I very much appreciate the opportunity to review Professor Rick Hasen’s timely and thoughtful book, Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy. The book does a great job of identifying some of the most pressing threats to our election system, and I do not think that voters sufficiently appreciate the seriousness of these threats. Many individuals assume that our democracy can survive these challenges because the system has survived challenges.[1] Professor Hasen challenges this assumption in important ways, presenting current threats as uniquely situated to cause enduring damage to our political system. According to Professor Hasen, “The synergy of…four factors—voter suppression, pockets of incompetence, foreign and domestic dirty tricks, and incendiary rhetoric—undermines public trust in the fairness and accuracy of American elections and creates a high risk for the 2020 elections and beyond.”[2]
While I appreciate the risks that Professor Hasen identifies, I do not think that the current dysfunction of our politics is unprecedented or that these risks are unique in the dangers that they pose to our system of democracy. More often than not, the prospect of an election meltdown has been the baseline from which most of our elections have always occurred. We have long accepted this risk because we somehow make it through each election cycle, quickly forgetting the problems that plagued the system or, at best, forming a commission of some sort to address immediate past problems (both real and perceived). But it is clear that our elections have never been healthy and robust. In my view, our current dysfunction is simply a different variation of the same problem that has haunted our country since the Founding. The default for our political system is, and always has been, well-ordered chaos. As historian James Baumgardner observed over three decades ago, “there is an often unspoken but well-known axiom to the effect that there never has been a truly honest election in the country’s history.”[3] Baumgardner made this comment in the context of the 1888 election, which was especially corrupt, but the idea that our elections are marked by misconduct of some sort could apply to virtually every election cycle. In the 1888 election, in particular, Republican Senator Benjamin Harrison defeated the Democratic incumbent, Grover Cleveland, although Harrison lost the popular vote by 90,596 votes.[4] In what is becoming a familiar narrative, it was the third election (and second in twelve years) in which the popular vote winner lost the Electoral College.