As Biden edges ahead, Trump’s effort to throw out your
vote gets more vile
Opinion by
Columnist
November 4, 2020 at 9:29 a.m. CST
After
an extremely fitful night, Democrats awoke to a much more optimistic picture
for Joe Biden’s chances of winning the White House. The Associated Press called Arizona
for Biden. He edged ahead in
Wisconsin, and it appears he’ll
win. He’s now ahead in
Michigan, and it looks likely he’ll prevail once all the votes from
Wayne County are added.
Nevada
is still touch-and-go. But if Biden holds that state, and wins the three above
ones, he will net 270 in the electoral college when you add in Nebraska’s 2nd
Congressional District, which Biden also
won.
Meanwhile,
Biden might still take Pennsylvania, because he’s likely to win the 1.4 million
remaining uncounted mail ballots by large enough
margins to surmount his current deficit. Georgia is still in the
mix, and winning it is also possible.
While Biden could still lose, getting to 270 and possibly well beyond appears
increasingly likely, if hardly certain.
Naturally,
President Trump wants to confuse you about where all of this is really headed.
At about 2:30 a.m. on Wednesday morning, when he appeared to be leading, he
gave a deeply depraved
speech declaring victory.
“This
is a fraud on the American public,” Trump said.
“We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this
election.”
The
“fraud” in question is the counting of your votes. Trump also vowed
to take his effort to stop this counting to the Supreme Court. He didn’t say
what his argument would be, but that’s exactly the point: Trump has
already revealed that in his disturbed mind, the court’s role is
simply to stop the vote-counting. No rationale is needed. It’s what he
appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett to do. Enough said.
But
let’s not forget that something else helped make this all possible: Republicans
in Rust Belt states worked to prevent the count of mail ballots (enormous
numbers of which we knew would arrive well in advance of Election Day) from
commencing until that day.
In
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, GOP state legislators refused to
change their laws to authorize the counting of mail ballots
before Election Day. By contrast, many other
states do allow this counting to commence earlier.
Amid pandemic
conditions, we have known for months that the crush of mail balloting would be
immense, and that if counting were allowed earlier, there would be no need for
the count to drag on for days afterward. Note that in Florida, we got the
results promptly.
It’s
important to stress that this is a feature of why Republicans
oppose counting ballots before Election Day: Creating the delayed count is the
whole point, because it’s supposed to help cast an aura of illegitimacy on the
votes counted in the days after.
When
Trump raged that the ongoing count of these votes is “fraud,” he was exploiting
exactly this deliberate state of affairs. Republicans want it to be harder to
count the votes on time; Trump then uses the resulting delays in the counting
of ballots to try to cast doubt on them.
It’s a
neat trick. And it has a deeper purpose, too: delegitimizing a Biden victory.
If Biden does go on to win — and it’s plausible both Wisconsin and Michigan
might be called Wednesday, and possibly Pennsylvania and Nevada on Thursday —
he’ll keep this up:
It’s
hard to know how much this will matter in the real world. All this will really
come down to what happens in the courts, and it looks plausible that Biden just
might win by enough to prevent GOP efforts to invalidate ballots to make a
difference. That is, he just might win this by a cheatproof margin.
But we
should not forget that none of this has to be happening.
In
fairness, some Republicans, such as Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), denounced (sort of, anyway) Trump’s declaration of victory. But Trump and
his allies remain fundamentally committed to disrupting democracy, to scuttling
the very possibility of a smooth resolution to this election, if they appear to
be on the verge of losing power.
Meanwhile,
many Republicans remain fully committed to manipulating the rules of political
competition to create an advantage for themselves in all kinds of sleazy and
dishonest ways, from preventing people from voting (against them) by any means
necessary to invalidating their ballots through technical trickery to rigging
district lines to dilute people’s votes.
It is a
real bright spot in this ongoing disaster that much of the news media treated
Trump’s speech dismissively, patiently informing people that there are huge
numbers of votes to still be counted and that Trump is not, in fact, even
winning right now, let alone the victor.
But
court battles lie ahead, and terrible outcomes remain feasible. Meanwhile,
Trump and his allies will do all they can to render the transfer of power (if
Biden wins) as destructive to the country as possible.