Voting issues roil U.S., Belarus

In Minsk and in Minneapolis, and throughout Belarus and America, citizens are seething over voting issues.

In Belarus, the throngs in the streets are protesting an election stolen this month by strongman Alexander Lukashenko, the repressive president for 26 years who's often described as "Europe's last dictator." Proving the appellation apt, Lukashenko's security services beat or tortured many of the brave Belarusian protesters, which only added to their numbers.

In the U.S., of course, the dynamic isn't as dire. But allegations of voter suppression are boiling over in the 2020 campaign, too. The most incendiary issue involves the United States Postal Service, which warned that it may not be able to properly process the record number of mail-in ballots expected because of COVID-19 concerns.

Critics charge that the cuts to a service that's even more essential amid the pandemic are politically motivated — an allegation backed up by none other than President Donald Trump himself, who told Fox Business Network's Maria Bartoromo, "If we don't make a deal, that means they don't get the money. That means they can't have universal mail-in voting; they just can't have it."

The "they" Trump is denying are Democrats and, more profoundly, the American people. Neither will have the president decreeing "they just can't have it," so a House vote and congressional hearings with Postmaster General Louis DeJoy (a Trump and GOP megadonor) were scheduled. DeJoy de-escalated the situation, at least a bit, by suspending further cuts until after the election. But he didn't commit to undoing any of the damage already done.

Voters electrified by threatened elections is an issue that extends beyond Belarus and the U.S., however. There's a universality to heated emotions over voting, three experts said in e-mail interviews.

"The protests we are seeing in Belarus and the U.S. are happening in two very different contexts, but they are a reflection of the same universal desire for representative government," said Annie Boyajian, director of advocacy for Freedom House, a nonpartisan think tank dedicated to strengthening democracies worldwide. The phenomenon is "something we see all over the world," Boyajian added. "No matter where people are — Sudan, Iran, Hong Kong, France — they want a government that protects their rights and is responsive to their needs."

And when a government is more repressive than representative, it can create a backlash that's hard to contain in any country, in part because it becomes a personal as well as a political issue.

There's an "underlying political psychology" behind voting, said Prof. Christopher Federico, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for the Study of Political Psychology. "There's a good deal of evidence that people care about 'procedural fairness' when they make judgments about whether governing institutions and leaders are worthy of respect and support," he said.

"Procedural fairness has to do with whether decisions were made in accordance with established rules for making decisions. In a representative democracy, those rules include a formal right to vote, so any infringement of that is likely to produce anger — anger being the emotion produced by perceptions of injustice.

"Now, beyond the issue of disenfranchisement being a rule violation, it also involves a denial of what political psychologists call 'voice' — the right to be heard by those in power, in this case by having one's vote considered. A lot of research suggests that voice is essential to judgments of procedural fairness. If citizens are denied voice in the form of the vote, they will believe that governing institutions and leaders are not rendering decisions or operating in a fair way. In turn, outcomes produced by procedures that are seen as unfair are more likely to be rejected."

And thus, there's a legitimacy crisis in Belarus — and maybe even here in America. In fact, that fear seemed to be present in former President Barack Obama's mind during his sobering speech to the Democratic National Convention. "Embrace your own responsibility as citizens — to make sure that the basic tenets of our democracy endure," Obama said. "Because that's what at stake right now. Our democracy."

Democracy's DNA — elections — are seen as a collective civic duty, but also an indicator of individual identity, said Aram Hur, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri's Truman School of Public Affairs.

"Although we often talk about voting in rights terms, survey data actually show that the majority of citizens in advanced democracies see voting as a matter of civic duty," Hur said. "I find that this sense of civic duty to vote has a lot to do with national identification with one's democracy — a sense of belonging to the national community that the democracy purportedly represents."

The backlash in Belarus and among some in the U.S., Hur said, "is actually about something deeper than just anger against rigged outcomes or ineffective votes (any given person's vote rarely is in terms of being pivotal to the outcome). It's about identity and feelings of national exclusion: that by curtailing or rejecting my duty to vote, one's democracy no longer represents 'who we are' as a nation or 'my' group as part of that nation. Vote-rigging is not new and happens in democracies more often than we think. But the degree and kind of backlash we're seeing in those two cases are better understood when seen through the lens of identity and national exclusion."

In Belarus, the backlash has Lukashenko back on his heels. The European Union won't recognize the results of the election and will impose sanctions on key government figures. And Europe's last dictator reportedly may turn to Eurasia's enduring one: Vladimir Putin. The former KGB operative's Russian government is suspected in Thursday's poisoning of top opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who is just the latest Kremlin critic to face grave consequences for their courage.

Here at home, backlash seems to be building against the paring of the Postal Service and other perceptions of voter suppression. "There is some evidence that threats to voting can produce a counter-reaction like this," said Federico, specifically pointing to legislation like voter ID laws that "can elicit anger and compensatory action by affected voters, which in turn offsets the suppressive effect of the legislation." And after nearly every DNC speaker sounded the alarm, there's a ballot alacrity that seems unprecedented in presidential elections.

Worldwide, Freedom House has tracked 14 consecutive years of a decline in global freedom. And the pandemic is presenting "a range of new challenges to democracy and human rights," Boyajian said. "But, the power of peaceful, motivated, citizen-led movements can overcome even the most dire circumstances and change the course of history overnight. They can generate much-needed improvements in democracies like ours, and transform authoritarian regimes."

Ending on a hopeful note amid a bleak outlook for democracy, Boyajian concluded that, "Even the worst, most repressive governments cannot sustain themselves forever when faced with that kind of power."

There's profound power in voting. Citizens should never take it for granted. And governments should never try to take it away.

John Rash is a Star Tribune editorial writer and columnist. The Rash Report can be heard at 8:10 a.m. Fridays on WCCO Radio, 830-AM. On Twitter: @rashreport.