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Specter

While there’s no evidence supporting this idea, and an abundance of evidence to the contrary, Trump’s supporters don’t trust these conclusions, believing they’re based on a coordinated campaign of lies and manipulation. Independent election officials, and one high-profile court case after another, however, have affirmed it—now to the considerable expense of Trump, a number of his associates, and even Fox News, which had to pay US$787.5 million in a settlement with Dominion Voting Systems for claiming their machines had been rigged.

And yet Trump is now alleging that the Democrats plan to steal the coming election, too. Democrats, meanwhile—who recall Trump’s own efforts to interfere with the 2020 election—worry that he could potentially steal next week’s election, himself. In the last two weeks alone, The New York Times has run a series of articles titled, “In case of an election crisis, this is what you need to know,” “What to know about the looming election certification crisis,” and “The army of election officials ready to reject the vote.” Earlier this week, someone seems to have burnt ballot boxes in Washington and Oregon, damaging hundreds of votes. How vulnerable is the U.S., then, to a presidential election being stolen?

Richard H. Pildes is a professor of law at New York University. Pildes says that if the election is close, there’ll likely be partisan attempts to affect the outcome—but the safeguards in the American electoral system make that a daunting challenge, if not effectively impossible. The U.S. election system does have some vulnerabilities. But they’re not, Pildes says, where the real risk to the legitimacy of the election is; the real risk to the legitimacy of the election is in the social reality that so many people, Republicans and Democrats, are now so ready to believe that it could be stolen …

• “There could be significant delays in counting the votes, which might in turn lead to a situation that’s even more explosive than what followed the 2020 election. So many people are now primed to believe that something suspicious is going on—especially if the projections change during election night or over several days. That could certainly lead to a situation that’s very open for exploitation. And this year, I think it is likely to take some time before we know who won, especially if the outcome turns on just a couple of states.”
• “The 2020 election happened during the pandemic—but before vaccines were available—so the election system faced exceptional pressures that year. Election officials made a lot of provisions to allow people to vote without putting themselves at physical risk. For instance, they made it easier to vote by mail; there were more days of early in-person voting to reduce crowding at election stations; and in some counties you could pull up and vote from your car. Many of these changes to the U.S. election process were implemented only shortly before the election, which fed suspicions and rumors. It was just all so unfamiliar to most people.”
• “Regardless of whether the election is secure, if a significant ratio of Americans just lack confidence in the integrity of the process, that’s a profound problem. I can say, there’ve been a lot of good efforts to address it ahead of this year’s election. Across the United States, election officials have opened up their processes to give citizens more of a window into them; they’ve been very willing to explain how the electoral system works; and there will likely be more transparency in the counting process itself—with both parties having election observers at voting stations. I know, in some cases, none of this will matter; some people will still be convinced that there’s something corrupt happening in the system. But election administrators have made big efforts to help people see and understand the process better. It shows a lot; it should mean a lot.”

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The day the lights went out in Cuba

The government blames the ongoing U.S. embargo; tourism hasn’t recovered since the pandemic; and more than 10 percent of the island’s population has emigrated in the past few years. And yet, as Javier Corrales explained in July 2021, Cuba’s economy has been falling apart for years—above all, because its main patron, Venezuela, is undergoing its own economic collapse. Meaning Venezuela can’t afford to send as much money—or oil to power the electricity grid—as it has been for the past 20 years. It’s one of the Americas’ more existential questions, Corrales says, of political and economic sustainability.

—Michael Bluhm

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