When Trump took an early lead on election eve, 2020, his supporters noisily demanded that vote counting stop (see video below). Later, they tried to spin the counting of everyone’s votes as “cheating.” That’s right, they argued that because your vote was counted too, the election was “stolen.”
This isn’t just dishonest, it’s offensive. What these people wanted was their votes counted, and yours thrown out. That’s like saying, “We have rights, and you have none.”
Mother Jones explains (here) what happened:
“Before election night in 2020, it was clear that Trump would never admit he lost. Instead he would use the early leads he was expected to have in many states— a result of his backers disproportionately voting in person rather than by mail—to declare victory and to advance the false claim that late-night shifts in favor of Joe Biden were the result of cheating. This was part of Trump’s larger plan to use election fraud conspiracy theories to challenge the legitimacy of his defeat.”
Republicans don’t like absentee or mail voting to begin with. That, in itself, is a slap in the face of voters who can’t, for one reason or another, get to a polling place (which they try to make as difficult as possible).
The mob scene below was a direct and violent attack on the civil rights of the voters whose ballots were being counted in that room. (This took place in Detroit, and many of those voters were black.) This was a riot, not a protest. And you have every right to be very angry with those rioters.
It came out this week that Rudy Giuliani was inebriated on election eve, and in his state of drunkenness, he urged Trump to declare victory — prematurely, it turned out. But as Mother Jones points out, whether Rudy was drunk, and what he said to Trump is irrelevant, and a distraction. Interfering with the counting of votes wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment impulse that came from Giuliani. It was part of a plan put in place well before the election.
Maybe from now on we need armed police guarding election offices. In between elections, we can keep them employed guarding schools against the Republican gun policies that put guns in the hands of homicidal maniacs.