This morning, I decided to stop looking at social media. I taught Civics, Government, US Consttution and History for the better part of 35 years and it hasn't been very encouraging to observe most of the comments, wondering if any of my former students are saying some of what I'm seeing. And I have to wonder, if all of these people finished high school in this country, how effective our social studies curriculum has been for the last half century. From what I'm seeing on social media, we really need to make some drastic changes in what we teach and how we teach it.
What's so hard to understand?
Elections are Delegated to the States
There is only one "federal" election, the Electoral College, and even it is subject to rules made by the states. All other elections are delegated to the states who then divide up the responsibilities to counties and municipal units which set up the logistics according to their own plans. State legislatures make the rules for conducting elections, determining voter registration, how ballots are verified, cast, delivered and counted. Most are fairly consistent but there are differences from state to state and those differences are responsible for some of the confusion that is happening now.
Remember Florida in 2000? The disaster that occurred in that state wound up holding up the results of the presidential election for over a month. Every county had its own way of doing things and several of them used a "punch card" ballot that no one noticed was not really efficient until the close nature of the election required scrutiny of every single ballot. But they learned something from the embarrassment of being labelled as "Flor-i-duh." The legislature approved early voting. People can vote in Florida for up to a month before the actual election date. They introduced mail-in voting prior to the 2016 election, requiring ballots to be mailed in so that they can arrive before election day. As soon as the early voting and mail-in voting starts, the ballots are verified and counted. On election night, Florida's counties released the results of the 75% of the vote that had been cast by mail or in early polling locations before 9 p.m. Eastern time. The election day tally was all that was left to count and they wrapped that up before 10 p.m.
Pennsylvania's legislature is a little more old fashioned. They do not allow any early polling locations. Just this year, reluctantly and because of COVID, they decided to allow mail-in balloting, but they determined that no votes could be opened, canvassed and counted before 7 a.m. on Election day. Most Republicans followed the President's rhetoric about both COVID and mail-in ballots and waited until election day. But Democrats are a majority of registered voters in Pennsylvania and they, along with almost 60% of independents, opted to vote by mail. That means more than half of what looks like it will be somewhere north of 7 million votes, have to be opened by hand, have the signatures checked and then the ballot flattened so it goes into the counting machine and then counted. And that is why it has taken three days to count most of the ballots.
If they had canvassed the ballots and checked all the irregularities prior to the election, all they would have to do now is run them through the machines. But to make sure the count is accurate, and that there is no fraud, it takes about sixty seconds to process each ballot. That's six million envelopes because each ballot is enclosed in an inner envelope with a signature inside the one in which it is sent.
Even at that, most counties in the state are small in population and in the rural areas, there are more Republicans than Democrats and Independents, so maybe a fourth, or a third, of the ballots came by mail. But the majority of Pennsylvanians live in clusters of counties around urban areas. A fourth of the voters live in Philadelphia or one of the four counties that surround it and another 10% live in Allegheny County, which is Pittsburgh and its suburbs. Smaller urban areas, Allentown-Bethlehem, Scranton, Erie and Harrisburg, account for another 20%. So that means 11 counties have to count about 80% of the more than three million mail ballots that were sent in and they can't touch them until election day. That's why Trump let by nine points at the end of the day Tuesday, and why his lead dwindled and then evaporated as mail ballots are counted. Over 75% of the mail in vote has consistently gone to Biden, because over 75% of Pennsylvania's Democrats and independents voted by mail.
The same phenomenon is visible in other states where there were high numbers of mail-in votes. There is even more pressure in Wisconsin, for example, because the majority of its Democratic voters live in just a few counties and almost half of them live in the city of Milwaukee. Wisconsin does allow early voting but the bulk of their mail-in vote was turned into boxes at polling locations the week before election day, so it took longer on election night to count. Biden's margin in Wisconsin depended on the Milwaukee vote, which is why it appeared to "flip" in the middle of the night. They counted all of their ballots then reported the results of over 100,000 of them at about 1 a.m. Biden got over 80% of the vote in Milwaukee, so he went from being behind by a couple of percentage points to being ahead by a fraction of a percent.
