American Democracy and the Willingness to Lose
The coming U.S. vote is worrying veteran election monitors used to watching global hot spots.
Voting booths are kept socially distant at the Chesterfield, N.H., polling site, which was moved to the gymnasium of Chesterfield Central School from the normal location of the town hall, during the New Hampshire state primaries on Sept. 8.
Photo Illustration by 731; Photo: Kristopher Radder/The Brattleboro Reformer/AP PhotoAhead of November’s presidential election, an assessment by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe explained its decision to send a “large” team of observers to help ensure a clean vote: There were fears the incumbent might abuse government resources to keep power, disinformation (or “fake news”) was being spread, and inflammatory language used. The report, published earlier this month, was about Moldova, where voters choose a new leader for the former Soviet republic on Nov. 1. If you thought it was describing the U.S., which goes to the polls two days later, that’s an easy mistake to make.
For decades, American nonprofits such as the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, and the Carter Center have observed elections in Moldova and other nations around the globe, confident of the model that their own country, the world’s oldest constitutional democracy, had to offer. But this year’s contest between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden is holding up a mirror. Fought amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, and levels of political polarization not seen for a century, it’s looking a lot more like the ones these organizations so often admonished—with even such fundamentals as the willingness to lose in doubt.