Election Trutherism Is Not a One-Sided Problem

Protecting faith in elections requires confronting sources of distrust on both sides of the aisle, Democrats included.

W hen investigating serious matters, do not do it by halves.

To pinpoint a problem’s root causes and identify possible fixes, it’s necessary to examine each side of the issue, not just the one that is politically advantageous.

This is especially true when discussing matters as serious as the effort to undermine faith in U.S. elections. And when it comes to casting doubt on the elections, the shame and blame belong to many; no party is free from sin. (One side may technically be guiltier than the other, but that is a matter of degree.)

It is therefore hard to hear someone harp on just one of the many purveyors of election distrust and leave it at that. What’s the point of entertaining a skewed perspective?

Thus, when the Washington Post publishes a report titled “How Trump and his allies are sowing doubt ahead of the midterms,” which rightly accuses President Trump and his Mos Eisley Cantina band of hangers-on of undermining Republicans’ faith in elections, one cannot help but ask whether the report will stop at the White House or include the whole picture — whether it will spare a word for what is happening on the other side of the aisle.

Forty-one percent of Kamala Harris voters believe Trump did not legitimately win a second term, according to YouGov data. The share of Democrats who believe votes will be counted accurately fell from 75 percent in 2022 to 55 percent in 2026, according to an AP-NORC survey. Separately, Pew found that the share of Democrats who say they’re “confident mail and absentee votes will be counted as voters intend” dropped from 88 percent in 2022 to 64 percent this year. Pew also found that 72 percent of Democratic supporters believe this week’s elections will be “well-run,” down from a peak of 90 percent in 2024.

Yet none of this is mentioned in the Post’s report on efforts to undermine faith in the U.S. electoral process. Rather, the story focuses only on Trump and his allies. It mentions Democrats only in reference to their supposed efforts to protect elections.

The New York Times did the same recently in an article titled “Trump Relies on Falsehoods to Cast Doubt on Elections,” concentrating solely on the president and sidestepping the mirrored phenomena on the Democratic side.

But if we want a serious conversation about attacks on election integrity, we have to cover all the threats, not just the one from the White House. We must ask: “What about the rest of the story?” “Who is pushing Democratic doubt?”

It is not “whataboutism” to ask these questions — it is simply the pursuit of the whole picture.

The left’s concern about elections stems largely from the same sources keen to highlight Trump’s anti-election chicanery: Democrats and the press, which may explain the one-sided reporting.

Go to a Trump rally or spend a moment with the president’s boosters on the podcast circuit and you will hear plenty of questions and doubts about the electoral process. But open your paper, turn on late-night television, or catch almost any Democratic press conference, and you will get more of the same, just from the other direction.

Last week, the New York Times posed a serious question in a headline: “If Democrats Win Congress, Could the G.O.P. Refuse to Seat Them?”

At MS NOW, Joe Scarborough worried whether Elon Musk or other “trillionaires” might try to “hack the results” of the midterm elections.

At ABC, late-night host and Democratic booster Jimmy Kimmel urged his viewers to “get out and vote” before adding, “Assuming the Trump administration allows the states to count the votes.”

Then there is the Washington Post again, which published an anonymously sourced report titled “U.S. officials privately advise states fearing Trump election meddling.”

The story names no individuals, titles, or offices. It refers only obliquely to having reviewed “some of the documents” prepared for the aforementioned private meetings. It does not identify which states the nameless “U.S. officials” — who, the Post notes, “have previously focused on countering authoritarianism abroad” — are supposedly advising. With the thinnest of sourcing, the article tells readers they need to be scared, and that they need to question whether the elections will be on the up-and-up come November.

All of this is in addition to the long-running effort by Democratic lawmakers and luminaries to challenge and undermine election integrity.

Just last week, Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom accused Justice Department employees of conspiring to “steal this election” and claimed there is “no question” in his mind that Trump is going to try to “steal votes.”

Elsewhere, Democratic Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York said Republicans would try “any diabolical scheme to prevent November 3 from being a free and fair election.”

If we reach a little further back, we get failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who has done more than most to advance the conspiracy theory that the Russians robbed her at the ballot box, and failed gubernatorial candidate and media darling Stacey Abrams, who has yet to provide the conclusive evidence she promised would show she was cheated in the 2018 Georgia governor’s race.

Election denialism was especially bad in 2000, when Democrats, including the late Democratic Representative Alcee Hastings of Florida, launched an effort to block the certification of George W. Bush as president. There were registered objections during the certification process, claims of voter fraud, and even a congressional walkout.

“I object to the certificate from Florida,” Hastings said on the House floor. Speaking to then–Vice President Al Gore, he added, “Mr. President, and I take great pride in calling you that, I must object because of the overwhelming evidence of official misconduct, deliberate fraud, and an attempt to suppress voter turnout.”

After Bush was declared the legitimate victor, a downcast Hastings turned to Gore and said, “We did all we could, Mr. President.”

To this day, a substantial number of Democrats remain convinced that Bush stole the 2000 election and that the Supreme Court helped him do it.

In fact, Al Gore still occasionally plays the king-in-exile routine, including during the 2016 election when he urged supporters to get and out vote because, “I don’t want you to be in a position year from now where you welcome Hillary Clinton and say, ‘Actually, you did win. It just wasn’t close enough to make sure that all the votes were counted’ or whatever.”

If one didn’t know better, one would think that the Democratic rubric is this: elections are legitimate only when they win. Don’t laugh: Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren suggested as much in 2019 when she declared, without evidence, that “massive voter suppression” efforts had robbed Abrams of the governor’s mansion in Georgia, and that Republicans resort to such dirty tactics because “they know that if all the votes are counted, we’ll win every time.”

When we debate serious matters, we cannot do it by halves. Yet that’s exactly what we see done repeatedly in news coverage. How can one write an entire news report about attacks on election integrity and omit half of the story?

We cannot talk about gerrymandering without inviting readers to examine Illinois’s congressional map. We cannot talk about Supreme Court voting habits without noting that the conservatives cross over to vote with the liberals roughly 100 percent more often than the reverse.

And we cannot talk about election integrity concerns without mentioning the culture of doubt that Democrats and members of the press have indulged for nearly every major election cycle since before 9/11, from straight news reports to “comedy shows.”

To tell only one half of the story suggests you do not care about the problem; you care only about landing a clean hit on your political rival.