McCain went so far as to request that Trump not be allowed to attend his funeral. Avowed institutionalists in his Republican party, from former Speaker Paul Ryan to the late Senator John McCain, have disavowed Trump. To those of us who treasure democracy and the institutions that defend it, there is solace to be found in the fact that Donald Trump is the first incumbent American President running for re-election who has not been endorsed by a single former President. They have adopted a flurry of similar strategies not to increase their own vote count, but to reduce the number of votes counted for their opponent, all of which would be unthinkable in Sri Lanka or any civilized democracy.
They have shuttered polling places in urban areas to dissuade the poor from voting. His acolytes have sabotaged the postal service to scuttle the postal vote and filed over 300 court cases across America to prevent valid votes from being counted.
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A president who came to power on a technicality seeks to cling to power by unleashing a torrent of technicalities. What remains unthinkable in little Sri Lanka is the only path before America’s Donald Trump to secure his re-election.
It would be unthinkable for Sri Lankan courts to even entertain a case that sought to discriminate against Sri Lankan electors. For all the political turmoil that our country has suffered in 72 years as an independent democracy, none barring the LTTE has even tried to deny the franchise to a Sri Lankan constituency or sought to prevent Sri Lankans from voting. Sri Lankans can take pride in our system. On more than one occasion, the politicized American Supreme Court has backed these efforts, further divorcing the American political system from what we in Sri Lanka understand as democracy. Politicians and partisan judges frequently succeed in preventing ethnic minorities, youth and other liberal demographics from voting, even divining ways to exclude the ballots of those who did vote. However, under the American system, it is the combination of states you win that counts, not the number of votes, and Donald Trump became president on that technicality.įor decades, the battle for the right to vote has been a feature of American politics. To put that margin in a context that Sri Lankans would understand, Ranil Wickremesinghe lost the Sri Lankan presidential election in 2005 by a slimmer margin of only 1.86%. He garnered 2,868,686 fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, losing the vote by a margin of 2.23%. By the measure of an election in any normal democracy, he failed.