Stolen Election Research Articles

Correction: When something is happening but you don’t know what it is: mood and agency after a stolen election

Correction: When something is happening but you don’t know what it is: mood and agency after a stolen election

When something is happening but you don’t know what it is: mood and agency after a stolen election

AbstractThe street protests in Belarus following an allegedly stolen election provide a context for an examination of the expression of public mood. We argue that political moods involve pre-agentic intuition rather than cognitively formed agency; and that they constitute a vital, too often overlooked stage of democratic action. Focusing upon such moments entails an understanding of the ways in which early impressions of situations often rely upon peripheral awareness and pre-reflective heuristics. Understanding pre-agentic action poses a significant methodological challenge to researchers who must determine how best to make sense of human responses to situations that do not yet make sense to them. The article explores the transition from mood to agency; that is to say, from generalised affective feeling to political intention and action. We looked through thousands of photographs, video clips, textual messages, voices, smartphone screens, maps and official documents that circulated online during the Belarusian protests both prior to and after the election.

The Real “Stolen Election”: Frank Hague and New Jersey’s 1937 Race for Governor

“Research Notes” allows scholars to share their works in progress (or update prior works) and solicit feedback from others in the New Jersey history community. All are welcome to contribute—simply send submissions for inclusion in future issues to the editor.

The Impact of Voter Education on Voter Confidence: Evidence from the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election

In this article, we assess whether voters who live in states where state election officials (EOs) invested in voter education have higher levels of confidence in vote counting. We argue state investment in voter education strengthens voter confidence by improving voter experiences and creating a culture of voter education, both of which facilitate transparency in elections. We measure state election official investment in voter education during the 2020 U.S. Presidential election by merging a unique dataset of EO social media communications during the last months of the 2020 election cycle with various election administration data sources. We find EO use of Facebook bolsters confidence in vote counting at the personal, local, and state level. Importantly, voters predisposed to question election integrity living in these states—those highly skeptical about the occurrence of fraud and who supported Donald Trump in 2016—express higher confidence at the personal, local, and state level in states where EOs were active on Facebook in 2020. Findings are mixed for measures of resource investment in voter education through federal and private funding. Our study is the first to establish a positive relationship between voter education and voter confidence. However, our findings also underscore the pervasive effects of partisanship and national narratives about stolen elections.

The Real “Stolen Election”: Frank Hague and New Jersey’s 1937 Race for Governor

Any notion of a rigged 2020 national election pales in comparison to America’s real “stolen election” 83 years before, in New Jersey. Republican state senator Lester H. Clee was poised to make the 1937 gubernatorial election a very close race. He carried 14 of the state’s 21 counties and was nearly tied in 5 others. Yet the day after polls closed, people awoke to news that Clee’s 80,000-vote lead had vanished. Overnight, his majority was erased by late returns from one single county—Hudson County, the power base of state Democratic boss Frank Hague. The 45,000-vote plurality delivered by Hague’s indomitable political machine put Clee’s opponent A. Harry Moore over the top. This article examines claims made by Republicans of the day that the 1937 election was stolen: that Lester Clee lost to A. Harry Moore because of institutionalized voter fraud in Hudson County.

The Redistricting and Voter Suppression in a Post-Pandemic America

The 2020 election was a referendum on many pressing issues of the time. COVID-19, climate change, and civil unrest propelled Americans to the voting booth in unprecedented numbers, shattering previous turnout records for both previous Vice President Joe Biden and the incumbent Donald Trump. Biden and the Democratic Party field won, but narrowly. With the Democratic Party ostensibly holding only a slim majority in the House and the Vice Presidency as a tiebreaker in a dead-locked Senate, there have been large cries of a “stolen election” and “rampant voter fraud.” This has prompted several states, usually with Republican majorities, to pass sweeping restrictions on voting. Using both historical and contemporary lenses, this paper investigates the causes, effects, and motivations to curb voting accessibility and redistricting with an emphasis on red and swing states in the aftermath of the 2020 election, as well as potential solutions to combat the push to further restrict voting rights.

