Safeguarding American democracy: Resisting electoral manipulation after the Attack on the Capitol

While electoral manipulation has been increasing all around the world, studies addressing resistance to electoral manipulation are rare. Very little is known about the actors attempting to prevent electoral manipulation and their strategies. This paper addresses the gap by offering a new way to categorize and assess said actors and their actions. This paper examines attempts to develop resilience against electoral manipulation in the United States between the contentious presidential election of 2020 and the next presidential election in 2024. The paper answers the following questions: 1) Which actors attempted to resist electoral manipulation in the United States between 2021 and 2024? 2) What kinds of strategies did they utilize? and 3) What are the partisan affiliations and leanings of the actors and what are the differences between the Democratic and Republican parties in their approaches to resisting electoral manipulation? The paper also offers a preliminary analysis of how effective or successful these actors and their strategies may prove to be in preventing manipulation of the 2024 presidential election. To recognize acts of resistance, this study first identifies the electoral manipulation tactics in use in the present-day United States. For that purpose, this study relies on a framework constructed by this author. The framework categorizes electoral manipulation tactics utilized by Trump and other members of the Republican party in connection with the 2020 elections and thereafter. This paper relies on qualitative and quantitative content analysis of news reports and editorials from the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. To complement the newspaper material, criminal indictments related to attempts to overturn the 2020 election are also examined. Acts of resistance to electoral manipulation are categorized by type of actor, type of action and type of electoral manipulation they are trying to resist. The paper finds that many different actors have attempted to resist electoral manipulation, for example Congress, the Biden administration, attorneys and the courts, electoral officials, the media, non-governmental organizations, and private companies. Some of the types of action these actors have taken include indictments, lawsuits, new legislation, raising public awareness of the issue, suspending lawyers’ licenses, and shutting down social media accounts. The actions taken seek to counter or prevent most if not all the different types of electoral manipulation identified in the framework utilized in the paper.