Free and fair elections

The legitimacy of representative government rests on a simple bargain: those who hold power do so because they won, and only for as long as they continue to win, through processes that are accessible, accurate, peaceful, and respected by losers as well as winners. When elections are administered fairly and their results accepted, defeat is feedback, not catastrophe. When they are not, every other democratic ideal becomes negotiable, because a government that cannot be removed through elections has no reason to honor any other constraint.

The threats this ideal tracks fall into two families. The first is making voting harder for some people than others: voter suppression, intimidation of voters and of the people who administer elections, partisan voter-roll purges, gerrymandering beyond routine line-drawing, and coordinated disinformation about voting itself. The second is manipulating or rejecting legitimate outcomes: election denial, refusal to certify, alternate-elector schemes, attempts to overturn results after the vote, and refusal to concede a legitimate loss. The standard applies symmetrically. A refusal to certify by either party's officials is the same offense, recorded the same way.

Further reading: National Constitution Center Interactive Constitution — Elections Clause, Fifteenth Amendment.