They will think that elections are rigged by the other side and will not accept the judgment of voters when it goes against their preferred candidate. It’s obvious how these kinds of claims damage Republican voters’ commitment to democracy. As the democratic theorist Adam Przeworski puts it, democracy is “a system in which parties lose elections.” These beliefs can break down when political insiders make bogus claims about general fraud, trying to cling to power when the election has gone against them. And now, his fellow Republicans are helping him.ĭemocracy works when we all expect that votes will be fairly counted, and defeated candidates leave office. For four years, Donald Trump has been trying to dismantle our shared beliefs about democracy. In democracy, the insiders aren’t just the officials who manage voting but also the politicians who shape what people believe about politics. In traditional information systems, the insiders are the people who have both detailed knowledge and high level access, allowing them to bypass security measures and more effectively subvert systems. And that is precisely what is happening in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. When you really need to worry is when insiders go bad. Russian trolls, who don’t really understand how American politics works, have actually had a difficult time subverting it. But as information security specialists know, outsider attacks are hard. When peoples’ faith in the democratic system is undermined, democracy stops working. American democracy is an information system, in which the information isn’t bits and bytes but citizens’ beliefs. The fear is that outsiders, whether they be foreign or domestic actors, will undermine our system by swaying popular opinion and election results. But they may still do lasting damage to American democracy for a shocking reason: the moves have come from trusted insiders.Īmerican democracy’s vulnerability to disinformation has been very much in the news since the Russian disinformation campaign in 2016. ![]() It is wildly unlikely that their efforts can block Joe Biden from becoming president. ![]() Trump won in a landslide, while Michigan election officials have tried to stop the certification of the vote. The Republican National Committee swung in to support her false claim that Mr. Trump won in a landslide, the entire election in swing states should be overturned and the legislatures should make sure that the electors are selected for the president. Another lawyer, Sidney Powell, argued that Mr. Last Thursday, Rudy Giuliani, a Trump campaign lawyer, alleged a widespread voting conspiracy involving Venezuela, Cuba, and China.
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