Stolen elections: How conspiracy beliefs during the 2020 American presidential elections changed over time

AbstractConspiracy beliefs have been studied mostly through cross‐sectional designs. We conducted a five‐wave longitudinal study (N = 376; two waves before and three waves after the 2020 American presidential elections) to examine if the election results influenced specific conspiracy beliefs and conspiracy mentality, and whether effects differ between election winners (i.e., Biden voters) versus losers (i.e., Trump voters) at the individual level. Results revealed that conspiracy mentality kept unchanged over 2 months, providing first evidence that this indeed is a relatively stable trait. Specific conspiracy beliefs (outgroup and ingroup conspiracy beliefs) did change over time, however. In terms of group‐level change, outgroup conspiracy beliefs decreased over time for Biden voters but increased for Trump voters. Ingroup conspiracy beliefs decreased over time across all voters, although those of Trump voters decreased faster. These findings illuminate how specific conspiracy beliefs are, and conspiracy mentality is not, influenced by an election event.

Alternatives

Whiteness was abundantly in evidence during the 2020 election in the United States and subsequently when a white mob stormed the Capitol to protest what they regarded as a stolen election. I suggest that we locate the confluence of “God, guns, and country” on that day on a settler-colonial and imperial landscape, tracing how a territorial white subject comes to feel racial entitlement and aggrievement through Christianity, an affect that is evident when we consider Muslims in the white imaginary.

Die Republikanische Partei nach den Wahlen 2020: Nach oder inmitten der Trump-Ära?

Donald Trump’s loss in conjunction with the outcome of congressional elections has left the Republican Party entirely removed from the political levers of power in Washington, D .C . - a mere four years after they had obtained unified control of government at the federal level. What are the lessons Republicans can draw from these results? How can a President who engaged in open efforts to overturn a democratic election result continue to elicit a degree of support among the party’s rank-and-file that has made him the current favorite to win the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2024? Explanations are found both in the 45th President’s governing record as well as in the composition of today’s Republican electorate, which largely subscribes to Donald Trump’s nativist populist worldview. The attitudes present among Republican voters were one of the key reasons why most Republican officials in Washington ultimately decided to at least tacitly support Trump’s anti-democratic lie of a “stolen election”. This may only have been a harbinger of the future threat Republicans pose to US democracy.

The Miracle and Tragedy of the 2020 Election

The 2020 election was both a miracle and a tragedy. In the midst of a pandemic, election administrators pulled off a safe, secure, and professional election. Still, lies of voter fraud have cemented in the minds of tens of millions of Americans that the election was rigged. As the first wave of the pandemic overtook the nation right as the presidential election season was beginning, most states responded by delaying their primaries and maximizing opportunities to vote by mail. We review how the quick actions of many states led to salvaging of the primary season, but also led to two cautionary tales, from Wisconsin and New York, that illustrated the disasters that could befall both mail and in-person voters if the nation did not act quickly. We recount the combination of actions taken by governors, state legislators, health officials, judges, and civil society to adapt election administration to the exigent realities of the pandemic and to cope with the logistical challenges state and local election officials faced. We discuss metrics of success in the adaptations that took place — record-high turnout, widespread voter satisfaction, a doubling of mail voting without a concomitant increase in problems often associated with absentee ballots, and the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of new poll workers. We also explore how the competing narrative of dysfunction and a “stolen election,” propagated by President Trump and his supporters, led not only to the insurrection at the Capitol on January 1, but also to a historically deep chasm at the mass level between partisans in their trust of the election process and outcome. We conclude by noting that many states will be considering legislation that re-litigates the election by addressing non-problems, rather than building on the triumphs of the election.

Habits of Mind in an Uncertain Information World

Ours is a fraught time. We see blaring headlines about stolen elections, the questioning of scientific findings and of the scientific method itself, of mutual incomprehension across political and cultural divides, of accepted norms upended, of governing processes questioned, and of facts themselves—facts comporting with reality—doubted. The swirling cacophony of competing viewpoints, perspectives, agendas, and “facts,” accelerated by a saturating and saturated media environment, challenges anyone seeking a firm ground for reasoned debate, reflection, and discussion—and anyone commited to teaching and scholarship. As a profession with ancient and honorable roots, including exposing uncomfortable truths, teaching requires a ground of reliable factuality, a foundation for debate, discussion, and improvement, no matter the level of education, the subject, or the method of instruction.

