Stealing elections

Saturday 7th November, 2020

Unusual delays in vote counting have a corrosive effect on the credibility of the outcome of an election. The US was still awaiting the election of its next President, at the time of going to press. The COVID-19 pandemic has slowed down the US like all other countries, and the delayed vote counting process would not have made such a stir if the White House had not made allegations of polls malpractices.

We thought the uncivilised practice of stealing elections was endemic to the developing world. We have experienced this blight on democracy firsthand. In 1982, the then UNP government stole a presidential election by stripping Sirima Bandaranaike, who would have been the Opposition candidate, of her civic rights and resorting to large-scale rigging and violence. It went on to cause a general election to disappear by means of a heavily rigged referendum. In 1988, another presidential election was stolen in the most despicable manner amidst JVP violence and counter-terror; the same fate befell a general election the following year. Perhaps, it was in 1999, under the Kumaratunga government, that the worst ever instance of stealing an election occurred in this country; Opposition polling agents were chased away and ballot boxes were stuffed in full view of the police during the North-Western Provincial Council election.

What is this world coming to when no less a person than the President of the US, which is the biggest exporter of democracy in the world, as it were, claims a US presidential election has been stolen? President Donald Trump repeated this very serious allegation, yesterday, making an official statement from the White House. Ironically, he was accused of winning the 2016 US presidential election with the help of Russians, of all people, and now he is accusing his rivals of having stolen the current election.

Truthfulness is not a trait Trump is known for. The same is true of some of his predecessors as well. Bill Clinton committed perjury, and George W. Bush fabricated a casus belli to invade Iraq, where the illegal War for Oil left hundreds of thousands of civilians including children dead. But the question is whether the incumbent US President’s complaints of election malpractices in his own country can be dismissed as baseless.

In his speech, yesterday, President Trump mentioned specific instances of what he called vote rigging. He said that in Pennsylvania the vote counting had been influenced by the ‘corrupt Democratic machine’. In Philadelphia, polls observers had been denied access to the counting centres, he claimed. When the Republicans successfully moved the courts, the observers had been accommodated but kept far away so much so that some of them had been compelled to use binoculars to watch votes being counted; then the counting officers had covered the windows blocking the observers’ view, the President said, insisting that there was no transparency in the counting process and electoral frauds were being committed behind closed doors. Millions of mail-in ballots had come after the Election Day without any verification of the signatures or even the eligibility of the voters concerned, he said, calling them mystery votes. The Democrats have pooh-poohed Trump’s allegations, but a protracted legal battle over the election is likely.

Trump, yesterday, promised a lot of litigation, and Democratic vice-presidential hopeful Kamala Harris has reportedly urged her party supporters to help the party financially in case the election is taken to the Supreme Court.

The Democrats and others are accusing President Trump of undermining the US electoral process. They may be justified in flaying him, but the serious electoral frauds he has alleged by citing specific instances ought to be probed and the truth got at for the sake of global democracy. If these allegations are dismissed as figments of Trump’s imagination, and no action is taken, the rulers in the not-so-mature democracies may feel called to emulate them, given their inclination to follow bad examples. It may be recalled that there has already been a call for adopting the US Electoral College mechanism here. Governments with steamroller majorities in this part of the world can be as dangerous as monkeys wielding straight razors.