The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between January 23rd and 26th of a nationwide sample of 1,684 adults (including 1,520 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.3 points for adults and 3.1 points for registered voters.
The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between June 27th and 30th of a nationwide sample of 1,648 adults (including 1,491 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.3 points for adults and 3.0 points for registered voters.
Written by President Joe Biden in The Washington Post:
On this Jan. 6, order will be called. Clerks, staff and members of Congress will gather to certify the results of a free and fair presidential election and ensure a peaceful transfer of power. Capitol Police will stand guard over the citadel of our democracy.
The vice president of the United States, faithful to her duty under our Constitution, will preside over the certification of her opponent’s victory in the November election.
It is a ceremony that for more than two centuries has made America a beacon to the world, a ceremony that ratifies the will of the voters.
For much of our history, this proceeding was treated as pro forma, a routine act. But after what we all witnessed on Jan. 6, 2021, we know we can never again take it for granted.
Violent insurrectionists attacked the Capitol, threatened the lives of elected officials and assaulted brave law enforcement officers.
We should be proud that our democracy withstood this assault. And we should be glad we will not see such a shameful attack again this year.
But we should not forget. We must remember the wisdom of the adage that any nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it. We cannot accept a repeat of what occurred four years ago.
An unrelenting effort has been underway to rewrite — even erase — the history of that day. To tell us we didn’t see what we all saw with our own eyes. To dismiss concerns about it as some kind of partisan obsession. To explain it away as a protest that just got out of hand.
This is not what happened.
In time, there will be Americans who didn’t witness the Jan. 6 riot firsthand but will learn about it from footage and testimony of that day, from what is written in history books and from the truth we pass on to our children. We cannot allow the truth to be lost.
Thousands of rioters crossed the National Mall and climbed the Capitol walls, smashing windows and kicking down doors. Just blocks away, a bomb was found near the location of the incoming vice president, threatening her life. Law enforcement officials were beaten, dragged, knocked unconscious and stomped upon. Some police officers ultimately died as a result.
As president-elect that day, I spoke to the country and called for peace, and for the certification to resume.
Four years later, leaving office, I am determined to do everything I can to respect the peaceful transfer of power and restore the traditions we have long respected in America. The election will be certified peacefully. I have invited the incoming president to the White House on the morning of Jan. 20, and I will be present for his inauguration that afternoon.
But on this day, we cannot forget. This is what we owe those who founded this nation, those who have fought for it and died for it.
And we should commit to remembering Jan. 6, 2021, every year. To remember it as a day when our democracy was put to the test and prevailed. To remember that democracy — even in America — is never guaranteed.
We should never forget it is our democracy that makes everything possible — our freedoms, our rights, our liberties, our dreams. And that it falls to every generation of Americans to defend and protect it.
The chart above reflects the results of the Monmouth University Poll -- done between December 5th and 10th of a nationwide sample of 1,006 adults, with a 3.9 point margin of error.
The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between November 9th and 12th of a nationwide sample of 1,743 adults (including 1,557 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.3 points for both adult and registered voters.
The following comment and illustrations are by Steve Brodner in The Washington Post:
While the violent mob swarmed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, aiming to subvert democracy and keep President Donald Trump in power, another group was already working on the same project inside. In an unsuccessful bid to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election, 147 Republicans formally supported objection to counting Joe Biden’s electoral votes.
Some have already left office. But as many as 117 members of Congress are running for reelection in 2024. Here they are, drawn together; a collection of American politicians engaged in using democracy in order to attain the power to subvert it.
The Insurrection Act is a dangerous centuries-old federal statute that authorizes the president, with few restraints, to deploy the U.S. military inside the United States to suppress threats the president perceives to the constitutional order. Commentators have recently proposed tightening the law following reports that former President Donald Trump and his advisers are planning to use it aggressively for law enforcement and to quell domestic disturbances if Mr. Trump is once more elected.
This focus on Trump is understandable but inadequate in capturing the compelling case for reform. It has been clear for decades that the poorly drafted and antiquated law needs revision. There is an opportunity in 2024 to make targeted changes to the statute’s main flaws — and, critically, in a way that both parties would have good reason to support.
