Don’t worry, America.

We got this.

By “we,” I mean California.

By “this,” I mean this presidential election.

And by “got,” I mean that we are sending you the best possible candidate to weather whatever the next three-plus months hold.

Now let’s be honest about Kamala Harris. We’re not giving you our most charismatic public speaker. Harris’ sentences are sometimes as awkward as Joe Biden’s. She has a bad habit of fusing her talking points into word salads.

We’re not giving you our most disciplined politician. She’ll crack a joke when she shouldn’t or make a mistake in a meeting or at the border that requires political clean-up.

What we are giving you is our most enduring political escape artist. We are giving you someone who can emerge improbably triumphant from losing situations.

But, most of all, we are giving you someone who will take more crap than anyone possibly could, and never quit.

The best way to understand Kamala Harris, if you care to understand the person who (non-Trumpian God willing) will be our next president, is through a classic movie quote, courtesy of a prominent San Francisco political consultant named Eric Jaye.

The movie is The Shawshank Redemption, released in 1994 and based on a Stephen King novella that owes a debt to the French writer Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, a classic story about a prison break and unexpected revenge.

Years ago, Jaye suggested Kamala Harris was the California equivalent of the movie’s main character, Andy Dufresne, a falsely convicted banker who escapes Shawshank Prison through a 500-yard-long sewage pipe.

“Andy Dufresne,” Jaye said, quoting Morgan Freeman’s character in the movie, “who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side.”

Because Americans don’t know Harris this way, they are underestimating her. Just like they underestimate California.

Contrary to the stereotypes, 21st-century California is not soft or easy. It’s a crowded, crazily competitive place where everything is a struggle. It’s next to impossible to get into the school you want, or get a job that pays enough, or find an affordable place to live.

The real California made Harris tough. It helps that she grew up in a tough place and time—the madness of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Berkeley and in Oakland, which might be California’s toughest city. Her parents were scholars—not the toughest of professions—but they were immigrants, from India and Jamaica, who experienced tough adjustments to American life. And after their divorce, when Harris was still very young, she and her sister were raised almost entirely by their mother.

As a mixed-race kid, Harris struggled to fit in, at a newly integrated elementary school, and at both a Hindu temple and the 23rd Avenue Church of God. In her early teens, she was relocated to a foreign city, Montreal. She attended law school not in the leafy Ivy League like that supposed working-class hero JD Vance but at the UC Hastings, in the middle of San Francisco’s toughest neighborhood, the Tenderloin. And she worked as a prosecutor in Alameda County and then San Francisco, on the sorts of cases—sex crimes and child abuse—that can harden people.

She launched her political career in the hyper-competitive political culture of San Francisco, which forged many of our state’s toughest pols—Willie Brown, Nancy Pelosi, Phil and John Burton. Her first election, for San Francisco district attorney, was one she should have lost, because it was the trickiest challenge in politics—beating an incumbent who was also her boss. Somehow, she escaped with victory in a three-way race when she’d started in third.

Then Harris, still little known, ran statewide, for California attorney general—against a popular Los Angeles Republican named Steve Cooley who had the state’s law enforcement community behind him. On election night, she appeared to have lost. But when all the votes were counted three weeks later, she had squeaked through.

When a U.S. Senate seat opened in 2016, Harris was hardly the most popular Democrat in the state. But she jumped into the race early and managed to scare off other contenders and win the seat over another Democrat.

Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign was a disaster. She started strong in debates but didn’t make it to the Iowa caucuses, alienating both progressives and moderates. But even after that embarrassing campaign, she found a way through, convincing Biden to make her vice president.

Media and public reviews of her vice presidency have been dicey. She had too much staff turnover. Biden gave her impossible issues to manage, mainly immigration. For the first three years, her approval ratings and polling were lower than the president’s. She was cited as the reason he couldn’t retire after one term. But all those things turned. Her performance improved. And now Biden has bowed out and endorsed her for president because she looks like the stronger candidate.

She doesn’t have the nomination yet of course. She may have to go through a contested convention. And if she earns the nod, she’ll face a former president who is ready to attack.

Democrats are worried. Because Donald Trump is a constant font of lies and accusations. His strategy, as the now-imprisoned Trump advisor Steve Bannon has famously said, “is to flood the zone with shit.”

But this time, his opponent is Kamala Harris. She survived all the BS of San Francisco and California and national politics. She’s heard every disgusting sexist insult. She sloughed off slurs against two different races.

She’s about to be submerged in it all again. Because American politics is a river of you-know-what.

Which is why this is her moment.

Who is better equipped to navigate us through all the crap, and to the cleaner other side, than Kamala Devi Harris?

The post California Has Got This, America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

President Biden should drop out of the presidential race, but not because he is too old or too infirm.

He should drop out because he is not criminal enough to win.

The United States has broken bad—just look at our guns, our drugs, our major corporations—and a good and decent man no longer seems up to the job of running the country. We want our leaders to be scary because the world is scary. We’re looking for someone more cunning, more brutal, willing to violate the law or Constitution to serve and protect us.

This, not age, is the real story behind the reaction to the first presidential debate. Donald Trump broadcast his criminal id, lied constantly, defended his lawless January 6 coup, and suggested he would commit new crimes against the republic. For this, he was judged the winner. Meanwhile, Joe Biden played the kindly forgetful grandfather standing up for the rule of law and democracy—and created a political crisis that has many in his own party seeking to drive him from the race.

This post-debate reaction is hardly surprising. Criminality is politically powerful. Trump surged in his fundraising and maintained his lead in the polls after a New York jury convicted him on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal from voters his liaison with a porn star. Now, Democrats are encouraging Biden to behave more like Trump, by raising his voice, demonizing doubters, and talking as tough as Clint Eastwood’s convict in Escape from Alcatraz.

Some Americans remain puzzled that Americans would elect a criminal, or anyone who behaved like one. But the only real puzzle is why anyone is puzzled.

Criminal daring has always been useful to democratic leaders. Writing during the French Revolution—that violent and criminal launch of the modern republic—the Marquis de Sade, who spent much of his life in prison, observed, “It is certain that stealing nourishes courage, strength, skill, tact, in a word, all the virtues useful to a republican system.” From France to Brazil and beyond, human beings vote for politicians whom they suspect of crime and corruption.

There are three reasons for this. One reason is that the criminal or corrupt may be better than the alternatives. (Ask Louisianans about “voting for the crook” Edwin Edwards for governor over the former Klansman David Duke). Another reason is that being a president or prime minister requires dealing with foreign leaders who are criminals (see Putin, Vladimir).

Another, less discussed reason is representative: We humans want to see ourselves in our politicians, and we humans are a crooked species.

“There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms,” Émile Durkheim wrote in his 1897 classic Suicide: A Study in Sociology. “We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization logically imply it.”

