Pennywise coming for democracy? How the ‘clown show‘ of private post-election audits challenges the rationality of the (neo)liberal democratic system

In the wake of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the losing candidate and much of his party and following have refused to accept the election results, citing ‘widespread voter fraud‘. Their subsequent measures to ‘stop the steal‘ and secure ‘election integrity‘ have included a range of (violent and even insurgent) acts promoting a manichean worldview, the passage of new voting and election laws as well as partisan election audits implemented by private firms to investigate largely conspiratorial allegations after the conclusion of official post-election auditing procedures. A Foucauldian governmentality perspective allows to show how these efforts have spanned and appropriated different arts of government. This contribution particularly focuses on the hitherto under-researched ‘audits‘ – rather mundane practices traditionally associated with a (neo)liberal art of government – and demonstrates how they exemplify in a condensed form the current challenges of and to advanced liberal democracy and its epistemic basis. While these ‘audits‘ draw legitimation from mimicking classical depoliticizing governmental strategies that rely on and in turn produce managerial expertise, they are mobilized to politicize election administration, basic democratic procedures as well as principles undergirding the relationship between the individual and the political community. Applying a genealogical approach to public statements given and documents issued by officials and private groups supporting or implementing these ‘audits‘, I analyze how they (re)form a problem to be governed and a field of possible actions for the governed, and furthermore ask what intra-societal relations they normalize and what norms, (forms of) knowledge, authority and truth claims they invoke.