This article contains liberal opinion.
This is a good time to remember the United States is a collection of 50 states.
The states, not the people, elect its president. Each state submits its choice for president to the lower house of Congress, which tallies the electoral votes to determine a winner.
If no candidate gets a majority of electoral votes, the House of Representatives elects a president, with each state getting a single vote. That’s in the Constitution.
Currently, all states choose their electors by popular vote. Two states do this by congressional district; the other 48 states award all their electors to the winner of the statewide popular vote. This is by state law. Electors are real people, not just numbers, as we were reminded in 2016 when several “faithless” electors didn’t vote for their pledged candidates.
After the citizens’ votes for electors are counted, all states allow for recounts if the results are close (varying by state from 1/2% to 2%). There are legal deadlines for certifying results, and when the results are certified, the election is over. Certification ends the election process and finalizes results. At this point, if the numbers are inaccurate, too bad. Counting has to end sometime, and certification is the point of arbitrary cutoff.
Certified results can be disputed in the courts, in what is called an “election contest,” but only on the limited grounds specified by statute. Judges can’t arbitrarily change or throw out election results. For a concise explanation of election contests, see this article here.
That’s the election process. Now, let’s talk about human nature.
Political inclinations are a stew of rationality, emotion, and tribal loyalty. People do tend to vote their perceived self-interest to some extent. But they also believe — and get angry about — things that aren’t even true. And there’s a fairly strong correlation between family and party loyalty; if you’re born into a Republican family, you’ll probably grow up to be a Republican. Of course, this isn’t 100% true; some people do go their own way. Party loyalties also can shift, as when traditionally Democratic blue-collar workers voted for Trump.
The main point to make here is that during election season, emotions run high, and people become less rational. The few small demonstrations and minor ruckuses we’ve seen so far in the aftermath of the 2020 election are normal. There’s really been nothing much out of the ordinary so far.
Going into the 2020 election, Republicans feared Democrats would “steal” the election, an idea Trump has promoted with false claims of widespread “voting fraud.” One of Trump’s most pernicious lies is there’s something wrong with counting ballots after election day. That’s ridiculous, but it appeals to simpletons.
As mentioned above, a presidential election is actually 50 elections, held simultaneously, but each state elects its presidential electors in its own way. Their election laws and procedures are not uniform or identical. Some states count mail ballots first, others count them last; some states begin counting before election day; those that don’t, because their laws prohibit it, will take longer to announce their results. This is why they’re still counting in Pennsylvania.
Trump is demanding that citizens who were legally entitled to vote, and voted legally, should arbitrarily have their votes thrown out because election officials couldn’t count them fast enough to suit him. That’s indefensible. It also violates their rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.
Democrats’ worst fears — that gerrymandered legislatures and/or rogue judges would overthrow a Biden win — probably won’t materialize. But those fears, unlike Republican conspiracy theories and baseless claims of voting fraud, have a basis in fact. For example:
“Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, two of President Donald Trump’s most vocal Republican allies, implied Thursday that Pennsylvania’s GOP-controlled legislature should consider invalidating the popular vote and appoint its own slate of electors to award the state’s electoral votes to Trump — despite the state Senate’s leader already stating this wouldn’t happen.”
(Read story here. Also see image below.) Of course, this behavior is outrageous and deeply irresponsible. It isn’t even their state; they’re interfering in the affairs of another state. But so far, that’s just loose talk by a couple of alcoholics, and I don’t expect anything to come of it. Pennsylvania’s top Republican, who has more sense than they do, wants nothing to do with it. (There’s also a Democratic governor in the way, and such a slate also would be rejected in the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives.)
The Trump campaign also is filing lawsuits, as he said before the election they would, but as far as I can tell all the judges deciding election-related lawsuits are following the rule of law. In addition, several prominent Republicans (including Mitch McConnell) have begun distancing themselves from Trump’s wilder allegations and schemes, which suggests they won’t support illegitimate efforts to overturn a Biden victory. However, Democrats understandably are nervous.
Trump’s supporters should consider this: The majority of Americans don’t want him to be president. He lost the popular vote by large margins in 2016 and 2020, not least because he made no effort to expand his base. But because America chooses its president with a patchwork of 50 state elections, under a system unequally weighted in favor of smaller and more conservative states, he won a majority of electoral votes in 2016. It was possible for him to do it again in 2020, but right now it looks like he will fall short this time.
They should also keep in mind that Democrats, as much as they loathed Trump, accepted his 2016 victory as legitimate. But if Biden wins the electoral vote, then is pushed aside by such means as Graham and DeSantis suggest, there’s no chance of that happening again. At that point, in the eyes of a majority of Americans, Trump will be a dictator and the GOP a totalitarian party, and they will become hated tyrants.
A country that can’t vote its rulers out of power is no longer free. Final thoughts:
The impeachment wasn’t an effort to overturn the 2016 election. Impeachment is a remedy provided by the Constitution, and Trump was impeached for a specific abuse of power, of which he is indisputably guilty. If I were a senator, I would have voted to remove him from office. If a Democratic president did that, I would vote to remove him from office, too. This isn’t a partisan issue, it’s a misbehavior issue.
The electoral system still favored Republicans in 2020. In addition, they rolled out their vast and well-oiled vote suppression machinery, and resorted to every dirty trick they could think of, including smearing their opponent. Trump even tampered with the mail service to interfere with our right to vote. If that wasn’t enough to re-elect him, it’s because the majority of the American people really want to get rid of him, and went more than an extra mile to vote him out of office.
If, after all that, Trump still lost, then he lost. If you’re a Trump supporter, and you don’t accept that loss as legitimate, that’s your problem. I’m not going to debate lies, falsehoods, or conspiracy theories with you. I have more important things to do.
Last, but not least, it’s hard to hold together a country of 330 million people spanning a continent. We came apart once before, and fought a bitter civil war against each other. It could happen again. Consider this: We have a good thing going for ourselves here in America. We’re safe from foreign invasion, enjoy great prosperity, and wonderful freedoms. But it’s fragile, and we could lose it all, if we’re not careful. No one can take it away from us, but we could choose to destroy it ourselves. Or, we can choose not to, and decide to live with each other despite our differences, under the system of imperfect but good-enough democracy that has kept our people free and prosperous.
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