MADEIRA BEACH, Fla. — The events in Washington on Wednesday, January 6 not only shocked the nation and the world, but also served as the culmination of months—if not years—of simmering uncertainty, doubt, and outright distrust in some circles of America’s established electoral process.

“This has really been extraordinary,” says Judithanne Scourfield McLaughlan, Ph.D. “We really haven’t seen anything like this before.”

McLaughlan is an associate professor of political science at the University of South Florida’s St. Petersburg campus. She’s a Fulbright Scholar and founder of the university’s Center for Civic Engagement; in addition to teaching American politics, public and constitutional law and judicial process, she has direct experience in our country’s political process, having worked at the Supreme Court and Department of Justice as well as on multiple election campaigns—including her own, as a candidate for the Florida Senate.

“We’re the oldest constitutional democracy currently, and our respect for the rule of law and the peaceful transition of power has really been our hallmark for hundreds of years,” she says. “And what we saw last week was shocking, horrifying, and unprecedented.”

America has certainly seen its share of contentious elections, the most recent modern-times example being the 2000 race between then-Vice President Al Gore and Republican contender George W. Bush. It took a Supreme Court decision to settle that election, and even then the country saw nothing that approached the level of division, protest and, eventually, violence that marked President Donald Trump’s loss to former Vice President Joe Biden.

So what, exactly, made the 2020 election so divisive?

“Donald Trump,” says McLaughlan. “Donald Trump has been spreading lies and disinformation for many years. We could go back to the whole birther movement… It’s been years, many years of lies and disinformation.”

Technology, in the form of social media, has an ever-growing influence on the lives and beliefs of American citizens, who naturally vote on what they know—or what they think they know. The fact that there has been no evidence of the kind of widespread voter fraud, tampering, and malfeasance President Trump claims led to the 2020 election being “stolen” is no match for the echo chamber of the internet, in which citizens can hear what they choose repeated and amplified over and over.

“[The electoral process] is not a broken system,” McLaughlan says. “There are people in authority saying that it’s broken, but it is absolutely not true. Anyone who is looking at the process, looking at the court cases and paying attention knows that it is not true.”

Despite the facts, the 2020 presidential election caused a massive rift in America, one that erupted into lethal violence on Wednesday, January 6, when a pro-Trump demonstration became an armed insurrection as some protestors stormed the United States Capitol in an apparent attempt to disrupt the certification of Electoral College votes in favor of President-elect Biden. It’s a day that, as they say, will live in infamy, a day that has since been endlessly compared to 9/11 as a pivotal point in the story of the United States. But while the events of January 6 will remain scorched in the collective American memory, their direct impact on the future of our electoral process is less immediately apparent.

“Some of this isn’t going to be able to be changed through statute,” McLaughlan says. “This is a crisis in civic education. We need to do a better job helping our citizens to discern what is credible.”

If the problem is one of culture and perception rather than process, then it’s more important than ever that our governmental processes be perceived as intact, functional, and resolute—and, above all, accountable, even if that means impeaching a president an unprecedented second time.

“The glory of our system is that we have a written Constitution, and the reason we have this Constitution is to have a limited government, and it needs to be enforced and upheld, and if we just walked away or tried to pretend like [January 6] didn't happen, I think that would even be worse,” McLaughlan says. “Our faith and confidence in our democracy is the most fundamental thing that underlies everything else, so to ignore that out of some sense of expediency would be to ignore the basic tenets of our democracy.

“I don’t think it’s partisan,” she adds. “I think one needs to stand up for our democracy.”