Choose Your Own Adventure

Or: Do you want a tin-pot dictatorship? Because that's how you get a tin-pot dictatorship.

When I saw this edition of The Morning from The New York Times in my inbox the other day, it didn’t surprise me. Saddened me, sure. But shock? That went out with the mail-in ballots.

Widespread antigovernment protests have escalated into deadly unrest and a deepening political crisis.

Thousands of people nationwide have demonstrated against corruption and police brutality — and clashed with the police. Last week, officers fired live rounds at them and arrested more than 500. At least 38 people were killed, including two children, the Commission on Civil Rights said. Just a few weeks prior, police forces killed 16 people and injured over 400 others.

For more than two centuries, the United States has been a politically stable economic powerhouse, a democratic anchor in an increasingly tumultuous world. But now the government is cracking down: Authorities ordered broadcasters to stop covering the protests live and restricted internet access to the messaging app Telegram. President Donald Trump said that protesters damaging businesses “should be shot in the leg.” Some rights groups and opposition leaders are now warning of an authoritarian turn in the United States.

As those of you who bothered to click the link above already know, this didn’t actually happen in America (yet). It happened in Kenya. But it took minimal editing to turn that NYT story into a plausible event you might have missed amidst all the Epstein files drama. And the fact that you didn’t flinch—at least not right away—is exactly the point of this essay.

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Two Elections, Two Stories, One Country in Doubt

Losing is hard. Losing power is harder.

In a democracy, every election is a referendum not just on policy, but on identity—on who we are, who we believe the country belongs to, and who we think should be in charge. When your side loses, it doesn’t just feel like a political setback. It feels like something was taken from you. Something important. Something personal.

For a long time, Americans accepted that loss—begrudgingly, bitterly, but still within the bounds of legitimacy. Now, when a party loses, the outcome isn’t just disappointing. It’s suspicious. The process is questioned. The vote is doubted. The result doesn’t feel like a reflection of the people’s will—it feels like a rigged game. A cheat code. A theft.

And so we arrive at our current moment: two elections, two cycles in a row, each leaving a good-sized chunk of party diehards convinced that the outcome wasn’t just unfortunate—it was illegitimate. Two stolen election narratives, competing for truth in a country where faith in the system is wearing thin.

The 2020 version came fast and loud. Even before the ballots were fully counted, Donald Trump was calling the election rigged. The fraud claims were sweeping: forged ballots, dead voters, secret midnight dumps, crooked poll workers, hacked machines. Republican officials in multiple states—some of whom voted for Trump—publicly refuted these claims. Sixty court cases failed to produce evidence. Recounts confirmed the original tallies. None of it mattered.

Because the narrative wasn’t about proving fraud. It was about restoring dignity. About telling millions of voters who had just watched their candidate lose—again—that it hadn’t really happened. That the deep state or the Democrats or the media had cheated them. It was a way to reframe humiliation as injustice. To turn defeat into victimhood. And in the process, to cast the entire electoral system as suspect unless it delivered the right result.

The 2024 version has come quieter, but with more technical intrigue. It begins in Rockland County, New York, where analysts have flagged precincts that looked off. Voters showed up, cast ballots for Senator Kirsten Gillibrand or local candidates, but—somehow—left the presidential line blank. In multiple precincts, Kamala Harris got zero votes. That data point has triggered affidavits, lawsuits, and another stolen election narrative.

This one doesn’t lean on fake ballots or dead voters. It focuses on machines. The ones used in Rockland are built and maintained by ES&S, a private vendor that serves more than half the country. After the election, watchdogs noticed that the testing lab that approved last-minute software changes had gone dark. Its website disappeared. When it came back online, months later, the changelog had vanished from public view. The testing lab director insists the changes were minor. But the seeds of doubt have already been sown.

Both narratives persist—not because they hold up to scrutiny, but because they offer something scrutiny can’t take away: a reason to believe the loss wasn’t real. That kind of story doesn’t vanish when it’s disproven. It hardens. It spreads. And with every new election, the foundation of trust gets a little thinner.

