You’ve seen the long-form think pieces, ominous and lurid and anxiety-producing. With titles like “How Six States Could Overturn the 2024 Election,” they offer a revealing glimpse into a pocket of underrecognized election procedure—a piece of back-office mechanics, a quirk of the statutory code—that could be the wildly improbable key to the whole thing this time. They delight in lingering lasciviously on impending transgression.

They’re electoral-process porn.

They are written not to inform or motivate but to titillate, as if they were meant to be read furtively, at night, in the dark. But electoral-process porn also dehumanizes and disempowers. It cultivates the exaggerated impression that an election can just be “overturned” or “stolen” out from under us by pushing the right series of buttons. That is, it wants you to forget the fundamental fact that we’re in charge of our own electoral fates.

There are a few different types of electoral-process porn.

There’s the subgenre focusing on Electoral College math and the architecture of the rites that solemnize the delivery of results. Such pieces have become—understandably—more present since Jan. 6. But the process-porn version isn’t spurred by the actual armed assault on the Capitol. A riot can lead to unquestionable individual tragedy. Yet even a mob several thousand strong has no more ability to change the recorded historical fact of a final tally than to change the ocean tides.

Instead, the enticement of this sort of think piece delights not in the brutality of violence but in the intricacy of the artful con. The fertile 2020-cycle soil for this electoral-process porn isn’t Jan. 6 but Donald Trump’s machinations of November and December: the multifaceted campaign to pressure individuals entrusted with official authority to abuse their positions. The new hypotheticals understand the storytelling power of the elaborate heist; after all, Jan. 6 was just the culmination of a monthslong version of “So you’re telling me there’s a chance!” Conjuring other process black swans is a shortcut to access the drama of a bevy of imagined alternate-future Jan. 6 iterations.

And the lurid hypotheticals usually operate with an additional twist. The 2020 plot was a criminal conspiracy. But it’s important to this realm of electoral-process porn that the hypothetical have the veneer of lawfulness. Breaking the law is mundane. But executing an Electoral College theft within the technical bounds of the existing structure? That’s devious and crafty. The allure of the caper is in the barely legal.

The notion of a lawful overturning of a legitimate election is also mostly fantasy. Law is a dispute-resolution mechanism, not a series of spells: In the real world, no set of Latinate incantations can disappear millions of valid votes. Magical legalism is just law cosplay.

Another subgenre fixates on fraud: officials stuffing the ballot box or ballots cast in violation of the rules, or the two in tandem. In every election cycle, there are handfuls of invalid ballots cast. We know about them largely because they’re caught (and rarely counted).........

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