Americans may not read much Durkheim, but our profoundly punitive country rivals dictatorships and autocracies in its fervor to lock up its people. So, it’s perfectly natural for huge percentages of Americans to want to see a convicted felon in the Oval Office.

Today, after generations of mass incarceration, one in three American adults has a criminal record. For context, that’s the same percentage of working-age adults who have four-year college degrees. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University once determined that if all the Americans who had been arrested held hands, they would circle the globe three times.

If such comparisons don’t grab you, here’s something more political. In raw numbers, about 80 million Americans have a criminal record of some sort. Back in 2020, Joe Biden received just over 81 million voters in the November presidential election. As of spring 2024, 80.7 million Americans were registered as either Democrats or Republicans. Criminality and party membership are similarly common American experiences.

Which is why the Democrats should make sure they replace “good and decent” Biden with a convicted felon.

I mean, why give Trump the honor of making history as the first-ever convict in the Oval Office?

Alas, by this logic, my fellow Californian, Vice President Kamala Harris, won’t be Biden’s replacement. As a prosecutor with deep law enforcement experience, she’s the wrong fit for a country this crooked.

The good news is that other distinguished Californians boast criminal records. The actor Danny Trejo, an Angeleno, has developed a devoted following after spending his young adulthood in most of the great state prisons, including San Quentin, Folsom, Soledad, Vacaville, and Susanville. But Trejo is 80, and not nearly as well known as the best choice to take on the Biden mantle:

Snoop Dogg.

Born in Long Beach, Snoop (aka Calvin Broadus), 52, would bring clear convictions to the campaign: for cocaine possession in 1990, for gun possession during a 1993 traffic stop, and for charges of drug and gun possession in 2007. Snoop was also tried and acquitted of murder in 1996, an experience that more presidents should have, since the job is about making life-and-death decisions.

What makes Snoop the best choice, among the one-third of Americans with criminal histories, is just how expertly he’s mined his record to produce one of the most diverse and enduring careers in 21st-century entertainment. He’s a rapper, record producer, actor, tastemaker (with a taste for cannabis), comic, poet, author, and game show host. In 2022, demonstrating more mainstream credibility than any living politician, he headlined the Super Bowl halftime show.

And choosing a VP would be a no-brainer. Snoop and his friend and business partner, fellow ex-con Martha Stewart, have worked together on everything from TV shows to a line of handbags. Together, the two would make an unbeatable and utterly indecent presidential ticket.

Democratic elites, who include a lot of lawyers, might feel uncomfortable with someone with Snoop’s past in the White House. But that’s only because they fail to appreciate just how much the federal courts have changed the job.

Just this year, the Supreme Court made two rulings that blew the door wide open for criminal presidents. First, the court ignored the plain text of the 14th Amendment to determine that even a person who had committed the crime of insurrection against the country couldn’t be thrown off the ballot by a state. Then, earlier this month, the Court’s six-member conservative majority found that presidents have near-total immunity for crimes they commit in office.

If both the people and the highest court in the land want a crook in the White House, who dares stand in their way?

The post Dump Biden. Run Snoop appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In 2013, when I was 13, one of the oldest comedy TV programs in Russia released a sketch in which a group of musicians performed a version of Queen’s “I Want to Break Free” satirizing the country.

The lyrics went: “The roads in this country are like cars in this country. Like the salaries, the football, the communal services, and, of course, the cinema …” When Freddie Mercury sang “God knows,” it was twisted to sound like the Russian equivalent of “shit.”

As the audience laughed, another actor approached the band to tell them to stop singing the song because “respected people are sitting in the hall.” He added, “Be grateful that at least Putin is not.” One of the musicians exclaimed, in shock, “What? Putin is not?”— a common Russian sentence construction that can either mean something isn’t present, or that it does not exist at all. “I told you!” he said. “He doesn’t exist.” The audience burst out with laughter.

My mom and I saw the sketch on TV when it came out. We loved it. When she took me to school by car and “I Want to Break Free” played on the radio, we loudly sang “our” version.

The following year, 2014, Russia invaded Donbass.

I do not remember much about my feelings about the invasion back then. I was a teenager concerned with two things: my weight and final exams. But even so, I could sense clearly that a younger version of myself who had laughed at silly jokes about Putin was gone.

The only political mood I could count on then was the anticipation of change. After there were large-scale protests against election fraud at the Kremlin’s Bolotnaya Square in 2012, the adults around me repeated again and again, “We just need to wait a little more.” They believed that a future of democracy and free elections was near.

But it wasn’t. Even before I became old enough to really recognize myself as part of the political process, the patience became sticky and suffocating. Now, it’s hard for me to believe that a 13-year-old me laughed at opposition jokes about Putin on the main state TV channel. I want to tell her, even though it would be upsetting, “Remember how people would point out that you had spent your whole life under Putin, as though it were hilarious? Well, I have news — I’m 23 now, and it’s not funny anymore.”

I started to see the reality of things in 2018, when activist and opposition politician Alexei Navalny was banned from participating in the presidential race. A famous photo of Navalny and his team walking through the center of Moscow to register for the elections will forever remain in my memories. Nikolskaya Street, where the photo was taken, is always bright and filled with tourists. I often walked there alone during my first year at university, when I didn’t know anybody in Moscow yet and needed to feel crowds around me.

It was meaningful to me that Navalny was trying to participate in the election as an opposition candidate the same year I finished high school and started my bachelor’s degree. At the time, it seemed like new futures were stretching out ahead for both me and my country.

Instead, it was a lesson that my childhood was over. That was the last year when Navalny’s participation in the presidential elections could at least be imagined or contemplated.

I finally realized that changes would not come through electoral politics during the September 2021 municipal elections, when Russian cities elected their local deputies. One of the most prominent politicians was Mikhail Lobanov, an opposition candidate with a leftist agenda and a young team. In his district, Lobanov was ahead of his pro-government competitor by 12,000 votes. But then, Russian authorities introduced “electronic voting,” which opened up the possibility of fraud on an even larger scale than the ballot stuffing protested back in 2012.

According to the results of the electronic vote—which were announced at the very end—Lobanov’s rival received 20,000 votes out of nowhere, to win by several percentage points. Independent media published lengthy articles about mass falsifications.

It was those municipal elections—small in the scope of the country—that secured absolute control for Putin. From then on, voting results could literally be drawn on a computer screen.

It’s 2024 now. Navalny is dead, and Russia is engaged in a large-scale war in Ukraine. Russian state media insist that the government was not behind his death because “it would be unprofitable for Putin to kill Navalny in prison before the presidential elections”— as though voters actually affect the elections’ outcome. None of the opposition candidates condemning the war in Ukraine were allowed to participate in this year’s presidential elections.

None of this was a surprise. But it makes me angry that I’m not surprised by anything.

