US electoral disputes: a new air of menace around an old problem

A badly designed electoral system (the electoral college … really?) and a close election is a recipe for chaos. In America, chaos has frequently accompanied presidential balloting.

When you throw in an era which combines instant communication and a need for instant gratification you add an element of tension to the recipe.

Mix in a president who is willing to lie about the situation and things could get very combustible.

This may have been President Donald Trump’s intention when he walked into the White House briefing room on Thursday and told the country the Democrats were trying to steal the election.

Among many lies Mr Trump offered instead of facts as proof that the election was being stolen from him was that his observers were not being allowed into the rooms where ballots were being counted.

That came as a surprise to people who were at duelling demonstrations outside the Pennsylvania Convention Centre and who watched Trump surrogate Corey Lewandowski and his team escorted inside to where the count of Philadelphia’s vote was taking place.

The demos were good natured but lurking at the edges were men with physiques built out of steroids and weight training. They were eyeing the Biden supporters, communicating with people inside the Trump-supporting barricades. They seemed on the alert for what? Trouble? If so they went home disappointed.

There have been mercifully few violent incidents at vote counts so far. But between now and the counts being certified by each individual state, given the fact that Mr Trump and his surrogates are using inflammatory language to say the election is being stolen, no one in the US would bet against more violence in the weeks ahead.

But violence around presidential elections is not a new thing in America.

The last time it happened, during the 2000 election between Al Gore and George W Bush, the focus was on Florida. Whoever won that state – and its 25 electoral votes – would win the presidency. It was incredibly close and there were many irregularities. Mr Gore successfully forced the vote in Miami-Dade county to be re-counted. Or so he thought.

As the count got under way, a group of men began pounding on the door, and tripped and punched a Democratic official. This became known as the Brooks Brothers riot – because the men were wearing suits. Republican dirty trickster Roger Stone claims to have organised the riot. It achieved its aims. The intimidation stopped the Miami count. (Stone would pop up again during the Trump campaign. He was convicted for campaign violations in 2019 but had his sentence commuted by the president.)

Prior to 2000 there had been a fairly peaceful sequence of presidential elections. Even in close ones, where Americans went to bed not knowing the name of the winner, there was nothing like the tension and anxiety of the votes in 2020 and 2000.

In 1960, Illinois was the pivotal state, and the votes had to be counted and re-counted in Chicago before John F Kennedy was declared the winner. But Richard Nixon accepted the result without public complaint.

You have to go back a century to find real violence in an election. And once again it was in Florida. It had nothing to do with counting votes and everything to do with just being allowed to vote. The town of Ocoee had a prosperous African-American community. Organisers from the Republican party (in those days it was still the party of Lincoln) held clinics to show the town’s black residents how to register and pay the poll tax and thus be eligible to vote. On election day, a group of black men voted but throughout the day tension mounted and during the late afternoon and evening mobs from around the area descended on Ocoee and burned its black neighbourhood down. An official death toll has never been established.

Most of America’s disputed elections took place during the first Gilded Age. The most famous was the election of 1876. It took four months to determine that Rutherford B Hayes had defeated Samuel Tilden in the Electoral College even though he had lost the popular vote.

But there was no violence as the months stretched out, although Hayes was known for the rest of his career as “His Fraudulency”.

But even when the winner is clear, violence can still stalk the electoral process. On March 4, 1865, as the Civil War wound down to a conclusion, Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated for a second term. He addressed the country from the steps of Capitol Building, concluding his speech:

“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds.”

A month later he was assassinated by a Confederate sympathiser.