You’ve seen the long-form think pieces, ominous and lurid and anxiety-producing. With titles like “How Six States Could Overturn the 2024 Election,” they offer a revealing glimpse into a pocket of underrecognized election procedure—a piece of back-office mechanics, a quirk of the statutory code—that could be the wildly improbable key to the whole thing this time.Best XXX porno video. They delight in lingering lasciviously on impending transgression. They’re electoral-process porn. They are written not to inform or motivate but to titillate, as if they were meant to be read furtively, at night, in the dark. But electoral-process porn also dehumanizes and disempowers. It cultivates the exaggerated impression that an election can just be “overturned” or “stolen” out from under us by pushing the right series of buttons. That is, it wants you to forget the fundamental fact that we’re in charge of our own electoral fates. There are a few different types of electoral-process porn. There’s the subgenre focusing on Electoral College math and the architecture of the rites that solemnize the delivery of results. Such pieces have become—understandably—more present since Jan. 6. But the process-porn version isn’t spurred by the actual armed assault on the Capitol. A riot can lead to unquestionable individual tragedy. Yet even a mob several thousand strong has no more ability to change the recorded historical fact of a final tally than to change the ocean tides. Instead, the enticement of this sort of think piece delights not in the brutality of violence but in the intricacy of the artful con. The fertile 2020-cycle soil for this electoral-process porn isn’t Jan. 6 but Donald Trump’s machinations of November and December: the multifaceted campaign to pressure individuals entrusted with official authority to abuse their positions. The new hypotheticals understand the storytelling power of the elaborate heist; after all, Jan. 6 was just the culmination of a monthslong version of “So you’re telling me there’s a chance!” Conjuring other process black swans is a shortcut to access the drama of a bevy of imagined alternate-future Jan. 6 iterations. And the lurid hypotheticals usually operate with an additional twist. The 2020 plot was a criminal conspiracy. But it’s important to this realm of electoral-process porn that the hypothetical have the veneer of lawfulness. Breaking the law is mundane. But executing an Electoral College theft within the technical bounds of the existing structure? That’s devious and crafty. The allure of the caper is in the barely legal. The notion of a lawful overturning of a legitimate election is also mostly fantasy. Law is a dispute-resolution mechanism, not a series of spells: In the real world, no set of Latinate incantations can disappear millions of valid votes. Magical legalism is just law cosplay. Another subgenre fixates on fraud: officials stuffing the ballot box or ballots cast in violation of the rules, or the two in tandem. In every election cycle, there are handfuls of invalid ballots cast. We know about them largely because they’re caught (and rarely counted). That doesn’t excuse the conduct, but it might well change the tenor of its newsworthiness. So fraud-based electoral-process porn needs some extra excitement that run-of-the-mill crime reports lack. One element is the fictitious scale. Three ballots is unremarkable. Three million—with a conspiracy to cover it up—is juicy scandal. It’s also a powerful scapegoat for a losing candidate (and sometimes even a winning one). Another pull of this kind of electoral-process porn is the drama of the armchair detective, at the core of police procedurals and true-crime podcasts. The film 2000 Mules is compelling not because of the possibility that an eligible voter, contrary to state statute, asked a parent in their kids’ soccer carpool to put their sealed ballot in a drop box on the way to the game. It’s compelling—if you find that sort of thing compelling—because of grainy surveillance video and cell-geolocation pseudoscience. It’s all in the film’s tagline: “They thought we’d never find out. They were wrong.” The amateur sleuthery means that the enticement still works even if there was nothing there to find. Still another subgenre highlights the fear of disenfranchisement. There are aspects of many American elections that are harder or more complicated or less accessible than they have to be, and plentiful worthy fights to open up possibilities for the marginalized. But the narratives of improving democratic infrastructure don’t drive popular engagement. Indeed, even egregious perpetuation of the status quo is rarely a page-turner. The continuing disenfranchisement of people with convictions is a travesty affecting millions, but—regrettably—unlikely to be a trending social media topic in October. So the electoral-process porn version needs something more: the scale of behind-every-corner threat and the same relatable protagonist that drives every horror movie. It’s important that the pervasive jump scare could happen to you. An army of body snatchers standing in for poll workers could challenge your vote. A mass purge could strike you from the rolls. It could be your signature that someone decides doesn’t match up. The violent mob could be coming for you. A final subgenre is the technological dystopia. “It” is coming for you, but “it” is now the machine. Deepfakes and hoodied hackers and sentient voting systems programmed to change your vote and erase the evidence. Artificial intelligence and something-something-blockchain. The more reliably mechanized the antagonist, the easier it is to imagine propagation, and the more convincing the science fiction world-building. Please don’t misunderstand. There are very important discussions to be had about every single one of the topics above, facilitated by journalists, advocates, scholars, and