By Chris Satullo

Pop quiz: Which of George Washington’s accomplishments had the most lasting impact on America?

1. Throwing a coin across the Rappahannock River.
2. Holding the Revolutionary Army together during that cold winter at Valley Forge.
3. Crossing the Delaware.
4. Leading the Constitutional Convention.
5. None of the above.

 With all due respect to 2, 3, and 4, the correct answer is 5.  

Washington’s most important gift came when he left the presidency voluntarily after two terms, providing for a peaceful transition of power that astonished Europe.  In “teaching them how to say goodbye,” Washington proved that constitutional democracy could work and established a norm of presidential behavior that no occupant of the office has ever breached.

Until now.

As you may have heard, Donald Trump, in a recent interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News, refused to commit to abiding by the results of the coming election.  “I have to see,” Trump said, as if it were solely his choice.  

He followed that up, on the day voting rights icon John Lewis was buried, by tweeting that he might just have to see about postponing the election.

Sadly for our Narcissist-in-Chief, this is something he has absolutely no power to do. It’s also something no incumbent would ever do, if he were up in the polls the way Trump claims to be. (After this tweet received broad pushback, even from some of his senatorial bootlickers, Trump, as he’s wont to do, walked it back a bit, hinting that he was just trolling “the lamestream media.”)

Both of these reckless acts were couched in Trump’s baseless claim that vote fraud is about to occur on a grand scale – thanks to a pandemic-driven surge in voting from home by mail.

All of this comes down to the Gaslighter-in-Chief setting up his alibi for losing and sowing doubt about the legitimacy of the election result.   

Is Trump just messing with us, for the sick fun of it?  Or is he a slave to his ravenous ego, which can’t bear the prospect of humiliation on Nov. 3 and demands what it demands without regard to consequences? Or, perhaps, are he and his acolytes in Congress and state capitols using these specious howls about fraud to set up a plot to manipulate the Constitution and Electoral College, turning a clear but close Biden win into a second term?

If you want to see a sober, well-researched and terrifying scenario by which that could happen, former U.S. ambassador Daniel Baer has one for you.

So, what’s a sane citizen to do, besides reach for the Xanax?

Channel your anxiety into useful citizen action. Here’s a list of seven practical things you can do as an individual to defend the Republic and stave off calamity in this moment of constitutional peril:

1. Know – and share – the facts about vote fraud and mail-in ballots.

Vote fraud is rare. It does happen, but mostly on a retail scale meant to influence local elections –  not on the wholesale level needed to tip votes in the Electoral College.  As a Philadelphian, I’m duty bound here to acknowledge my beloved city’s long history of election chicanery, from the Second Senate District absentee ballot scam in the ‘90s up to the latest prosecuted example, which involves the incorrigible Ozzie Myers of Abscam fame. If I do that, I hope my Republican friends will concede that the worst recent example of election fraud, leading to the voiding of a congressional election result in North Carolina, was by a GOP candidate.

Trump’s roly-poly henchman, Attorney General William Barr, loves to hint darkly that vote frauds stalk the land. But look at this breathless list meant to support his conspiracy theories. Note how paltry the yield really is. Most of the cases cited are about, yep, local elections; the number of votes involved is minimal; the list is padded with cases involving things like forged petition signatures, not direct vote fraud. 

Slim rations, indeed.

You know what almost never happens? Voter impersonation fraud. Despite the claims of vote-fraud hucksters, one nationwide study of more than a billion votes cast from 2000 to 2014 found all of 31 credible cases of voter impersonation.

But what about voting by mail, which probably will explode thanks to the pandemic?

Oregon has been using mail-in ballots since 2000. Out of about 100 million ballots cast by mail there since then, about a dozen have been found to be fraudulent. That’s 0.000012 percent.

Also, despite Trump’s fulminations, studies have found no partisan lean amid mailed ballots in the past. This year, as the Conspiracist-in-Chief works to turn mail-in voting into a partisan fault line, a la mask-wearing, it’s true that many more Dems say they plan to vote that way. But that is the result of Trump’s own poisoning of the wells, not liberal chicanery.

