Election integrity is becoming a partisan prize. California voters did not take the bait

The sheer magnitude of the Republican Party’s election defeat suspends, but does not extinguish, a dangerous and growing assault on U.S. elections. 

If Democrats had won only the four seats they needed to gain control of the Senate in the 2026 midterms, President Donald Trump would again have had the sort of incentive he had after losing Georgia in his 2020 election defeat — incentive to pressure state election officials to “find” non-existent votes, threaten poll workers with criminal charges, allege interference with voting machines, claim victory despite obvious defeat and attempt to thwart certification of the results.

If Senate control in the 2026 midterms turned only on Mississippi, for example, where a Democrat currently leads by a hair or two, Trump might have lost Congress in the end yet still advanced a far more nefarious campaign — to sow doubt and thereby undermine public confidence in fundamental institutions of American democracy.

To proclaim that U.S. elections are “rigged.” To have millions of Americans believe it. To have millions more question whether any given election will be free and fair.

The threat to American elections has little to do with the actual freeness or fairness of voting, or the accuracy of reported results.

The threat is to public confidence in that freeness and fairness. If election outcomes perfectly reflect the will of the voting majority, but the voters don’t believe that they do, democracy cannot survive.

Or if a segment of voters believe the results are accurate but reject them anyway and falsely claim “fraud” — again, democracy cannot survive. Victory and power become things snatched by aggressors, liars and crooks, not by candidates with winning campaigns and majority support. 

Voter confidence in the instruments and processes of democracy is precious and fragile. Once lost, it is not easily recovered.

Close elections test that confidence, strain it and tempt cheaters.

But this election was not close. It was a broad and historic repudiation of the president in the form of a “bluenami” that rolled over Texas, the Carolinas, Kansas, Iowa and other GOP strongholds, bumped Republicans from statehouses and delivered control of both the House and Senate to Democrats by — and again, this is key — large margins. Democrats won not just four but at least seven, and possibly eight or nine, Senate seats. 

That’s a scale too big to look “rigged.” 

By Monday, Trump was up to his old tricks and suggested on Truth Social that it was, but the post seemed mostly for form. No one seemed to be taking the bait.

The Democratic (and democratic) wave also helped derail the administration’s odious and easily disproven allegations of widespread non-citizen voting and its attempt to compel California to sequester 20,000 supposedly suspect ballots, plus its threats to criminally charge county elections officials. It is one thing for courts to reject such gambits, as they did — first and forcefully in the district court, then twice in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and finally in the U.S. Supreme Court. It is another thing altogether for the federal prosecutor, Bill Essayli — who was disqualified from representing the Trump administration in court but purports to do so anyway — to ultimately acknowledge futility and to drop the suit.

Also, in California, voters soundly rejected Proposition 39, which would have required them to present government-issued identification the next time they go to the polls, and forever after. 

It was never an unreasonable-sounding idea on its face. Only citizens may lawfully vote, so how can a poll worker know if a person, absent identification, is entitled to cast a ballot? Most other states require ID. If the goal is not just free and fair elections, but broad voter confidence in that freeness and fairness, what would be so bad about requiring ID?

But a majority of California voters saw the measure for what it was: not an attempt to solve any problem that actually exists, but a ploy to use the banner of “election integrity” for partisan gain. 

Many states have a long, sordid history of efforts to disenfranchise whole swaths of American society by making it harder, more expensive or more risky to register and to vote. If you must pay a fee to replace a lost California drivers license ($37) or to get a U.S. passport ($165), and if you need to present one of those documents when voting, what practical difference is there between that and an unconstitutional poll tax? (The “free” ID that Prop. 39 would have required would have cost the state millions).

Or if armed federal agents routinely arrest or threaten to arrest naturalized citizens because their language or their accent or their skin supposedly make them suspect, how is that different from threatening Black voters in the South with arrest in the days before the Voting Rights Act of 1965?

Now that the Voting Rights Act has been all but extinguished by the U.S. Supreme Court, California and some other forward-looking states have expanded and protected voting rights by permitting everyone to choose to vote by mail, and by rejecting onerous ID requirements in favor of proven safeguards and audits.

That’s important. The right to vote, like confidence in elections, is fundamental and precious. Indeed, when voting is disparaged, discouraged or disputed, elections are by definition neither free nor fair and we can have no confidence in them.

And there’s the rub. Political parties and their adherents have made not just electoral victory but also election integrity a prize to be grabbed from the hands of one another. One side argues that elections are unfair if the franchise is restricted, and the other side argues that elections are fraudulent if the franchise expands. At this moment in history it is Democrats who are protecting voting rights, but a quick look at the Alaska Senate ballot and the multiple Dan Sullivans fiasco demonstrates that they are hardly on the side of the angels. 

No party, candidate or leader is standing up purely in defense of democracy and confidence in democratic institutions.

And yet, in a delicious irony, one American did step forward to rescue democracy, in spite of himself, by encouraging a large voter turnout and an unmistakable electoral verdict.

It was Trump. So many voters of various political stripes found him to be such a clear and present danger to American liberty, American leadership, American justice, the American economy, America’s capital city, America’s allies, American decorum and yes, American elections, that millions of Americans set aside their differences in order to go to the polls and say “no.” 

Trump gifted us with the unassailable margin of his own defeat. That margin buys us a temporary period of shared belief in election integrity.

States can use those 18 months or so to hammer out mutual political and racial gerrymandering agreements, accords on election security, compromises where possible — an array of projects to firm up not just actual election integrity, but restored and enduring confidence that our elections are indeed free and fair.

It’s that, or the further and perhaps permanent degradation of democracy.