Corrupt Illinois: Patronage, Cronyism, and Criminality by Thomas J. Gradel and Dick Simpson

Reviewed by: Corrupt Illinois: Patronage, Cronyism, and Criminality by Thomas J. Gradel and Dick Simpson David Schultz Thomas J. Gradel and Dick Simpson, Corrupt Illinois: Patronage, Cronyism, and Criminality. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 270pp. $19.95. Corruption knows no bounds. At least this is the case with Illinois. Chicago is as famous for its corrupt city politics as it is for its food, architecture, and sports. But over time corruption has ebbed beyond its borders and the suburbs of Cook County, infiltrating every corner of Illinois from the lowest town government to the governor, snaring even federal offices that touch on the president of the United States. No branch of government is immune, no level, and no type of or form of corruption beyond the possibility. This is the argument of this entertaining yet sobering account of corruption in the prairie state. Corrupt Illinois: Patronage, Cronyism, and Criminality is neither the first nor the last word on the history and legacy of corruption in the land of Lincoln. Instead the authors, Thomas Gradel, a media consultant and former staffer to former governor Dan Walker, and Dick Simpson, a University of Illinois at Chicago professor and former Chicago alderman, have produced one of the best documented accounts on the history and extent of corruption in the state. First, as the subtitle describes, the authors define [End Page 124] corruption broadly to include not simply criminal acts of bribery, extortion, office selling, and influence peddling, but also political favoritism, conflicts of interest, and other assorted unethical behavior. Yet only defining corruption as mere criminality, from 1976 to 2012 the Chicago area recorded 1,597 federal corruption convictions, the most of any city in the country. All of Illinois during that time ranked third in federal convictions per capita, right behind the District of Columbia and Louisiana. It was also third in total number of convictions, behind only California and New York. These statistics substantiate that corruption is more than simply anecdotal—its flourishes in the state. But why? Corruption infused the political culture of Illinois from the start. Gradel and Simpson declare the first stolen election was in 1833 when the town of Chicago sought to incorporate and several of the votes were by individuals ineligible to vote. Governor Matteson left office in 1856, owing the state “a quarter of million dollars for selling false script.” In 1869 fourteen Chicago alderman and Cook Country commissioners were tried for contract rigging. Why this legacy? The authors invoke political scientist David Elazar’s discussion of the three types of political cultures that exist across the country. Illinois is dominated by an individualistic culture, one seeing politics as less about serving the public than furthering private interests. It envisions government as a necessary evil, one where political decisions are seen as market transactions to exchange personal favors. For reasons not even the authors can explain, from the earliest days of Illinois’ history this individualistic culture has persisted, reinforced both by repeated unethical behavior of public officials and a public tolerant or indifferent to it. So long as this culture of corruption persists, no amount or number of convictions will stem it. Having established Chicago and Illinois as among the most corrupt governments for the duration of their history, the core of the book tells their sullied story in charming detail. Chapter two focuses on stolen elections and boss politics, detailing mostly the practices of Mayor Richard Daley who also served as chair of the Cook County Democratic Party from 1955 to 1976. The chapter charts the structure of Daley’s machine, how the use of patronage was swapped for votes, campaign contributions, and precinct work. Yet Chicago machine politics goes back to right after the Civil War where Michael McDonald was a party boss employing similar techniques to protect saloons, brothels, and his friends. As for stolen elections, Daley is credited with delivering questionable votes to put Kennedy on top over [End Page 125] Nixon in 1960. Chapter three summarizes the history of corruption in Illinois, noting its legacy downstate and in Springfield. Among the conclusions is that corruption has taken three visible forms: small bribes as pay to play, stealing money from...

The “Orange revolution” and the “sacred” birth of a civic-republican Ukrainian nation

The article analyzes the “sacred” dimension of the Ukrainian “Orange revolution”, its festive or carnivalesque quality, and properties of a communal ritual. The author argues that Ukrainian citizens who protested against the stolen elections in Kyiv found themselves in the liminoid situation of temporary egalitarian utopianism. This situation resulted in the emergence ofcommunitas, and engendered a powerful feeling of the birth of a civic-republican Ukrainian nation. The festive nature of the “Orange revolution”, sanctioned by the overwhelming confidence in fighting for the rightful democratic cause, reinforced the impression of renewing the society along Western liberal democratic patterns.

