"You'll never Have to Vote Again": Autocrats like Trump and Maduro Want You to Lose Faith in Elections
They know that your vote is your voice and your voice can change history.
The history of autocracy is the history of war on the idea and practice of free and fair elections. Among members of the tribe of arrogant and corrupt authoritarian leaders, allowing a population to determine through their votes who is in government and for how long is extremely problematic. Wherever they fall on the political spectrum, today’s tyrants take their cue from Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who derided elections as a “childish game” that had “already humiliated the nation for decades.”
Il Duce replaced democratic elections with occasional plebiscites whose methods can be summarized as "vote yes or else". Propagandists could use the near-unanimous “approval” produced by these events as evidence of the regime’s success at creating a conflict-free “new unified national life.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin is among those who continue the tradition with referendums which create the illusion of consent for “reunifying” illegally seized territory with the “motherland.”
And why should lesser beings decide the fate of the strongman, who alone can lead the nation to greatness? It is history itself that demands that "men of destiny" such as former president Donald Trump and Mussolini– or, say, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro-- stay in power. Who can blame today’s authoritarians for doing all they can to save the nation by subverting or discrediting corrupt democratic elections?
No wonder aspiring tyrants such as Republican candidate Trump admire leaders who don’t have to deal with this “problem.” When Trump praises Chinese head of state Xi Jinping for his ability to rule “with an iron fist,” he is praising a situation in which opposition parties don’t exist, which makes elections moot and “simplifies” political life.
Trump has worked hard for almost a decade to get Americans to give up their quaint ideas about voting as a valued democratic right: he has conditioned them to see democracy as a failing system, and to view elections as an inferior and unreliable way to choose leaders.
He started this crusade in 2016, when he feared Hillary Clinton might prevail. In 2020, Trump launched a massive propaganda campaign to cast doubt on every single aspect of voting. He told lies about dead people voting, about fraudulent mail-in ballots, about votes illegally counted, not counted at all, or invented.
All of this prepared Americans to see his loss in Nov. 2020 as a thwarted victory, and inculcated the proper disposition for MAGA acolytes to be ready to commit crimes on his behalf on Jan. 6 to “stop the steal.” Today, millions continue to believe, against all evidence, that their Leader is the rightful president and Joe Biden is the authoritarian who is occupying the White House and holding the Jan. 6 freedom fighters “hostage” in his jails.
Although Trump’s “self-coup” failed (the term used for attempts by incumbents to stay in power illegally), it was influential abroad, inspiring Jair Bolsonaro’s failed Jan. 8, 2023 Brazilian insurrection. Having had a coup that led to a decades-long dictatorship, the Brazilians took the danger of propagating electoral fraud seriously, convicting Bolsonaro for it and banning him from politics until 2030.
That hasn’t stopped other bad actors from declaring any election results that don’t go their way to be fraudulent, or simply ignoring those results and pronouncing themselves the victors. That’s what Maduro is doing, falsely claiming (with the complicity of his crony-stuffed national election autocracy and other institutional actors) that he and not the opposition won the election. Hopefully this latest attempt at a “self-coup” will be stopped.
In the meantime, over in America, Trump is upping the ante with his recent pronouncements about voting. "Christians get out and vote. Just this time," he said at a July 26 Florida campaign event for Evangelical Christians. "You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years. You know what? It'll be fixed. It'll be fine. You won't have to vote anymore my beautiful Christians."
Trump knows that our votes are our voices and our voices can change history, as has recently happened in Poland and France. That’s why he and his GOP loyalists are escalating their longtime war on voting to call for a change in political system.
The trial balloon for that authoritarian message was launched by MAGA Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) when he told Newsmax in 2023, "The American people should just stand up and say enough is enough, let's don't have elections anymore." Watch for more of this going forward.
The endgame of MAGA election denial is not challenging this or that election, but convincing Americans that elections as a practice are unnecessary. Trump would be delighted to relieve us of the “burden” of voting, just like Mussolini did for Italians a century ago.
So true, distrust is a prerequisite for failing democracy. But what if they plan to steal the vote anyway? That's seeming more and more possible, based on MAGA activities in local elections.
Trump should by now have been on trial for inciting an insurrection and possessing classified documents without authorization. Merrick Garland is derelict in his responsibility to protect the American people. I hope that one of President Harris’ first actions is to replace Garland with a reputable prosecutor.