How US election deniers have eroded trust in elections everywhere

Having led election monitoring efforts abroad for 25 years, I can attest that elections can indeed be manipulated. When I lived in Cambodia, I worked on a voter registry audit to assess the quality of Cambodia’s voter list ahead of the 2013 elections. We found serious problems. More than 10 percent of voters were deleted from the list inexplicably, while more than 10 percent of the names on the list belonged to no one — so-called “ghost voters.”

Further, following the elections when we looked at voting records and compared them to census data, we discovered turnout was up to 140 percent in certain areas. Meanwhile, many voters showed up on election day and were turned away. This legitimately cast the integrity of the elections in doubt.

The aim of election integrity work I aided abroad — from pre-election voter registry audits, training of election management bodies, long-term and election day observation, to parallel vote tabulations of the count, post-election audits and election legislation reform — much funded by the United States, was to identify problems where they exist in order to educate, reform and repair.

The greater goal, however, was to establish checks and safeguards to get to a place where observation efforts validate the integrity of the elections and build public trust in the process. Through this experience one quickly learns that the most necessary — and elusive — ingredient for quality elections is trust.

In the U.S., we have managed to work in the opposite direction. We’ve taken a praise-worthy election process — with bipartisan management and different layers of government scrutiny, subject to audits and stress testing, and with a complaints adjudication process through the courts — and tried to undermine integrity and erode public trust.

In 2020, according to the Trump administration’s own officials, the elections were labeled “the most secure in American history.” The courts validated the results, hearing dozens of cases of fraud filed by the Trump campaign. Audits and recounts were conducted, from Arizona to Georgia, all confirming the official results. Election officials, such as those in Maricopa County, ground zero for election denialism, made Herculean efforts to enhance transparency, debunk and preempt disinformation, and implement additional checks to the system. Despite all the verifications and safeguards, Republican leaders led by Donald Trump continue to undermine the process today, and 70 percent of Republican voters believe them.

The result is yet another Orwellian cooption of reality. Just as those spreading disinformation have become the loudest voices screaming “fake news” or “free speechers” purging books from our libraries, so-called “election integrity” efforts are working against integrity. Groups like the “Election Integrity Project” are false flag operations designed to spread disinformation and erode public trust. They fall far short of global election observation standards, which detail rules on how to interact with local authorities, media, and political players, the types of observation, terminology and methodologies acceptable, and required transparency of funding and disclosure of support.

Americans are heading into another presidential election where political actors are preemptively stoking doubt in the process, spreading conspiracies and putting officials in place to disrupt the process. Elections simply cannot be fair if their side loses, setting America up for another potentially volatile post-election period. But the U.S. also has created a global permission structure for political losers everywhere to reject election results, undermining legitimate election observation efforts.

After 2020, we immediately saw how the “I lost therefore it was stolen” became the new black, jumping from the U.S. to Burma and Israel, in many cases with losing candidates parroting Trump talking points. Infamously, Jair Bolsonaro ripped a page out of the Trump playbook, spreading lies about electronic voting ahead of the elections in Brazil as he saw his popularity drop. Steve Bannon and other actors on the right backed Bolsonaro’s claim.

Foreign adversaries have helped spur global election denialism by quickly adopting and repurposing false narratives from the U.S. to enhance their information operations elsewhere. In the country Georgia, for example, the Kremlin is preemptively creating an opening to reject this Saturday’s election results should their chosen party, Georgian Dream, not win, spreading lies about foreign interference. Ahead of last weekend's elections in Moldova, Russia accused the government of “rigging” the election by banning Russian-backed political movements, and after the elections delivered a vote for the EU, the Kremlin is now implying meddling.

Trust in elections is not optional in a democracy. Global democracy will continue its deterioration, and conflict will ensue, if publics do not trust electoral outcomes. As with disinformation, undermining faith in elections is not about a specific lie or act but the distortion of reality. Now the critical work of independent election observers, whom I supported overseas for years, has become immensely more difficult.

Pointing out legitimate problems in an election is immediately written off as a partisan ploy. And if observers declare the process free and fair, it will not necessarily stem accusations of fraud. They are caught between a rock and a hard place as even the word "election integrity" has become loaded with contradictions.

The U.S. continues to serve as a model for both good and bad political behavior. As Cambodian leader Hun Sen once remarked when criticized for his attacks on the media, “Well Trump did it.” Election denialism is sadly another export.

Laura Thornton lived 25 years overseas working for democracy-promotion organizations from Thailand and Cambodia to Georgia. She is senior director for global democracy at the McCain Institute.