The Age of Manufactured Doubt

Widespread distrust in the election process isn’t just bad for democracy—it’s fatal to it. If people don’t believe the vote counts, they won’t accept the outcome. If they don’t accept the outcome, they won’t accept the authority of those elected. And if that authority breaks down, what comes next isn’t peaceful disagreement—it’s power struggle. People stop participating. Or worse, they decide that ballots are pointless and bullets are faster. Either way, the social contract dissolves.

As Renée DiResta lays out in Invisible Rulers, modern propaganda doesn’t aim to replace the truth—it aims to exhaust it. We’re not living in an age of lies so much as an age of infinite plausible explanations. Influencers, algorithms, and niche propagandists flood the zone until nothing feels trustworthy and everything feels rigged. These people don’t need to convince you of their version of reality. They just need to convince you that no one else has one either.

This ecosystem took root long before 2020. In 2016, Russian influence campaigns blanketed Facebook and Twitter with meme-fueled outrage. They didn’t hack the vote—they hacked our brains. They played on race, religion, immigration, guns, whatever fault lines they could find, and amplified them until they split. And when Hillary Clinton lost, millions were already primed to believe something sinister had happened. Because something had. Not a ballot heist, but a hijacking of perception.

That’s what makes disinformation so effective—it’s believable. The trick I played at the top of this piece, rewriting Kenyan unrest as if it were happening in the U.S., only worked because nothing about it felt far-fetched. We’ve seen enough dysfunction to believe anything, and enough spin to doubt everything. We’re not naïve. We’re overloaded. And in that kind of noise, even the truth starts to sound suspicious.

If DiResta explains how modern propaganda works, Bruce Schneier helps explain why it works so well. In this article in The Conversation, he and his co-authors point to a creeping distrust—not just in politicians or parties, but in the infrastructure of voting itself. The machines. The code. The cloud. The very idea that your ballot disappears into a digital system and comes out as a number on a screen. Most people don’t know how any of it works—and in that vacuum of understanding, fear rushes in.

This is cyber breach fatigue. After years of hearing about hacks, leaks, ransomware, foreign meddling, and digital black ops, Americans have come to expect that everything online is compromised. They may not know what a DNS server is, or how multi-factor authentication works, but they’ve been told—repeatedly—that their bank accounts, medical records, and voting systems are all just one zero-day exploit away from collapse.

And if that sounds paranoid, remember: we live in a country where millions of people believed COVID vaccines contained microchips—and where 5G towers were blamed for causing the virus. As Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And to a lot of people, magic is just another word for scam.

That’s why the 2024 stolen election narrative has staying power, even without proof. When watchdogs say voting machines were modified, or that a certification lab’s website went dark, it doesn’t matter whether the technical details check out. What matters is that it sounds shady—and in an environment saturated with anxiety about digital systems, that’s more than enough to plant the seed of doubt. The breach doesn’t have to happen. All you need is the headline.

Trust Wasn’t Stolen—It Was Spent

It’s tempting to blame America’s election trust problem on bad actors. There’s no shortage of them—foreign intelligence agencies, partisan operatives, professional propagandists. Renee DiResta has written persuasively about the way misinformation now flows through legitimate-looking channels, not just fringe websites. Bruce Schneier points out that even fictional reports of cyberattacks can reduce confidence in elections across party lines. It’s all real, and it’s all dangerous.

But it’s not the whole story.

The deeper truth is this: Americans don’t distrust the system because they’ve been tricked. They distrust it because they’ve been paying attention.

We’ve been told for years that everything’s fine. The economy’s strong. The system works. Our votes matter. But we’ve also watched that system fail us—again and again—while the people in charge cash in, cover up, and move on. It doesn’t take a Russian bot to convince someone the government doesn’t work for them. All it takes is looking around.

So yes, when Democrats raise questions about down-ballot drop-off in 2024, it might be driven by confirmation bias. Maybe they’re seeing patterns where there are none. But that’s a far cry from a coordinated disinformation campaign. Unless you’re ready to argue that data scientists and local watchdog groups are acting as foreign assets, you have to consider another possibility: that they’re acting in good faith, trying to make sense of a system they no longer trust.

And why would they?

This is the part too many institutional defenders skip over. The trust didn’t just evaporate. It was spent—slowly, steadily, over decades—by politicians who said one thing and did another, who traded public promises for private gain. Iraq. The financial crisis. Citizens United. Gerrymandering. Insider trading. Bailouts. Broken campaign pledges. The revolving door between public office and corporate lobbying. None of this was hypothetical. We lived it.

