COLUMN: Virginie, 2025: Trump Loses a Vote and Blames the Vote Itself

Dobbs has opened a rift that Trump cannot close

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Roe v. Wade was overturned. That day, women wept in clinics in Memphis, Nashville, and Atlanta. Not metaphorically. Physically. Tears on exam gowns, in waiting rooms that smell of disinfectant and cold coffee. Abortion once again became a crime in thirteen states in less than sixty days.

What Republican strategists hadn’t anticipated—or refused to see—is that Dobbs doesn’t end the debate. It shifts it to state referendums. Since June 2022, every time American voters have been able to vote directly on this right—in Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, California, Vermont, Ohio, and Virginia—they’ve voted to protect it. Even in red states. Even in states where Trump won by a 15-point margin. Kansas voted 59% in favor of protecting abortion in August 2022. Kentucky rejected a restriction by a 52% margin in November 2022. The electoral map for abortion doesn’t look like the presidential map. And Trump doesn’t know what to make of that.

There’s something almost cruel about this arithmetic. The same voters who vote for Trump in November vote in favor of abortion in referendums. They aren’t inconsistent—they’re complex. They want low taxes, and they don’t want their daughter to be forced to carry a pregnancy resulting from rape to term. These two desires coexist. Trump doesn’t have the cognitive tools to process this reality. So he resorts to fraud.

The women of Virginia have names—and they voted

Jennifer Alvarez, 34, an obstetric nurse in Richmond, voted “yes” on May 6, 2025. She works in the gynecological emergency room. Since the Dobbs ruling, she has seen women arrive with sepsis—a systemic infection linked to an untreated miscarriage—because the doctors at her hospital were waiting for their condition to deteriorate enough to intervene legally without risking prosecution. She saw a 29-year-old woman, Maria, arrive at the emergency room one Thursday evening in September 2023 with a fever of 40.2°C and an infection that had progressed over 48 hours while her doctor consulted a lawyer before taking action. Maria survived. Jennifer says it shouldn’t have been that close.

Jennifer isn’t an activist. She doesn’t march. She votes. And she voted “yes” because she has seen, with her own eyes, what a “no” vote does to women’s bodies. To call that fraud is to call Jennifer a liar. It’s to call Maria a liar. It’s calling the 57% a fraud because the result bothers a man at Mar-a-Lago who has never set foot in an obstetric emergency room.

A lie repeated long enough becomes part of the infrastructure

Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951: “The purpose of systematic lying is not to persuade, but to disorient.” It’s not that Trump wants to convince his supporters that there was fraud in Virginia. Rather, he wants them to no longer know what to believe. When everything is potentially rigged, nothing is true, and the only compass left is loyalty to a man—not to an institution, not to a result, not to a fact.

This is what Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, political scientists at Harvard and the University of Toronto, call “institutional erosion by accumulation” in their 2010 book Competitive Authoritarianism—democracy does not collapse all at once, it is hollowed out by a thousand small punctures of everyday lies, circumvented procedures, and institutions delegitimized one by one until they no longer protect anything because no one believes in them enough to defend them.

I’m not crying wolf. The wolf is already in the sheepfold—he’s counting the sheep. What keeps me awake isn’t Trump. It’s the normalized silence surrounding each new accusation. The resigned “here he goes again.” The collective shrug that is the gentlest form of capitulation.

The judges are holding firm—but for how much longer?

And yet—the judges are holding firm. For now. Federal Judge Royce Lamberth, appointed by Ronald Reagan, rejected a pro-Trump motion in December 2020 with these words: “This court refuses to disenfranchise nearly seven million voters in the absence of any concrete evidence.” ” Judge Matthew Brann, appointed by Barack Obama but confirmed unanimously, wrote in his November 2020 denial that Trump’s lawyers presented “legal allegations resembling a Harlequin’s cloak sewn from scraps of worthless fabric.”

