A Red Card, a Phone Call, and the Authoritarian Playbook
If Trump Will Cheat at Soccer, He’ll Cheat at an Election
On Wednesday, U.S. striker Folarin Balogun picked up a red card in our World Cup win over Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was a controversial call. Plenty of people, maybe most, thought the referee blew it. But a red card carries an automatic one-game suspension. Those are the rules.
Then the president called FIFA.
Trump phoned FIFA president Gianni Infantino, the same guy who awarded him a “peace prize” last year. FIFA waived the red card suspension, the first time it’s done that in more than sixty years of World Cup play. The Belgians said they were “astonished,” because the reversal breaks FIFA’s own written rules.
You can believe the ref got it wrong… and still know this is worse.
It’s not good for anyone–and it’s definitely not good for our right to vote and protect our freedoms–when the most powerful man on earth can change any outcome he doesn’t like with a phone call.
When They Can’t Win, They Change the Rules
This is the oldest move in the authoritarian playbook. When people with too much power hit a result they don’t like, they don’t dig in and play harder like the rest of us: they change the rules and erase whatever came before.
A red card Trump didn’t like becomes no red card at all.
An election result he didn’t like becomes no election at all.
Even Our Imperfect System is a Better Option
For America’s 250th, VoteBeat’s Jessica Huseman published a sharp little history that’s worth your time. Her point is one many of us never learned in school: the Constitution has never contained a national right to vote. The founders left voting rights to the states, not to a president and not to one government in Washington.
That wasn’t an oversight; it was the design. For 250 years states have widened the franchise and rolled it back. New Jersey let some women and Black men vote under its 1776 constitution, then stripped those rights in 1807.
Whether and how you can vote has always been a matter of which state you’re standing in–for better or worse. States don’t always get it right. Sometimes they get it horribly wrong. But leaving the vote to fifty states, fifty sets of hands, was the whole point. It means no single ruler in Washington gets to set all the rules.
This is Happening With Elections – Right Now
Unlike cheating your way out of a red card after it’s given, the easiest time for an authoritarian to steal an election is before Election Day. And they’ve already started.
Look at the past few months: Trump’s administration has moved to have the Postal Service refuse to carry your mail ballot, sued thirty states to pry loose their voter rolls, pushed a national proof-of-citizenship system built on a broken database, and sent ICE into county election offices to pull names straight from the files. The FBI has raided the voter-registration groups that help people get on the rolls.
It’s all the same move, all part of the same plan. Trump doesn’t like how the election is shaping up, so he changes the rules while the game still being played. He’s trampling the states to seize control of who gets to vote, just like he ignored the World Cup referee and the FIFA rulebook.
When the Ref Really Does Blow It
Sometimes a state is the problem. Red states are quietly writing their own citizenship tests for the ballot box. Louisiana redrew its map to erase a Black district after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Callais.
Even then, the answer is never a strongman reaching beyond his authority to put things right for his own side. The answer is to let the system–imperfect as it may be–do its job. Voters in California and Virginia killed mid-decade map grabs at the ballot box. Wisconsin’s supreme court is taking up its gerrymander. Federal judges have thrown out Trump’s demand for voter rolls ten times and counting. The people’s elected and appointed leaders fixing it a step at a time; not a thumb on the scale to rig the whole thing.
In America, Voters Pick Their Leaders—Not the Other Way Around
So here’s what our 250th birthday should teach us. Because the founders left the vote to the people’s elected representatives in the states, your own vote is where this is won or lost. Your secretary of state race, your state supreme court, the ballot measure two towns over.
The strongman is on the phone with the referee, right now. He’s making his plans for this election. Are you making yours?
Hands off our vote.