Instead of the optimism of 10 years ago, I feel meaninglessness. And I’m not alone. When I interviewed 18-year-olds who will vote for the first time in 2024, they said things like, “I am sure that my vote will not change anything, we all know the result,” and “There can be only one outcome of the elections.” For them, hoping for change feels irrational and forbidden, but still desired — like wanting to eat delicious fruit that gives you an allergic reaction.

Still, when the anti-war politician Boris Nadezhdin tried to become a presidential candidate this year, thousands of people in different cities stood in line in the cold to sign for his nomination. They didn’t necessarily support him as an individual but wanted to express their opposition to the war through legal means. A huge campaign collected more than 100,000 signatures, even though many people participating knew that the outcome would be the authorities rejecting Nadezhdin’s candidacy.

What was all their work for? Was it meaningless?

I think a lot about the conversations that people in those lines may have had. I remember how I used to go to the court hearings of political prisoners in Russia—not only to show solidarity but also because people who gathered near the courts became friends. The hearings were spaces of political communication, even if they had no real power or purpose.

Philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said that “meaninglessness shouldn’t lead us to give away all subjectivity to others.” These words resonate with me. In the face of Russia’s anti-democratic acts and governance, I feel an urge to dissolve my voice because my vote means nothing. But that would be wrong.

For many Russians, the tedious wait for change has proven too frustrating. When nothing changes we gradually lose our political drive, deciding that our actions are meaningless.

But politics is not just what appears in history textbooks—key events and major actors. Growing up in Russia under Putin, I learned that you can’t wait for politics. Now I think my main political actions happen when I interact with other people, and when I care about other people. That could be outside the courts, at rallies, and in the living room with my friends when we argue about colonialism in Russian regions. It’s also when I comfort my mom, because she feels lonely in Russia and hates to see the pro-war posters on the streets of our city.

Over the weekend, the opposition conducted a “Noon against Putin” campaign. It asked people to come to polling stations at a specific time — 12 p.m.— to either spoil their ballot or choose any candidate other than Putin. The main value of the campaign was to give people the opportunity to see others who hold similar beliefs and anger. To feel solidarity and their own agency.

I think this is especially important for 18-year-old voters who have no illusions about a democratic future and who, like me, have spent their childhood under Putin. I once wanted to warn my younger self that nothing would change. Now, I think it’s better to say that waiting for change isn’t the main point. It’s also about forging relationships that turn into like-minded community. Perhaps, in doing so, we will create bonds on which to build new political hopes and democratic futures.

The post Seeking a Politics of Solidarity in Putin’s Russia appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In December 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin officially announced his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election. It had long been clear that he had plans to aim for his fifth term in office. Most people in Russia believed he would secure a victory, and that the other candidates served merely to legitimize the electoral process. For Russian authorities, demonstrating majority support for Putin has long been the objective of elections—this time, they were aiming for him to win 80% of the votes. The question was, would anyone be allowed to put up a real challenge, and would voters dare to support them?

The men who initially declared that they would run for president in the March 2024 elections were all establishment candidates who either tacitly or openly backed Putin remaining in power. There was no one who opposed Putin’s war with Ukraine.

Then, Yekaterina Duntsova, a journalist and former Duma deputy in Rzhev, a town west of Moscow, unexpectedly decided to run as an independent candidate. She quickly gained support throughout Russia thanks to her strong antiwar stance and criticism of the country’s direction over the past decade. But the Central Election Commission (CEC), the federal body that organizes and oversees elections, rejected Duntsova’s registration as a candidate in December 2023, citing numerous errors in her submitted documents.

The following month, the CEC approved the documents of another anti-war candidate, Boris Nadezhdin, who was nominated by the Civic Initiative party. Nadezhdin is known for his liberal views and has participated in elections at various levels for almost 35 years. His presidential platform focused on peace, reconciliation, and justice, with a commitment to resolving conflicts through negotiations. He supported holding referendums on disputed territories between Russia and Ukraine. He also emphasized the need to strengthen international relations, release political prisoners, and repeal discriminatory laws against organizations and individuals, including the LGBT community.

The election commission approved his initial documents, but Nadezhdin needed to collect 100,000 signatures from Russian voters from different regions to get on the ballot. Inspired by Nadezdin’s platform, I decided to join his team as a volunteer at a signature collection site in St. Petersburg in January 2024. I am an environmental sociologist and had never before been involved in politics. But Nadezhdin’s emphasis on peace resonated with me, and I was eager to make a difference.

On January 13, Nadezhdin arrived in St. Petersburg to engage with citizens at a public event in one of the city’s business centers. The atmosphere was electrifying, resembling the kind of unauthorized rally strictly prohibited in Russia. Nadezhdin delivered a speech and Q&A session that gave people the opportunity to express their views on the Putin regime and the future of Russia through an open microphone session.

I spent 12 days collecting signatures. Initially, it was slow: only a few individuals were willing to sign in support of Nadezhdin. But as the submission deadline approached, there was a significant surge in participation, particularly among young people, ages 18 to 25. Many were spurred on by exiled political players like Maxim Kats and the TV channel Dozhd, also known as TV Rain, as well as social media. This wave of enthusiasm rapidly spread across Russia, and long queues formed at Nadezhdin signature collection sites throughout the country.

By January 21, the waiting time at the Nadezhdin signature collection site in St. Petersburg was 2 to 4.5 hours. The collection site operated around the clock, spending 9 to 10 hours each day collecting signatures. At night, volunteers did quality checks to ensure that people’s handwriting would satisfy the CEC’s intricate and complicated rules and regulations.

According to the CEC’s regulations, Nadezhdin had to collect signatures from at least 40 regions of Russia, with each region limited to a maximum of 2,500 signatures. After our signature collection site surpassed this requirement, quickly collecting 5,000 signatures from residents of St. Petersburg, we shifted to only collecting signatures from people who were officially registered in other regions, as indicated by the official stamp in their passports. Many people were disappointed to be turned away.

On January 31, Boris Nadezhdin submitted 105,000 signatures—the maximum permitted—to the CEC. He had managed to collect 211,000 signatures in Russia alone, and 11,000 more from abroad.

The volunteers who collected signatures in St. Petersburg had doubts about his chances of being registered, but remained hopeful. One of them shared their thoughts in our volunteer group chat:

“Today, at noon, I stood on the street with frozen hands, scrolling through the news channels’ feeds, anxiously waiting for any updates from the Central Election Commission. It’s disheartening, but not surprising. However, I refuse to lose hope or give up, and I wish the same for everyone.”

Nevertheless, on February 8, 2024, the CEC refused to register Boris Nadezhdin’s candidacy. They justified their decision by declaring that more than 5% of the submitted signatures were invalid. Nadezhdin appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, but they rejected the appeal.

