Ronald Linden: Changing the rules — in life as in baseball

The Little League World series began in Pennsylvania in 1947 and for most of the next 20 years, American teams won. Then, as baseball grew in popularity in other parts of the world, Asian teams began to take the championship. Teams from Taiwan and Japan took all but one title between 1967-74.

Dismayed and embarrassed at being defeated in their own game, the organizers showed the true spirit of fair play: They changed the rules. From 1976 on, all international teams played in one bracket and U.S. teams played in another, with the winners meeting in the World Series final. The new rigged system — which continues today — guarantees that a U.S. team will always be in the championship game.

As with baseball, so with life, and elections. Faith in free and open elections is a rhetorical staple of party pronouncements — until the party starts to lose. Then, as we have seen, it is better to scream fraud — with or without evidence — and change the rules.

The elections of 2020 proved a watershed in American electoral history. A sitting president was defeated, and several key states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia — changed from red to blue. Republican control of the White House and Senate was lost and Democrats were elected in places that had been reliably red — two as senators in Georgia.

The big loser, Donald Trump, and his acolytes cried foul, pressed state officials to “find” votes, and cheered on an insurrection against the elected U.S. government. Unsuccessful at the Capitol in January, they have moved to block the power of voters. It is like the rigging of brackets in Little League baseball, only with much more profound consequences for American democracy.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, nearly 400 new laws have been introduced in state legislatures across the country aimed at making voting more difficult, especially for those voters who are less mobile, live in cities and are less wealthy — in other words, Democrats.

Restricting poll hours and imposing burdensome ID requirements are just the beginning. Some states, like Arizona, have made it easier to purge people from the rolls, while several have raised obstacles to the use of absentee ballots.

But the real aim of these measures is to suppress early voting and mail-in ballots. In 2020 these non-Election Day ballots made up nearly three-quarters of the national vote and in key red-to-blue states, broke heavily for Joe Biden. In Pennsylvania, nearly three times as many Democrats returned early ballots as did Republicans. Trump’s repeated attacks on mail ballots laid the groundwork for his effort to delegitimize the election even before such ballots were counted. Afterwards, Republicans who lost moved to kneecap the early and mail-in voting system.

Republican-controlled states thus have passed measures to change deadlines for mail-in ballots and raise the bar for their use; for example, by prohibiting aiding people in securing and using mail-in ballots. Local officials, more politically reliable, have been granted more power to disenfranchise voters who seek to use absentee or mail-in ballots. Republicans in Georgia and Arizona stripped their secretaries of state of authority over elections gave it to those more beholden to the party. Here in Pennsylvania the Legislature passed a bill mandating voter IDs and restricting time and availability of ballots and boxes. Gov. Tom Wolf has promised a veto.

The problem for the GOP is that even before its capture by Donald Trump, the party’s hold on U.S. voters was weakening. Since the mid-1990s, more U.S. voters have identified or leaned Democratic than Republican — a gap that widened this year. Election vote totals show sizeable majorities in favor of Democrats in key states, and polling repeatedly shows that on most key issues, e.g., abortion, gun control, LGBTQ rights, the electorate favors positions opposed by the Republican Party and Donald Trump.

Despite this, Republicans control more than 60% of the country’s state legislatures and in almost half the states, also the executive. Historical districting patterns and outright gerrymandering ensures suburban and rural dominance — and thus Republican control — of state legislatures.

Redistricting in Pennsylvania in 2011 (later overturned by the state Supreme Court) consistently produced a three-quarters Republican delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives despite the fact that congressional votes were split evenly. Control of state Houses and fears of primary defeats has led to a slew of measures designed to weaken Supreme Court rulings (e.g., Roe vs. Wade) and now limit voting under the guise of protecting it.

A key moment for democracy occurs when the fight is not over the rules of competition but instead takes place within mutually accepted rules. As political scientist Valerie Bunce puts it, in democracies, everyone knows the rules but no one knows the outcome. In authoritarian systems, no one knows the rules, but everyone knows the outcome. Pervasive rule changes to privilege one side or the other are a sign of a wounded democracy.

Like the Little League world series, crucial elections take place in Pennsylvania. Rigging the brackets in baseball might be embarrassing, but rigging the rules to weaken one of democracy’s most powerful tools leaves us all on the losing side.

Ronald Linden recently retired as a professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh.