Jon Margolis is a political columnist for VTDigger.
That was a pretty impressive bunch of demonstrations in Vermont on Wednesday. In cities and towns all over the state, hundreds of Vermonters marched, chanted, and held up signs with a simple message: “Count Every Vote.”
A good message. Every vote should be counted. That’s how elections are supposed to work. The people vote. Then those votes are counted. All of them. Let’s hear it, then, for those who insist that this activity proceed as prescribed by custom and law.
But let’s also pause to note that it is proceeding.
The votes are being counted. All of them. The 2020 presidential election worked as elections are supposed to work. The votes are being counted capably and openly by officials in states governed by Democrats and Republicans.
More people voted than ever before. The leading vote-getter, former Vice President Joseph Biden, had received (as of Friday morning) almost 74 million votes. That’s more than any candidate for president has ever received.
And Biden will get more, perhaps millions more. That’s because all the votes are being counted.
Perhaps one reason so many people voted is that nobody – or as close to “nobody” as it gets in a country of some 330 million people – made any effort to interfere with voting. Despite earlier fears, there were no reports of bands of thugs trying to harass people waiting to vote, or self-appointed “ballot security” agents challenging the legitimacy of voters as they checked in at the polls.
On Election Day, USA Today quoted Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, reporting only there were “very isolated and sporadic” reports of alleged intimidation.
“Fortunately this hasn’t been a systematic or widespread issue,” she said. “We certainly were prepared for this being a bigger problem than it proved to be today.”
So it seems there was little or no “voter suppression” on Election Day itself. That doesn’t mean there had been none earlier. Some states and counties made it harder to vote: fewer days for early voting, fewer spots to drop off ballots, fewer polling facilities leading to longer lines. There were places where voters had to stand on line for hours to cast their ballots.
Markets work. Making something more difficult to do is like raising the price for a product. Demand (or participation) goes down. The lawmakers who make voting more difficult to do know this. That’s why they did it.
In this case, though, it doesn’t seem to have been all that effective. Those people who had to stand for hours stood there. Those who had to go farther to find the drop-off box went farther. An analysis by the Washington Post and Edison Research projected that when all the votes are counted, 66.4% of voting age citizens will have cast ballots, the highest since 1960, exceeded only by the 65.7% turnout of 1908 (when William Howard Taft beat William Jennings Bryan).
There could have been even more votes to count. Some mailed ballots might have arrived too late because for reasons that defy explanation (but arouse suspicion), the U.S. Postal Service’s on-time delivery rate had declined in recent weeks, with perhaps 8,000 ballots reportedly not delivered on time in some states.
There would have been more votes to count in Florida had the Republican legislators not managed to reverse the results of a statewide referendum that called for restoring the voting rights of former prisoners. Whether those extra votes would have been decisive is impossible to determine. For what it’s worth, Vermont (like Maine and the District of Columbia) allows even the incarcerated to vote.
One reason there was so much concern about the integrity of this election was because one person kept claiming that the process would be “rigged.” That same person is now saying that no more votes should be counted.
It’s only one person. The complicating factor here is that this person is the president of the United States, who has some power in these matters.
But probably less than he thinks. Early Wednesday morning, Donald Trump said he would “go to the Supreme Court” to get states to stop counting ballots.
Even the president has no authority simply to “go to the Supreme Court.”
What is most striking is how alone Trump is out on that limb of his. A few leading Republicans have noted that of course it is important to make sure that only valid ballots be counted. But none have repeated Trump’s charge that Democrats are “trying to steal an election.” Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, generally a strong backer of the president, has called for all the votes to be counted.
The example of Georgia is relevant here. Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger are partisan Republicans who were accused of suppressing Black votes in 2018. Whatever happened then, this time they are playing it straight. The counting continued, openly and without interruption as Biden caught up with and then overtook Trump. Like their counterparts in other states, Kemp and Reffensberger did their jobs. They followed the law and played by the rules.
Perhaps in part because like their counterparts in other states, they knew they were being watched. Among those watching them are folks like those Vermont demonstrators and the groups that organized the demonstrations (VPIRG and Rights & Democracy in Vermont, cooperating with a nationwide coalition called “Protect the Results”).
Still, it’s hard not to wonder whether, at least to some extent, the demonstrators are demonstrating just for the fun of it, protesting to assert themselves, in effect using political as a form of personal expression.
They are, after all, protesting a non-problem. They are demanding that officials do what the officials are doing: counting all the votes.
Some people have a hard time accepting success.
