51. Election Day

The headliners are still hustling for the last votes. Pundits and partisans are comparing the “vitality” of the candidates; it’s an endurance race, and all candidates will collapse sometime tomorrow night. 

The pundits other favorite issue is fraud or no fraud, and its corollary, acceptance or no acceptance. An old friend recently emailed me about his concerns with mail ballots. He claimed that in some states, including Oregon, the number of ballots mailed in some counties was greater than the number of legal voters living in the same counties. I searched and found nothing—from left or right, D or R, that indicated any concern about this in Oregon, and wrote back to tell him so, and ask him to please let me know where he found the information. No word back.

 

I also reminded him of a previous election controversy that provided more opportunity for fraud and outright theft. As I recall it, several states were moving to all touchscreen voting—without paper backup. The systems, they said, were foolproof. At which point a computer whiz from MIT showed how easy it would be to hijack the system and redo the vote count. 

 

Those systems are mostly, quietly, gone. Georgia still has old touchscreens, but a new, complicated, paper backup system has been added. There has been no public concern about this kind of fraud, and no mention of the long-ago “perfect system” being easily hacked for demonstration purposes. We’re concentrated on drop boxes, mail votes, and the integrity of the Postal Service.  

 

This might be puzzling, unless we remember the overall acceptance of even the most controversial election results in our past. Popular vote winners have lost the presidency in the Electoral College. There is brief outrage, and then acceptance. Kennedy, the outsider, the Irish Catholic who inspired fear in protestant pulpits, won in a very close election, but there was an undercurrent that said that Mayor Daily of Chicago was managing the last precincts in Kennedy’s favor. Yet Nixon conceded.

 

I think most historians and political practitioners purposefully do not bring up the voting machines. Dr. Dennis Strong, a history professor of mine 57 years ago, told us that the most important factor in American political stability and success over centuries is orderly succession. 

 

We are being tested this year, the first time in my 56 years of voting.

 

# # #