It’s been a few months since the election, and Joe Biden has won and been inaugurated. While some say that all the legal challenges that the Trump campaign mounted showed how weak our election system is, I believe these legal challenges show its resilience.
You see, the framers of the Constitution were afraid that a tyrant like King George III, who didn’t allow basic civil liberties and freedoms that we have in our Constitution, would be able to take control of the government. So they wrote Article 2, Section 1, Clause 2 of the Constitution that “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.”
Now, they didn’t lay out the whole election process, which would have been too complicated. What they did was set a starting point for how the country should conduct its elections, which was that the states run the elections, not the federal government.
There are plenty of reasonable arguments for why the federal government should run elections. For one, the election process would be simpler. Rather than having 50 states all report their own results, it would be easy to have the results certified and approved.
But this overlooks the problem. With President Trump and his lawyers trying to overturn the results in swing states, they have to contend with tens or hundreds of courts, judges and election officials. They were able to sue in the Supreme Court, but their argument was rejected because it had no basis whatsoever and because states can’t tell other states how to run their elections.
While it may seem like this opens up a wide array of results to challenge, having to challenge results in multiple areas makes it much harder to overturn large numbers of ballots in one ruling.
If you had a national board certifying the elections, it would be much easier to persuade a seven-member board compared to thousands of elected and appointed officials across the country. Making it hard to overturn an election and to protect election integrity is what the founders intended when they wrote the Constitution, and those who say that elections should be nationalized are missing the original intent of the founders.
Although Trump has authoritarian tendencies, suing everyone and everything is in the bounds of the Constitution. Despite this, it isn’t morally right to attempt to overturn millions of legally cast votes in multiple states. And encouraging a mob to break into the Capitol and disrupt the certification of the election is neither within the bounds of the Constitution nor morally right.
First, Trump tried to see how far he could go legally to overturn the election in multiple places, which was better than having him be able to exert enormous influence over a national election board or committee. But then came the Capitol riot where Trump encouraged the rioters to break into the Capitol. Decentralized elections cannot protect our country from violence and brute force. But what they can do is protect our country from a President who wants to overturn the results of a democratic election.
