US has a bigger problem than Trump’s ‘Big Lie’

The former President insists the 2020 election was stolen but there is another electoral scandal plaguing America – and it shames the nation.

Former president Donald Trump speaks to voters during a visit to a caucus site in Clive, Iowa. Picture: Kevin Dietsch

I have been involved in state and federal elections since the mid-1960s. Writing ads and speeches, doing “door knocks”, sticking up posters, proffering how-to-vote cards outside polling booths. Then heading for the tally room to watch the results come in. More often than not I’ve been on the losing side. Yet I’m forever fascinated by the process – by the power of an HB pencil dangling on piece of string to elect or reject a government. In this country the pencil is mightier than the sword. Yes, we’ve had some examples of voting fraud. As a teenager I learned that the dead in Labor stronghold Richmond could vote – as long as they were still on the electoral rolls. It was a Richmond tradition but never affected the outcome.

Yet US democracy, such as it is, knows nothing of the power of our HB pencil. There are many ways to cast a vote in America, varying from state to state and within a state – but that’s only if you’re permitted to vote. Vast numbers, particularly of African-Americans and particularly in Republican states, are prevented from voting by various tactics in an ongoing scandal that shames the nation.

Then there’s the issue of the “stolen” election that Trump trumpets, the Big Lie that he used to justify an armed insurrection. But let the record show that there have been genuine cases of stolen US presidential elections, two of them in living memory. The first involved the sainted John F. Kennedy and the wicked Richard M. Nixon. Many political scholars then and now believe that JFK should have lost to Tricky Dicky in the 1960 election; Nixon, remarkably, behaved with some dignity to avert a constitutional crisis.

Supporters of former US President and Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump celebrate during the 2024 Iowa Republican presidential caucuses in Des Moines, Iowa. Picture: Jim Watson

The story, or perhaps conspiracy theory, has the villainous mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago cooking the books to give Kennedy a narrow winning margin. Perhaps in vengeance, a few decades later the Republicans stole a presidential election from the Democrats. This time the battle was between Vice President Al Gore and George W. Bush and it was neck and neck, coming down to a few hundred disputed votes. The key battleground this time was Florida, where George’s brother Jeb was Governor. Scandal upon scandal. Tens of thousands of blacks were turned away at Florida booths, illegally denied their right to vote. Weeks later the saga ended in Washington DC with a stacked pro-Republican Supreme Court ruling against Gore in his last hope for electoral justice. The whole tale is too tangled and twisted to tell here – I suggest you Google “hanging chads” or, better still, watch a star-studded movie called Recount on Foxtel. Yes, there seems to be overwhelming evidence that Gore was well and truly Bushwacked by the US legal system and lost the presidency that he’d actually, narrowly, won.

Thus the ongoing debacle of the Trump era has pre-echoes. And the US and the world are unlikely to be spared another presidential run by a traitor. Not with another stacked and compromised Supreme Court.

Perhaps we’re fortunate not to elect a president in Australia. We don’t even directly elect a prime minister. Both systems produce duds galore for the Oval Office and the Lodge. But while we have Trumpian politicians, we haven’t yet had a Trump.