2. Know – and share – your presidential election history.

Three presidential elections (1800, 1876 and 2000) were not decided until long after Election Day. The 1800 and 1876 elections were decided by the U.S. House and in both cases the losers – Aaron Burr (yeah, him) and Samuel Tilden – accepted the result, even though they each had cause to complain of rough handling. In 2000, the Supreme Court, in one of its all-time worst decisions, chose George W. Bush as the winner, while popular vote winner Al Gore, to his great credit, patriotically accepted the result of the legal process, flawed as it was. 

What’s more, even Richard Nixon bowed to the razor-thin John F. Kennedy win in 1960, though he had far more reason than Donald Trump has ever had to suspect funny business (e.g. Illinois and Texas).

In 2016, Trump whined like a 2-year-old about fraud and unfairness after he won. View his coming tweetstorms about rigged elections in that light.  Consult FactCheck.org to compare his wild claims to the truth.

3. Sign up to be an election protection volunteer.

You can visit polls or answer calls from home on Election Day to help out voters who see something amiss at polling places or whose right to vote is being challenged or blocked by people who don’t know the law.

It’s important citizen work and 866ourvote.org is the national clearinghouse for information on how to sign up, get trained and take part. In Pennsylvania, the state Common Cause chapter takes the lead in the fieldwork.  (I’m indebted to Patrick Christmas, my colleague at the Committee of Seventy, Philly’s good-government group, for this and the next two suggestions.)

4. Sign up to be an election day poll worker.

One of the main tactics favored by those who seek to stay in power by suppressing the vote is to limit the number of polling places, hoping that long distances and long lines will discourage many from voting.  

This year, the pandemic supplies these anti-patriots with a convenient excuse: The bulk of poll workers are elderly, thus more susceptible to the virus and more likely to opt out. Don’t let a shortage of poll workers provide a pretext for suppressing the vote, particularly on college campuses and in disadvantaged communities. If you’re someone less susceptible to the virus, or have immunity, take Nov. 3 as a day off now and apply to your local election board or state Department of State to be a poll worker. In Philly, at least, you might get a tasty hoagie out of the deal.

5. Help your friends make the choice to vote.

A large body of research shows that the best way to get an occasional or reluctant voter to exercise their franchise is for someone they know to encourage them.

Pat Christmas says every election he pulls together a message to share with his network of friends and acquaintances. It details the links he’s using to study candidates and issues – and to learn the deadlines and procedures he must know to make sure his vote counts.  You could do the same. It’s especially vital in this vote-from-home year.

6. Understand (and share) that we might not know the results of this election for a week or more – and that’s OK.

Deep into the digital age, we Americans have become a people who collapse in annoyance if our smartphones don’t deliver Google search results in a nanosecond.

But with this election, we’re just going to have to get used to the idea that, barring a Biden landslide, we might have to wait days, even weeks, to find out who won. Most of the county and state election apparatuses who must tally and certify the votes simply are not prepared to handle the deluge of mail ballots they’re about to receive due to COVID-19 fears about in-person voting. 

The performances of those election boards will be spotty. In the primaries, Kentucky surprised skeptics with how well its count went – and it still took a week to declare a Democratic Senate primary winner. New York’s handling of mailed primary ballots, however, was a chaotic mess.

You need to steel for yourself for a wait that needs to be as long as it needs to be to get a fair, accurate count. And, as I’ve written before, advise everyone else you know to do the same.

7. Contact your state and congressional representatives and tell them you insist they confirm electors who will represent faithfully the will of the people in your state.

Maybe David Baer’s nightmare scenario is just that – a bad dream.  But it still seems wise to contact your elected representatives now – remembering that your state legislature has as big a role to play here as Congress – and let them all know that you expect them to help deliver to the Electoral College a set of electors that accurately reflects your state’s popular vote. Do it now, get your friends to do it and keep doing it once a month until the Electoral College votes in December.

Overall, remember this:  Political operatives wield claims of voter fraud the way a magician waves one hand to distract you from what he’s really doing with the other hand. 

Currently, the most potent work to rig elections comes from using control over the levers of power to suppress the vote. Purges of voter rolls, closing of polling places, spurious voter ID requirements, modern versions of the poll tax, disinformation campaigns – all these ways of discouraging or barring people from voting affect election results far more than the piddling frauds that the hucksters hype.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.