My fellow volunteers and I were deeply disappointed by the outcome. “Some people may have questioned the purpose of collecting signatures for Nadezhdin, believing that the CEC would find faults anyway. However, pay attention—the CEC officially recognized that 95,000 signatures are clean,” someone wrote in our chat. “Everyone saw the queues! There are a lot of people from different walks of life who are against the current system, and we showed that there are a lot of us.”

Just over a week later, another candidate for the presidency Vladislav Davankov from the New People party announced at his meetings with voters that he is for negotiations with Ukraine. Simultaneously, the government announced the death of another Putin opponent, Alexei Navalny. Nadezhdin attended his funeral, as did Duntsova.

The Russian government understands that millions of its citizens oppose Putin. Now, the whole world has seen that there are many people in Russia striving for peace, change, and a more inclusive future.

The post On the Campaign Trail With a Russian Antiwar Candidate appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Conspiracies appeared even at the founding of the country, when, during the early decades of the American republic, the Federalist and Jeffersonian Republican Parties engaged in conspiratorial rhetoric on a regular basis. Following the War of 1812, the Federalist Party faded, leaving the Republicans as the predominant national party. Their hold was so great that in 1816 and 1820, James Monroe, the Republican presidential candidate, ran virtually unopposed. In 1824, however, the Republicans splintered into factions. Five viable candidates ran in that election cycle, and John Quincy Adams won the presidency.

The controversy around Adams’s victory quickly fueled suspicions: Tennessean Andrew Jackson had won the most electoral and popular votes and the most regions and states, but because he did not win the majority of electoral votes, the U.S. House of Representatives was constitutionally required to choose the president in a runoff of the top three vote-getters. Jackson’s supporters believed that House Speaker Henry Clay, who had placed fourth in the regular election, helped Adams win the House election in return for being appointed secretary of state. The Jacksonians’ charges of a “corrupt bargain” between Adams and Clay ensured that the 1828 election would, in part, be fought over this conspiracy theory.

During the hotly contested 1828 campaign, Jackson’s opponents, too, trafficked in conspiracy theories: In particular, administration men accused Jackson’s supporters of plotting a coup d’état if their candidate lost to President Adams. This “theory” held that pro-Jackson congressmen, upset about the national government’s attempts to impose a new tariff on imports, held “secret meetings” to discuss “the DISSOLUTION OF THE UNION.” One pro-Jackson supporter “declared that he should not be astonished to see Gen. Jackson, if not elected, placed in the Presidential Chair, at the point of fifty thousand bayonets!!!” The thought of a national military hero such as Jackson leading a military rebellion had no basis in reality, but the conspiracy theory fit the tenor of the times.

Jackson won—and conspiratorial rhetoric remained ever-present in his presidency. In the run-up to the 1832 election, for example, the national organization of Freemasonry drew conspiracy theorists’ attention. Spurred on by the murder of a New York Mason named William Morgan, who had threatened to disclose the fraternal order’s secrets, an Anti-Masonic political party had emerged during the 1828 election. Frequently repeated accusations that Freemasonry was secretive and elitist reflected larger concerns about the ways in which the ruling elite undermined the nation’s democratic institutions through corruption. And for the Anti-Masons, Jackson was no better than Adams; in their view, the Tennessean’s promise of “rotation of office” was simply cronyism.

Four years later, the Anti-Masons had gained enough supporters to run William Wirt for president against the Democratic incumbent Jackson and the National Republican candidate Henry Clay. During the 1832 campaign, they accused Freemasons of a number of transgressions beyond Morgan’s murder, including subversion of free speech and democracy. Rhode Island Anti-Masons, for example, warned that Freemasons were “darkening the public mind” by attempting to quash public criticism of their organization in the state’s newspapers. Vermont’s William Strong charged the Democrats with following the Masonic dogma of “the end justifies the means” to elect Jackson in 1828 and secure government patronage for party members.

But in that same election of 1832, Anti-Masons themselves became the target of conspiracy theorists. New York Democrats saw a plot afoot in the coalition of the Anti-Masonic Party and the National Republicans in their state. How was it possible, one New York newspaper asked, that the Anti-Masons had nominated Wirt, yet had allied themselves with Clay? It was not because of principled opposition to Freemasonry, as all three presidential candidates were Masons. The only answer was that it was a “deep laid conspiracy to defeat the wishes of the people” to elect Andrew Jackson.

During Jackson’s second term, much of the conspiratorial rhetoric centered on the Bank War, the political battle between the president and the Second Bank of the United States, the nation’s chief financial institution, which held both government and private funds and was supposed to remain non-partisan in its loans. Jackson, however, believed that the bank’s president Nicholas Biddle had used the institution’s deposits and influence to assist John Quincy Adams in the 1828 election. If true, this was a blatant misuse of the people’s money. Consequently, Jackson exerted his power as chief executive to remove government funds from the Second Bank, which would cripple its financial power. In retaliation, Biddle began calling in the bank’s loans across the country, precipitating a financial recession to pressure the president to restore the government’s deposits.

As a result, accusations of conspiracy flew on both sides. The anti-Jackson Whig Party (which had replaced the National Republican Party of the 1832 campaign) accused Vice President Martin Van Buren of being “at the bottom of all this hostility to the Bank.” Allegedly, the “Little Magician” was using his “arts and tricks” against the Second Bank to further his presidential prospects in 1836.

Democrats then responded by constructing their own conspiracy theory about “the Boston Aristocracy” and its control of the Second Bank. Stretching back to the early days of the republic, they claimed this “nefarious conspiracy” had used the Second Bank to target the anti-aristocratic Southern and mid-Atlantic states, “producing universal panic and distress” by constricting the money supply in those regions. These same conspirators, according to Democrats, were now employing “the whole power of the present Bank to embarrass the administration and distress the country,” not to mention hurting the Democratic Party’s chances of retaining the White House.

In the 1836 presidential campaign, which pitted Van Buren against three Whig candidates—William Henry Harrison, Daniel Webster, and Hugh Lawson White—the Whigs used conspiracy theories in an attempt to derail the Democrats’ chances for a political victory. They accused Van Buren of being a member of the Catholic Church and of participating in a “popish plot” intended “to conciliate the Catholics, in the U States for Political purposes.” Van Buren, who was raised in the Dutch Reformed Church, denied the accusation.

Whigs also accused Democratic vice-presidential candidate Richard M. Johnson of wanting to force Washington society to accept his two daughters, who were the product of his relationship with an enslaved African-American woman. According to one Richmond Whig, Johnson’s “depraved tastes” threatened to destroy the racial barrier that kept African-Americans in a subordinate position, and endangered “the purity of our maidens, the chaste dignity of our matrons.” Van Buren and Johnson won in 1836, but Johnson’s family circumstances continued to plague his political career and harmed Van Buren’s standing with some Southern voters in 1840.

