Article originally published on Crain’s Detroit Business.
Former Govs. John Engler, a Republican, and Jim Blanchard, a Democrat, are joining forces to bolster the public’s faith in elections amid attempts to undermine and sow distrust in the process and results.
They are board members of the Democracy Defense Project, a bipartisan group created this year to defend the transparency, safety, security and validity of the electoral system after former President Donald Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election. It is focused on eight swing states, including Michigan. Other Michigan leaders are former U.S. Rep. Mike Bishop, a Republican, and former Lt. Gov. John Cherry, a Democrat.
The initiative, launched ahead of the 2024 presidential election, comes as Gallup reports that 57% of American adults are very or somewhat confident that votes will be accurately cast and counted. There is a record-high 56-percentage point partisan gap, with 84% of Democrats and 28% of Republicans having faith in the vote’s accuracy.
What is your goal?
Engler: It’s an effort to reassure the electorate voters that the process is going to be handled in a fair way, that people who are entitled to vote do and that the votes that are cast on Election Day or cast early through absentee ballots and early voting are counted properly and reported properly and the outcomes are then as such to be accepted.
Blanchard: We have a history of accurate, fair, open, transparent elections. Yet in recent years, people have begun to attack the election process, claiming it’s rigged or certain votes aren’t counted or other votes are phony. It dispels trust in the system, and trust is the coin of the realm. We’ve come together like a lot of leaders in other states to work hard to push back on all this misinformation and point out elections are decentralized as well. We have 83 county clerks, over 1,500 local city and township clerks. The people who work at the polls are your neighbors. There are thousands of people who work at the polls. They’re really the anchor of democracy and they deserve our respect, indeed admiration, given the kind of threats that are made occasionally. We’re united in doing that.
Engler: A good example of something in the past, you remember, (was) four years ago in Antrim County. (A user error related to a tabulator media drives resulted in the clerk initially showing that Joe Biden beat Trump in the rural county. It was quickly corrected.) Antrim County is a very small county. If all the votes would have gone one way or the other, it wouldn’t make much difference. Yet that got spun up because there was nobody who could immediately say, ‘Wait a minute, stop.’ … That got blown up into some kind of talisman for all kinds of massive problems and it really wasn’t and shouldn’t have been. It should have been spiked early on.
Blanchard: I don’t ever remember people questioning the processes in elections locally or the workers that you go see who are largely older women trying to do their patriotic duty. This is a new problem. Obviously, I think it’s been aggravated by Donald Trump. There’s no doubt about it. But there are others that lose elections and claim it wasn’t accurate or (was) rigged and the count should have been questioned. It’s not just one party, although in more recent (times) it has been Mr. Trump. It doesn’t matter. We have to defend our system and promote it. … We’ve released survey results from Glengariff that shows that the public, if they know the processes we adopt and have, would have a lot more faith in elections.
How do you cut through when Trump has a bullhorn and misinformation easily spreads on social media platforms?
Engler: We’re already seeing — at least some of these reports on the early voting, absentee ballots around the country — a bit of a return to normalcy. I want to put brackets around normalcy I guess. But 2020 was so aberrational because of COVID and we had so many changes in election process, how you could vote, how ballots were being collected, things done differently that hadn’t been done before. That whole environment in 2020, it was just a weird time for the country in a lot more areas than just elections. But the elections were obviously really important. I think ’24, behaviors have gone back, tend to the mean. (He noted new changes, like same-day voter registration and in-person early voting, however, and said Trump has learned from his mistake of criticizing early and absentee voting in 2020.) They’re taking a much better approach in both campaigns and that’s saying, “Swamp the vote. Let’s get our numbers out there in such big numbers that it isn’t going to be close.” That to me is the way to do this. … I just think ’24 is going to be a much more normal type of year.
Blanchard: We had an August primary, and there were contests, particularly for the Senate and primaries in the House. I don’t know of anyone complaining it was rigged or inaccurate or unfair or secretive. That’s a good sign. … The truth is we can’t control (social media). It’s so easy on social media to lie, lie, lie and get away with it. … Our remedy is to push back publicly through public media. Another thing I think we need to do is asking people to thank their local election worker. Most of them are not paid. If they’re paid, it’s a modest stipend. We need to make sure they’re recognized, thanked and protected.
Is diminished trust in elections a blip or has permanent damage been done?
Engler: The system of having the votes cast and then counting the votes, that’s reverting to the mean. It’s going back to being more normal. It doesn’t mean people are going to like the results if they lose. Nobody likes that. But it will be harder going forward to question and suggest, “I lost because of something.”
Blanchard: The focus on quote “rigged elections” by some is a passing fancy and we’ll get back to normal. There’s always been some suspicion about voting and the results. There’s always been rural concern about the big city and how it’s run. There’s always been that. But we’re hoping (it is) not (lasting), of course, because we’re bipartisan and I think that gives us some credibility. We know about Michigan elections. We know what’s going on. We know the candidates that are running. We have the experience and we care enough to say so. We’re trying to engender greater trust in our election process, which we think has worked quite well to the benefit of the people of Michigan.
Engler said the “harder problem” arises when there are recounts in tight races, such as Florida in 2020, or situations like when Stacey Abrams alleged voter suppression in her loss in the 2018 Georgia governor’s election. “On both sides we’ve seen this. But clearly when you have a presidential candidate who continues on, it prolongs it.”
Blanchard: I think business leaders can help push back on any notion that our elections are not safe, secure, transparent and accurate. The business community could be really helpful.
Should money be spent on ads to help restore trust in the system?
Engler: I don’t know how you break through. You tell me what you put on the election that anybody would even see today with the avalanche of ads that are out there. One thing we’ve talked about is the importance of going back to civic education. We have a whole generation growing up who frankly don’t know a heck of a lot about much, certainly not about how government works and local clerks work. … The other thing is the actual decline of the media itself. (He cited less coverage of local and state government.) To have that all replaced by social media, it’s one of the reasons the ads are out of control. There’s no ability for anybody to speak with any kind of authority about the condemnation of something that’s obviously false.
(Blanchard noted there is risk to spreading disinformation, noting that Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems nearly $800 million to settle a lawsuit over the network’s lies about the 2020 election.)
“It’s a serious issue. The point about civic education, everybody has been wringing their hands about that. I have been working with the National Archives Foundation. We’re trying to figure out how to pump up civic education in schools. Our survey research shows that young people get involved for almost the rest of their lives and get knowledgeable during their middle school years, almost before junior high. That’s where they kind of get interested in politics. The more schools can have mock elections, debates, go visit your city hall, (that is) really big stuff that sticks with people. You’ve got to start early.”
Published: Oct 23, 2024