The Insurrection Act empowers the president to order the armed forces and state militias into action within the United States and against American citizens in numerous ill-defined circumstances. The president can, for example, deploy military force where states call upon federal assistance in quelling an “insurrection”; or as the president “considers necessary” to enforce federal law against “obstructions,” “combinations” or “assemblages”; or alternatively to quell any “domestic violence” or “conspiracy” that impedes the enforcement of constitutional rights or even “the course of justice” under federal law. . . .
The problem is that the act has very broad and imprecise triggers to its operation and no temporal constraints, and it does not specify any role for Congress to assess, shape or limit the president’s response to an emergency. It is in many respects like the Electoral Count Act, which Congress by large bipartisan majorities revised in 2022 to govern the final tally of the state electoral votes for presidents and vice presidents: a statute widely recognized to be poorly designed and clearly susceptible to harmful misinterpretation and application, yet left on the books for too long because the dangers it presented had not yet come to pass. . . .
There is no serious dispute, on the merits, that the Insurrection Act gives any president far too much unchecked power. It is hard for anyone to argue that a president should be able to unleash U.S. troops or state militias without any accountability beyond public opinion or impeachment. . . .
Insurrection Act reform has many potential moving parts. There are three vital elements.
First, Congress should tighten the triggers to presidential invocation of the act. It should eliminate vague and obsolete terms like “assemblage” and “combination”; clearly define other terms like “insurrection” and “domestic violence”; and narrow the president’s seemingly boundless discretion to determine when the act’s triggers are satisfied.
Second, it should require the president to consult with state and local authorities to ensure that troop deployment is needed to address a serious threat to safety; to make findings to that effect; and to report to and consult with Congress on a regular basis.
Third, and perhaps most important, Congress should place a relatively short sunset provision on a president’s invocation of the act — weeks, not months — subject to additional short-term continued deployments approved by Congress. This is where the rubber meets the road, since Congress might not approve the president’s continued use of the military.
But any threat that justifies using the military for domestic law enforcement should be severe enough for majorities of Congress to approve the action, and the dangers of presidential abuse here outweigh the dangers of congressional gridlock.
Amending the Insurrection Act along these three dimensions addresses the primary concerns with the statute without veering off into more contested issues that might make it harder for the parties to find common ground. Yet these simple changes would constitute a historic reform and would be far better than no reform at all. The primary and urgent task is to bring the core of the president’s promiscuous Insurrection Act authority to heel.
Is it fair and just — is it a wise use of prosecutorial power — to bring criminal charges against former president Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election?
The answer to this question will become clearer once the indictment is handed up, as now seems inevitable. And, I suspect, the accumulation of evidence, both that already known and facts newly revealed, will point strongly in the direction of yes.
Still, there is a challenging paradox embedded in the idea of charging Trump for his behavior on Jan. 6, 2021, and in the lead-up to that day. His conduct simultaneously involves the most wicked crime — he orchestrated an assault on democracy, literally and metaphorically — and a crime that presents the greatest challenge to fit within the demanding rubric of criminal prosecution.
If Trump shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, most of us would have no problem understanding that to be a criminal offense for which he should be charged and convicted. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, he took aim at our democratic system.
In other words, this is the one we’ve been waiting for, for two-plus years now. It is the real deal — not getting Al Capone for tax evasion but for the true crime of being a gangster. But it also comes with worries — some concocted and inflated for partisan advantage, some serious and deserving of consideration.
Criminal law can be an imperfect tool to punish wrongdoing, especially when it comes to fuzzy, inchoate crimes in the arena of public corruption. Even there, the broad proscriptions of the criminal law — prohibiting conspiracies to defraud the federal government, to obstruct an official proceeding or to deprive voters of their rights — aren’t as self-evidently tailored to the specifics of Trump’s conduct. The precedents aren’t precisely on point, precisely because his behavior is so unprecedented.
There will be space for Trump’s lawyers to argue, for example, that the statute prohibiting obstruction of an official proceeding was meant to apply to tampering with documents, not pressuring Congress not to certify electoral votes.
Should Trump then be allowed to escape responsibility for his most egregious actions, with prosecutors relegated to contenting themselves with Capone-like charges? More fundamentally: Is the criminal justice system the best venue for pursuing justice when it comes to Trump?
Trump’s allies, along with nearly all his rivals for the GOP nomination, have an answer that aligns conveniently with their political interests: No. “He should be held accountable at the ballot box, not at the behest of a federal administrative police state,” said tech executive Vivek Ramaswamy. Former vice president Mike Pence, among the more direct victims of Trump’s behavior, told CNN’s Dana Bash that voters already have a “deep concern” about “unequal treatment of the law” when it comes to Trump and having “one more indictment against the former president will only contribute to that sense among the American people.”
