Why is nonviolence important right now?
November 7, 2020
“The status quo always blames violence on those who are trying to change the status quo.”
Dear Friends and Family
Last Sunday, November 1, the “Gandhi Team” was training a group of peace ambassadors (rally marshals, if you prefer) for a nonpartisan faith-based democracy rally in San Jose. The team asked me to explain why nonviolence is so important. Tonight, Nov 5, it finally occurred to me that this might also be helpful to some of you.
Each state makes its own rules governing its own elections. So different states finish counting their ballots at different times. California announced this year that it would mail ballots to all registered voters, due at least in part to the pandemic, and that it will continue counting ballots until November 20, as long as they are postmarked by Nov 3, perhaps out of concern for slowing postal service.
When people vote in-person, their ID and address are checked by their own neighborhood poll workers. But when they vote by-mail, their signature and address have to be manually checked against their county database. So counting vote-by-mail ballots is much slower than counting in-person ballots.
Another complication is that Democrats and Republicans do not vote by mail in equal numbers. Several sources confirm that Democrats are much more likely to vote by mail. The one numerical source I found stated that 40% of Democrats, but only 10% of Republicans, vote by mail. This year with COVID, this inequality will likely be even greater.
Can you see the implication here? Democratic votes, because more are mailed in, are tabulated more slowly than Republican votes. So as the counting progresses, the proportion of Democratic votes starts low but keeps going up. This progressive increase in the Democratic proportion over time is often called “the blue shift”.
Several months ago, President Trump transparently stated that, if everyone voted, Republicans would never win another election. Then he began claiming that mail-in ballots are “rigged,” as if he intended to disqualify those mostly blue votes. (And so tonight, when the still-to-be-counted votes were mostly mail-in, he announced that he was filing suits to stop the counting.)
Have mail-in ballots been “rigged” in the past? The conservative Heritage Foundation looked through the two billion mail-in ballots of the last half century, but found only 1,285 fraudulent ballots. That’s less than one per million.
Many political strategists foresaw that President Trump would try such a trick, so in June a bipartisan group began organizing the Transition Integrity Project (you can google for details). Their transition scenario exercises suggested nonviolent resistance might be essential. As part of such a campaign, many thousands of activists have pledged “We will refuse to accept election results until all the votes are counted.”
(Vice-President Biden is obviously aware of the game Trump is trying to play, which is why he has been saying he has not won until all the votes are counted. But thus far, most of the courts have seen that the counting of votes has been very rigorous, and have not stopped the counting. So many of the rallies and protests scheduled for the day after the elections, when people thought counting might be stopped, were called off.)
The activists have also pledged “We will nonviolently take to the streets if a coup is attempted.” I do not know if Trump can get the Supreme Court to try to overturn Biden’s election. I assume the three justices Trump has appointed should recuse themselves. If not, the Court will undermine itself.
If Biden’s victory is clear, and the Supreme Court still tries to overturn it, that would constitute an attempted coup, and many Americans will protest in the streets. Our Bill of Rights guarantees this Right of Assembly. But in our negotiations with our local police, they always affirm that any assembly which turns violent will immediately be declared “unlawful” and be dispersed. (I have no idea how the various private militia groups plan to navigate this.)
If anti-coup protests turn violent repeatedly, something different begins to happen. The status quo always blames violence on those who are trying to change the status quo. What happens next has been conclusively demonstrated by two warriors, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, in their book “Why Civil Resistance Works,” 2011.
They collected detailed data on all 323 revolutions, nonviolent or violent, in the 20th century. Their statistical analyses demonstrate that:
The success rate for violent revolutions was 25%
The rate for nonviolent revolutions was 54% (p 9)
The primary factor for success was mass participation
The average participation for violent revolutions was about 50,000 people
The average for nonviolent revolutions was about 200,000 (p 32)
In other words, if a movement (including a pro-democracy movement, or a Black Lives movement) tolerates violence, people who have been undecided are alienated by that violence. This alienation reduces the movement’s probability of success, on average, by at least 50%. And 75% of the movement participants withdraw, for the very obvious reason that human beings do not want to be killed, nor do they want to kill others.
This is why nonviolent discipline is critical right now. Our heroes of nonviolence include, of course, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. They also include a man from San Jose itself, Cesar Chavez, and his right-hand help, Dolores Huerta.
They borrowed their Great March (Delano to Sacramento, 1965) from Gandhi’s Salt March. When a grower killed two farmworkers, Chavez, like Gandhi, told his followers to return love for hatred. And, like Gandhi, he fasted, to challenge his own followers to grow in forgiveness, grace and wisdom. King’s bus boycott became Chavez’s grape boycott.
I concluded my part of the training by inviting our participants to volunteer to be peace ambassadors, helping maintain nonviolent discipline at the faith leaders’ democracy rally Wednesday evening, Nov 4. Nonviolence is maintained by actively de-escalating whatever conflicts may arise between pro-democracy advocates and possible anti-democracy provocateurs. The rest of our training Sunday evening was devoted to teaching de-escalation skills.
Pace e bene
Lorin