Americans should be pleased, proud and relieved that the largest election in American history has been honest, transparent, and professionally managed with no serious claims of voter intimidation and or any legitimate claims of mass voter fraud. The Trump campaign has filed numerous lawsuits claiming fraud with absolutely no evidence, so the courts have continued to dismiss them. The Trump campaign had one victory in the courts when they argued that their election observers did not have enough access to the vote counting. The court said that the observers could stand six feet from the vote counting rather than 10 feet. To be clear, there are cameras all over the vote counting areas similar to gambling floors in casinos.
Our presidential election is really 51 separate elections run by each state and the District of Columbia with a different set of laws and rules in each jurisdiction. Our federal system giving states various powers can be frustrating at times, but with respect to the presidential election, the Founding Father’s healthy skepticism of central authority worked very well in 2020. All the votes are being counted, which is a basic tenet of any legitimate democracy, despite Trump’s efforts to stop the counting in states where he is ahead.
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As of early Friday morning, we still have five or six states depending whether you call Arizona “too early to call” that have yet to declare a winner. We also have two US Senate races that will go into a special election on January 5. Trump has 214 electoral college votes and Biden has 253 with Arizona still considered too close to call. One reason for the delay in a final count is that some states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have laws on the books that prevent any election officials from counting or even verifying signatures on early mail-in or drop-off ballots until 7 a.m. on election day. Biden is currently ahead in four of the remaining six states that would easily get him across the needed 270 finish line.
The Trump campaign’s strategy was for the president to encourage his supporters to vote on the day of the election and let the Democrats do the early voting often because of fears of voter intimidation in some communities and because they understand that COVID-19 is real and deadly. The Trump campaign also strongly supported state laws that kept states from starting to count votes until election day and laws that invalidated any ballot that came in after 8 pm on election day no matter when it was postmarked. Then on election evening, the in-person ballots would be counted first and quickly with the early voting ballots slowly being counted since the election staff had to first open the envelopes, verify the signatures and then run the ballots through the counting machines. This takes time since accuracy is the name of the game.
The Trump Strategy
On election night Trump would obviously be ahead due to his supporters listening to him and voting in-person on election day. Trump would then sue to end the voting. His plan was to get the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, and he expected the justices that he appointed along with the usual two rightwing justices to end the election count and Trump would be re-elected. Unfortunately for Trump, the system was honest and most people from both parties wanted to see all the ballots counted even if it took a couple of extra days.The majority of voters felt that faith in the accuracy and honesty of the vote was most important to preserving our nation’s democratic experiment.
So we continue to believe that Biden will win as we stated in our early Wednesday morning update, but we want to point out one very important and exciting fact. Georgia had two senatorial races this election because one was in the normal cycle and the other was an appointed senator that replaced an elected senator. Georgia has a state law that was designed to keep African Americans from becoming US Senators. In Georgia, a candidate for the U.S. Senate must get 50% of the vote and if no candidate gets the magic 50%, there is a special election in January between the top two vote getters. Both of these Georgia senatorial seats will be on the ballot again on January 5 and if the Democrats will both seats, Mitch McConnell would become minority leader.