This is not the right way to think about criminal prosecution. The best place to start is with the opening words of the manual that governsfederal prosecutors. “A determination to prosecute represents a policy judgment that the fundamental interests of society require the application of federal criminal law to a particular set of circumstances — recognizing both that serious violations of federal law must be prosecuted, and that prosecution entails profound consequences for the accused, crime victims, and their families whether or not a conviction ultimately results,” the Principles of Federal Prosecution instruct.
The fundamental interests of society. Nothing less is at stake in deciding whether to indict Trump for his efforts to remain in power. If prosecutors can make that case — if they can fit Trump’s conduct within the necessary elements of various criminal statutes — they are duty-bound to do so. Looking away is not an option. There has already been too much of that.
House and Senate Republicans looked away — not just through the course of the Trump presidency, but most fatefully after Trump left office, when they declined to vote for his impeachment and conviction even while knowing, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “there is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day.” Convicting Trump would have served the important function of disabling him from seeking future elective office, but the Senate chose not to take that route. “We have a criminal justice system in this country,” McConnell said then.“We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”
No, they aren’t. Trump already faces federal charges stemming from his post-presidential refusal to turn over classified documents to the National Archives. Those who lament the anticipated “legal flimsiness”of the forthcoming election-related indictment would do well to recall supposed overreach by the Justice Department in choosing to execute the search at Mar-a-Lago. The eventual facts quelled all but the most partisan critics.
The fact of charges being brought in the documents case does not inform the separate matter of whether charges are appropriate for Trump’s election-related conduct as well. Being prosecuted for an armed robbery in one jurisdiction does not excuse you from being indicted on kidnapping charges in another.
And those who complain of a supposed double standard in going after Trump but turning a blind eye to the conduct of Hunter Biden somehow choose to ignore another, more glaring inequity: that more than 1,000 people, incited by Trump, have been charged in the Jan. 6 insurrection. McConnell put it powerfully: “The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president.”
And their having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories and reckless hyperbole that the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth. Where is the fairness in prosecuting the foot soldiers but not their general?
Bringing charges against Trump for trying to undo the election isn’t piling on. It’s protecting “the fundamental interests of society,” which is another way of saying what prosecutors are supposed to do.
Here is part of what Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman have to say about it in The Washington Post:
Amid the parade of awful revelations unearthed by the House select committee examining the Jan. 6 insurrection, one area of immense culpability still needs further fleshing out.
It turns on this question: How is it possible so many Americans became convinced that a reversal of Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss was even possible in the first place? What’s been missing from this story has been the role of the Republican Party writ large in helping create the conditions for that belief to take hold.
Dramatic testimony from two former right-wing extremists at Tuesday’s hearing helps illustrate the point in a new way, one that implicates large swaths of the GOP in creating those conditions. What they said resembled the sort of introspection you sometimes hear from previously brainwashed, deprogrammed victims who escaped cults.
Stephen Ayres, who was among the rioters who entered the Capitol, offered powerful direct testimony on this score. He said he had fallen under the spell of Trump’s lies about the election.
Ayres said he came to Washington from Ohio precisely because he had been convinced that Trump’s lies were true. And, crucially, when Ayres was asked whether he thought the election could be overturned, he answered in the affirmative.
“At that time I did, because everybody was kind of, like, in the hope that, you know, Vice President Pence was not going to certify the election,” Ayres said.
What’s more, Ayres testified, had he known the president was being told by his own advisers that there was no evidence for his claim, he might not have showed up at all. “I may not have come down here,” Ayres said.
You know who else could have told Ayres — and countless others similarly deceived into following this doomed crusade — that there was no evidence for Trump’s claim? The vast bulk of mainstream Republicans who remained largely silent.
Another example came from Jason Van Tatenhove, a former high-level official in the extremist Oath Keepers who said he left the group in 2016. Some of its members are facing prosecution for seditious conspiracy.
Van Tatenhove was asked by Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) why Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, kept calling on Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. Van Tatenhove responded that Rhodes was looking for the trigger to carry out a violent insurrection, and said Trump himself kept Rhodes fully in the game by claiming the outcome could be reversed.
“The president was communicating, whether directly or indirectly, messaging that gave him the nod,” Van Tatenhove said.
Here again, a forceful and sustained declaration from most mainstream Republicans that the election was over and would not ever be reversed could have made a difference. . . .
A full accounting must include the role of many mainstream Republicans in feeding the belief among countless Americans that the election actually could be procedurally reversed. This no doubt helped fuel rage when Trump’s procedural efforts failed, helping spark the violence.
This dereliction included the studied silence of countless elected Republicans. But it also included the noise made by GOP politicians such as Sens. Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Ted Cruz (Tex.), who led an effort to object to Biden’s electors on Jan. 6. . . .
The violence was at least in part enabled by the deranged, futile and ultimately dashed hope that the election would be reversed.
Republicans were responsible for encouraging those hopes. And if you ask yourself why we’re now stuck in a situation where overwhelming majorities of GOP voters continue to believe that the 2020 election was stolen from them and that Trump was merely exercising his legal options in response, well, that’s part of the reason.
Without a full accounting of that extraordinarily degenerate conduct, as well, no investigation into this horror will be complete.
It has been no secret that Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is a right-wing extremist. But now we learn that she had an active part in trying to subvert our democratic system by overturning the legitimate results of the 2020 election. She texted Mark Meadows (Trump's White House Chief of Staff) at least 20 times, asking him to continue efforts to overturn the election. She also attended the January 6th insurrection.
This wouldn't be newsworthy, except her husband voted to keep secret Meadows texts -- including those from his wife. Justice Thomas should have recused himself, but instead became the ONLY justice to vote to keep the texts secret and deny their release to the January 6th Select Committee.
Here is part of how this was reported in The Washington Post:
Virginia Thomas, a conservative activist married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, repeatedly pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in a series of urgent text exchanges in the critical weeks after the vote, according to copies of the messages obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News.
The messages — 29 in all — reveal an extraordinary pipeline between Virginia Thomas, who goes by Ginni, and President Donald Trump’s top aide during a period when Trump and his allies were vowing to go to the Supreme Court in an effort to negate the election results.
On Nov. 10, after news organizations had projected Joe Biden the winner based on state vote totals, Thomas wrote to Meadows: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!...You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”
When Meadows wrote to Thomas on Nov. 24, the White House chief of staff invoked God to describe the effort to overturn the election. “This is a fight of good versus evil,” Meadows wrote. “Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”. . .
The messages, which do not directly reference Justice Thomas or the Supreme Court, show for the first time how Ginni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner circle to promote and seek to guide the president’s strategy to overturn the election results — and how receptive and grateful Meadows said he was to receive her advice. Among Thomas’s stated goals in the messages was for lawyer Sidney Powell, who promoted incendiary and unsupported claims about the election, to be “the lead and the face” of Trump’s legal team. . . .
It is unknown whether Ginni Thomas and Meadows exchanged additional messages between the election and Biden’s inauguration beyond the 29 received by the committee. Shortly after providing the 2,320 messages, Meadows ceased cooperating with the committee, arguing that any further engagement could violate Trump’s claims of executive privilege. Committee members and aides said they believe the messages may be just a portion of the pair’s total exchanges. . . .
In February 2021, when the Supreme Court rejected election challenges filed by Trump and his allies, Thomas wrote in a dissent that it was “baffling” and “inexplicable” that the majority had decided against hearing the cases because he believed the Supreme Court should provide states with guidance for future elections.
In her text messages to Meadows, Ginni Thomas spread false theories, commented on cable news segments and advocated with urgency and fervor that the president and his team take action to reverse the outcome of the election. She urged that they take a hard line with Trump staffers and congressional Republicans who had resisted arguments that the election was stolen.
The following op-ed is by Hayes Brown at MSNBC.com:
The Republican National Committee on Friday approved an astounding resolution that all but expressly condoned the attack on the U.S. Capitol last year. In doing so, it’s given up any pretense that the party stands in opposition to the violence that then-President Donald Trump inspired.
The resolution in question is focused specifically on censuring Reps. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Liz Cheney of Wyoming for their participation in the House Jan. 6 committee’s work. The fact that the censure was happening at all was the focus of reporting leading up to Friday’s RNC vote, given that the resolution was originally meant to expel the two from the party entirely.
