David Colburn

When I was a boy in the 1960s, election night often meant a trip to the county courthouse with my father.
Couriers brought the ballots in from precincts around the county, and the latest totals were posted on a board in the second-floor hallway. I would slip through the crowd of adults and crane my neck to get a look at the newest numbers.
I don’t remember anyone questioning whether the ballots were real, whether the couriers had switched them along the way, or whether the people posting the totals were part of some elaborate conspiracy. Perhaps someone was grumbling in a corner. I was a child, after all, and my memories are necessarily those of a child.
But the assumption in that hallway seemed straightforward. The votes had been cast. They would be counted. Eventually, we would know who had won.
It would be dishonest to portray that era as a golden age of American elections. In much of the country, Black citizens were still fighting for the basic right to vote. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was needed to attack literacy tests and other practices used to keep them from the polls. Election fraud and political corruption weren’t total strangers.
Still, there was a broadly shared expectation, at least in the world I knew, that election results represented something more consequential than another partisan claim to be accepted or rejected according to one’s political preferences.
That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.
A recent Pew Research Center survey found that only 55 percent of Americans are confident that this November’s midterm elections will be conducted fairly and accurately. Just 15 percent are very confident. Overall confidence has fallen from 64 percent before the 2022 midterms and 61 percent before the 2024 election.
The partisan numbers tell an even more troubling story.
Republican confidence has risen from 47 percent in 2024 to 55 percent today, following Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Democratic confidence has dropped from 77 percent to 58 percent over the same period.
Confidence in elections increasingly appears to depend on which party holds power.
Researchers at the MIT Election Lab call this the “winner-loser effect.” People whose preferred candidate wins tend to express greater confidence that votes were counted properly. Those on the losing side tend to be more skeptical.
That tendency is not new, but political leaders can either restrain it or exploit it.
Richard Nixon faced that choice after the presidential election of 1960.
John F. Kennedy defeated Nixon by fewer than 113,000 votes nationwide. Kennedy carried Illinois by fewer than 9,000 votes, and allegations of voting irregularities emerged in Illinois and Texas. Republican officials pursued investigations and challenges in several states.
Nixon nevertheless conceded. Two months later, acting in his constitutional role as vice president, he presided over the electoral count. When Hawaii submitted competing certificates, Nixon asked Congress to count the Kennedy slate certified following a recount. He then formally announced Kennedy’s 303-219 electoral victory and his own defeat.
Richard Nixon was no model of political virtue, as the nation would learn during Watergate. But faced with a razor-thin loss amid allegations of voting irregularities, he reportedly told a journalist investigating those allegations that “our country cannot afford the agony of a constitutional crisis.”
Sixty years later, Donald Trump chose the constitutional crisis.
Trump never formally conceded the 2020 election. He and his allies filed more than 60 lawsuits seeking to challenge or overturn the results, without changing the outcome in a single state. They pressured state officials, promoted alternative slates of electors from states Joe Biden had won, and sought to prevent or delay congressional certification of the result.
Trump also pressured Vice President Mike Pence to reject certified electoral votes, authority Pence concluded the Constitution did not give him. When Pence refused, Trump publicly denounced him.
On Jan. 6, 2021, a mob attacked the Capitol and interrupted the electoral count. Some rioters hunted for Pence and chanted for his execution. Pence returned to the Senate chamber that night and completed the certification of Biden’s victory.
The corrosive effects of the Trump era are now playing out here in Minnesota.
Mike Lindell, one of the country’s most persistent promoters of Trump’s unsupported 2020 election claims, lost Minnesota’s Republican gubernatorial primary to Lisa Demuth by roughly 11 percentage points. Demuth defeated both party-endorsed Kendall Qualls and Trump-endorsed Lindell.
Lindell refused to concede. He alleged irregularities in electronic election-night reporting and announced that he wanted a hand recount.
Minnesota law allowed Lindell to request and pay for a recount of the Republican gubernatorial contest. State officials estimated the cost at $825,000. Lindell did not submit the request and payment by the deadline. Instead, he demanded an examination of every ballot cast in both the Republican and DFL primaries.
The Minnesota Supreme Court rejected his petition. Lindell responded by saying he would take his complaints to the U.S. Supreme Court.
When the election result did not suit him, the count became suspect. When the available recount did not satisfy him, the recount rules became suspect. When Minnesota’s highest court rejected his argument, its decision became something else to challenge.
The goalposts now come equipped with wheels.
Other political practices contribute to the erosion of confidence. Both parties have used redistricting to draw congressional districts that favor themselves, leaving many voters with the understandable impression that politicians increasingly choose their voters rather than the other way around.
Gerrymandering is not the same as ballot fraud. It does not ordinarily prevent votes from being counted accurately. It does undermine confidence that those votes will translate into fair representation.
The cumulative lesson delivered by all this political manipulation is hard to miss: Elections are just another battlefield, and no rule, result or institution needs to be respected when it stands between a party and power.
The election system of my childhood was slower, less technologically sophisticated and certainly not flawless. Its strength was not the couriers, the paper ballots or the handwritten totals on that board in the courthouse hallway.
Its strength was a political norm. Candidates could question genuine irregularities and pursue remedies provided by law. Eventually, however, the count ended. The loser conceded, and the country moved forward.
Democracy cannot survive for long if elections are considered legitimate only by those who win them.
As a boy craning my neck in that courthouse hallway, I thought we were waiting to learn who had won. I understand now that something even more important was happening.
We were agreeing that the answer mattered.