Why Does the US Electoral Process Breed Suspicion?

National Catholic Register, 05 January 2021

Americans’ weakened trust in elections is attributed in part to the electoral institution itself and to high-profile cases of alleged stolen elections.

As the U.S. Congress meets to certify the Electoral College votes, President Donald Trump and his allies have sown seeds of doubt in the integrity of the election. Those allies are a minority, but they are not few. Tens of millions of Americans believe that there was significant electoral fraud, perhaps sufficient to have stolen the election from Trump.

That is remarkable, setting the United States apart from nearly all other historic democracies. It simply doesn’t happen in Australia or Belgium that large segments of the population believe that their elections have been corrupted. Why is the soil of U.S. politics such fertile ground for the seeds of suspicion?

At a recent press conference for his new book, Cardinal George Pell offered caution regarding allegations of electoral fraud, saying that “it’s no small thing to weaken trust in great public institutions.” 

True enough, but trust in America’s electoral institutions has historically been weak.

There are two reasons: One is structural, and the other regards high-profile cases.

The structural reason is that the U.S. gives to elected officials an unusually decisive role in the administration and certification of elections. While most countries have independent electoral commissions that implement the statutes governing elections, in the United States it is directly supervised by partisan elected officials.

In many states, the secretary of state who administers an election is in an elected position. A secretary of state running for reelection is the referee for a game in which he is playing. In other states, the position is a partisan appointment by the governor. Partisan administration of elections is a recipe for conflicts of interest.

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