As long as they could prove that Martians truly existed, it would benefit some people. For example, opposition parties that wanted to use "Martians infiltrating human voting" as an excuse to hold the election again.
Lex Luthor was right, Clark thought. These politicians had gone mad, lost themselves, and stopped caring about anything. They just wanted to drag everyone into this insane election game. At this moment, anything happening on Earth could become an excuse for them to either rerun or not rerun the election.
Clark also realized that moving Capitol Hill before might indeed have been somewhat rash. If he had not opened that door, the politicians might not have become this insane.
Originally, the opposition had lost a great many votes in this election, and the president's reelection had looked promising. If the election had proceeded smoothly, reelection would have been virtually guaranteed. At that point, the opposition had been in a half-give-up state. They had performed too poorly in the midterms, and they themselves had not really wanted to keep fighting.
But the election kept running into problems, and the vote-counting process had suffered dramatic twists and turns. That let the opposition see a kind of hope: snatching the fruit.
They had not worked very hard that year, and if nothing unexpected happened, they would have accepted the loss. But if there was even a chance to turn things around through opportunism, they would definitely throw themselves into it with everything they had.
It was like a college student who had barely studied all semester. Failing was only to be expected, but if he learned that a certain professor was softhearted, he would certainly try every possible way to beg for a pass.
At its core, it was not that their desire for success was all that