Whose Votes Count
Late on Tuesday night President Trump told The New York Times by telephone that he was “absolutely willing to accept” the results of the midterms. He had spent most of two years building a case against them. He revived the old claims about rigged machines and noncitizen voters and seized ballots from 2020 in Georgia, and his administration sued states to purge their voter rolls. The courts stopped much of it. On the eve of the vote the Supreme Court refused to let the administration set aside 20,000 mail-in ballots in California. Then the voters gave the Democrats one of their largest House majorities in generations and flipped seats that had been Republican for decades. The margin left no room to claim fraud.
A week earlier Benjamin Netanyahu lost his majority and called it theft. In the Israeli election on October 27 his bloc fell from 68 seats to 53 in the 120-seat Knesset. Gadi Eisenkot’s bloc won 48. The two Arab-led parties, Ra’am and the Joint List, won 19 seats on a national turnout of almost 78 percent. That is nearly double their share in the last Knesset and the most they have ever held. Netanyahu said on election day that the Arab parties were trying to steal the vote, and Likud later declared the election stolen. The election committee called claims of systematic fraud baseless. Netanyahu then wrote that it is forbidden to form a coalition with Arab parties.
The two leaders made the same claim, but they aimed it at different people. The American deniers say people with no right to vote are voting. Netanyahu cannot say that. Arab citizens make up about a fifth of Israel’s population and they hold the vote by law. His claim is that their votes may be counted but may not choose a government. A court cannot test that claim, and a larger margin cannot beat it, because the margin is made of the votes he rejects. Eisenkot cannot reach 61 seats without the 19. Only once has an Arab party sat in an Israeli government, when Ra’am joined Naftali Bennett’s coalition in 2021, and that government lasted a year.
Raz Segal, who teaches genocide studies at Stockton University, argues in Jacobin that the fight over the Arab parties hides a larger fact. Millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza live under Israeli rule and have no vote. The Jewish settlers who live among them in the West Bank vote in every Knesset election. Segal goes further and calls Israel a genocidal state whose elections cannot be democratic. Israel rejects the charge, which South Africa has brought before the International Court of Justice. But the voting rule needs no verdict on Gaza. A government chosen by some of the people it rules and not by others is a democracy only for those who vote.
The American system held for reasons it can name. The Constitution gives the states the power to run elections and gives the president no role in them. Thousands of local officials ran the count and it went smoothly. Democrats will now run the top election office in nearly every battleground state for 2028. But the system held under a landslide. Gabriel Sterling, who helped run Georgia’s elections in 2020, said this week that one election does not end the movement and that much depends on how close the next one is. Cleta Mitchell, whose group has placed allies across the administration, said it is adding state coalitions.
Trump accepted the result because the numbers left him nothing to dispute. Netanyahu disputes his because the numbers rest on voters he says should not decide. Every democracy counts its votes. The harder test comes when the count is close and the loser has to accept every voter in it.