Opinion: Hard to make a case for a rigged election now

Andrew McKeever

GNAT-TV News Project

While the attention of the public and the pundits has been mainly drawn to the announcement that the FBI is reopening an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, the bureau’s director James Comey may have unintentionally done more to undermine a wrongheaded and dangerous argument being advanced by presidential nominee Donald Trump. That’s the one about how American voters are in danger of having the outcome of next week’s election “rigged” and stolen.

It’s a little disingenuous to make that argument when the FBI director — also wrong-headedly, and more on this in a moment — announced last Friday that the bureau had uncovered thousands of emails on a laptop computer belonging to Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Huma Abedin, one of Hillary Clinton’s closest advisers. These emails were found during the course of a separate investigation into Weiner’s sordid social media adventures. But Comey felt it necessary to publicly announce the discovery of the batch of other emails which may — or may not– have a bearing on an investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server the FBI closed earlier this year, after they determined the use of the non-official server was not a deliberate and intentional attempt to shield government communications that might have contained confidential information.

Coming a scant 11 days before an election which has been one of the more tortured national experiences of recent decades, this was a thunderbolt that upended all boats. Typically, the FBI doesn’t announce its investigations without a clear idea of what it’s looking for or the “probable cause” that there’s something fishy buried within, in this case, a trove of emails. It’s certainly not typical for it to announce such an investigation, without the new evidence being properly vetted. In this case, Comey was eager to appear even-handed after closing down his earlier investigation into Clinton’s emails last summer. While you can see he was between a rock and a hard place on this one, announcing the reopening of the investigation when he did was irresponsible. To throw that political dynamite into the fire, without knowing what it really amounted to was not wise, and probably reflected intense pressure either from his agents, who felt the earlier investigation was shut down prematurely, or from elsewhere in the Washington political eco-system.

And apparently, there are hundreds of thousands of emails to go through. So many, that the task of reviewing them all by Election Day, next Tuesday, Nov. 8, will probably not be complete. So we have the specter of a possible president-elect being indicted, should enough question marks turn up in this new round of research turn up something, or the election being influenced by a late-breaking legal issue that won’t be fully explained or knowable. Or Mr. Trump, bellowing from the sidelines in the event he loses, and not accepting the outcome. He has a TV station to launch, after all.

Voting-wise, it may not make much difference. After this crazy election campaign, most voters by now have probably made up their minds one way or the other. The “race to the bottom” quality of this election has tarnished both candidates. There are still probably a large number of undecided voters out there, and another large number who may not bother to vote at all because “holding your nose” and casting a ballot against rather than for a candidate is unappealing. These may be sizable enough blocks to influence a battleground state or two, and more likely, a “down ballot” race for Congress or a state governorship. But voters have probably already “baked in” what they think about Hillary’s “damn emails” as Bernie Sanders artfully put it. Still, it’s shocking that Jim Comey, a fairly well-respected federal official up to this point (and granted, one caught in a massively awkward situation) chose the course he did, instead of taking the time to learn what was contained in the Abedin emails.

But just as Donald Trump may have unwittingly given a (desperately needed) boost to the prospects of the wide-ranging tax reform and overhaul we’ve needed for a long time, so his unsubstantiated claims of a rigged election may have been dashed by Comey’s announcement.. A “grand bargain” awaits where corporate tax rates are reduced and loopholes closed. Common sense reform seems to be beyond the grasp of this and recent Congresses, but the revelation that Trump may have avoided paying taxes for 18-20 years because of a massive $916 million write  off he took in the early 1990s when his fortunes were at a low ebb might finally have been the spur to action that’s been missing up to now. Or not. No point in getting our hopes up.

Similarly, it’s hard for Trump to maintain with a straight face that the election is somehow in danger of being stolen from him, or going to be fraudulent or “rigged,” when the FBI director is okay with taking the step he did last week. That’s a funny way to rig an election. Of course, that paranoia was always absurd and self-serving, designed to whip up his base and soften the blow to the Donald’s ego when he suffers what could be a shattering and humiliating loss. It wasn’t my fault we lost we can hear already — it was rigged. Yeah, right.

Voter fraud happens, but it is incredibly rare. Thanks to the decentralized nature of the U.S. voting system, it’s really hard to impersonate dead voters, or tweak results so massively to change an outcome. When there is suspicion of that, we have the tools to examine every “hanging chad” as took place in Florida following the 2000 election, and get it right. So hopefully, we won’t be hearing any more nonsense from Mr. Trump on rigged elections, but that would be too good to be true. His audiences, though, ought to know better.

A final thought: it’s been reckless and cynical in the extreme for Mr. Trump to  not make crystal clear that he would accept the results of the election, win or lose. That is an unprecedented breach of the unwritten rules of democracy which makes the whole enterprise go. To question the legitimacy of the electoral outcome — unless he wins — risks undermining the ability of the next president to speak authoritatively on behalf of the country and operate as commander-in-chief. But it’s just one more example — not that any more are needed — of how completely unqualified and temperamentally unsound and unfit for the presidency Mr. Trump sadly is.

Hopefully voters will reject him convincingly at the polls, and the long painful struggle to rebuild the Republican Party into a sensible, center-right party ready to responsibly cooperate and compromise and put the interests of the country first, can begin at last.