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    • Trump won through a safe electoral system. It’s good news
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    Trump won through a safe electoral system. It’s good news

    Online Niel Posted on

    Vote misinformation has become a big business that cannot be ignored. But the 2024 election proved that our voting system works.

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    The good news coming out of Tuesday’s election is clear: Regardless of which presidential candidate you supported, our free and fair system of collecting and counting mail-in and precinct ballots worked as designed.

    At dawn on Wednesday, we knew who had won and could be confident in the results, even though the winner had spent more than a year. lying about how elections are conducted in this country.

    The bad news here is also perfectly clear: the “Fraud Industrial Complex” that has grown and thrived around President-elect Donald Trump. ceaseless flow of election disinformation it is here to stay. There is money to be made from those lies. So you will hear more about them.

    The unknown going forward is this: Republicans have long embraced the state-centric system of organizing elections. But they just spent the year suggesting ways to federalize elections, based on false claim that noncitizens vote in ways that tilt federal elections – they don’t – and supporting voter ID requirements that could concern eligible voters.

    The “resilience” of the American voting system was on full display

    The good news rang out Wednesday morning, when 11 political science and law professors gathered virtually to talk to reporters about what happened in the past 24 hours.

    Charles Stewart, a political scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said people have the most confidence in elections when they have a good voting experience and when the candidate they support wins.

    “I used to joke that the easiest way to increase confidence in an election is for Donald Trump to win the presidency,” Stewart said. “And I think we’re going to test that proposal over the next couple of months and whether that actually takes some of the air out of the tires … of the ‘choice denial’ types of movements or not.”

    Opinion: Trump wins the 2024 election. America needs to admit it doesn’t get “better than this.”

    R. Michael Alvarez, a CalTech professor of political and computational social science, said US election officials withstood foreign disinformation, strong voter turnout, hurricanes that hit Florida, North Carolina and other states and still got the job done.

    “Our electoral process and our electoral system in the United States showed amazing resilience yesterday,” Alvarez said. “I think it was really kind of a remarkable day for election administration.”

    Election disinformation is here to stay. It is too profitable.

    You’ll hear more of the bad news as we wait to see if Republicans retain control of the US Housewhich would give that party a lock on Congress and the White House in January.

    Justin Grimmer, a senior man of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, noted that some groups point to lower voter turnout in 2024 compared to 2020 to suggest that this is evidence that there were “fake votes” cast four years ago.

    “There’s this big fraud industrial complex that’s now being built around claims that there’s a lot of fraud in the U.S. election,” Grimmer said. “It’s hard to put it back in the bottle.”

    There’s a reason for that, according to Stewart, who runs the MIT Election Data + Science Lab: There’s money in disinformation.

    “What we’re seeing now are groups that are emerging specifically to maintain the controversy and make money off of it and try to expand the view,” Stewart said.

    Opinion: Trump is president again, and Democrats can blame Biden’s ego

    It could be more than a week before we know which party won control of the House. This is a window for election naysayers to attack the ballot counting as corrupt. They probably won’t have any proof to offer, but they’ll still want your money.

    “It presents opportunities for the kinds of controversies that we anticipate with presidential elections to come to places like California that have generally been out of the public spotlight in terms of election administration,” Stewart said. — So we’re not out of the woods yet.

    Will Republicans push for federal election legislation? They already have.

    Ben Ginsberg, a lawyer who served as national counsel for four Republican presidential campaigns from 2000 to 2012, is now watching to see if members of Congress in his party propose federal legislation on issues such as non-citizen voting and voter ID.

    US House Speaker Mike Johnson led just such a push this yeareven threatening to shut down the government if he didn’t get his way with the legislation. Johnson and his allies backed down to avoid a political backlash. This has always been more about injecting the false pretense of widespread non-citizen suffrage than actually producing any kind of policy.

    Here’s a hint of how that might play out—the standard Republican tactic has long been to limit voter turnout because a smaller electorate tended to be more beneficial to the party. Trump’s coalition building changed that.

    “In all the years I’ve done Republican campaigns, low turnout has been seen as an advantage for the Republican Party,” Ginsberg said. “But I think his recruitment of low-propensity voters and non-college-educated whites has led to this phenomenon that has changed the base of the party, it seems to me as it has shown in this election.”

    Both political parties need to figure out what kind of presence is preferred

    Jonathan Rodden, a professor of political science from Stanford University, said the shift to low-propensity voters, who now lean Republican, could have an impact on how that party shapes policy when it comes to voting.

    “A lot of this stuff they’ve pushed in the past has operated under the idea that lower turnout is better and that low-propensity voters are likely to be Democrats,” Rodden said. “And now that that’s clearly not the case, it seems like a game-changer for both sides in a way that I don’t think we’ve dealt with yet.”

    Could making it more difficult to vote become a weakness for Republicans, who have so long projected that as a strength? This would be, for me, the biggest surprise of the results of these elections.

    Follow USA TODAY election columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan

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