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly how many votes changed because of conspiratorial rhetoric, either then or now. It seems clear, though, that American politicians believe that this type of rhetoric makes a difference—and that American voters have always had to be politically literate to determine the difference between conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies.

Still, this enduring belief in vast, unexplainable conspiracies has often contributed to voters’ feelings of powerlessness, increasing their cynicism and apathy. And of course, conspiratorial rhetoric undermines the nation’s democratic institutions and practices. Politically motivated conspiracy theories, ultimately, bring the same result as conspiracies themselves: a small number of elite Americans wielding immense power over the future of the United States, power that may not account for the will of the majority.

The post When American Politicos First Weaponized Conspiracy Theories appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the next presidential election, we may not be so lucky. With antiquated voting devices at the end of their projected lifespans still in widespread use across the country, the U.S. is facing an impending crisis in which our most basic election infrastructure is unacceptably vulnerable to breakdown, malfunction, and hacking. It’s not just an inconvenience. If the machinery of democracy is called into question, so are its foundations.

Those of us who can recall the presidential election of 2000 know exactly what can happen when faulty technology meets a razor-close election. The Bush-Gore contest came down to just a few hundred votes in Florida, and butterfly ballots and faulty punch card machines left us arguing about hanging, dimpled, and pregnant chads. It left wounds that still afflict the country. In today’s hyperpartisan environment, such a scenario—or even unfounded accusations of a “rigged” election that gained postelection traction—would be far more contentious. Just imagine what it might be like in 2020.

Absent a wholesale replacement of our outdated electoral equipment, this scenario is becoming increasingly likely for our future elections. The problem of aging voting technology reaches nearly every corner of the United States, as we documented in a report released by the Brennan Center for Justice in 2015. Unlike voting machines used in past eras, today’s systems were not designed to last for decades. Although it is difficult to predict how long an individual machine will reliably function, the experts we spoke with generally agree that machines purchased since 2000 have expected lifespans of only 10 to 20 years. (And for most systems, it’s probably closer to 10.) This makes sense: No one expects a laptop to run reliably for more than a decade. Yet on Election Day 2016, 42 states used voting machines that were at least 10 years old, and 13 of those states used ones more than 15 years old. If replacements continue to stall before the next presidential election, many more will surpass their recommended retirement age.

Perhaps even more troubling, these aging machines are particularly vulnerable to hacking. Although the country has made important advances in securing our voting technology in recent years, these older devices often rely on unsupported software (we found machines still operating on Windows 2000) that doesn’t receive the regular security patches that help protect against modern methods of cyberattacks and hasn’t been through the relatively rigorous federal certification program that exists today. What’s more, many of these systems don’t have physical paper trails or ballots to back up the results, meaning there’s no way to independently verify how voters intended to cast their ballots in the case of a suspected hack. Our country’s patchwork of jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction voting systems would make it difficult to manipulate results on a national scale, but hackers could still do considerable damage by tampering with votes in a swing district, stealing records to undermine voter privacy, or just sowing suspicion of a larger conspiracy.

Though voting went relatively smoothly this year, a scattering of issues that popped up during the election hinted at what problems may await if we fail to replace aging equipment. Voters complained of touchscreen calibration errors that “flipped” votes in North Carolina, Texas, Nevada, and Georgia and interfered with selecting straight party tickets in Pennsylvania. Optical scan machines malfunctioned in parts of Michigan and Massachusetts, and a few in Illinois had to be replaced because a “memory card blew.” Although all of these issues appear to have been resolved by delayed or alternate voting methods, that doesn’t mean that glitches like these are unproblematic. It may never be clear how many people didn’t vote in this election because of the wait times. In the 2012 election, one study estimated that between 500,000 and 700,000 failed to vote because of long lines.

These voting machine issues aren’t a surprise. We have heard from dozens of election officials who say they struggle to keep their aging machines running and that replacement parts are increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to find. Some even said they have resorted to eBay to find antiquated parts—from analog modems to dot matrix printer ribbons—to keep their voting systems running. Prior to the election, we surveyed 274 county election officials in 28 states. More than half of the officials said that they would need new machines by the 2020 presidential election, and 80 percent of those said they did not know if or how they would be able to pay for the replacements.

There’s a serious risk that we’ll create a two-tiered voting system—one in which wealthier counties will replace their equipment as needed, while poorer counties will be forced to use aging equipment for much longer than they should. This is a worry that has been voiced by Edgardo Cortés, the commissioner for Virginia’s Department of Elections. In 2014, the state legislature stripped funding for new voting machines from the budget, leaving the cost to localities. In the aftermath, Cortés said, richer counties such as Loudoun and Fairfax bought new equipment, but “smaller, poorer and more rural counties around the state are going to have a tough time.”

At least according to data we collected from four states—Virginia, Ohio, Minnesota, and Colorado—Cortés’ suggestion proved troublingly true. In these states, counties whose election officials purchased or had near-term plans to purchase new machines had an average median household income of $10,000 or more than those that did not. In Colorado, we also found an urban and suburban versus rural divide—counties that replaced machines generally had a higher population density. If only some counties can replace aging voting equipment, it is possible that machine breakdowns could disproportionately affect certain voters—namely, rural or working class and poor voters.

Our political discourse is full of talk of the need for investment in infrastructure such as roads and bridges but almost never includes mention of that infrastructure most critical to a functioning democracy: our voting system. We estimate that the nationwide cost to update voting machines could easily cost $1 billion—in fact this might be a low estimate since replacing machines will likely require the replacement of other incompatible systems. Considering the size and scope of the federal budget, this is a paltry sum. If the expense is shared with the states, it should be a small lift. Lawmakers can start with a smaller, immediate investment prioritizing the aging electronic devices that are, by far, the most insecure.

Unfortunately, to date, there has been a lot of buck-passing, with federal officials arguing this is a responsibility of the states, and with state officials arguing that the burden should fall on counties. But counties and towns have other pressing budgetary needs. The truth is that until there are problems, most citizens don’t think about voting machines. They are far more likely to be concerned about whether their roads are paved, the snow is cleared, and their teachers are paid.

The good news is that at least a few federal officials and experts are paying attention. Last year, Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., introduced a bill that would allocate $125 million in matching grants for states to replace outdated voting equipment. Some—including Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson and a bipartisan group of security experts that included former National Security Agency director Michael Hayden—have stressed the necessity of securing and investing in our voting systems, as we do critical infrastructure like the electric power grid and nuclear sites. Others, such as computer security expert Bruce Schneier, recommend that the government develop processes for detecting and responding to malfeasance, including standards for fair resolution of an election should tampering be discovered.

Considering all that could have gone wrong, Americans were lucky not to have a major contestation of the results on Nov. 8. We can’t rely on such luck next time. There’s four more years until the next presidential election—and we need to start thinking about this problem now, not just a few days before we cast our 2020 ballots.

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As at many political events that would follow, there were vendors along the procession route busily making and selling souvenirs to commemorate the day. Among the items sold were small brass discs with shanks on the back, to be pinned or sewn onto clothing and stamped with “Long Live the President” and Washington’s initials, or American eagles. While those items had a very 18th century feel, they are not very far away.

This desire to publicly declare one’s political views through some material form—to be worn, carried, or displayed in front of ones’ home—has continued unabated through today. To carry out this messaging in the pre-electronic media age required stuff. Today, once-ubiquitous pins and stickers have given way in some measure to partisan Twitter feeds and other digital means of expression. But the underlying impulse remains the same: Active participation in the democratic process beyond the ballot box for those lacking a podium or direct engagement with a campaign.

Historically, the most successful efforts captured the essence of a candidate’s character, appeal, or ideals through simple symbols and slogans. William Henry Harrison’s Log Cabin strategy of 1840 was the inspiration for many later campaigns. When a rival newspaper quipped that Harrison would be content to retire from the contest and spend his days in a log cabin drinking hard cider, Harrison flipped the disparagement to his advantage.

William Henry Harrison model log cabin, carried on a pole in parades by supporters.

 
His campaign created canes with miniature barrel heads, lanterns in the shape of logs cabins, and ribbons and pottery plastered with their image. All of this aimed to lampoon his opponent, Martin Van Buren, as the elitist candidate of fine wine and mansions, while convincing voters that Harrison, who went on to become the 9th president, understood and would represent the interests of the common man. Not long thereafter, a lawyer from Springfield, Illinois, employed Harrison’s technique to good effect, creating the image of “Old Abe” Lincoln the rail-splitter. Supporters paraded with wooden axes and decorated local campaign headquarters with rails supposedly split by the candidate himself.

“Full dinner pail” lantern from McKinley and Roosevelt’s 1900 campaign.

Time and again, the creation—and romanticization—of simple symbols to convey a deeper emotional message won the day. For Williams McKinley’s 1900 re-election campaign, the 25th president deployed tin torchlight “dinner pail” lanterns. The candidate’s name was punched on one side and “Four More Years of the Full Dinner Pail” was punched on the other. For Teddy Roosevelt, it was paperweights and bandannas related to his founding of the Rough Riders, the first voluntary cavalry in the Spanish-American War. John F. Kennedy burnished his image as a presidential contender with photos and scale model replicas of PT-109. Kennedy was commander of the World War II Patrol Torpedo boat and led rescue efforts to save his crew after it sank. And, of course, we have the brass belt buckles and ten-gallon hats associated with Ronald Reagan, the quintessential self-reliant cowboy.

These objects remind us that voting is intended to be not only deliberative, but also fun and full of spectacle. Campaigns and vendors eagerly supplied the party hats, noisemakers, and novelties to make exercising political rights a celebration. The stuff of politics also found its way into the home—if a campaign succeeded in getting a voter to ensconce a Roosevelt clock on a mantel or an Eisenhower potholder in the kitchen, you not only had that family’s support for one election, but their loyalty for generations to come.

Theodore Roosevelt doll depicts him in his Rough Rider uniform from the 1898 Spanish-American War.

Our digital age has relegated many of these mainstays of campaigns past to a shelf in the back room. While media buys can be tested, the effect of buttons, stickers, and yard signs in increasing poll numbers is hard to quantify, and moving those numbers is now the name of the game.

Nonetheless, we still harbor cravings for actual things, and the stuff itself continues to inhabit a special place in the campaign landscape. The current election, with its deeply partisan hats, t-shirts, and signs, demonstrates both the legacy and the need. These items create a visual whole that binds the candidate to their message—and to the voter—in personal ways that other forms of media cannot achieve. For these reasons the paraphernalia endures. It can be as meaningful to the voters today as the brass buttons were to supporters standing outside of Federal Hall, watching the first president inaugurated in 1789.

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Twenty-four years earlier, next door in Independence Hall, brave men had declared to King George the right of the people to alter their government. Now, just days before a crucial New York vote in the 1800 presidential contest, Cooper stood charged with having “falsely” published criticisms of Adams’ policies “to arouse the people against the President so as to influence their minds against him on the next election.”

The capital’s high and mighty—the president’s private secretary, Cabinet members, prominent congressmen—thronged the courtroom. This was no election-year sideshow; it was political strategy in action. The newspapers popping up across the Republic, rudely partisan, were the heartbeat of public life in the new nation. The Republican press was vital to Vice President Thomas Jefferson and his party in their campaign to oust Adams and the Federalists from the presidency. None understood this better than Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, who faced Cooper from the bench. There he sat alongside Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase—presiding judge and persecutor hip to hip. Pickering, kingpin of the administration’s effort to gag its foes, would bring 17 sedition indictments, including against the editors of the leading Jeffersonian papers.

Every presidential election matters. But only a few have offered a choice of fundamental principles, in ways that seemed fundamental at the time, and not just in retrospect. The election of 1860, which led to Civil War, tops that list. The election of 1800 follows close behind. In 1800, as in the courtroom that spring day, two visions of the meaning of the Revolution and the Constitution butted heads.

As Cooper told the jury, “this country is divided, and almost equally divided, into two grand parties.” Jefferson’s Republicans might have been queasy at the rise of those parties but Adams’ ruling Federalists were horrified.

They had written and ratified the Constitution to quell what they saw as the excesses of democracy and faction unleashed by the Revolution. Their Constitution had created a strong federal government, which took power away from state legislatures they judged too responsive to calls for debt relief, paper money, and lower taxes. They believed the presidency and the Senate, indirectly elected from among the best men, would check popular enthusiasms arising from the directly elected House of Representatives. The people would go to the polls every two years, choose among the candidates offered to them, and then go back, quietly, to their private lives, leaving their betters to govern them.

It didn’t work out that way. In the 1790s Americans grew more energetic in pursuit of money, more heterodox in religion, more noisy in politics, and less deferential to gentlemen. When French revolutionaries took up the self-evident truths proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, some Americans wore the French tricolor on their hats and joined Democratic Societies. Those who had opposed the Constitution as a threat to liberty were joined by those, like Jefferson and James Madison, who had supported the Constitution but now saw Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist program of debt funding, taxes, and manufacturing promotion as re-creating the overweening state and monarchal corruption they had just thrown off.

These differences simmered while George Washington, the untouchable hero, remained president. They boiled over under his successor Adams, particularly after the revolutionary French government in 1798 treated American diplomats and ships as roughly as England had for years.

In that crisis, Republicans urged meeting insult with caution. Adams and congressional Federalists instead prepared for war, against foes both abroad and at home. They built up the navy and, at Hamilton’s instigation, created a permanent army of 12,000 troops, with himself as organizer and effective commander, and a “Provisional Army” of 10,000, to be activated in case of invasion or emergency. What purpose a large army would serve was never clear—Adams himself thought a French invasion implausible—and even some Federalists shared Republican fears of Hamilton’s intentions. To defray the expense, they passed a direct property tax on houses, land, and slaves.

