Are our governors are losing legitimacy?
Benjamin David Steele and I have been having some interesting discussions about the state of the world. We crossed paths again somewhere on Medium and he offered about 10 links to the possibility that Election 2024 was stolen from Kamala Harris. I should mention that I don’t think Mr. Steele is obsessed with cheating in the American elections. I think he found these links somewhere and is only raising the possibility. I have seen similar posts on my Mastodon feed.
I didn’t go to any these links. Whether this conspiracy gets more legs won’t depend on my eyeballs: I’m so uninfluential on Medium.
But voter fraud in 2024 is plausible
To digress, I should say that a narrow Harris victory on November 5, 2024 would have brought a different set of problem to the USA and the rest of the world. There would have charges of election fraud, which would later turn to political violence. I’m not convinced the Biden/Harris administration (or anyone else) could have handled these situations well. So maybe the better outcome was the narrow Trump victory — and allow that administration to fall on its own sword.
To come back to the topic, my six-years of Canadian political experience gave me these three insights:
1. The voters’ list will always have administrative errors. And it is possible for dead people to vote (actually, other people pretending to be dead people).
2. Zealous, dishonest party workers will try to stuff the ballot boxes. But there are tallies to prove ballot box tampering. If the tallies are too far off, serious investigations are called and prison time is a consequence. If party workers do cheat, it is not by much.
3. Voter ID does prevent some of the shenanigans by zealous, dishonest party workers.
So things can go wrong at election polling stations. Honest mistakes and dishonest actions can tilt the balance, but only a little. In Canadian elections, it would be hard for one party to gain an advantage more than 500 votes, per constituency, with these ways. My brief inspection of Canada’s 2019 election results led to maybe 30 out of 330 constituencies were within this 500-vote margin. All the other 300 constituencies were beyond the margin of any possible cheating.
For some strange reason, the American presidential elections have turned into a 50/50 coin flip. The last decisively decisive election was Ronald Reagon is 1984 where he won 59% of the vote. Every election since then has been the winner getting 53% or less. Here is the Wiki article.
When we look at many American congressional elections and governorships, we really do not see many cases of one party clearly wiping out the other. In contrast, some Canadian constituency elections often have one party to winning 2/3 of the vote with the other third being split between two or more parties. Now that is a decisive victory!
This coin flip has been so ingrained in the American psyche that Americans now consider a 53/47 split as a decisive win. We Canadians would call a six-point difference a close election.
Narrow wins are so normal in American political culture.
But with narrow wins, the incentive to cheat increases. Remember, the winner gets everything and the loser has to wait for the next election cycle. And after the winner is declared, it is hard for the electoral system to reverse a decision because of election regularities, whether conclusively proven or not. So the political party must cheat because the other party is already cheating.
At best, the election authority might set up protocols to circumvent the irregularity for the next election. That of course assumes the election authorities are neutral. But for the moment, the cheating winner still won, thus not having legitimacy in the eyes of many citizens.
In 2020, many Americans of the political right believed, rightly or wrongly, that that election was rigged. If the conspiracy mentioned by Mr. Steele gains traction, then many Americans of the political left will also believe the same. American elections will be more discredited. More people will not bother voting. Both sides have incentive to cheat even more. Elections no longer reflect the will of the people. Elected politicians have no legitimacy to make decisions for us.
We might as well let the leader with the biggest club take control.
The solution
Admittedly, I don’t have a solution to fix the degradation of American elections.
Instead, I offer Tiered Democratic Governance (TDG). The TDG is to later replace American democracy — and all other systems of governance around the world. The TDG has much different elections, so whatever flaws are baked into the current system won’t be found in the TDG.
But perhaps just as important, building the TDG allows us to start new — instead of trying to fixing a broken system — or instead of pretending it can be fixed.
Eventually we will let go of our 19th century ways. Why not sooner than later?
Published on Medium & Substack 2025
