Tinker Bell and The Ballot

In Peter Pan, Tinker Bell the fairy would not have lived if people had not believed in her. The same is true of Democracy and its institutions.1

The Rule of Law sounds magisterial: invincible, unbreakable, and immutable. It is not. Laws are just words that everyone has agreed to believe in, including those who enforce it and adjudicate it. Laws, and the institutions erected upon them, therefore, are only as indestructible as the people involved in the process: that is, they are fragile, as ephemeral as fairies; without faith, they die.

The bedrock of democracy is fair and free elections whose results are accepted by all parties. No electoral system or process is perfect—databases drop data; signatures don’t match; someone forgets about that one bag of paper ballots in the corner. And human error, at all levels of the process, is always with us. In strong democracy finding errors is a good thing: finding errors tends to lead to better systems, incremental improvements. Finding and fixing errors makes things fairer and better, not worse.

But we have to believe in the inherent worth of a system or institution in order that when we see errors we don’t see bad intent and believe in corruption, but, rather, see human mistakes and believe it’s worth finding way to improve it. When politicians and pundits and bad actors question the essential integrity of any voting system they weaken the very trust a system needs to work. When someone, such as Donald Trump, says he will only trust an election result if he wins, he is eroding that bedrock faith required to make the system work.

When good people disagree, or the errors have piled up enough to be confusing—the hanging chads, the lost-from-the-database signatures, the felons who weren’t felons when they actually voted—then the two sides go to court to let the law sort it out. But what happens when one side or the other no longer trusts the court, no longer believes that the law is impartial? We get the situation we are in today in which election officials are afraid for themselves and their families; afraid for their lives. We get voters who are afraid to go to a polling station to fill in a ballot because they are intimidated by the other voters (themselves emotional and angry because they’ve been told the law is not trustworthy and that their country is being stolen) who are on a hair trigger and looking for someone to blame.

The US election is 8 days away. I don’t know who’s going to win.2 (No one knows.) My hope, though, is that wherever you are, you vote. My hope is that you still believe enough in the rule of law and the soundness of our institutions, that you still have faith enough in our democracy to make the effort. That you trust that you and your vote count. I believe you do.

I want Tinker Bell to live.

See the Tinkerbell Effect.