Dear Trump supporters,
How does this end for you?
As the president presses his claim of widespread, systemic fraud in last week’s election, it cannot be a secretive cabal of a few high-ranking Democrats that engineered the fraud. It will be thousands of everyday Americans, like you and me, who decided to engage with the process as poll workers for very little money. Working long hours at a tedious, temporary job, they somehow decided to commit literally thousands of acts of felonious voter fraud, both federal and state. If they are guilty, these individual Americans will be exposed to long prison sentences, perhaps as long as life behind bars.
United States Attorney Barr recently empowered U.S. Attorneys around the county to prosecute credible cases of election fraud. As the president tells it, this fraud is widespread and obvious, so it shouldn’t be difficult for these federal prosecutors to find their thousands of defendants.
That’s one way this story ends.
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The other way is that for all the president’s bluster, his legal threats will amount to so much hot air, quickly dispatched by the courts before he is pleading his case. What will be left is President-elect Joe Biden and his team, who will take the White House, and work to the best of their ability for the United States.
Let’s make a deal, all of us. If President Trump is correct, we should welcome the thousands of prosecutions of criminal poll workers around the county, and their imprisonment. Should the fraud result in an incorrect election result, let’s all welcome Trump to his second term. But if the president’s claims turn out to be false, let’s just as readily accept President-elect Biden, recognize that Trump lost fair and square, and dispense with the bogus conspiracy theories. Is that a deal?
Let’s ask our elected officials to make their own deal.
Republicans and Trumpists should press their case in court in time for a quick resolution — quick enough to prevent a constitutional crisis and allow Biden to take office in January, if the lawsuits fizzle out. And they should accept the results of these lawsuits — if the courts find no widespread fraud, then there was no widespread fraud. At the same time, they should treat Biden as the president-elect, and engage the normative and legal transition process, so that, should he take office in January, he and his team will be prepared to govern seamlessly. And folks like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo should dispense with before-the-fact and contrary-to-the-facts statements that Trump will serve a second term.
Democrats and Biden supporters should work, as Biden has said he will, for all Americans. This means listening not only to their own supporters, but reaching out even to those groups of people who have said they would never accept Biden as president.
Clearly, America is divided. We should all accept facts, make conclusions based on evidence, reject conspiracy theories, and communicate with and listen to the people around us — especially the people with whom we disagree. Let’s get off social media and into each others’ lives. Let’s live in our own communities and not in the echo chamber of our preferred national cable news channel. If we do this, names like Clinton, Trump, and Biden won’t be calls to arms, but people about whom we can have civil, reasoned discussions. Can we do these things for ourselves, and for our country?
Morrison is an associate professor at the University of North Dakota School of Law, where he teaches criminal law. The views expressed in this op-ed are his alone.
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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Forum's editorial board nor Forum ownership.
