Electoral Processes

3. Factors That Make Conflict Intractable

This introductory article was written by ChatGPT at the direction of Heidi Burgess, who reviewed, edited, and approved the final content.
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We have frequently written that democracy is much more than elections and voting. While that is true, legitimate elections are a key component of successful democracies. Democracy depends not only on holding elections, but on having elections that citizens and political competitors regard as legitimate. When the rules are trusted, losing parties can accept defeat, organize for the next election, and continue to participate peacefully in the political system. When the rules are widely seen as rigged, every election becomes an existential struggle. Electoral processes therefore become a major conflict overlay problem: disputes over policy are intensified by disputes over whether the process for choosing leaders — and hence, policy — is itself fair, honest, and worth following.

Some concerns about electoral legitimacy are well grounded. In the United States, partisan gerrymandering can allow politicians to choose their voters, rather than voters choosing their representatives. The Brennan Center's explanation of gerrymandering describes how district lines can be manipulated to favor one party or dilute the voting power of particular communities. Although racial gerrymandering was recently disallowed by the U.S. Supreme Court, political gerrymandering is still considered legal.

Voting rules can also make participation harder for eligible citizens, especially when registration, identification, mail voting, polling-place access, or voter-roll maintenance rules are designed or implemented in ways that disproportionately burden some groups. The Brennan Center's tracking of state voting laws illustrates how much election rules vary across states.

In presidential elections, the Electoral College creates another legitimacy concern, because it can award the presidency to a candidate who did not win the national popular vote. This is constitutional and legal, but it still seems unfair to many citizens. However, the Electoral College has a legitimate reason for existing. It was originally created as a compromise between founders who wanted citizens to elect the president directly (to maintain separation of powers), and those who wanted Congress to do it (fearing "mob rule" if the voters chose the president directly). In addition, the electoral college was designed to protect the interests of small states, at least a little bit. With direct election of the president, the fear was that the citizens of the heavily populated states would completely outvote and essentially disenfranchise the citizens of small states. (This one reason for the Senate's structure too.) By allocating electoral votes based on a state's total representation in Congress (two for its Senators plus its seats in the House), the system guarantees smaller states a baseline level of influence in presidential elections — though not nearly the equal influence they get in the Senate. It certainly can be argued that this is a legitimate solution, though it is also understandable why some people think it is unfair.

Other common claims are much less well supported. The most important example is the claim that large numbers of fraudulent or ineligible voters routinely decide American elections. Individual cases of illegal voting do occur, and election systems need safeguards against them. But repeated studies have found that voter fraud, especially in-person impersonation fraud, is extremely rare. The Brennan Center's review of the myth of voter fraud concludes that fraud is not occurring on anything like the scale needed to "rig" major elections.

Claims about erroneous counting also are largely unfounded, but need careful handling, nevertheless. Counting mistakes can happen in any large administrative system, but modern elections include layers of checking, recounts, and audits. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission explains that election audits are designed to verify voting-system accuracy, detect discrepancies, and promote public confidence.

Unfortunately, real concerns and unfounded claims often become mixed together. A voter who hears about gerrymandering, long lines, slow vote counts, rejected ballots, foreign interference, or confusing election laws may become more willing to believe sweeping claims that "the whole system is corrupt." Political leaders can then exploit that distrust by insisting that any loss must be the result of cheating, as Trump asserted after his 2020 loss (and continues to do so to this day).

After the 2020 Presidential election, the Trump campaign and allied parties filed 62 lawsuits challenging the results. 61 of those claims were rejected as invalid, by both Democratic and Republican judges. And the one that was upheld, in Pennsylvania, had nothing to do with fraud, and would not have changed the outcome of the election. Nevertheless, Trump and about 70% of Republican voters still believe the election was "stolen," and a large number of Republican leaders still assert that, although there apparently is no polling available to come up with an exact (or even approximate) number.

Internationally, the problem of election illegitimacy is also growing. International IDEA's Global State of Democracy 2025 warns of declines in electoral integrity and other democratic institutions across many countries. Once large groups of citizens believe elections are illegitimate, they may see ordinary democratic constraints as naïve or even dangerous. If the other side is presumed to be stealing power, then intimidation, voter suppression, refusal to certify results, manipulation of rules, or even political violence can be rationalized as necessary self-defense.

The constructive response to such election skepticism is not to deny that electoral systems have flaws. It is to distinguish between real vulnerabilities that need reform and claims that are unsupported by evidence. Legitimate concerns about gerrymandering, unequal access, confusing procedures, campaign manipulation, and cybersecurity should be addressed through transparent, fair, and broadly accepted reforms. Strong electoral legitimacy, for example, requires easy access for eligible voters, together with security to assure that ineligible people do not vote. Counting processes need accuracy and transparency to promote public confidence.

In deeply divided societies, protecting democracy means defending not just one's preferred candidates, but the integrity of the process that allows political opponents to compete, lose, accept that loss, and try again, peacefully, the next time around. The U.S. certainly has a long way to go in that regard, as do a significant number of other countries around the world.

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This page was created by ChatGPT in response to this prompt. It was then reviewed, edited, supplemented (considerably this time) and approved by Heidi Burgess. More information about how and why we are using AI in this way, and about the growing number of ways in which Beyond Intractability is using ChatGPT, Claude and other AI systems to generate content and build out the BI system, is available on our BI/AI Overview Page.