These men stood their ground. But since then, Trump has appointed more than 234 federal judges during his first term, and his second administration is accelerating appointments with surgical precision. The question is not whether the judges stood their ground yesterday. The question is how many will stand their ground tomorrow, when the pressure is greater, when the cases are tighter, when the judicial system itself is populated by people who owe their robes to him.

Distance creates the illusion of a spectacle

From Paris, from Berlin, from Brussels, we watch Trump cry fraud the way we watch a familiar arsonist light another match. We tell ourselves it won’t stick. We’re wrong. Not because American democracy is going to collapse tomorrow morning. But because these tactics spread. Viktor Orbán in Hungary has refined his own version of this playbook: delegitimizing independent media, contesting unfavorable results, and rewriting electoral rules between elections. He’s been in power since 2010.

The Law and Justice Party in Poland, Fidesz in Hungary, and certain parties in Western Europe—they’re studying Trump as if he were a laboratory. Not to blindly imitate him. But to adapt. To take what works and apply it within their respective institutional contexts. Alleging fraud after a defeat is now an exportable political technique, much like gerrymandering or the suppression of voter rolls. It comes with a manual. It has legal precedents. It can be taught.

And yet, Europe sleeps. Not a deep sleep—a restless one, with eyes moving beneath closed lids, aware of something but lacking the strength to get up. We keep an eye on Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova. We pay less attention to what’s happening in our own parliaments when an elected official loses a committee seat and starts talking about “rigged results.”

This rhetorical contagion has already crossed the Atlantic

In France, following the June 2022 legislative elections, several National Rally lawmakers cited “irregularities” in districts they narrowly lost—without presenting any evidence or filing successful formal appeals. In Italy, following the 2021 regional elections, officials from Fratelli d’Italia cast doubt on the “integrity” of the vote in two southern provinces. In Germany, the AfD contested the fairness of the vote count in several states following the 2021 federal elections. None of these challenges succeeded. All of them planted a seed of doubt in the minds of their voters. Doubt doesn’t need a legal victory to cause damage.

That is what Trump exported—not his governing methods, not his economic policy, not his tweets. He exported the principle that losing an election is proof that it was stolen. Once entrenched, this principle is nearly impossible to uproot because it is self-validating: any attempt to refute it is immediately perceived as further evidence of the conspiracy.

Winning a referendum in America in 2025 comes at a heavy cost

To reach May 6, 2025—to enshrine this right in the Virginia Constitution—people worked hard. Not bureaucrats. Volunteers. Amara Johnson, 28, a community organizer in Henrico County, spent eighteen months knocking on doors in neighborhoods where the usual response was polite silence or a door slammed shut. She knocked on 4,200 doors between October 2023 and April 2025. She had difficult conversations with evangelical women who, after thirty minutes of discussion, told her in a hushed voice, “I’ll vote yes. But don’t tell anyone in my family.”

These women—the ones who vote “yes” in secret because their community votes “no”—are invisible in political analyses. They don’t wear T-shirts. They don’t go to rallies. They slip a ballot into an envelope in a voting booth, alone, and then go home. The 57% is made up of their silences.

To call that fraud is to erase Amara. It’s to erase the 4,200 doors. It’s to erase the women who vote in secret. It’s to take all that human effort—all that accumulation of difficult conversations and ballots slipped in silence—and say: it doesn’t exist. I can’t read that without feeling a tightness in my jaw.

And yet—resistance exists, named and dated

And yet—Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, refused on January 2, 2021, to “find” 11,780 votes. He recorded the call. He made it public. He stood his ground. Aaron Van Langevelde, a Republican member of Michigan’s certification commission, voted on November 23, 2020, to certify the results in his state against his own political party, stating, “I am bound by my oath and by the law.” He was removed from his position six weeks later by the state’s Republican leadership.

These men paid a real price. Raffensperger received death threats against himself and his wife. Van Langevelde lost his job. Their names deserve to be written in full because democracy does not depend on abstract institutions—it depends on real people who choose, on a Tuesday night, not to lie.

