Opinion
A Great Election, Against All Odds
Democracy is hard work. That work paid off.
By The
Editorial Board
The
editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by
expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate
from the newsroom.
Nov. 22,
2020
The 2020
election was not simply free of fraud, or whatever cooked-up malfeasance the
president is braying about at this hour. It was, from an administrative
standpoint, a resounding success. In the face of a raging pandemic and the
highest turnout in more than a century, Americans enjoyed one of the most
secure, most accurate and most well-run elections ever.
Don’t take
our word for it. Listen to the state and local officials of both parties in
dozens of states who were tasked with overseeing the process.
“Numbers
don’t lie,” Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, said
on Friday when he certified his state’s vote total following a hand recount of
about five million ballots. Joe Biden won Georgia by a little more than 12,000
votes.
Same story
in Michigan. “We have not seen any evidence of fraud or foul play in the actual
administration of the election,’’ said a spokesman for the Democratic secretary
of state there. “What we have seen is that it was smooth, transparent, secure
and accurate.”
Over all,
the 2020 election “was the most secure in American history,” according to a
statement put out this month by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security
Agency, which is made up of top federal and state election officials. “There is
no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was
in any way compromised.”
A
bipartisan consensus like this may tempt some people to conclude that the dire
pre-election warnings were overblown, that the risks to the election were never
that serious. The reality is the opposite. The threats were many and real.
There were massive logistical hurdles to running an election during a deadly
disease outbreak. There was chaos sown deliberately by a sitting president to
undermine Americans’ faith in the integrity of the democratic process. There
was good reason to fear an electoral meltdown.
That the
meltdown didn’t materialize was thanks to months of hard work and selfless
commitment by tens of thousands of Americans across the country: state and
local elections officials, volunteer poll workers, overburdened postal
carriers, helpful neighbors and generous philanthropists.
Together,
this ad hoc democracy-protection network fanned out to expand access to mail-in
ballots, helping more than 100 million Americans, nearly two-thirds of all
voters, to vote early or absentee. They took on poll worker shifts so that
older Americans would not have to risk their lives to keep precincts open. They
volunteered time to ensure votes would be counted as quickly and accurately as
possible. It was a heroic effort, and the people who worked its front lines
deserve Americans’ everlasting gratitude.
It is
neither wise nor realistic to count on this sort of mobilization happening
every four years. “The smoothness of the election was not self-executing,” said
Vanita Gupta, the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human
Rights, an organization that supports voting rights. “Don’t lose sight of how
much work we did to make it this way.”
The nation
will need to prioritize voting rights and election administration to a degree
it has never adequately done. For example, why are Americans still waiting for
hours in line to cast their ballots? In 2014, a bipartisan commission said no
one ought to have to wait more than 30 minutes to vote. Six years on, the
country is nowhere close to that goal.
The
solutions are not a mystery. Here are three of the most obvious ones.
More money.
In the first wave of the pandemic last spring, elections experts and officials
pleaded with Congress to provide up to $4 billion to help ensure a smooth
election. Lawmakers approved one-tenth of that amount. “We get what we pay
for,” said Justin Levitt, an election law scholar at Loyola Law School. “We
poured trillions into pandemic recovery, and a teaspoonful into the democracy
that makes it work.”
Some of the
shortfall was made up by private philanthropists, who gave hundreds of millions
of dollars to state and local governments. Professional sports teams offered up
their empty arenas so voters could safely cast ballots in person. Donors
provided masks and other protective gear for poll workers. All of that was
welcome, and yet the American people pay taxes for just this purpose; they
shouldn’t have to rely on the beneficence of the wealthy to keep their
democracy intact.
Less voter
suppression. It wasn’t so long ago that both parties supported the protection
of voting rights. In 2006, Congress overwhelmingly voted to reauthorize the
Voting Rights Act. Today, the Republican Party is awash in conspiracy theories
and — there’s no other way to put it — fundamentally distrusts the American
electorate.
In hundreds
of lawsuits filed over voting and election procedures in 2020 — the most ever
in an election season — Republicans consistently sided against voters. In too
many cases, the courts let them have their way. They blocked reasonable,
targeted measures to make voting easier during the pandemic, like extending
ballot-arrival deadlines or increasing the number of drop boxes.
President
Trump has spent the past five years building a fantasy world in which he can
lose only because the other side cheated, and far too many people are content
to live in it. In the absence of a whit of evidence, a majority of Republicans
say they believe Joe Biden’s victory is the result of fraud. That’s why Mr.
Raffensperger, a committed Republican, is being punished for his defense of
Georgia’s electoral process with everything from death threats to a potentially
illegal request by Senator Lindsey Graham, a top Republican, who Mr.
Raffensperger said tried to persuade him to throw out legally cast ballots.
The United
States needs members of both major political parties to support voting rights
and access to the polls — not just because they believe it helps democracy, but
because they believe it helps them.
Thwart
disinformation. America needs a far more aggressive and coordinated response to
the massive disinformation campaigns polluting social media and people’s
dialogue with one another.
Social-media
giants like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube did more in 2020 to combat these
campaigns than ever before, and yet it wasn’t nearly enough. When a lie can
race around the globe in minutes, anything less than an immediate response is
too slow. The labels applied to misleading or factually untrue content were
often vague, and did not necessarily refute the disinformation.
Also, it’s
obvious that most of the disinformation right now is coming from one side of
the political spectrum. Social media companies need to confront that reality
head-on and stop worrying about being called biased. That’s especially
important when it comes to the accounts of high-profile figures like President
Trump, who have the power to deceive huge numbers of Americans with a single
tweet.
Democracy
is a fragile thing, and it requires constant tending and vigilance to survive.
Americans were lucky this time. They were also well prepared. When pushed to
the brink, they mobilized to protect their democracy. For this moment, at
least, tune out the president, his flailing dishonesty and his bottomless
disregard for the American experiment. Instead, express gratitude to the
millions of Americans who still believe in that experiment, and who did all
they could to make this election succeed in the face of daunting odds. Then
help make sure they don’t have to do it by themselves again.
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