Take heart, dear voter

Let’s admit it. Our holiday season doesn't seem very seasonal or holy this year. Not only are some who presided over Thanksgiving feasts now wondering if they sawed a couple of branches off the family tree but many remain anxious or discouraged at the unprecedented spectacle of a U.S. president defeated for re-election so frantically employing legal forces and powerful political allies to resist leaving high office come January. If so, take heart at the developments below and give belated thanks where appropriate. In some ways we have much for which to give thanks:

– In a Nov. 27 U.S. Third Court of Appeals decision reaffirming a lower court ruling, Judge Stephanos Bibas – a President Trump appointee – nonetheless made clear that Trump's legal forces offered no legitimate grounds and no evidence to toss millions of Pennsylvanians’ votes: “Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here. The Trump Presidential Campaign asserts that Pennsylvania’s 2020 election was unfair. But as lawyer Rudolph Giuliani stressed, the campaign 'doesn’t plead fraud. . . . [T]his is not a fraud case.' Instead, it objects that Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State and some counties restricted poll watchers and let voters fix technical defects in their mail-in ballots. It offers nothing more."

– Responding to a fact-free lawsuit by renegade Trump attorney Sidney Powell alleging Dominion Voting machines switched Trump votes to Joe Biden votes, Dominion issued a statement including this: "Claims that 941,000 votes for President Trump in Pennsylvania were deleted are impossible. The 14 counties using Dominion systems collectively produced 1.3 million votes, representing a voter turnout of 76%. Fifty-two percent of those votes went to President Trump, amounting to 676,000 votes processed for the president in Pennsylvania using company systems. Dominion doesn't even operate in some of the contested districts, including Philadelphia; Allegheny County, PA; Milwaukee; and Dane County." Powell's work here and elsewhere is regarded as so laughable – a real stretch if you’ve read federal rulings reflecting absurd challenges by the rest of Trump’s legal beagles – that the president severed any connection she had or did not have with the rest of Trump's team. (Quick Nov. 30 addendum: As if suddenly deciding not to be outdone by Powell's bizarre claims, the president in a freewheeling Nov. 29 Fox News interview suggested the Department of Justice, run by one of his most protective loyalists, might have helped steal the election from him.) 

– When Michigan state Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and State House Speaker Lee Chatfield were summoned to the White House amid Trump effort to scuttle the 157,000-vote lead that Biden had in that state, the two Republicans said they only discussed the process of verifying Michigan’s presidential election results. Their Nov. 20 statement after leaving the White House: “We have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan and, as legislative leaders, we will follow the law and follow the normal process regarding Michigan’s electors, just as we have said throughout this election." Michigan’s votes have now been properly certified.

– In comments on Nov. 13 and since, embattled Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a diehard Trump disciple and Republican who represents South Carolina, not Georgia, contacted him to raise doubts about Georgia's signature-matching law. During the conversation, Sen. Graham reportedly raised the specter that biased poll workers had counted ballots with inconsistent signatures and that Raffensperger might consider dumping all mail-in ballots from counties that had shown higher rates of unmatched signatures. This charge will complicate Graham's public vow as chairman of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee to oversee an investigation of voting fraud in the presidential election, given he now stands accused of conspiring to fraudulently alter a federal election vote tally, a federal crime.

– In a Nov. 12 statement, the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council Executive Committee of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which ultimately reports to the president, issued this statement: “The Nov. 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double-checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result. When states have close elections, many will recount ballots. All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary. This is an added benefit for security and resilience. This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised." This was sufficiently inconvenient that President Trump fired his very own DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director who stood by the statement. Later, when Christopher Krebs was interviewed about his abrupt dismissal by presidential tweet as well as allegations the election had been rigged by China and a long-dead Venezuelan dictator, he responded: “Look … we can go on and on with farcical claims alleging interference in the 2020 election, but the proof is in the ballots.”

It's relevant to point out that many of those accused of electoral malfeasance in these scattershot, mistake-ridden Trump legal challenges in battleground states across the republic happen to be work-a-day election workers, many of them patriotic volunteers who take solemn oaths to put aside any and all partisan sentiments and conduct fair and free elections. From all evidence, including sober court rulings as well as eye-opening court transcripts of exchanges between colossally unprepared Trump lawyers and incredulous judges (and, yes, I've read many of the rulings and exchanges), these extraordinary everyday citizens are doing their duty to degrees that would mystify too many of our out-of-touch elected officials. Two letters to the editor I published during my final week at the Waco Tribune-Herald (just days after the contested Nov. 3 election) highlight the good that goes on at the local level, despite presidential efforts to tarnish such individuals and their dedication, this year unfolding amidst a deadly pandemic gaining unprecedented rates of infection:

"I publicly thank Russell Larkins, election judge, and all the election clerks at Tennyson Middle School for their excellent work in running a polling station on Election Day. For the first time in 45 years of voting, I didn't just vote this year, I also served as poll watcher, observing the voting process and making sure, to the best of my ability and training, that they followed the rules, allowing all eligible voters to vote and making sure no one was abusing the system. This team earned an A+!

