The-Ave.US

This article contains news and liberal commentary.

Amid intense partisan divisions, and despite prevalent pre-election fears, the 2020 election appears to have gone smoothly and without major problems. In short, it was a very normal election.

Throughout America, elections are run by professionally-staffed county and local election departments, with broad oversight exercised by state-level elected officials (usually secretaries of state). Many of these departments, especially in larger counties, hire temporary workers to help count votes, who receive training and are closely supervised, and counting is conducted in public view of observers. More complex tasks, such as comparing signatures and determining voter eligibility, are handled by the professional staff.

After the election, New York Times reporters “contacted election officials in every state, both Democrats and Republicans, and of the 45 who responded directly, none reported any major issues with voting.” In 4 other states, they “spoke to other statewide officials or found public comments from secretaries of state” and “none reported any major voting issues.” In Texas, the only state that didn’t respond, local election officials in “the state’s largest county” said they “had a very seamless election.”

Minnesota’s top election official told the Times, “I don’t know of a single case where someone argued that a vote counted when it shouldn’t have or didn’t count when it should.”

A spokesperson for his Kansas counterpart said, “Kansas did not experience any widespread, systematic issues with voter fraud, intimidation, irregularities or voting problems. We are very pleased with how the election has gone up to this point.”

Pennsylvania’s attorney general told the Times his state’s elections were “fair and secure.” (CNBC reported that “the only known case of voter fraud in Pennsylvania in this cycle, is a registered Republican in Luzerne County, [who] tried to vote for Trump with his dead mother’s ballot.”)

The Times reported,

“Some states described small problems common to all elections, which they said they were addressing: a few instances of illegal or double voting, some technical glitches and some minor errors in math. Officials in all states are conducting their own review of the voting — a standard component of the certification process.”

That happens in all elections; there’s no such thing as a perfect election, nor do we need perfect elections. The goal is fair elections, in which errors and irregularities don’t change outcomes. As Vox says,

“America’s democracy is not without its flaws. Voter suppression is an issue in this country, most of it propagated by the Republican Party. … But voter fraud is nowhere near as big a problem as many Republicans claim. And 2020 was no different.”

And by all appearances, this election was fair, the GOP’s baseless and factless complaints notwithstanding.

Republicans use spurious voting fraud claims for several purposes: (1) To cast doubt on outcomes, (2) to delegitimize legitimate results, (3) to sow confusion and discord, (4) as a pretext for restrictive voting laws that are part and parcel of their massive voter suppression efforts, and (5) perhaps more than anything, to raise money from their gullible supporters.

Typical of these spurious fraud claims is this one:

“Take the Trump campaign lawsuit to stop 592 absentee ballots from being counted in Montgomery County, in suburban Philadelphia. There, the campaign is trying to have the ballots revoked because those voters didn’t handwrite their full address in a specific place on the outer absentee ballot envelope — something that the respondents point out is not a mandatory requirement. And as the Trump campaign’s lawyers admitted to a judge Tuesday, there is not currently any reason to believe there is any fraud connected to these votes. Even if the suit is successful, it won’t go very far toward overturning the election — Biden won Montgomery County by more than 100,000 votes.”

Republican lawyers and strategists aren’t stupid. They know this isn’t going anywhere. The lawsuits are expensive, but it’s not their money they’re spending. None of this is intended or expected to overturn Biden’s election victory; all of it is designed to feed a narrative whose purpose is to undermine his ability to govern. If Republicans can’t run the country, they don’t want anyone to be able to run it. But that goes against America’s most basic principle: That the people get to choose their government.

Many of this blog’s readers can’t access New York Times stories, because they’re behind a paywall (i.e., you have to subscribe to read them). Vox, a free source, picked up the essentials of the Times reporting, and you can read the entirety of the Vox story here.

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