November; the Most Frightening Month

by Jack R. Johnson 11.2022

Halloween may mark October as scary, but by far our most terrifying month is November. Come that first Tuesday, the fate of our nation’s Democracy can hang by a thread; and this upcoming election is no different.

According to a recent study by the Brookings Institution, about one in five Americans support strong men “authoritarian” rule. They also support political violence with 30% of Republicans, 17% of Independents, and 11% of Democrats agreeing that they might have to resort to violence in order to “save” our country. Just last week, in a classic case of stochastic terrorism, Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi was bludgeoned with a hammer by an addled Trump supporter. He’s still in the hospital.

At the local level, death threats are being made against election administrators. The Today show recently reported up to 30% of election officials surveyed saying they are concerned for their safety. A 64-year-old Iowa man was arrested earlier this month for threatening to kill election officials in Arizona’s Maricopa County —where former President Donald Trump lost by about 10,000 votes. According to CNBC the man left a voicemail that said, “When we come to lynch your stupid lying Commie [expletive], you’ll remember that you lied on the [expletive] Bible, you piece of [expletive]. You’re gonna die, you piece of [expletive]. We’re going to hang you. We’re going to hang you.” 

Worse, some states are considering laws that would bypass the long-established institutions for certifying the vote-count and give partisan legislatures the authority to determine which slate of electors will represent them in the Electoral College.

We’ve been here before, and it’s dangerous territory for any Democracy. Especially ours.

As an example of how badly things can go, take the election of 1876, perhaps one of the most contentious elections in our nation’s history. Like today, our country was deeply divided. The Civil War had officially ended in 1865, but the Southern states were angry and resentful of Northern troops occupying their land. More importantly, many white Southerners rejected and feared the voting rights of the newly emancipated free men. Like today, questions of electoral integrity hounded the process. The Southern states, used the threat of violence by organizations like the Knights of the White Camilia, the White League and the Klu Klux Klan to intimidate and suppress the black vote. Even with the presence of Northern troops, incidents like the New Orleans Race Riot of 1866 or the Colfax Massacre of 1872 meant freedmen were often casting their votes in an oppressive and deadly environment. 

Republicans managed to maintain control of the national polity until the early 1870s, when an economic depression and political scandals like the Whiskey Ring tainted their popularity.  By 1876, the Democrats thought they had a shot and a national win. Both the Democratic presidential candidate, Samuel Tilden, and the Republican, Rutherford Hayes were fairly conventional politicians for their time, but the polarized party apparatus on either side sought to demonize the opposing candidate. Tilden’s opponents painted him as a diseased drunkard who planned to pay off the former Confederacy’s debts; Hayes’s enemies claimed he had stolen money from his brothers in arms during the war. 

Although Tilden won the popular vote, there were wide allegations of electoral fraud, election violence, and other disfranchisement of predominately-Republican Black voters. After a first count of votes, Tilden had won 184 electoral votes to Hayes's 165, with 20 votes from four states unresolved. In Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, both parties reported their candidate to have won the state. Meanwhile, in Oregon, where Hayes had won the popular vote, the Democratic governor claimed one of the state’s three Republican electors was ineligible because he was employed by the postal service. (Federal employees are not allowed to serve as members of the Electoral College.) As a result, the state submitted two competing certificates of the final electoral vote tally, one signed by the Democratic governor that showed two votes for Hayes and one for Tilden, and another signed by the secretary of state that showed three votes for Hayes.

Like Trump’s “Stop the Steal” calling for a march on the Capitol on January 6th, Henry Watterson, a journalist and Democratic member of the Kentucky House of Representatives, used his platform to call for a “peaceful” army of 100,000 men to march on Washington unless Tilden was declared the winner. As Mark Twain once remarked, history doesn’t repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.    

Finally, an informal, "back-room" deal was struck to resolve the contested votes: the Compromise of 1877.  The Democrats would concede the 20 electoral votes to Hayes, resulting in a 185-184 victory; in return, the Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South, marking the end of Reconstruction. Amid fear of assassination, Hayes was sworn in during a secret ceremony the next day.

For the newly freed Black population, the cost of this compromise was enormous. A second Civil War was avoided by essentially forsaking the gains in civil rights for Black freed men across the South. Nearly another century would pass before Blacks began to operate with the same level of freedom and rights that they had directly after the Civil War’s end. 

In many Southern states, active voter suppression and tactics to intimidate minority voters never really went away. Indeed, as of 2021, in Florida, Georgia, and Texas there are new voter suppression laws and tactics being enacted. There are also new and ridiculously punitive penalties for minor infractions. In Arizona, for example, this year an election worker was sentenced to 30 days in jail for merely mailing in mail-in ballots for four other individuals because they didn’t have access to a mail box (the prosecutor wanted a year in jail). Election officials in Yuma County confirmed that the ballots were legitimate and the mail-ballot envelopes were signed by qualified voters, so they were counted, but the worker was nevertheless sentenced to jail time. The judge explained that he felt the worker wasn’t sufficiently contrite.

As the Brookings Institution notes, if democracy fails in America, it will not be because a majority of Americans demand a non-democratic form of government. It will be because a deluded minority seizes strategic positions within the system in order to subvert it. The horror of Halloween is mild by comparison.