When the executive cries fraud without evidence, liberty trembles

The first principle I ever committed to public paper was this: governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Every word of that phrase matters, but none more than consent. An election is the formal act by which a free people render or withhold that consent. It is, in a republic, the one mechanism that separates self-government from every other arrangement. When a president takes to primetime and declares that arrangement riddled with "shocking vulnerabilities" — and experts, as NPR reports, find the claims to consist largely of old arguments unsupported by new evidence — something far more corrosive than fraud is at work.

I want to be precise here, because precision is what the matter demands. The allegation of fraud is not the same as the demonstration of fraud. A free republic must be able to investigate irregularities; that is not only permissible but necessary. What is not permissible — what is, in fact, the classic instrument of despotism — is the deployment of unverified allegation by an executive who holds the machinery of government in his hands, aimed at the very institution that checks his power. That is not protecting elections. That is undermining them.

I distrust concentrated power on principle, and I distrust it most keenly when it speaks in the language of emergency. Every consolidation of authority I witnessed in my own time came dressed in the rhetoric of necessity — the alien threat, the seditious press, the smuggler at the border. The Federalists who passed the Alien and Sedition Acts believed themselves defenders of the Republic. They were its enemies. The form of the emergency changes; the logic does not. When an executive warns of vulnerabilities he cannot demonstrate, the citizen ought to ask a plain question: who benefits from a public that has lost faith in its own vote?

The answer, as inference — and I mark it as such, since I have not lived these events — is always the same: the one who already holds office. Doubt cast broadly enough becomes an argument for executive intervention in the counting of votes, the certification of results, the rules of participation. Each intervention, however small, is a stone removed from the wall between the citizen and the government that is supposed to serve him. NPR's reporting that experts find "much of Trump's claims" to amount to "old news" is not a partisan judgment; it is the ordinary work of an educated public doing what an educated public must do — testing a claim against evidence and reporting the result.

I founded a university because I believed, without reservation, that liberty's only durable guardian is an informed citizenry. The press — imperfect, partial, sometimes scurrilous — is the instrument by which that citizenry stays informed. When I was president I said things about newspapers I am not proud of; the heat of office tempted me toward impatience with criticism. But the principle I held before and after office was correct: a free press, however maddening, is more friend to liberty than a quiet one. The reporters and experts quoted in this story are performing exactly the function a republic requires. That work deserves support, not contempt.

Let the standard be simple: bring the evidence into the open, subject it to scrutiny, and let the citizen judge. That is the republican way. What a republic cannot survive — what no republic has ever survived — is a governing power that persuades its citizens their own choices do not count. The Declaration's premise is that all authority flows upward from the people. The moment the people are taught to doubt the pipe through which that authority flows, the whole edifice is in danger. On this, I will not equivocate: unsubstantiated claims of election fraud, advanced by the executive branch against the institution that checks it, are an assault on the consent of the governed — and ought to be named as such.