The battle over Florida ripped a veil off a dysfunctional system and offered an opportunity for meaningful electoral reform and new forms of political warfare

Donald Trump may have shocked the American political establishment with his refusal to say whether he will accept the results of next month’s presidential election, but he is far from the only candidate for high office in the United States who has cast serious doubt on the integrity of the system and the campaign tactics of his opponents.

Over the past 16 years – ever since the epic, 36-day presidential showdown in Florida in 2000 that was resolved not by a full recount of the votes, but by a supreme court split along partisan lines – accusations of vote-rigging and out-and-out theft have become increasingly common among partisans on both sides, and the electoral process has become ever more politicized, rancorous and fraught with mistrust.

“I will tell you at the time,” Trump said at last Wednesday’s debate when asked if he would accept the election result on 8 November. “I’ll keep you in suspense.” The Republican candidate has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that the election is “rigged” against him. “Of course there is large-scale voter fraud happening on and before election day,” he tweeted last week. All available evidence shows that in-person voter fraud is exceedingly rare.

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Opinion polls suggest that Trump’s charges of a “rigged election” have struck a nerve: 41% of voters believe him when he says the election could be stolen, according to one survey. More than two-thirds of all Republicans believe that if Hillary Clinton is declared the winner, it will be because of illegal voting or vote-rigging, according to another.

Those attitudes are almost certainly the result of Republicans beating the drum for more than a decade about elections being skewed by the illegal participation of dead people, illegal immigrants and even the occasional household pet. To this day, many in the GOP are convinced Barack Obama was elected only because community organizing groups such as Acorn – now defunct – registered extraordinary numbers of ineligible or nonexistent voters in the inner cities, and because busloads of Mexicans came over the border to vote using someone else’s name.

Eight years before Trump ever publicly uttered the words “rigged election”, Obama’s first Republican opponent, John McCain, said in a presidential debate that Acorn was “on the verge of perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy”. No credible evidence ever emerged of a single fraudulently cast ballot arising from Acorn’s activities.

While Democratic candidates have rarely resorted to such inflammatory language, their rank-and-file supporters certainly have, suggesting the problem crosses party lines. The 2004 election, which saw George W Bush re-elected despite the mounting unpopularity of the Iraq war, saw an explosion of unfounded conspiracy theories that Republicans were in cahoots with the manufacturers of electronic voting machines and would never lose an election again. (The theory fell apart as soon as Democrats retook control of the House of Representatives two years later.)

This year, a hard core of Bernie Sanders supporters remains convinced that the senator from Vermont was cheated out of the Democratic presidential nomination by the underhanded maneuvering of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee – despite the fact that Clinton won 3m more primary votes.

American history is hardly lacking in examples of real voter manipulation and electoral skullduggery, especially in the segregation-era deep south. To this day, the US electoral system is widely viewed as an anomaly in the western world because of persistent problems with the reliability of its voting machinery, frequent bureaucratic incompetence, the lack of uniform standards from state to state or even county to county, the systematic exclusion of more than 6 million felons and ex-prisoners, and the tendency of election officials to adopt rules that benefit their party over democracy itself.

Until 2000, though, these issues were not widely aired in public. Then the battle over Florida ripped a veil off a dysfunctional system and offered an opportunity not just for meaningful electoral reform – a slow and frustrating process – but also for new forms of political warfare unseen since the darkest days of the segregation era in which the electoral process itself became fair game, particularly for the Republicans.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Attorney Nicole Pollard, Judge Charles Burton and attorney John Bolton review questionable ballots for the 2000 presidential election in Florida. Photograph: Rhona Wise/EPA

It began, perhaps, when the hand recount of punch card ballots requested by Al Gore and the Democrats – something both parties had routinely pressed for in previous contested elections – was recast by many leading Republicans in their talking points as a form of “slow-motion grand larceny”.

Then, in Missouri, Republican Senator Kit Bond took one look at African American voters in overcrowded precincts in St Louis casting ballots beyond the official poll closing time – something that has since become standard practice in many states – and denounced what he called a “major criminal enterprise”.

Soon, a narrative took hold that Democrats were habitual vote-stealers – something that was indubitably true in the days of Boss Tweed in 1860s New York but now took the form of a racist dog-whistle because the voters under most suspicion were black or Latino. Within a few years, politicians such as Sarah Palin were openly distinguishing “real Americans” – meaning white Republicans – from the rest, and states under Republican control were passing voter ID laws to crack down on a problem – voter impersonation fraud – that experts have repeatedly found to be rare to non-existent.

As the federal courts have now begun to find, the effect of these laws has in fact been to discriminate against groups of voters – the transient, the elderly, students and the poor – who are much more likely to support Democrats.

Given the level of mistrust, rank-and-file members of both parties have increasingly come to define democracy by the elections their side wins, and any other outcome as prima facie evidence of theft and corruption.

Royal Masset, a former political director of the Texas Republican party, once described how he would receive dozens of calls from disappointed candidates after election day complaining about some unsubstantiated outrage, usually involving illegal immigrants or lightning-rod political figures such as Jesse Jackson. “Human beings do not accept defeat easily,” he observed in 2007.

If Trump is different, it is only because he began complaining about vote-rigging months before election day and because he threatens to depart from the tradition that says you fight as hard and as dirty as you want, but only until the final results come in.

The sheer volume of his complaints, however, may be doing his prospects little good: a fascinating American National Election Study survey conducted in 2012 shows that people are less likely to vote when their faith in the integrity of the system has been shaken, and much more likely to vote if they think the ballots are counted fairly. In other words, Trump’s rhetoric may just be depressing his own turnout and making defeat all the more likely.