Some might argue that campaign promises were never really promises—just goals, subject to compromise and political reality. Fair enough. But when the system routinely delivers excuses instead of outcomes, it stops feeling like compromise and starts feeling like a con. You don’t need a PhD in political science to know when someone’s bullshitting you. At this point, the one thing Americans of every political stripe can agree on is that you can’t trust a politician to do what they say they’ll do. That’s not healthy skepticism. That’s collapse.

So when someone tells you the election was stolen—whether it’s 2020 or 2024—it hits a nerve. Not because the evidence is ironclad. But because the betrayal feels familiar.

That’s the real danger. When people stop believing in the process, not because they’ve been lied to, but because they’ve seen the truth. And when the candidates on the ballot all look like more of the same, it raises a darker question: even if the election was fair… who cares?

Choose Your Own Adventure

At this point, we’re well into the tin-pot dictatorship part of the program. All that’s missing is a mustache and some medals. If current trends hold, we’ll need UN observers to guarantee a free and fair election in 2026—and possibly every cycle after that. The American public isn’t debating whether democracy is in danger. We’re just arguing about how the finale ends: pitchforks and torches, or a military coup with a YouTube live stream and merch.

But under the gallows humor, there’s a bootstrap problem. This isn’t just about any one election. It’s about the larger collapse of democratic trust—both in the people we elect, and in the process by which we elect them. One without the other isn’t enough. Trust in politicians without trust in elections is autocracy. Trust in elections without trust in politicians is paralysis. Either way, the system stops functioning.

If democracy is going to survive, we have to rebuild trust in both the system and those who operate it. And that means fighting on two fronts at once: restoring faith in how we vote, and raising the bar for who we elect.

On the process side, we need end-to-end transparency. That means voting systems with auditable trails, real-time oversight, and clear public communication. Universal suffrage must be protected—not just in name, but in practice. That includes blocking efforts to suppress turnout, purge rolls, or stack the deck through gerrymandering and arbitrary ID laws.

We need accountability. That starts with banning insider trading, enforcing ethics rules, and ending the revolving door between public office and corporate lobbying. We need campaign finance reform with teeth—limits on dark money, public financing of elections, and an end to the notion that a corporation deserves the same First Amendment rights as a person.

We need representation that actually represents us. Open primaries. Ranked-choice voting. Ballot access for independent and third-party candidates. A system where voters aren’t forced to choose between bad and worse, but can actually vote for someone they believe in.

And we need civic education—not just about how voting works, but why democracy matters. What the stakes are. What power we still hold. And what happens when we stop using it.

But all of that creates another bootstrap problem: the kind of candidates who would vote for these reforms can’t get on the ballot, much less win, without beating back a tidal wave of corporate and dark money. And the only way to change that system… is by changing the people inside it.

We have to stop waiting for permission. No one is coming to save us—not from above, and definitely not from Washington. It’s extremely unlikely that we’re going to see a trustworthy, anti-corporate candidate for president in 2028. That’s not how this works. This isn’t a one-and-done. It’s not about winning the White House and hoping change trickles down. It’s about organizing from the bottom up—one school board, city council, and statehouse seat at a time.

When Zohran Mamdani ran for State Assembly in New York, the party machine backed Andrew Cuomo. The donor class lined up behind him. But Mamdani won anyway—because regular people knocked doors, made calls, and chipped in five bucks at a time. That’s the model. Not magic. Just work. The same was true for Kshama Sawant in Seattle, who faced relentless opposition from real estate developers, Amazon, and the Democratic establishment—and still won on a platform of rent control, labor rights, and working-class power.

We need hundreds more like them. Thousands. We need to find the people already running on courage and integrity—and if we can’t find them, some of us need to become them. All politics is local, which means every community has a role to play. Every office matters. Every race is a chance to fight back.

If we want to get money out of politics, we’ll have to out-organize it. If we want to rebuild trust, we’ll have to earn it—by showing up, speaking plainly, and refusing to look away.

Because trust isn’t owed. It’s built.

And without it, democracy doesn’t end in a coup.

It ends in a shrug.

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