Here’s Bloomberg:
“We are witnessing the greatest election fraud in the history of the country, in my opinion in the history of any democracy,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said this week, echoing Trump as he smeared an unusual political coalition formed to unseat him. Though he is also mired in a corruption trial, Netanyahu said he won’t recognize a new government. Vitriol among his supporters has prompted Israel’s domestic security service to warn of escalating, possibly lethal, violence.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro faces re-election next year and has already lashed out at his country’s courts and made baseless claims of voter fraud. He has refused to condemn the Jan. 6 siege in the U.S. because, he said, there were “a lot of reports of fraud.” Should he “have problems” in Brazil, he said he would deploy the military to solve them.
Netanyahu and Bolsonaro have absorbed a valuable lesson from Trump: If you co-opt the imagination and intentions of enough members of your own party and your voters, you can persuade them to buy into your lies and rise up on your behalf when power slips from your grasp.
Claims of election fraud have been around for decades. So why do I call this the “new” election fraud? What’s new about it?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but most of the claims of widespread election fraud during the 20th century were made by the candidate that was challenging the incumbent. After all, the government controls the electoral process, and thus is in a position to assure that it is reasonably fair. What’s new is not claims of election fraud—candidates challenging authoritarian leaders have been complaining about fraud for decades—what’s new is that there are now lots of incumbents crying fraud.
PS. Yes, this argument is a bit less applicable to the US where the election apparatus is controlled by state governments. But there were lots of claims of anti-Trump election fraud even in states controlled by the GOP. Weird.
PPS. I recently appeared on the Bob Murphy Show. We discussed monetary policy during the Great Recession.