There are countries where challenging election results comes at a different cost

Volodymyr Zelensky was elected on April 21, 2019, with 73.2% of the vote in the second round. His opponent, Petro Poroshenko, conceded defeat that same evening. This is commonplace everywhere except in the post-Soviet space, where, since 1991, challenging an unfavorable result by arming militias or alleging nonexistent fraud has been a regularly employed tactic—by Lukashenko in Belarus, by Putin in Russia, and by regimes that the Western world defines precisely by this criterion: they never lose because they cannot lose.

What Zelenskyy represents—beyond the war, beyond the resistance—is the simple and radical principle that the vanquished acknowledges the victor. This is the foundation. It is not a democratic sophistication. It is the cornerstone. And it is precisely this cornerstone that Trump has been methodically attacking since 2020, in Virginia as elsewhere.

And yet—here, too—millions of Americans hold that cornerstone in their hands. They keep polling places open despite the threats. They certify the results despite the pressure. They vote en masse on abortion despite the noise. That 57% in Virginia represents this as well: a silent and massive resistance to the idea that votes only count when they favor the “right” candidate.

What losing means in a democracy—a harsh reminder

Abraham Lincoln lost two Senate elections before being elected president in 1860. He didn’t cry foul. Jimmy Carter lost the 1980 presidential election to Ronald Reagan. He called Reagan that very evening to congratulate him. George H.W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton in 1992. He wrote Clinton a letter—discovered by Clinton in the Oval Office—that began: “You are our president now, and I wish you all the best.” Not because Bush was a saint. Because he understood what the peaceful transfer of power means structurally for a system of government.

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a description of what is disappearing. Carter’s call to Reagan, Bush’s letter to Clinton—these gestures aren’t mere courtesies. They are the moments when a democracy proves that it is real, that it rests not on the strength of the winner but on the consent of the loser.

Two hundred thirty-seven Republican members of Congress. How many spoke out?

After Trump’s accusation on Truth Social regarding the Virginia referendum, five Republican senators posted comments on social media. None directly challenged the fraud allegation. Two avoided the subject. Two congratulated their local candidates for “a campaign waged with courage.” One posted a photo of himself with a horse. This isn’t ordinary cowardice. It’s calculated cowardice—silence as a political stance, the absence of dissent as tacit approval.

Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator from Alaska, said on May 8, 2025, during a press conference in Anchorage: “The Virginia election results have been certified by officials from both parties and must be respected. ” Her voice trembles slightly on the word “respected.” She knows what it will cost her in the 2026 primaries. She says it anyway. She is the only one in her caucus to say it.

The silence of the other two hundred thirty-two that evening speaks volumes. Not about their cowardice—but about their calculations. They’ve done the math. The truth is too costly. The lie is more profitable. And in this cold calculation, in this cynical accounting, something dies that will not come back on its own.

Poll workers are receiving threats. The elected officials, however, remain silent.

Susan Chapman, 61, who has served as the election director for Fulton County, Georgia, for twenty-two years, received a letter on May 9, 2025—three days after Trump’s accusation regarding the Virginia referendum. The letter contained her home address, the first names of her two adult children, and the phrase: “Traitors pay for their treason.” She forwarded it to the FBI. The FBI opened a case. Susan returned to work the next morning at 8:00 a.m. because voter registration requests don’t stop just because of threats.

The cost of Trump’s lie is not abstract. It is measured in Susan Chapman’s sleepless nights. In her hands, which tremble slightly when she opens her emails in the morning. In the decision she makes every day to come back to work anyway. She has never met Donald Trump. She has never contributed to his campaign. She is just a 61-year-old woman who has been counting ballots in a Fulton County office since 2003, and who has become the enemy of a man who cannot accept being told “no.”

A country more complex than its presidential campaign rhetoric

America in 2025 is a country that votes for Trump in the presidential election and votes in favor of abortion in a referendum. Both of these things are true at the same time. This isn’t a contradiction—it’s a layering of priorities. American voters are not monolithic. They have hierarchies of priorities. Economic security can coexist with the right to bodily autonomy. Trade protectionism can coexist with the refusal to see one’s daughter or sister forced into unwanted motherhood.

