Mid-term elections in the United States: “The danger is not so much massive electoral fraud as an organized fog of doubt”
Lhe mid-term elections have always constituted an essential counter-power in the United States against the president. They allow voters to correct the course. But those of November 3 are even more crucial. For millions of Americans, they could be one of the last opportunities to place real democratic limits on a president who, since his return to power eighteen months earlier, has methodically weakened the institutions supposed to contain him.
On November 3, the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate will be renewed – a vote that could deprive Donald Trump of his grip on all powers in Washington, restore parliamentary control and restore part of the lost constitutional balance. This is precisely why he is now attacking the elections themselves.
Midterm elections usually punish the party that controls the White House. In 2018, during the Republican’s first term, the Democrats gained 40 seats (out of 435) and regained control of the House of Representatives. Today, with approval ratings at an all-time low, rising inflation and a very unpopular war in Iran, the risk of another electoral setback is very real. This explains the American president’s determination to distort the rules of the game even before the first ballot is cast, to interfere with the electoral process and to sow doubt in advance about the results.
A first method consists of carrying out partisan electoral gerrymandering (gerrymandering). Donald Trump pushed Republican states to redraw their districts in their favor – a maneuver made easier in April by the Supreme Court’s weakening of the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 law protecting the right to vote of minorities. Result: an electoral map which favors less and less electoral competition, where the Democrats will have to gather around 53% of the votes nationally to hope for a simple majority in the House.
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