Borrowing from the autocrats’ playbook: How Trump is trying to manipulate election results

In contesting the election results, the US president is aping some of the world leaders he most admires

Heading for the exit? Donald Trump in the briefing room at the White House (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Striding to the podium late Thursday, President Donald Trump insisted he had won reelection, alluding to conspiracies and allegations of fraud without disclosing evidence. He rejected an outcome that appeared to increasingly favour his opponent and insisted he would resort to courts and election officials loyal to his party.

“There’s tremendous litigation going on, and this is a case where they’re trying to steal an election,” he claimed without evidence. “They’re trying to rig an election and we can’t let that happen.”

Few are surprised that Trump would try to manipulate the vote results. He has often voiced his admiration for dictators and absolute monarchs across the world, and has called even the election he won in 2016 rigged and fraudulent, claiming without absolutely no evidence that he lost the popular vote count because of cheating.  

“There’s an opponent of democracy in the United States sitting in the White House,” says Paul Salem, president of the Middle East Institute in Washington. “If elections go his way he’ll accept them and if they don’t he won’t accept them. He’d clearly like to be president for life.”

Still, experts say, a number of factors in the U.S. will make it harder for Trump to bend the rules in his favour. They include an inhospitable media environment and a Republican Party establishment content with its better-than-expected performance in simultaneous Congressional elections, as well as a US electoral system that is so messy that it’s difficult to corral.  

Trump appears to be cut from the same cloth as the autocrats he admires. He has repeatedly cast doubt on whether he would be willing to hand over power were he to lose elections. Few can imagine him delivering an eloquent concession speech, or even conferring with a successor in the Oval Office on foreign policy concerns, a tradition in the U.S.

“It’s the nature of his personality,” says Judah Grunstein, editor-in-chief of World Politics Review. “He’s unable to accept that someone would not vote for him.”

But while Trump may be inspired by autocrats across the world, what he’s attempting in the US will likely fall short. For one thing, the US electoral system is extraordinarily complex and difficult to manipulate on a national level. There’s no ministry of interior that oversees and counts the vote. There’s not even a central election commission. Rather there are 50 separate systems, each broken down into counties overseen by local officials who are often elected to their posts.  

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“The US is such a weirdly decentralised place,” says Goldman. “There’s no other system like it.”

While experts and advocacy groups have warned that US democracy has receded in recent years, it’s still far from an autocracy where votes are a formality or even struggling democracies, where some opposition is allowed and limited competition takes place.  

“The fact is that in the U.S. the ballot boxes are still out of the hands of the regime,” says Grunstein. “And it’s the incumbent making allegations of election fraud.”

In addition, despite the flaws in the constitutional law experts have noted how resilient the American system has remained despite Trump’s efforts to undermine it.  

“There’s a lot of confidence that a system of law is going to resolve the disputes within a few days,” says Zaid Ali, a scholar of international law and senior official at the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, a multilateral organisation based in Stockholm.  

“People can say whatever they want in the news and at rallies,” he says. “But there’s a sense that after you get through the mist of all these allegations, there’s a very robust system that’s backing up the system of democracy in the US and that makes it difficult even for someone like Trump to challenge it.”

While Trump has been able to count on the support of and loyal rightwing media outlets throughout the campaign, he has been unable to shape the entirety of the media environment like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan or Russia’s Vladimir Putin, whose loyalists control most major news outlets. Even Rupert Murdoch-owned rightwing Fox News has been pushing back against his unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.

“Trump does not enjoy that sort of power over his media supporters – as we can see now,” says Matthew Goldman, of  the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul. “Fox has been so far largely unwilling to endorse Trump’s claims that votes are being stolen, which I believe will be an important signal to Republicans not to line up behind this effort to declare the vote-counting fraudulent.”

Experts note that the type of election-time chicanery being utilised by Trump is nothing new in the US, and voting irregularities have more often than not been the norm.  

There’s an opponent of democracy in the United States sitting in the White House

Paul Salem, president of the Middle East Institute

African-Americans were not granted citizenship rights until 1865 and remained disenfranchised for another hundred years, while women only got the right to vote in 1920. Ballot stuffing took place in big cities where organised crime, labour unions and established politicians colluded before and after votes to ensure desired outcomes -- including close 1960 elections in which John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon.

“We’re talking about a very narrow window when US elections were free and fair,” says Grunstein. “As recently as the 1960s and 1970s in Chicago it was common to say, ‘Vote early and vote often,’ Much more violently, there was the voter suppression of Black Americans, whether through Jim Crow laws, terrorism, or poll taxes.”