That 57% figure in Virginia is documented, certified, and verifiable. It says something about this country that neither the progressive nor the conservative media really know how to address: America is more nuanced than its culture wars. The people living their lives—in their homes, in their cars, in obstetric emergency rooms, at polling stations—these people have lives that are more complicated than what either side portrays them to be.

Maybe that’s what Trump can’t stand. Not defeat—he’s lost before and he’ll lose again. It’s the complexity. An electorate that resists him on one specific issue while remaining loyal to him on others. An electorate that isn’t a mirror image of him. An electorate that thinks for itself. He doesn’t have the tools to deal with that. So he calls it fraud.

Demographic data doesn’t lie—it’s just inconvenient

In April 2025, the Pew Research Center published a study on American attitudes toward abortion. Sixty-one percent of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in “most or all cases.” This figure has not varied by more than 3 percentage points in fifteen years. It predates Trump. It outlasts him. It endures through administrations, Supreme Court appointments, and disinformation campaigns. 61% is a bedrock, not a wave. When 57% of Virginians vote to enshrine this right in their constitution, they aren’t staging a revolution. They are following a stable baseline that presidential elections obscure but do not erase.

What Dobbs did was make visible what had been silent. It forced people to vote explicitly on something they had taken for granted. And when they were asked the question directly—without the filter of a presidential election, without the noise of trade wars and immigration—they answered with a clarity that the fraud accusers cannot stomach.

Virginia’s 57% deserves to be defended—now, not tomorrow

The results of the May 6, 2025, Virginia referendum have been certified. They are real. They are irreversible. Fifty-seven percent of voters in a complex, swing state—neither red nor blue—voted to enshrine the right to abortion and contraception in their state constitution. They stood in line. They waited. They cast their ballots. Some of them—like the evangelical women Amara Johnson spoke with—voted against the advice of their communities, in secret, in silence, because they had weighed the matter in their hearts and concluded that it was the right thing to do.

This result cannot be a fraud. Not because election fraud doesn’t exist. It does—in history, around the world, and sometimes in the United States. But it leaves a trail. It involves named individuals, dated actions, and recoverable evidence. Eighty-five days after the 2020 presidential election, sixty-one courts have found no such traces. After the Virginia referendum, Trump did not produce a single piece of evidence. Not a single specific polling place. Not a single named poll worker. Not a single unexplained figure. Just a sentence on Truth Social, at 2 a.m., that is beginning to gnaw at something.

And yet—that’s the word that’s stopping me in my tracks tonight. And yet, despite everything, the 57% exist. The Susan Chapmans exist. The Brad Raffenspergers exist. The Lisa Murkowskis exist. Democracies don’t die because powerful men lie—powerful men have always lied. They die when the rest of us stop resisting. The issue isn’t Trump. The issue is what you do with what you’ve just read.

The final image—a polling place in Henrico County

On May 6, 2025, at 7:47 p.m., at an elementary school in Henrico County, Virginia, a 44-year-old woman—with short gray hair, a beige coat, and a canvas bag slung over her shoulder—is waiting in a line of twelve people. She left her job at the pharmacy at 7:00 p.m. She has twenty minutes before the polling station closes. She’s holding a pen in her right hand. She’s been holding it since she left the parking lot. She doesn’t know why she took it out so early. The line moves forward. She enters the voting booth. She checks a box. She steps out at 7:53 p.m. She gets into her car. She sits there for a minute without starting the engine, both hands on the steering wheel. Then she drives home.

Her name won’t appear in any news reports. She’ll never wear a campaign T-shirt. She won’t get into arguments with strangers on social media. She just voted. And a few hours later, a man at Mar-a-Lago said her vote was fraudulent. She may never know that. Or maybe she’ll read about it tomorrow morning, while drinking her coffee, before heading to work. And maybe something inside her chest will tighten in a way she won’t be able to put into words—but that she won’t be able to shake off either.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist