The U.S. presidential election is the most internationally consequential of all, while, by sheer weight of numbers, India’s is the most awe-inspiring.
Commentary
This is the year of elections, with
about 80 countries and the European Union going to the polls, accounting for almost half the world’s total population. The list includes the United States and India, the world’s most powerful and populous democracies, respectively. The U.S. presidential election is the most internationally consequential of all, while, by sheer weight of numbers, India’s is the most awe-inspiring.
In India’s 2019 election, Narendra Modi was returned to power with an increased majority. There was no serious questioning of the outcome or Mr. Modi’s popular mandate. Indeed, of all India’s federal and state elections since independence in 1947, not one has been challenged on the overall outcome. That’s some claim.
By contrast, the United States is no stranger to allegations of stolen elections—from John F. Kennedy’s 1960 to George W. Bush’s 2000 victories—through voter suppression, ballot stuffing, and even the dead emerging from their graves to vote.
Donald Trump won in 2016 and was sworn in as president. Yet a lot of Americans, for example, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), positively exulted in their public displays of disrespect toward President Trump, heedless of how they were demeaning the office and damaging future presidents’ authority to govern.
The process of casting, counting, and certifying votes needs to be simple, observable, and verifiable, otherwise faith in the system will collapse. The U.S. system is anything but: overly complex, variable from one state to the next, and more open to abuse at many points than in most democracies. There are multiple pathways through which and multiple points at which the process can be
corrupted. But proving electoral malfeasance to an appropriately rigorous standard in a court of law is extremely challenging. Statistically improbable results and anomalies in critical precincts will rarely cut the mustard as a legally acceptable standard of proof of malfeasance.
About 160 million Americans voted in 2020, more than 40 percent by mail. This offered a “perfect storm” of mass mail-in voting with inherently less rigorous checks, an uneven and imperfect election mechanism that differs from one state to another, a winner-take-all system where victory in the vote count—no matter how slim the margin—yields all of its Electoral College votes, and narrow margins of victory in enough states to give one candidate the decisive edge in the Electoral College.
President Trump lost in 2020 by a mere
44,000 votes across three states. The system makes it difficult to detect and defeat strategic voting via harvested ballots in individually targeted polling centers. President Trump launched multiple lawsuits alleging fraudulent practices in several critical battleground states that he claimed to have won but was unable to substantiate them.
India goes to the polls again in April and May, and Mr. Modi is expected to triumph once more. By contrast, only the foolhardy would predict even the final candidates in the U.S. election, let alone the outcome.
One key difference between the two countries is how the Supreme Court of India (SCI) has been prepared to uphold ballot integrity while the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has declined to rule on the issue.
On Jan. 30, mayoral elections were held in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh. Anil Masih, the returning officer, declared Manoj Sonkar from the Bharatiya Janata Party, which forms the federal government, elected but only after discarding eight ballots for an opposition party’s candidate, Kuldeep Kumar. This gave the mayoralty to Mr. Sonkar by a 16–12 vote. When Mr. Kumar’s plea to the High Court to grant interim relief pending fresh polls was rejected, he appealed to the SCI. It
ruled on Feb. 20 that by defacing eight ballots, Mr. Masih had “murdered” democracy, declared Mr. Kumar elected, and ordered criminal prosecution of Mr. Masih.
The SCI upheld ballot integrity, righted electoral fraud, and put the legitimate victor in office, all within a month of the election. The Times of India welcomed the speedy resolution in an editorial titled “
Well done, Milords,“ noting that ”in electoral malpractice cases, justice delayed is emphatically justice denied.”
In 2021, SCOTUS
declined to hear challenges from Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin to the 2020 results. This may have been legally correct, but the abdication of the court’s responsibility to answer important constitutional questions was a political blunder. Unprovable and implausible claims of voter fraud do not invalidate the need for reforms to harden the U.S. electoral system against future disaster. Even false allegations that are not tested and disproven fester and breed distrust. Post-election litigation that overturns a declared result will create chaos and provoke unrest. Being too timid to confront systemic flaws in ballot integrity erodes voter confidence and continues the momentum for serial chaos with successive presidential elections.
Election integrity needs to be ensured and voter confidence assured by settling rules and standards well in advance. This is why the court’s decision was “inexplicable,” in the words of the
dissenting note from Justice Clarence Thomas. The court had passed on the opportunity to provide authoritative clarity before the next election. An issue likely to be repeated was allowed to escape review. This can only deepen “the erosion of voter confidence.”
The SCI would have likely set up a “special investigation team” to examine the flaws in the procedures and the anomalies and recommend corrective measures to be put in place by the Election Commission before the next election. SCOTUS has watched from the sidelines as more and more Americans lose faith in their electoral system.
In a 2022
Rasmussen poll, 84 percent of Americans expressed concern about election integrity in the imminent congressional elections. By a 62 percent to 36 percent majority, they held eliminating “cheating in elections” to be more important than “making it easier for everybody to vote.”
The United States desperately needs laws and procedures that enhance the ease of voting and protect the integrity of the vote against fraud. The more that rules and procedures are standardized across states, including regarding voter IDs, the more credible and easier to implement the process will be.
Instead, too many seem to believe in a constitutional right to cheat in elections. The major parties have refused to come together to correct the increasingly obvious flaws of election rules and practices. SCOTUS has refused to see the big picture with regard to them. Consequently, we can confidently predict that if the choice in November is President Joe Biden or President Trump, whomever of the two is declared the winner, half the country will refuse to accept him as legitimate.
Meanwhile, other imperfections of India’s democracy notwithstanding, a reelected Mr. Modi will be widely accepted as the country’s legitimate leader for the next five years.
That is quite a stunning note on which to conclude.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
