TODAY'S THE DAY
Kinda busy these last coupla weeks canvassing, phone-banking…and starting later this morning, a stint as a VOTER PROTECTION monitor. Still time to share a few things, though.
Could be tense, but we’re more prepared this time…
Bart Gelman, a national security expert who wrote the prescient The Election That Could Break America for The Atlamtic in 2020 foretelling much of Trump’s multi-pronged attempted coup, assures that we are much more ready now, even though things could get quite tense.
As Nov. 5 approaches, former president Donald Trump has left little room for doubt about his intentions. He will almost certainly declare victory on election night, as the votes are still being counted. He may turn out to be right. But if Vice President Kamala Harris wins, Trump will reject the result as corrupt and launch a scorched-earth campaign to overturn it.
This plot is so well telegraphed that it barely counts as a prediction. Trump has stated repeatedly that he cannot lose unless there is “massive fraud”—and, separately, that the election is “rigged,” with a “bad voting system.” As he told the Fraternal Order of Police on Sept. 6: “We win without voter fraud, we win so easily.” Voters, by that reckoning, can make no other legitimate choice. That upside-down view of elections may still have the power to shock, but after Trump’s response to defeat four years ago it cannot be called surprising….
….We are embarking on a presidential election in which tens of millions of Americans disbelieve the results in advance. The 2020 election, relatedly, was the only one in American history which the loser refused persistently to concede. The partisan split—close to 80% of Democrats, but just 30% of Republicans, have faith in the vote count—reflects the cumulative damage of countless lies….
Yet, Gelman has confidence we’re ready:
But the arc of the evidence, based on interviews with state, local, and federal election officials, intelligence analysts, and expert observers, bends toward confidence. Since 2020, the nation’s electoral apparatus has upgraded its equipment, tightened its procedures, improved its audits, and hardened its defenses against subversion by bad actors, foreign or domestic. Ballot tabulators are air-gapped from the Internet and voter-verified paper records are the norm. Bipartisan reforms enacted in 2022 make it much harder to interfere with the appointment of electors who represent a state’s popular vote, and harder to block certification in Congress of the genuine electoral count. Courts continue to deny evidence-free claims of meddling. The final word on vote-certification in key swing states rests with governors from both parties who have defied election denialism at every turn...
…At the heart of that system are nonpartisan election officials at the federal, state, county, and local level who are dedicated to delivering a free and fair election. Poll workers will verify the identity and registration of every person who casts a ballot, in person or by mail. When polls close on Election Day, sooner in some states, election workers will begin tabulating early and mail-in ballots and in-person votes, usually on scanning machines. As they proceed, officials will secure counted ballots, compile the results from the tabulation machines, and save worksheets and (for 98% of votes cast) paper records for official and public review. The entire procedure is overseen by poll watchers from both parties.
No human enterprise that spans tens of thousands of polling places, hundreds of thousands of election officials, and more than 150 million projected voters can aspire to be flawless, says Jen Easterly, a former Army intelligence officer who directs the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). “There could be a ransomware attack on an election office,” Easterly says. “There could be a distributed denial of service attack on a website, so you can’t see election-night reporting. Somebody will forget their key to a polling place, so they could open late. A storm may bring down a power line, so a polling place needs to be moved.”
What matters, she says, is that election officials have trained for all those contingencies. “They are prepared to meet the moment and to deal with any disruption,” she says. Easterly and her state counterparts play this message of reassurance on repeat, interview after interview and speech after speech. It has the virtue of being true. There really are playbooks and backup procedures and well-designed mitigation plans for every bad thing they have ever seen happen to an election, and none of those bad things pose a genuine threat to the integrity of the vote….Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author, is senior adviser at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law
“West Wing” cast weighs in
During the dark years of the “W” Bush years, this show nurtured some of us through the reign of The. Worst. President. Ever.
Up to then.
…the cast comes back to endorse Kamala.
Nixon: “I am not a crook.” Trump: “I am not a Nazi.”
“Methinks thou doth protest too much…”
What was sickening about being there in person was watching the Trump fans around me and realizing that there was nothing shocking about it to them. The hate was the thing that they were there to cheer for; the nastier the nickname, the cruder the slur, the bigger the roar. - “Garbage Time at the 2024 Finish Line,” Susan Glasser in The New Yorker
Today’s the day we boot him to the curb…but it’ll take a few days to count the ballots..
From Charlie Sykes, a onetime conservative talk radio mega-host in WI who advanced the careers of Paul Ryan, Scott walker, and Ron Johnson (the latter much to his chagrin) before seeing the light when the GOP nominated Trump, and doing penance by co-founding The Bulwark, which has been a stalwart in opposing Trumpism…