analysts operating in the world beyond process porn. At their best, even dire warnings can function a bit like the intelligence disclosures preceding the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, hoping for deterrence and facilitating response. I’m all for calling out room for improvement in a way that furthers a possibility of that improvement. There are plenty of reforms that add more security without meaningfully jeopardizing access, or that make the process more accessible without meaningfully jeopardizing security. And both our constitutional structure and our tech could always do with updating. The problem is the way the story is told. Electoral-process porn has a distinctively prurient tone and style. You know it when you see it. It is crafted not to inform, to advocate, to encourage discussion, or to drive policy change. It’s not a memo for decisionmakers, or a recording of history that we can learn from, or a comparative mirror that encourages new insight into our own circumstances. It’s clickbait that distorts scale and turns each tiff into combat with apocalyptic stakes. It lands precisely at the point in the electoral cycle when there’s no realistic prospect of addressing the alleged issue—because the audience’s absence of power is part of the point. It cultivates urgency, but only in a directionless flail. (Except, of course, when the urgency connects to a donation pitch.) And it’s not benign. First, electoral-process porn can erode the confidence our elections have earned. The vast majority of the time, our elections reliably reveal the preferences of the electorate that shows up at times defined in advance using procedures defined in advance. And because humans are both imperfect and able to recognize our own imperfection, on the handful of occasions when the principal process fails, we’ve set up redundancies and safeguards to address those failures as well. There are a lot of people who work tirelessly, in a rigorously nonpartisan fashion, for little pay and fewer accolades, to maintain a system that continues to earn our trust. Of course, we can get better. That the system works doesn’t mean that it works as well as it could. But it’s also emphatically true that the fact that the system doesn’t work as well as it could doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work. Electoral-process porn undermines that imperative for self-improvement. It drives wave of anxiety after wave of anxiety that attaches not to any particular procedure or location but to the process as a whole. And, perhaps inevitably, to the electoral enterprise. That leads to the second impact: Electoral-process porn can erode participation. If the system is rigged—by the lawyers or the courts or fraudsters or the disenfranchisers or the machines—then it’s rational not to participate. Studies have shown that people who see a news story showing long lines at the polls—even if the article is not about the lines!—are less likely to say that they will vote in future elections. Repeated iterations of lurid narratives about disempowering process problems may help turn that inclination into inactivity. Sometimes this impact is a side effect. Sometimes it might be the point. Third, electoral-process porn based on imagined hypotheticals can desensitize. The more transgressive the projected affront, the more it paints the real-world issues that do occur as benign by comparison. The imagined what-ifs are so much worse. Electoral-process porn becomes a sort of trial balloon for moving the outrage goalposts. The last impact is at the root of the other three. The defining feature of electoral-process porn is that it communicates lack of agency. In electoral-process porn, voters are objects, not actors. They exist in the narrative only to get screwed. At its heart, electoral-process porn contributes to the notion, both counterproductive and counterfactual, that someone other than the voters will decide the outcome of the elections. That our self-governance … isn’t, really. That’s also what makes electoral-process porn different from any of the other narratives of catastrophes, real or imagined, sensational or sensationalized. Elections are the way in which we give ourselves agency to get out of every other problem. It’s the way we decide to build the world in which we want to live together. Sometimes we make dumb choices. Sometimes we make smarter ones. But the election process is our only way to take steps toward fixing the problems we’ve got, or staving off the ones that are coming, beyond just hoping for a savior. And if that election process is the thing that’s unfixably broken … hoo, boy. But it’s not unfixably broken. It’s true that there are very, very, very rarely functional ties, where the margin of victory is smaller than the margin of error. Where elections really are left to the lawyers and the courts to sort through the morass, because we can’t realistically tell whom the voters have truly chosen once the voters have had their say. When an election comes down to 537 votes out of 5.8 million—out of 101 million—every process choice is outcome-determinative. But that shared national black-swan trauma was the anomaly, not the new normal. Plenty of elections before and since—even plenty of elections that seemed really close—have yielded governance at the end of the day by the officials we chose. And so will the elections to come. For a national vote, unless it gets down to 537 ballots in a single determinative state, the voters’ preferences will register and will determine the outcome, even if there’s a bit of white-knuckling as the process plays out. The translation process doesn’t have to be perfect. Unless the ultimate margin is a fraction of a fraction of a percent, we the people still determine our own destiny. Slate is published by The Slate
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