What Fresh Hell Is This?: Revisiting Reconstruction

What Fresh Hell Is This?Revisiting Reconstruction Mark Wahlgren Summers (bio) Mark L. Bradley , Bluecoats & Tar Heels: Soldiers and Civilians in Reconstruction North Carolina (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009. Pp. xi, 370. $25.00 paper) Judkin Browning , Shifting Loyalties: The Union Occupation of Eastern North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Pp. xiii, 250. $37.50 cloth) Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, eds., The Great Task Remaining Before Us: Reconstruction as America's Continuing Civil War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Pp. xv, 268. $35.00 cloth) Gregory P. Downs , Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1861-1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Pp. 346. $39.95 cloth) Philip Dray , Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008. Pp. xiii, 463. $15.95 paper) Gary Gallagher , The Union War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011. Pp. 215. $27.95 cloth) [End Page 559] Benjamin Ginsberg , Moses of South Carolina: A Jewish Scalawag during Radical Reconstruction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Pp. xi, 219. $21.95 cloth) Suzanne Stone Johnson and Robert Allison Johnson, eds., Bitter Freedom: William Stone's Record of Service in the Freedmen's Bureau (Columbia, S. C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2008. Pp. 177. $29.95 cloth) Chandra Manning , What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007 Pp. v, 350. $16.95 paper) James Marten , Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Pp. xii, 339. $39.95 cloth) Kate Masur , An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle for Equality in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Pp. x, 364. $39.95 cloth) Jerry L. West , The Bloody South Carolina Election of 1876: Wade Hampton III, the Red Shirt Campaign for Governor, and the End of Reconstruction (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2011. Pp. 216. $35.00 paper) To paraphrase Mr. Lincoln, writers must love Reconstruction—they make so many of them. Once the poor stepchild of Civil War histories, Reconstruction studies have become something of a growth industry with popular accounts of massacres and injustices, promises unfulfilled, and possibilities denied. In the last decade, there have been at least two books about the Colfax massacre, several more about the months at the end of the war, a lively potboiler about the president's impeachment, and three studies of the "stolen election" [End Page 560] of 1876. A very clever, challenging monograph by Gregory P. Downs uses Reconstruction as the starting point for his discovery that emancipation and the desolating need bred by devastating war created a new kind of politics, one based on those with power dispensing personal favors: contracts, jobs, services—and this "patronalism," as Downs calls it, created constituencies that saw government as their likeliest hope and the men in power as their personal friends. By his alchemy, the begging letters that every politician, north and south, saw, before and after the war, turn into one of the proofs of a very different statism, fostered by a government endowed with new and burgeoning responsibilities. There are even two books about "the great task remaining before us," one of them with that very title and the other actually showing what it may be. New scholarship explores the feminine side of Reconstruction, traces it outside of the reconstructed states into Kentucky and the District of Columbia, follows it down to the crossroads, and chases it all the way through to century's end and beyond. No reviewer could do justice to the scholarship; this one will do as little justice as it possibly can. Publishing markets love a ripping story, and for those who write with sales in mind, Reconstruction provides blood-and-thunder stories, free from the dangers of too many notes or too-complicated thought. That does not make them untrue. Some of them make terrific reads. All they need are antidotes or, perhaps, sedatives, to be administered with them to let...

Democracy unravelled in Kenya: multi-party competition and ethnic targeting

The introduction of competitive multi-party politics in Kenya has led to intense struggles for the ultimate political prize, the ‘imperial presidency’. Given the country's multi-ethnic character which is dominated by five large ethnic communities or tribes, parties tend to be erected on ethnic foundations. Strong political personalities are elevated to represent and advance the interests of their people. Given the power and resources associated with the capture of power, electoral competition becomes a struggle for ethnic dominance. The Kikuyu who were the first community to rise to power after independence see the presidency as belonging to them. The others however seek to marginalize and/or displace the Kikuyu at every opportunity. In 2007, two political titans – Mwai Kibaki of the Kikuyu and Raila Odinga of the Luo – fought a harsh and virulent campaign which ended in a deeply flawed vote count. Kibaki won but Odinga claimed a stolen election. Immediately, severe ethnic violence was wreaked on one community only to be followed by revenge violence on others. The country came perilously close to collapse. The pattern of political violence to wound and destroy ethnic opponents arose in 1992, then in 1997 and finally in 2007. Multi-party electoral competition has brought untold grief to hundreds of thousands of Kenyans. In essence, democracy has become a curse for ordinary Kenyans.