But in reading the resolution’s language laying out Cheney's and Kinzinger’s supposed crimes against the party, one clause jumps out:
WHEREAS , Representatives Cheney and Kinzinger are participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse, and they are both utilizing their past professed political affiliation to mask Democrat abuse of prosecutorial power for partisan purposes…
That phrase — “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse” — is chilling to read for anyone who understands what happened Jan. 6 last year. It goes beyond just defending Trump or faulting the apostates in question with defying party gospel. It sanctions and indeed sanctifies the actions of the rioters and insurrectionists who wanted to see the results of a legitimate election overturned.
It’s not a shock that this rhetoric exists; we’ve seen it for months now. Whether it’s involved calling the rioters who smashed their way into the building “tourists” or calling those charged “political prisoners” and the conditions they have faced in jail “inhumane,” members of the right-wing have consistently downplayed the severity of the attack. In turn, that has involved finding an alternate reason for the prosecutions and investigations — namely, that this is yet another, as they frame it, Democratic attack against Trump’s political fortunes.
That fiction has been hypocritical when coming from the Republican members of Congress who feared for their lives Jan. 6. It’s been cynical when spouted by Fox News hosts and other conservative media figures who warned Trump about the danger of the mob he was fomenting. But now it’s been endorsed directly by the party itself. The Republican Party is on the record as being pro-Jan. 6.
RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel used a similar phrase when talking to reporters about the censure Thursday. MSNBC’s Steve Benen wondered ahead of Friday’s vote if she was referring to the fake electors who cast invalid Electoral College votes last year. Several of them, including an elderly friend of McDaniel’s, were recently subpoenaed to testify before the Jan. 6 committee.
That may be the case for McDaniel specifically. But the language of the RNC’s resolution lacks any such context or clarity. Instead, it is the venture that Trump embarked on after the 2020 election as a whole that is dismissed as par for the course in politics — from the Trump campaign’s efforts to cause confusion during the electoral count to the attacks on Capitol police officers on the day of the assault. There is no hedging to be found in its defense of “ordinary citizens.”
There’s no concern to be discerned from this resolution for Trump’s recent floating of the idea of pardons for participants in the Jan. 6 attack. Nor the clear indications that Trump is willing to rally these “ordinary citizens” into engaging in more political violence on his own behalf. As The New York Times reported, the resolution was adopted “without discussion and almost without dissent.”
No matter what McDaniel says as far as her own justification, these are the words as they were written and approved by the Republican Party. There’s nothing to conclude except that should the events of Jan. 6 repeat themselves, there is no “political discourse” that the GOP will not stand behind and endorse.
Anyone who has been paying attention knows our democracy is in trouble. The loser in our last presidential election has been telling a big lie -- that he won the 2020 election, but it was stolen from him through massive fraud. It's not true, but he has convinced many people that it is.
He even encouraged his deluded supporters to stage a violent insurrection at our U.S. Capitol building. When that failed, Republicans in red states began passing a whole raft of laws to suppress voting and give GOP legislatures the ability to change the outcome of voting in many states. The goal, of course, is to make sure Republicans will win future elections -- even if they have to cheat to do so.
If we allow these anti-democracy Republicans to be successful, we will lose our democracy. It will be replaced by an authoritarian government that refuses to recognize the will of the voters.
This must be stopped, and the only way to stop it is to pass federal laws to protect the right of citizens to vote and to protect the valid outcome of that voting. There are bills to do exactly that. They have been passed in the House, and are currently pending approval in the Senate.
The problem is that Democrats (who support the bills) only have 50 votes in the Senate. And the Republicans are filibustering the voting rights bills -- meaning it will take 60 votes to pass them. There is no chance of getting those 60 votes, since the Republicans are unanimous in their opposition.
The only way the bills can be passed to protect voting (and our democracy) is for the filibuster to be banned on voting rights bills. This could be done if all 50 Democrats voted to do that, and Vice-President Harris casts the tie-breaking vote.
Unfortunately, there are two Democrats -- Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema -- who love the filibuster. They even refuse to carve out an exception for voting rights and to protect election results. They seem to think that an archaic Senate rule (the filibuster) that is not in the Constitution is more important than the right of every citizen to vote. More important than democracy itself, which depends on the right to vote.
Their refusal is making it possible for Republicans to suppress the vote, and possibly even overturn the will of the voters in some states. They are enabling a future coup by anti democracy Republicans.
Their behavior is shameful!
