr. Becker said. Despite this, however, “everything this administration has tried has failed.” The executive orders were blocked by multiple courts, including the Supreme Court. To date, “every effort to seize states’ voter data has failed.” He predicted record turnout in the midterm elections.
Mr. Goldfeder’s outlook was somewhat less optimistic. Election workers are professional and objective, he said, “but we do face a situation that’s unprecedented, where we have the president of the United States trying to undermine our elections, trying to undermine our faith in the elections, in the integrity of the elections. . . . What David suggests is resilience, and what that means in practical terms is turning out. Our institutions are strong, but the reason our institutions are strong is because the people, Americans, are resilient.”
Suffolk County voters can feel confident in the board of elections, he said, “but nationwide, there will be problems throughout various election polling places. . . . If there is a huge turnout and the margins are comfortable, then there’s very little that those who want to challenge the elections can do.” There are templates of litigation forms “in order to go to court if anything untoward occurs on Election Day or early voting. . . . But we can’t rely on the courts, because when the administration says that they are contemplating sending F.B.I. folks to the polls and [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] folks to the polls and other armed and unarmed representatives of the federal government to the polls, we can expect that that might very well happen.”
The antidote, he said, “is for people to go to the polls as monitors,” who are posted outside polling stations and whose presence provides a sense of safety and security to voters. “It’s really important that we have as large a turnout as possible, and that people make sure that they have a plan to vote, their family has a plan to vote, their colleagues, their friends, they all have a plan to vote.”
“Imagine what happens if American voters reject the despair and the fear that some are trying to press on this election,” Mr. Becker said. “There will not be ICE at the polls. I will say that definitively. . . . One of the five or six reasons I know is because they’re trying so hard to make us believe that it might happen, because they want to scare voters. We have to reject that fear.”
The federal criminal statute known as 18 U.S.C. subsection 592 prohibits military and civil officers or personnel of the United States from bringing, ordering, keeping, or controlling troops or armed men at any general or special election polling place. This alone, Mr. Becker said, precludes ICE agents from going to polling stations.
Moreover, more than half of voters do not vote in person on Election Day, he said, but rather by mail or during the early voting period. “The American voter is a moving target. If you want to suppress them from voting, if you want to make it difficult for them to vote, when and where do you do that?” Those who vote early or by mail “are disproportionately Democratic,” he said. “That’s because President Trump delegitimized mail voting. So if he deploys ICE on Election Day, which is when it would be most likely to be effective and when courts would have the least amount of time to stop it, those voters are disproportionately Republican, and he could very well hurt his own voters’ turnout in that circumstance. “
“Almost every federal judge in the country would block this immediately,” he said. “And it’s very likely there would be an incredible political backlash.” Nonetheless, he said, courts and election officials should be prepared for anything.
“What we’ve seen over the last 18 months,” Mr. Goldfeder said, “is an administration that thumbs its nose at the law. And some of the president’s followers, such as the Proud Boys, they don’t know the statutes. They don’t care about the law. . . . So if they have a mind to do so, David is absolutely right. We shouldn’t pretend that it’s not going to happen.”
“People who hate democracy,” Mr. Becker said, “are, fortunately for us, generally cowards. What they would rather do is to spread expectations that they’re going to be there. . . . It is really hard to find people who are willing to do this, get arrested for what might very well be something that generates political backlash against them and their approved candidates.”
