William Jefferson Clinton, Election Denier What in the world does the 42nd president mean by the suggestion that the election will come down to whether we can get an honest vote count?
Bill Clinton, election denier? That’s the prospect heaving into view now that the 42nd president is raising doubts about the legitimacy of the vote tallies on November 5. What he said is that he’s wondering “whether we can get an honest, open count.” With the presidential contest in a “dead heat,” as NBC News puts it, Mr. Clinton’s remarks suggest an emerging Democratic strategy if the votes don’t go their way: Challenge the integrity of the balloting.
On the hustings in Georgia for Vice President Harris, Mr. Clinton mused that “what will decide the outcome,” NBC reported, is “who wants it bad enough.” A Clinton aide clarified that “various reports of threats and intimidation against election officials” prompted the remarks. Yet Mr. Clinton’s comments remind that while President Trump is often excoriated for his refusal to accept the outcome in 2020, the Democrats are better on this head.
Feature, say, Secretary Clinton and other members of her party who, after Trump’s win in 2016, insinuated that Russian meddling in the race had made him an “illegitimate president.” Mrs. Clinton, after losing, pointed to “the many varying tactics” deployed during the 2016 campaign, “from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories” as among “just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did.”
Then again, too, what about the Democrats who doubted the fairness of the 2000 and 2004 elections won by President George W. Bush? In 2001, the head of the Congressional Black Caucus, Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, decried “overwhelming evidence that George W. Bush did not win this election either by national popular vote or the Florida popular vote.” She put Mr. Bush “on notice that without justice there will be no peace.”
The spectacle in Congress on January 6, 2001 featured fulminating over Florida’s election results, in part because of the intervention of the Supreme Court in the case of Bush v. Gore. Black voters had been disenfranchised, several members of the House contended. Yet, with Vice President Gore presiding over the count, no Senator agreed to challenge Florida’s electoral votes, and the objections went nowhere. “We did all we could,” one solon shrugged.
The certification of the 2000 election failed to stop Democrats from muttering about Mr. Bush being “appointed” by the Supreme Court. A similarly querulous spirit followed the outcome in 2004, when liberals were dismayed by Senator Kerry’s loss at the polls to Mr. Bush. Though Dubya had carried the Buckeye State by a margin of more than 100,000, Democrats began to fret, in respect of the voting, over “statistical anomalies.”
The alleged fraud “can only be explained by forms of computer manipulation that would not be conspicuous to election officials, that are a direct attack on the integrity of our election process,” said an official with Common Cause Ohio, Cliff Arnebeck. So on January 6, 2005, two Democrats — Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones and Senator Boxer — rose to object to the counting of Ohio’s votes. They failed to convince their colleagues.
In 2017, House Democrats raised objections to counting six states’ electoral votes, but failed to enlist a Senator’s support. After the 2020 election, and the breach of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Congress moved in 2022 to reform the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which some had blamed for the chaos that day. The new law, among other changes, sets a higher bar — one-fifth of the House and Senate — to objecting to counting a state’s electoral votes.
Will the reforms lead to a more tranquil electoral count on January 6, 2025? Whoever ekes out an Election Day win, the results are sure to be scrutinized. That’s well and good, provided the review doesn’t cross the line into conspiracy-mongering, illegality, or demagoguery. Whether election denial comes from Republicans or Democrats, and by the Trumps or the Clintons, the Cato Institute calls sowing false doubts about the integrity of voting “a bad and toxic habit.”
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