The Republicans have done their best to bad-mouth the January 6th Select Committee. They want Americans to believe it is unnecessary, and nothing more than a witch hunt. Fortunately, most people are not buying into the Republican lie.
Only the Republican base has a majority saying it's a witch hunt. All other groups say it is appropriate, and necessary to find out exactly what happened, and who was responsible for it.
Once again, Republicans find themselves in disagreement with a significant majority of Americans!
One year ago, a violent mob, guided by unscrupulous politicians, stormed the Capitol and almost succeeded in preventing the democratic transfer of power. All four of us former presidents condemned their actions and affirmed the legitimacy of the 2020 election. There followed a brief hope that the insurrection would shock the nation into addressing the toxic polarization that threatens our democracy.
However, one year on, promoters of the lie that the election was stolen have taken over one political party and stoked distrust in our electoral systems. These forces exert power and influence through relentless disinformation, which continues to turn Americans against Americans. According to the Survey Center on American Life, 36 percent of Americans — almost 100 million adults across the political spectrum — agree that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” The Washington Post recently reported that roughly 40 percent of Republicans believe that violent action against the government is sometimes justified.
Politicians in my home state of Georgia, as well as in others, such as Texas and Florida, have leveraged the distrust they have created to enact laws that empower partisan legislatures to intervene in election processes. They seek to win by any means, and many Americans are being persuaded to think and act likewise, threatening to collapse the foundations of our security and democracy with breathtaking speed. I now fear that what we have fought so hard to achieve globally — the right to free, fair elections, unhindered by strongman politicians who seek nothing more than to grow their own power — has become dangerously fragile at home.
I personally encountered this threat in my own backyard in 1962, when a ballot-stuffing county boss tried to steal my election to the Georgia State Senate. This was in the primary, and I challenged the fraud in court. Ultimately, a judge invalidated the results, and I won the general election. Afterward, the protection and advancement of democracy became a priority for me. As president, a major goal was to institute majority rule in southern Africa and elsewhere.
After I left the White House and founded the Carter Center, we worked to promote free, fair and orderly elections across the globe. I led dozens of election observation missions in Africa, Latin America and Asia, starting with Panama in 1989, where I put a simple question to administrators: “Are you honest officials or thieves?” At each election, my wife, Rosalynn, and I were moved by the courage and commitment of thousands of citizens walking miles and waiting in line from dusk to dawn to cast their first ballots in free elections, renewing hope for themselves and their nations and taking their first steps to self-governance. But I have also seen how new democratic systems — and sometimes even established ones — can fall to military juntas or power-hungry despots. Sudan and Myanmar are two recent examples.
For American democracy to endure, we must demand that our leaders and candidates uphold the ideals of freedom and adhere to high standards of conduct.
First, while citizens can disagree on policies, people of all political stripes must agree on fundamental constitutional principles and norms of fairness, civility and respect for the rule of law. Citizens should be able to participate easily in transparent, safe and secure electoral processes. Claims of election irregularities should be submitted in good faith for adjudication by the courts, with all participants agreeing to accept the findings. And the election process should be conducted peacefully, free of intimidation and violence.
Second, we must push for reforms that ensure the security and accessibility of our elections and ensure public confidence in the accuracy of results. Phony claims of illegal voting and pointless multiple audits only detract from democratic ideals.
Third, we must resist the polarization that is reshaping our identities around politics. We must focus on a few core truths: that we are all human, we are all Americans and we have common hopes for our communities and our country to thrive. We must find ways to re-engage across the divide, respectfully and constructively, by holding civil conversations with family, friends and co-workers and standing up collectively to the forces dividing us.
Fourth, violence has no place in our politics, and we must act urgently to pass or strengthen laws to reverse the trends of character assassination, intimidation and the presence of armed militias at events. We must protect our election officials — who are trusted friends and neighbors of many of us — from threats to their safety. Law enforcement must have the power to address these issues and engage in a national effort to come to terms with the past and present of racial injustice.
Lastly, the spread of disinformation, especially on social media, must be addressed. We must reform these platforms and get in the habit of seeking out accurate information. Corporate America and religious communities should encourage respect for democratic norms, participation in elections and efforts to counter disinformation.
Our great nation now teeters on the brink of a widening abyss. Without immediate action, we are at genuine risk of civil conflict and losing our precious democracy. Americans must set aside differences and work together before it is too late.
