America has had troubled elections before.
In 1861, Lincoln was forced to elude would-be assassins by sneaking into Washington, D.C., for his inauguration.
In 1876, electoral disputes yielded an unsavory deal leading to the end of Reconstruction and the resurgence of racist terror in the South.
In 1968, the leading Democratic candidate, Robert Kennedy, was murdered in June, and riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago followed. The prevailing turmoil led to the narrow victory of Richard Nixon, who resigned in disgrace six years later.
In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court intervened to block a recount in Florida that could have delivered the election to Al Gore, winner of the national popular vote.
Now Donald Trump is threatening “bedlam” if his legal troubles lead to his defeat in this year’s elections. For a candidate to threaten violence in order to get his way is a dangerous portent for any democracy.
Next month the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear the case in which the Colorado Supreme Court barred Trump from appearing on the Colorado ballot because of his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. The case is based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War to prevent Confederate insurrectionists from returning to office in the federal government. The Colorado court found that Trump’s role on Jan. 6 as insurrectionist-in-chief ought to bar him from running again.
Vermont has not followed the lead of Colorado — or of Maine, where in December the secretary of state knocked Trump off the primary ballot. That’s because Vermont’s secretary of state, Sarah Copeland Hanzas, concluded that she is not empowered by Vermont statute to rule on a candidate’s qualifications, beyond tallying the petition signatures required to obtain a position on the ballot.
Tom Sullivan, former president of the University of Vermont, and political analyst Steve Terry had urged her to take action on the ballot question. In a commentary appearing in the Addison Independent last September, Sullivan, a legal scholar, and Terry argued that because the U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of the land and because Copeland Hanzas has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, she could assume for herself the job of enforcing Section 3. It would have been a bold move for her to conclude on her own, first, that Trump qualified as an insurrectionist and, second, that the language of the amendment applied.
She demurred, and it’s easy to see why. The Colorado Supreme Court based its decision on the record established in a legal case, and the Maine secretary of state based her decision on established administrative procedures. Copeland Hanzas, on her own, would have had a challenging job establishing her authority in pressing the case. Most recently, the Oregon Supreme Court deferred its decision on the issue until the U.S. Supreme Court rules in the Colorado case.
Thus, Colorado has guaranteed that the issue will be addressed this year, and however it is decided, 2024 is likely to rank among those troubled elections of the past. So it’s worth considering the nature of that trouble.
It is a legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement of the 1960s that we understand the importance of standing up to intimidation and violence. King and his followers were called troublemakers for the simple act of walking down the street — in Birmingham, in Selma, in Chicago. In Chicago trouble actually originated with the white neo-Nazis and others who attacked King and other marchers with bricks, rocks and vile language. In Birmingham and Selma trouble was the work of the white racists who wanted to maintain their regime of white supremacy. It was the aim of marchers in those places to expose the trouble that was at the root of the many social ills caused by racism. For the late John Lewis, revered congressman and civil rights leader, exposing trouble in that way was what he called “good trouble.”
To hold an election and to follow the procedures set down by law is the peaceful substance of democracy. When a candidate promises to spurn the result in the event of his defeat, that is actual trouble, and when he spreads his lies across the country in a campaign of disinformation, it is a pernicious violation of democratic norms. To spur violence in defense of his lies is to make war against democracy. It is to incite an insurrection.
It is argued that barring Trump from the ballot would be anti-democratic because doing so would prevent his backers from voting for him. But the U.S. Constitution is the supreme expression of democracy in our country, and the 14th Amendment serves as a fundamental guarantor of our democratic freedoms. To bar an insurrectionist from public office would be an expression of our foundational belief that democratic processes most be protected from those who would destroy democracy.
The nation and the freedom-loving rank and file of the citizenry can withstand these troubles. If we can’t, then we won’t have a democracy for long. Threats around the world from online disinformation and the cultish surrender of reason to pretenders like Trump may require us to weather storms as bad or worse than 1968 or 2000.
Vermont is not in the driver’s seat on the issue of Trump’s place on the ballot, but depending on what the U.S. Supreme Court decides in February, the state may eventually be able to purge Vermont’s ballot of Trump’s name. It’s questionable whether the Supreme Court will make such a dramatic move. The conservative justices have described themselves as strict constructionists, meaning they prefer to hew to the plain meaning of the language in the Constitution. We will have to see whether they will step in on behalf of the plain meaning of the 14th Amendment.