“Made up of regular citizens like you and me, they warmly welcomed potential voters, checked their identification and voting registration status, congratulated first-time voters, watched them sign in, made sure they knew how to work the voting machines (and no, they are not touch screens!) and let them vote in privacy and peace. Then they gave them their ‘I voted’ stickers, thanked them for coming and then, fully recognizing our pandemic times, carefully sanitized the voting machine for the next voter.

"There is a lot to be done - all while wearing appropriate anti-COVID-19 garb! "It was heartwarming to see how friendly this election team was to each person who came through the door; they maintained those warm feelings all the way through the process. They were also careful and conscientious in allowing people to vote - no voting fraud here! When there were problems with identification or registration lists, they went through all steps possible to let people vote properly, but they did have to turn down potential voters who for various reasons were ineligible to vote this year. They followed the rules even if you and I might question some of these rules.

"Last Tuesday I saw democracy in action in its most basic form, with a multi-ethnic, multi-racial team of citizens helping other citizens of all ages, races, genders and ethnicities exercise their rights as citizens to vote. I was then, and still am, proud to be an American."

                                                                                                                          Bill Lockhart, Woodway

                                                                                  * * *

 

"We should not let this election cycle end without recognizing the heroic service of our poll workers the past few weeks. I salute them all, especially one woman who worked at the polling place at Bosque and Cobbs who, in my view, represents this group at their very best. Her name is Iris.

"I was asked to drive a disabled veteran in his 80s to the poll last week and was happy to do so. When we arrived, I went inside to ask someone to handle curbside voting for him. Iris came out immediately and got his photo ID and returned inside the polling place. There was a lengthy delay and I became concerned, so I went inside to talk to Iris. She explained that my veteran had sent in a mail-in ballot already but that he hadn't signed it correctly. She needed to do the paperwork to allow him to vote on a provisional ballot that would replace the mail-in ballot.

"When she came back out, she explained all of this to him, then walked him through the ballot since it was clear he couldn't manage the keypad on his own. The entire process, from arrival to departure, probably took close to an hour. Throughout the entire process, Iris was courteous, professional and knowledgeable. "We're lucky to have selfless, caring people like Iris protecting our democracy and we should never take them for granted."

                                                                                                                         Mike Raymond, Waco

Such letters make me proud, even more so after reading conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks’ reflections, “The Rotting of the Republican Mind,” of Nov. 28. They're a wakeup call about vigilance in the future. An excerpt:

“In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77% of Donald Trump’s backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. We live in a country in epistemological crisis, in which much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality. Moreover, this is not just an American problem. All around the world, rising right-wing populist parties are floating on oceans of misinformation and falsehood. What is going on? Many people point to the Internet — the way it funnels people into information silos, the way it abets the spread of misinformation. I mostly reject this view. Why would the Internet have corrupted Republicans so much more than Democrats, the global right more than the global left?”

Democracy in America? Probably safe this go around, thanks to a handful of courageous state and local officials, Republican and Democrat, who put a far higher premium on the voters and dedicated and maliciously maligned election workers than a deceitful president and misinformation-peddling minions conspiring to overturn the will of the American people. This was admittedly a hard-fought election that real estate tycoon and reality TV star Donald Trump lost under a constitutional system he never quite grasped and his followers view with respect only when vote tallies go their way. Thanks this season also goes to federal judges who, whatever their ideology, whoever appointed them to the bench, still recognized the greater peril to our democracy and their own vaunted institution of the federal judiciary, a trust they would have had hell regaining had they gone along with Trumpian lawsuits.

Yet we're left to marvel at the tragic spectacle of a nation where many Republicans – not all but way too many of them, including our congressman-elect – have sought to shatter confidence in our electoral system. In doing so, they have aided, wittingly or not, global adversaries who work day and night to undermine our system of bottom-up self-governance and our national unity. The worst of this nightmarish circus involves friends, neighbors and co-workers more than willing to shelve democracy and forsake the Constitution just so long as it means four more years of Donald Trump in the White House. And that's more than disgraceful.