Is There a Pattern?

The countries that experienced a ‘coloured revolution’ between 2000 and 2005 – Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan – were not distinguished by their levels of economic development, as political modernization theory suggested. Nor did they distribute incomes more unequally than other countries at the same level of development, as class analysis would have posited. By contrast, perceptions of the political system, and of its levels of corruption and responsiveness, were more closely associated with a series of irregular regime changes that had generally been precipitated by a ‘stolen election’.

Weapons of mass destruction: Land, ethnicity and the 2007 elections in Kenya

A number of political commentators, the media and observers have portrayed the 2007 election violence in Kenya as an ethnic conflict between two of the largest tribal opposing factions: the Kikuyu and the Luo. However, the situation in a multi-ethnic country like Kenya could prove to be much more complicated than one may think. According to Mueller (2008, 186) the violence was a result of weak institutions, mostly overridden by a highly personalised and centralised presidency that does not exercise the autonomy or checks and balances normally associated with democracies and political parties that are not programmatic, driven by ethnic clientism, and have a winner-take-all view of political and its associated economic by-products. Africa Policy Institute (2008) described it as a crisis of democratic transformation typically experienced by countries facing a closely contested election or election dispute. During an interview at the Wilson Centre on 10 January 2008, Maina Kiai said that ‘this is not an ethnic conflict; this is a political conflict with ethnic overtones’ caused by the lack of transparency in the elections. Githinji and Holmquist (2008, 344) argue that the crisis is best understood not simply as ethnic rivalry for power but rather as a product of rising expectations due to the increase in democratic space in the last five years combined with the frustration of exclusion on the economic and political front. Finally, others are of the opinion that the violence was a spontaneous reaction targeted against Kenya's stolen election. If the historical perspective outlined below is anything to go by, there is more to the violence than solely the perceived ethnic conflict. Kenya's crisis, including the 2007 election violence, has deep historical roots.

More than Just the Final Straw: Stolen Elections as Revolutionary Triggers

Stolen elections are triggering events that overcome barriers to revolutionary action against electoral authoritarian regimes. They mobilize ordinary citizens, strengthen the opposition, and divide the regime. As neo-institutionalist theories of revolution suggest, the relative openness of electoral authoritarianism inhibits mass protest. But when elections are stolen, regimes undergo “closure,” increasing the probability of protest. The failure of other potential revolutionary precipitants underlines that stolen elections are not merely replaceable final straws. Stolen elections have not only been crucial for the emergence of revolutionary situations, they have shaped outcomes as well. Linking popular mobilization to fraudulent elections has become part of the repertoire of contention of democratic revolutionaries.

March 2005: parliamentary elections as a catalyst of protests

Analyzing political opportunity structure in both the long and short terms, this article focuses specifically on the trigger effect of elections that provided the political space for oppositional leaders to frame their grievances. The emerging framework of understanding mobilization in the coloured revolutions combines stolen elections as a motivating trigger; an incumbent weakened by succession crisis and disunity of his power base; the semi-authoritarian character of pre-revolutionary politics; an opposition able to unite despite their inevitable differences and potentially important international factors. The specific mechanisms that translated stolen elections into mass demonstrations, succession crisis into a defeat of the incumbent and foreign example into a spillover effect, are not yet perfectly understood, and nor are their outcomes. The implications of how stolen and manipulated elections differ from each other are explored.

True enough: learning to live in a post-fact society

Introduction: Why Facts No Longer Matter. 1. Reality Is Splitting. 2. The New Tribalism: Swift Boats and the Power of Choosing. 3. Trusting Your Senses: Selective Perception and 9/11. 4. Questionable Expertise: The Stolen Election and the Men Who Push It. 5. The Twilight of Objectivity, or What's the Matter with Lou Dobbs? 6. Truthiness Everywhere. Epilogue: Living In a World without Trust. Acknowledgments. Notes. Index.