Questioning the election: How 'making sure' creates doubt
Stephen H. Provost
From the author of Jesus, You’re Fired!, which examines Donald Trump’s hold on evangelical Christians, and is now available on Amazon.
Why are so many evangelicals standing by Donald Trump in Santa’s making a list and he’s checking it twice.
But why? Why does he need to check it at all? Is his memory failing him? And if he can’t trust himself to get it right the first time, why should we trust him to get it right the second or the third? Yes, he’s Santa. He’s supposed to be trustworthy. But is he really? The more he has to be sure, the less certain we become.
Have you ever left the house for a vacation, when a question occurs to you: Did you turn the stove off? You’re sure you didn’t cook anything this morning, but... what if someone else in the house did? Or what if you left the stove on all night and forgot about it? Suddenly, you can’t be sure about any of it. So, you go back and check “to be safe” and find out you were right all along: The stove was off.
The ruling on the field...
Say you’re watching a football game, and a player makes a catch near the sidelines. The offense runs up to the line of scrimmage, but before they can snap the ball, the defensive team’s coach throws a red flag, challenging the ruling. The referees stop play and refer the decision to “New York,” where officials with access to numerous replay angles check to see whether it was the right call.
Did the player get both feet inbounds? Had he gained control of the ball, or was he bobbling it?
While they study the replays, you get to see them at home, too. At the same time, the broadcasting team offers their opinions. If all the replays are deemed “inconclusive,” the original call stands. But the very concept of something being inconclusive is subjective. In the end, after several minutes, a call is made, but does the audience have more or less confidence after all is said and done?
If your own conclusion doesn’t square with the call by the replay officials, how do you resolve that? How much of it is based on your own bias, and how much on the replay officials’ competence?
A lot depends on how close the call is.
After it’s made, the NFL has a rule: Players, coaches, and others associated with a team can be fined if they criticize the officials. On one hand, this seems like censorship. But there’s a reason for it: It preserves confidence in the officials — and the game itself — if the complaining isn’t allowed to continue. If coaches and players were still blasting the referees a month or two after the call or, worse, suggesting without evidence that the game was “rigged,” it would do immense damage to the league’s credibility. No one would ever be sure that games weren’t really carefully disguised choreography, ala the WWE.
Election free-for-all
No such protections are in place with our election system. We’ve relied for centuries on a gentleman’s agreement that we don’t question the results of an election — especially if it’s not close. If there are a few hundred votes separating two candidates in a single state, that’s one thing. Recounts are to be expected. Court challenges are possible. But clear victories have never been challenged. Until now. Because Donald Trump is no gentleman.
Trump has built a career on gaming the system by simultaneously using and questioning it. He’s manipulated the courts by filing a steady stream of lawsuits and appeals, counting on his deep pockets to wear down less-well-funded opponents. Because the courts want to be sure. He’s used the psychology of repetition to sow doubt through his own certitude — using ego-driven confidence to bolster lies, such as Barack Obama’s fictitious birth in Kenya, in the face of facts.
That confidence is contagious, regardless of the facts, and that’s especially so if he’s telling his followers what they already want to believe. He’s literally a con artist: The term is derived from someone who uses confidence as a weapon: his own confidence and his ability to elicit the confidence of his targets, or marks.
So when he says, again and again and again, that the election has been “rigged,” it’s no wonder it damages the confidence we place in our democratic systems.
Dangerous paradox
But it’s not just about Trump repeating bullshit. That would be bad enough. It’s the fact that we, out of an abundance of caution, feel compelled to listen — and keep trying to reassure ourselves that there’s no “there” there.
But paradoxically, the more we try to “make sure” everything was done properly, the more doubt we create. If Santa has to check his list twice, there must be something wrong worth checking, right?
Court after court has thrown out Trump’s challenges to the election results, but because the courts keep hearing them, that must mean there’s something of substance worth considering. Or so we think. The seed of doubt has been planted. The more recounts we undertake, the less confidence we have in the original count, because even if the result only changes by a few votes, that proves there was something wrong the first time.
And where there’s smoke, there’s fire: That’s Trump’s argument. He relies on anecdotal evidence and isolated incidents to argue it’s proof of something far more widespread and sinister. That argument itself is absurd, but the doubt it creates is very real — and very damaging to our democracy.
If someone in authority dares to contradict him, he’s terminated. Case in point: cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs, who got the ax from Trump after declaring the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”
Trump is creating a false equivalency between isolated incidents that don’t change the outcome and widespread fraud that would, if it were real. But not only is there no proof of it, there are no rational grounds for even suspecting it. Trump saying our democracy is rigged is like an officer stopping a driver for “driving while Black,” then trying to arrest him without probable cause.
There’s no probable cause to believe this election has been anything other than fair or accurate. But the longer we put up with baseless challenges to the results, out of “an abundance of caution” or for the sake of “fairness” and “making sure,” the less sure — and the less fair — we’ll be. Yes, it’s important to be fair to the losers, but it’s just as important to be fair to the winners.
Corrupt commissioner?
Imagine if an NFL owner didn’t just question a call on the field, but instead kept insisting it was wrong and saying the league was conspiring against his team. Now imagine that this owner was also the league commissioner. (This has actually been the case: Of the first three presidents of the NFL, two were owners and one was a player; the Milwaukee Brewers remained in owner Bud Selig’s family after he took over commissioner of baseball.)
Say this imaginary NFL commissioner decided he didn’t like way a call went against his team in the Super Bowl, so he decided to nullify it after the fact and award his team the victory. Say he lobbied his fellow owners to go along with him, and threatened them if they didn’t. If he were to succeed, it wouldn’t just be an unfair victory for his team, but it would be unfair to the team that won on the field.
The irony is that all the court challenges and recounts that are supposed to make us feel more secure about our system are having the opposite effect. No matter how decisive a judge’s ruling is, there’s always an appeal. No matter how many recounts are conducted, the loser can always cry fraud.
The very system we created to ensure fairness and accuracy, when manipulated, can cause us to doubt those very things. That’s what’s happened. Call it gaslighting, call it a con game, call it whatever you want.
To me, it’s nothing less than evil.