Editor’s note: This commentary is by Michael Long, of Burlington, who served on Burlington’s Development Review Board for more than a decade and has been active in efforts to moderate the redevelopment of the Burlington Town Center Mall.
I endorse Dan Coats’ urgent call in a recent New York Times op-ed for a commission to ensure the integrity of the vote and public confidence in the November election. The irony and horror of the genuine threat to our democracy that this former Trump administration director of national Intelligence describes is that it emanates principally from Donald Trump himself.
There have always been and will always be nutcases ranting about fake moon landings, Obama birth certificates, or servers hidden in Ukraine. Such rantings typically have scant effect, consigned to the lunatic fringe where they belong — but in this extraordinary time we have a president who embraces and leads the lunatic fringe and promotes it toward the mainstream from the bully pulpit.
As if this weren’t bad enough and formerly unimaginable, Donald Trump is actively, repeatedly, and without grounds condemning voting by mail as inherently fraudulent when the coronavirus pandemic will necessarily require and encourage more voting by mail than ever before. He has claimed falsely since losing the popular vote by three million in 2016 that fraudulent votes were to blame and that Democrat fraud votes are rampant. He has actively and repeatedly asserted that only a rigged election in 2020 could result in his defeat and he will not commit to accepting the election result, an echo of his 2016 assertion that he would accept the election result so long as he won.
That Donald Trump himself is the heart of the problem and that undermining our elections and our democracy in alignment with enemies of democracy like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Ali Khamenei is central to his political strategy and personality severely complicates the work of the commission Coats proposes. It also perhaps necessitates such a commission.
If nothing else, the public discourse surrounding the creation and work of such a commission would highlight and expose the danger and recklessness of statements from the president or the White House undermining confidence in the vote or raising the possibility of a candidate rejecting the election outcome. It would also reveal more starkly the multiple anti-democratic voter suppression and manipulation efforts afoot.
We have become in just four years the sort of country that requires people of integrity to oversee its elections, a country akin to a fledgling or a questionable democracy. This is a shocking, unfortunate reality, but one with the potential to reveal in brilliant relief the value and the fragility of the democracy that is ours to preserve or squander.