Once eager for immigration to bolster the economy, Federalists by 1798 eyed immigrants as enemies within. As a Federalist congressman put it, they did “not wish to invite hordes of wild Irishmen, nor the turbulent and disorderly of all parts of the world, to come here with a view to disturb our tranquility …” Under the terms of a new Naturalization Act passed in June, aliens would have to wait 14 years instead of five to become citizens. (An initial version would have forever barred naturalized citizens from voting—new citizens had a nasty habit of backing Jeffersonians.) A companion Alien Friends Act, passed a week later, authorized the president, without giving a reason or holding a hearing, to expel any immigrant.

Finally, on July 14, 1798, Adams signed the Sedition Act, under which Cooper was prosecuted. The law made it a crime to “write, print, utter or publish … any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” against the government, president, or Congress with the intent of bringing them “into contempt or disrepute.” Or as the Federalist Boston newspaper Columbian Centinel summarized it, “It is patriotism to write in favor of our government—it is sedition to write against.”

Thus were stark lines of division drawn for the 1800 presidential election, which played out under rules unfamiliar to modern voters. As today, winning required a candidate to gain a majority of electoral votes. Unlike today, most electors were still chosen by state legislatures. (Citizens directly voted for presidential electors in only five of the 16 states.) Each elector cast two votes, with the leading vote-getter becoming president, the runner-up vice president. There was no single presidential vote on a single day in 1800, rather a series of individual state legislative elections. These contests stretched out over a year in a polarized nation where Federalists and Republicans sang different songs, applauded different plays, used different forms of address, and read different newspapers.

What’s striking is how much more clearly a partisan press framed the issues of 1800 than today’s elite media has in our current election, where coverage elevates petty scandal and character over the substance of policy.

Readers in 1800 did not go wanting for character slams, of course. The Gazette of the United States held up to Jefferson his “want of fortitude and total imbecility of character, which have marked your whole political career.” But for all the attention to character, no regular reader of the press could mistake the fundamental party choice at hand. An expensive navy, a standing army, the property tax and the national debt, the Alien and Sedition Acts—for or against.

As Thomas Cooper himself told his jurors before they convicted him to six months in prison, one party “thinks that the people, (the Democracy of the country) has too much, the other, too little influence on the measures of government.” He might have added that one party was unprepared to accept the legitimacy of organized opposition parties and the regular transfer of power between them. Federalists “were doing something more than moving against ‘sedition …’” historians Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick write. “[T]hey were striking out furiously at parties in general, in a desperate effort to turn back the clock.”

The contest came down to the last two days before the Dec. 3 deadline for balloting by the presidential electors. In Pennsylvania, a legislature divided between a Republican lower house and a Federalist senate cut a deal to split its votes, giving eight to Republicans and seven to the Federalist ticket. With the two candidates tied nationally with 65 electoral votes apiece, the South Carolina legislature handed victory to the Jefferson and the Republicans.

Unexpectedly—and potentially disastrously—none of the Republican electors, as intended, cast his second vote for someone other than Aaron Burr, Jefferson’s running mate. Jefferson and Burr tied, sending the election to be decided by the Federalists who controlled the lame-duck House of Representatives. After months of plotting and dozens of ballots, a handful of Federalists abstained from their leaders’ effort to elevate Burr, and Jefferson prevailed.

In the preface to the transcript of his sedition trial that Thomas Cooper published from his prison cell, he posed a question to voters. “Ask yourself …, is this a fair specimen of the freedom you expected to derive from the adoption of the Federal Constitution? And whether the Men who can sanction these proceedings, are fit objects of re-election?” Voters answered more decisively than the close electoral vote suggested. They elected Republicans to 67 of the 106 House seats. Federalists would never again control the House or come close to winning the presidency. Jefferson called it the “Revolution of 1800.” Few historians have disagreed.

As in 1800, voters this year face a choice, perhaps of equal historical significance, about whether to turn back the clock—on immigration, religious tolerance, racial equality, health care, the NATO alliance, nuclear proliferation, even on protecting the press against the kind of libel action brought against Cooper. Were Cooper to come back, he might well ask himself—in this age of cable news, of clicks and tweets, of professional nonpartisan reporters, how well do voters of 2016 even know it?

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We are told that this year’s presidential election is unprecedented in many ways. The American voters are faced with the choice between an unlikely candidate who has been repudiated by many within his own party, and a seasoned politician whom the head of the FBI characterized as “extremely careless.” The tumultuousness of the race makes many long for the good old days when elections were civil, thoughtful, and quickly resolved

In other words, we are not longing for 1876.

A legal scholar, I first learned the story of the 1876 presidential election when I was studying the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election and examining how the laws governing the counting of votes remain unsettled in the 21st century. In 1876, as today, the country was deeply divided. The presidential contest pitted Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican governor of Ohio, against Samuel Tilden, the Democratic governor of New York.

In the Republican Party convention, Hayes prevailed on the seventh ballot against the early party favorite, Maine Representative James G. Blaine, after Blaine was unable to clear his name from a scandal involving the lucrative payment that he allegedly received from the sale of apparently worthless railroad bonds. Tilden had a much easier road to the Democratic nomination due to his reputation as a reforming governor who had gained his office by exposing the corruption and bribery practiced by Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall in New York City.

The general election campaign became a referendum on two distinct concerns. First, the widespread corruption of the administration of the departing incumbent president, Ulysses S. Grant. Second, the struggle to re-establish state governments throughout the areas controlled by the defeated Confederacy. Tilden appealed to rural voters who were fed up with the corrupt mess in Washington as well as to white Southerners who sought to recapture control of their state governments from Republican carpetbaggers and newly free African-Americans.

The Republican strategy, as Chief Justice William Rehnquist recounted in his 2004 book about the 1876 presidential election, was “to impress on the electorate that while every Democrat had not been a rebel, every rebel had been a Democrat.” Hayes was the champion of those who feared the election would undo everything the Civil War had achieved for African-Americans. Just 11 years past, the war’s bloody cost was still vividly remembered by the many Union soldiers now voting in the North.

We remember 1876 though, not because of the presidential campaign, but because of the inconclusive vote. Two weeks before Election Day, Hayes confided in his diary that “danger is imminent: A contested result. And we have no such means for its decision as ought to be provided by law.” Hayes could not have imagined how prophetic his words would become.

An illustrated sheet music cover for a song composed in honor of Republican presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes, 1876.

