All Votes Count

Posted by Sappho on November 10th, 2020 filed in Election 2020

There are many important political issues ahead of us. I look forward to holding Biden accountable on some of them, when, as happens with all Presidents, he proves to be wrong. For now, though, the critical issue is this: that the candidate who won the election, decisively, by a 4.6 million lead in the popular vote, and by a large enough margin in the electoral college that we’d need to see more than one state shown to be off in its count by double digit thousands of votes for this electoral college result to change, be the candidate to take office. The millions of people who voted, fairly and according to the rules, for Biden, and whose votes were counted and found to be proper and legal votes while representatives of both parties got to observe the count, deserve to have their choice respected. Those who don’t like it can grump about their loss, as can Trump himself, and you can by all means, as we did when Trump was elected, organize protests when Biden issues executive orders that you don’t like. But a vote is a vote, our votes get to count just as much as yours do, and elections have consequences.

I get that people are confused on this point because they trust Trump, and Trump and his surrogates are screaming fraud. But the evidence for fraud is lacking. Let me look at the arguments:

1) Why did many down ballot Republicans do better than Trump? Because people *split tickets*. I’ve split tickets, myself, in the past. Some people like a lot of Republican policies but don’t like Trump’s character. Some people think that Trump has done a lousy job as President, but have enough disagreements with Democratic policies that they prefer divided government. Some people like their particular Representative or Senator.

2) Why has it taken so long to count?

a) It always takes a long time to count. That’s why the electoral college certifies the election in December, in case we don’t know the winner in November. It’s just that usually we know the winner even though votes are outstanding.

b) This year we had an unusually large turnout.

c) This year an unusually large number of people in many states chose to request absentee ballots, due to COVID.

d) This year, there was an unusually strong partisan skew in who voted in person and who voted by mail (no surprise, given the different messages going out about absentee ballots in the two parties). I’m old enough to remember when absentee ballots skewed Republican; clearly that wasn’t the case this time.

3) What about recounts? Well, Trump is absolutely entitled to recounts for those states that are within recount margins. It’s just that, at this time, it’s mathematically impossible for a recount in Georgia to swing the election to Trump.

4) “But there’s a difference between traditional absentee ballots and universal mail-in ballots.”

a) A couple of states (I think Oregon and Washington are among them) have done universal vote by mail for multiple elections now, and we do not have more vote fraud observed in those states than in states that require mail in ballots to be requested.

b) In any case, the only one of the swing states that automatically mailed out ballots to all voters was Nevada. Even if that act somehow caused double digit thousands of cases of voter fraud in Nevada, enough to swing the state to Trump, Trump still loses.

5) But what about Pennsylvania’s decision to allow ballots postmarked by election day to be received after election day? Doesn’t matter. Pennsylvania sequestered those ballots, so when AP news called the state for Biden, because his lead had crossed the threshold that would mean no automatic recount, none of the late arriving mail in ballots had been counted.

6) “But election officials wouldn’t let Trump supporters in to observe the count!”

a) Not true. At every ballot counting site, an equal set of observers from each side were admitted and allowed to observe. Some Trump supporters staged protests where they showed up and tried to be admitted as additional observers, and were not allowed in because doing so would have meant that the Trump side had *more* observers than the Biden side, and would also have crowded sites that were trying to space people out in a pandemic.

b) Reporters also observed, and the sites had cameras (the Philadelphia site is said to have had “more cameras than a casino”).

7) What’s the harm of allowing Trump his court appeals? Sure, Trump should get any recount to which he is entitled (if a state is within the recount margin a recount should go ahead), and both sides should have (and do have) an equal opportunity to offer grounds to challenge ballots. But there *is* harm in taking seriously accusations of widespread vote fraud when evidence of such has not been presented.

a) “When the 9/11 Commission did their autopsy on what went wrong, one of the things they pointed to was the slow pace of the Bush administration getting our national security team in place. And they said it impaired our ability to react.” (https://www.npr.org/…/what-role-does-federal-agency…) It’s important to get the transition process going when it’s exceedingly unlikely that the result will change.

b) Some of the people who are being convinced, falsely, that the election is being stolen, are dangerous and violent. We already had a thwarted plot to attack the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia. This is a horrible thing to do to people trying to do an honest (and not especially well paid) job, performing the important civic function of counting our votes. They deserve better.

And the majority of us who voted for Biden deserve to have our votes honored, as those who voted for other presidents have had their votes honored in the past.