ELECTION INTEGRITYDon’t Panic Reading ‘Electoral Process Porn’: There Are Plenty of Safeguards to Make Sure Voters’ Wishes Are Respected
Because of all the fail-safes built into the system, even very close is something the election process can handle, sys one expert. “I’m very confident that the voters are going to decide this election, not the lawyers or the courts.”
You’ve probably seen them: alarming columns or stories with alarming headlines about how somebody is going to exploit an obscure provision in election law to undo the 2024 presidential election and toss it to the House of Representatives. Your vote won’t count, and democracy will go to hell.
Election law scholar Justin Levitt throws cold water on those scenarios, and in an interview with Naomi Schalit, The Conversation’s senior editor for politics and democracy, he says the voters will decide the election, “flat out.”
What’s “electoral process porn?”
It’s a writing genre identifying a tactic or loophole that’s supposedly going to fundamentally change the election process – what I called “The Key to the Whole Thing This Time” in a Slatepiece earlier this year – usually, by taking away everyone’s voting rights and magically delivering the election to one candidate. It’s a lurid, titillating take that depends on the fact that election law and process can sometimes seem impenetrable.
What distinguishes this type of think piece from other reporting on the election process is tone and emphasis, rather than information. Just like not every sex scene in the movies needs an NC-17 label, not every piece about how elections work is going to be electoral process porn.
Perhaps the worst part about electoral process porn is that it leaves readers with an unjustified feeling of helplessness, even the thought that voting might be pointless, if it’s all subject to this supposed hidden gimmick. It is dystopian fiction masquerading as analysis, feeding on people’s anxieties that a basic process of self-government might be taken out of their own hands.
Can you give me a few examples? I want the person who reads this to understand concretely what you’re talking about.
Sure. One example fits the mold of the artful con: the heist movie or spy thriller that depends on knowing the particular procedural lever to deliver results, the MacGuffin nobody else can anticipate, making the person who’s the center of the thriller the smartest person in the room. It’s the story about an Electoral College feature in which an obscure part of the law, say subparagraph (ii)(B) of paragraph (1)(c) about delivering a particular piece of paper, secretly holds the spell to make millions of votes disappear. It depends on a wildly implausible sequence of events and a whiff of magical legalism, with a basic misunderstanding of what legal rules are for.
