Provocative Justin Levitt piece at Slate:

You’ve seen the long-form think pieces, ominous and lurid and anxiety-producing. With titles like “How Six States Could Overturn the 2024 Election,” they offer a revealing glimpse into a pocket of underrecognized election procedure—a piece of back-office mechanics, a quirk of the statutory code—that could be the wildly improbable key to the whole thing this time. They delight in lingering lasciviously on impending transgression.

They’re electoral-process porn.

They are written not to inform or motivate but to titillate, as if they were meant to be read furtively, at night, in the dark. But electoral-process porn also dehumanizes and disempowers. It cultivates the exaggerated impression that an election can just be “overturned” or “stolen” out from under us by pushing the right series of buttons. That is, it wants you to forget the fundamental fact that we’re in charge of our own electoral fates.

There are a few different types of electoral-process porn…..

Third, electoral-process porn based on imagined hypotheticals can desensitize. The more transgressive the projected affront, the more it paints the real-world issues that do occur as benign by comparison. The imagined what-ifs are so much worse. Electoral-process porn becomes a sort of trial balloon for moving the outrage goalposts.

The last impact is at the root of the other three. The defining feature of electoral-process porn is that it communicates lack of agency. In electoral-process porn, voters are objects, not actors. They exist in the narrative only to get screwed.

At its heart, electoral-process porn contributes to the notion, both counterproductive and counterfactual, that someone other than the voters will decide the outcome of the elections. That our self-governance … isn’t, really….