Social Media Distortions
The President gave broad hints weeks before the election that indicated he knew he was likely to lose it. Social media picked up on his themes. It really amazes me how, after four years of being caught having told some of the most outrageous lies that people still fail to question everything he says. He has been setting up the narrative about not trusting the ballots since the last election. But there's only fraud if he loses. If he wins, then there's no fraud. A sixth grader can see how ridiculous that is.
Social media already had memes and posts available to start posting on election night to perpetuate the image that Trump was right about election fraud. One post put up a list of official looking voter registration numbers and claimed that the vote totals in Wisconsin exceeded the registration. It wasn't true, about 80% of the registered voters in Wisconsin cast ballots. But that didn't stop the post from circulating. Then there were the videos from people claiming to be poll watchers, telling of mysterious vans pulling up in the middle of the night, dropping off boxes of ballots to vote counting locations "after they had already counted all the ballots." There's no shot of the van, the boxes or the votes being counted, it's just an allegation. One of the videos claims it is in Detroit.
It is certainly feasible that vans dropped off boxes of ballots at odd hours all night because over 100,000 voters dropped their mail-in ballots off on election day at the collection boxes scattered all over Wayne County. Precinct workers bring the boxes from the polling places to the counting location, accompanied by one Republican and one Democrat poll watcher. But the election board has to send workers to pick up the drop boxes and they also must be accompanied by one Democrat and one Republican poll watcher. Since they can't open the boxes, they have to have vans to transport them and workers to load the boxes into the vans. Wayne County was the most heavily observed vote counting location in all of Michigan so it is not likely that a van could pull up and secretly deliver thousands of phony ballots with over a hundred Republican poll watchers, double the number of Democrats, all over the room and 24 hour live camera streaming of the whole process.
Racial Slurs
The focus on ballot counting in cities like Milwaukee and Philadelphia, and in Wayne County, Michigan and Fulton County, Georgia is a subtle way of saying that African Americans can't be trusted when it comes to counting votes. Trump's call for supporters to crowd into places where votes were being counted, aside from demonstrating inexcuseable ignorance of the vote counting process by a President who should know better, not only created confusion and chaos, which was one of his goals, but he was saying "you can't trust Black Democrats with the election process because they cheat." This from a guy who knowingly accepted Russian help with his first election.
There were not many other places in the country where the ballot count was watched as closely as it was in those counties. Most states have strict laws requiring a Republican, a Democrat and an Independent voter to be present when ballots are counted, especially when mail-in ballots are opened and counted. They must be involved in any decisions regarding handling ballots that are rejected by machines, witnessing signatures, transcribing ballots that are spoiled or won't go through the machine and everything is verified down to the time that poll workers take breaks and go to the bathroom. Polling locations are watched just as closely.
Of course, large cities with large African American populations have had some highly publicized incidents when it comes to attempts at voter fraud. But the bigger picture is that voter fraud is rare, more legend than fact, and there has been more of it in rural areas and small towns, especially in the South, than in the large industrial cities of the Northeast and upper Midwest. It has only been in the past three or four decades that African Americans have registered to vote in similar percentages to whites. The number of incidents of voter fraud are tiny compared to the number of votes that are cast and the verification processes have become virtually foolproof.
Of course, as the cities and their suburbs have become the centers of political power, resentment among those in places that can't match the vote totals grows and making accusations that "shenanigans" are going on is a way of venting frustration. As far as reported incidents of irregularities goes, smaller counties and rural counties have a disproportionate share of them. There will always be people who try to cheat, but there has not been any evidence at all of "massive voter fraud" in this election.
If you want to read about real election "shenanigans" andwhat that looks like, check out The Mueller Report.
No comments:
Post a Comment