Tilden emerged as the undisputed victor in 17 states containing 184 electoral votes, and Hayes clearly prevailed in 15 states with a total of 166 electoral votes. Tilden won all of the former Confederate states that had emerged from reconstruction; the border states of Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri a handful of Northeastern states; and the three scattered states of Indiana, Missouri, and West Virginia. Hayes won a belt of states ranging from the West through the Plains, as well as the Midwest, Pennsylvania, and five New England states.

The winner was unclear in the three Southern states that were still under the control of Republican governments backed by the federal army: Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Each of those states had struggled to make the transition from the Civil War to the new era prohibiting slavery and guaranteeing equal rights, which was promised by the constitutional amendments. Federal troops were still there to enforce those legal guarantees and to defend the many African-Americans who had been elected to office.

Additionally, while Hayes won Oregon by about 1,000 votes—one of his electors also served as a deputy postmaster, thus violating the constitutional prohibition upon electors holding federal office. Hayes would prevail only if he won all 20 of the uncertain electoral votes: Louisiana’s eight electoral votes, South Carolina’s seven, Florida’s four, and the disputed elector in Oregon. Conversely, Tilden would be elected if he captured just one of those 20 electoral votes.

Tilden’s supporters insisted that Democratic votes had been wrongfully ignored in the three Southern states, while the Republican supporters of Hayes complained that African-Americans in those states had been prevented from voting through intimidation. The dispute was not resolved by any of the extant constitutional provisions or federal statutes, but rather by the 8-7 vote of a special commission that Congress established solely for the purpose of resolving the election.

Hayes thus defeated Tilden by one electoral vote–185-184–after it was determined that all four contested states had cast their votes for Hayes. Congress accepted that result just before Hayes was inaugurated on March 4, 1877.

There has never been anything like it before or since. Even in 2000, when the Florida Supreme Court and then the U.S. Supreme Court took turns overseeing the recounting of votes in Florida, the dispute was limited to one state and there were no allegations of violence or widespread fraud on Election Day. Since 1876, we have expanded the right to vote to women and to 18-year-olds, and have worked to secure the voting rights of African-Americans that were supposed to have been guaranteed by the constitutional amendments adopted after the Civil War. But we have yet to adopt a widely accepted standard procedure in this country for how to count votes—and recount votes when there are disputes. And this lack of a standard is what precipitated the events in 1876 and again in 2000. The special commission that Congress created in 1876 was a one-off, and nothing has replaced it. Each state has its own rules for counting the votes cast by the public on Election Day, and Congress remains free to decide how it wants to count contested electoral votes.

So as we endure a presidential campaign that offers new, often unwanted, surprises at every turn, the best conclusion may be that the election results are conclusive, whatever they happen to be. 2016 may come to represent the nadir of presidential campaigns, but 1876 still holds the title for problems in the election itself, the counting of presidential votes. Let’s hope that doesn’t change this year.

The post Remembering 1876, the Year of the Inconclusive Vote appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But I can attest from personal experience that not long ago our presidential debates were fragile. During the 1988 presidential campaign I had a close-up view of the near-cancellation and 11th-hour rescue of a debate that turned out to be crucial to the outcome of the election.

The presidential debate tradition as we know it is newer, and less established, than is commonly understood. Following the Nixon-Kennedy face-offs of 1960 (the first to be televised), presidential debates vanished for the next three presidential elections. And it wasn’t until 1987 that the Commission on Presidential Debates was created.

Formed jointly by the Democratic and Republican parties to ensure that debates were part of every general election, the commission’s stated mission was to provide voters more opportunities to hear directly from the candidates on the issues of the day.

The 1988 presidential election was the first in which the commission assumed responsibility for the debates, previously run by the League of Women Voters. The League was less than thrilled with the change in sponsorship. Created in 1920 when women won the right to vote, the League is non-partisan and does not endorse candidates but encourages members to be involved in advocacy and politics.

Probably at least in part to diffuse tensions, the commission invited the League to sponsor the second debate between Republican Vice President George H. W. Bush and Democratic Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis.

The first of that presidential election’s two debates had been held in late September at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. The League-sponsored debate was slated for the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.

But ten days before the debate, scheduled for Oct. 13, the event suddenly came into doubt. The campaigns were insisting on choosing the moderator and the questioners, as well as determining the seating arrangements and the camera positions and hall access for the press, among other things.

In addition, the format put forward by the campaigns permitted only short answers to questions and brief rebuttals before another question was asked, a marked departure from League format, which allowed more opportunity for follow-up questioning.

The League’s leadership objected to these changes, and to the fact that the campaigns were forging ahead without seeking their input. So they withdrew League sponsorship, declaring in a press release, that they would not “help perpetrate a fraud.”

With no sponsor to cover the costs, the commission scrambled to find sufficient support to proceed as scheduled. The commission’s executive director, Janet Brown, issued a public plea “seeking local partners to underwrite the cost of the debate in Los Angeles.”

At the time, I was president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association in Los Angeles; we also had a Foundation arm dedicated to educating the public about economic issues. I felt helping sponsor a presidential debate would satisfy the Foundation’s mission and not incidentally offer some high-profile, national recognition for our organization.

The commission put the total debate cost at about $750,000. We were one of a number of groups to pitch in—others included the Los Angeles Times and ARCO Corporation (now part of the oil giant BP).

With new and different funding in place, the focus shifted to finding a new venue. The new location—UCLA’s basketball arena, Pauley Pavilion—took ‘round-the-clock prepping to ensure it was “camera ready” by debate time. (The exact date also wasn’t certain, for reasons that might be of interest today given Mr. Trump’s concern about sporting events; one rule that year was that if the Oct. 13 date coincided with the seventh game of the American League baseball playoffs, the debate would have had to be moved back one day, according to the New York Times).

Things were moving so fast that, along with our organization’s General Counsel, Trevor Grimm, I drove over to UCLA to personally hand the donation check of $100,013 to the commission’s Ms. Brown. (The final two numerals were in recognition of the organization’s support for Proposition 13). As we delivered the check, we had to walk carefully over and around cables and equipment as crews worked feverishly to transform the arena.

The debate came off—just barely—and proved to be a decisive moment in a bitter, historic campaign. The signature exchange of the night came right at the top when moderator Bernard Shaw of CNN asked Gov. Dukakis if he would support the death penalty if his wife were raped and murdered.

Dukakis’ dispassionate response cost him dearly according to political analysts. (A transcript is here.) It fed into perceptions of Dukakis as a technocrat, and into the Bush campaign’s portrayal of him as soft on crime (a portrayal which included the infamous Willie Horton “revolving door” ad).

Our donation helped make the debate possible, but it didn’t buy us much beyond a few tickets in the middle of the audience, fairly close to the stage. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Foundation was included in the program, but when the head of the national Democratic Party spoke to the audience beforehand and thanked the organizations that came to the rescue of the Commission on Presidential Debates, he left us out!

In hindsight, I console myself knowing that we had both a role in and a ringside seat to a crucial moment in modern presidential debate history.

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