Unofficially Speaking

There seems to be some confusion about how elections work in the United States.

In the words of President Trump, a lot of people are saying the election can’t be held fairly with mail-in ballots, that the results won’t be known for days or weeks or even years, and that court challenges could go on for a really long time.

Now, he hasn’t told us the names of any of the people are who are complaining, but obviously they don’t know how elections work. 

That could well be. 

We take pride in how so many people overcame obstacles to earn the right to vote, overcoming barriers of race and sex  and wealth. (Check out the property owner practices we had in Colonial days). And we are still fighting over voter suppression. 

Some day, college students living away from home and all the residents of Washington, D.C. will be allowed to vote for local officials and members of Congress.

Strangely, once people win the right to vote, a lot of them don’t use it.

How many? Well, in our last Presidential election, 138 million Americans voted. That was less than 60 per-cent of those eligible to cast ballots.

(Here’s an interesting footnote. Somewhere between 9 and 13 percent of Trump’s voters had voted for Barack Obama four years before. No one is claiming good figures on how many of them may turn back to Joe Biden in 2020).

Now we are a television nation. There is something comforting in watching election returns after the polls close. You can see our democracy working, and get a feel for how big our country really is, as returns come in, state by state, from the East Coast to the West. Long into the night.

Broadcast and cable stations compete to see who will be the first to predict one state or another going for one candidate or the other. None of those predictions are made before the polls close - that would be bad form - but most states get a declared winner from the media long before the final vote is counted.

Why? Well, let’s say a state has a million eligible voters, and usually sees 650,000 people casting ballots. Now, lets say 500,000 of those ballots have been counted, and one candidate is ahead by 250,000 votes.

Lets also say that there were no unusually long lines at the polls, and that the paper ballots total 40,000 votes. No chance the results of the election will change. So, you declare a winner.

Now, smart news organizations will dig a bit deeper. They know which areas in the state typically vote Democratic or Republican, and the know the turnout from election districts as they are called in. They can predict a race better and faster by looking at a new swing areas and at the turnout on those traditional voter strongholds. So, declare a winner. Faster, sooner, better.

Now, comes the lesson. Nobody - except for some sloppy commentators - actually declares who won on election night. They declare who the apparent winner is.

What’s the difference? Time for a long, rambling story.

One of the fun things I used to do as a reporter before I retired was cover village elections. I really liked it.

Why? Because you could really get into local issues - not just taxes being too high, but why street flooding wasn’t being taken care of, why parks weren’t being maintained, why the zoning code was being changed to allow new kinds of businesses to come into Main Street or to keep them out. Visceral stuff for local residents.

Voting was usually in a village hall or a fire house. The Village Clerk who ran the election had a pile of paper ballots - absentee ballots - that would add 20 or 30 votes to the total. There were two or three voting machines, and people checking the registration of every voter.

And, I got to hang around in some really nice villages, eating an ice cream cone and looking at yachts in the harbor or just walking past some homes put up in the 1600’s.

Why do I bring this up? Well, the vote totals on Election Night were all counted and certified. Polls closed at 9 p.m. Totals were available and official before 10 p.m.  I could call the results into my newspaper, then drive back to the office and file a short story for the web, then do  bigger one the next day explaining what had happened.

The overtime pay was good, the rum raisin ice cream was tasty, and having a beer with a source while waiting for the polls to close was, well, a necessary part of the job.

My point, of course, is that these little village elections are the only ones where the vote can be certified on election night.  The Village Clerk who gave the results was the person with the power to officially certify the election count.

When I worked the county Board of Elections, their computers were really good at giving updates. How many eligible voters, percentage of votes cast, tallies broken down by line, with race results updated every few minutes.

I didn’t always know where the votes were coming from - that’s why reporters in the field talk to people after they vote - so early numbers didn’t tell us much. But, as the night wore on and the numbers of votes still to be called in from the field got lower and lower,  the outcome became clear. One candidate had won, another had lost, or the result was too close to call.

Important difference here. Television and newspapers can call races and declare winners and losers, but their projections don’t really count. That’s why election boards put out an unofficial list of voting results, and sometimes it can take a day or two before that list becomes public.

And, that’s just the beginning.

All those voting machines, the scanners and the paper ballots and the voice-activated interactive beta ray checkers (a little joke amid all this dull stuff) have to be verified.

If you hang around the polling place after the voting is over,  you would see that every voting machine is tallied, the results recorded, and the machines sent back to a warehouse.

There, the real count takes place. Every machine is checked for the number of votes entered, the ballot count, the number of times a vote failed to be counted. There are random checks of actual scanned ballots against the machine count - no names on those, of course. Just numbers - to see how accurate the reported count really is.

Then there are stacks of paper ballots, counted and separated by election districts. In New York, each ballot is looked at by a Republican and a Democrat (the parties choose their inspectors), and they argue about whether it is addressed properly, when it was postmarked, and if Ryan G. Matthews ballot can be counted because the election book has him as Ryan George Matthews.

While the name of the person who got the absentee ballot is on the outside of the envelope - to check no one voted twice - there is another envelope in the first one with the voter’s actual ballot. Once the vote is accepted, that is put in a separate pile to be opened and recorded anonymously.

Trust me, these things are really boring. That’s why I only followed the ones where the paper ballot vote could change the outcome of a race.

Now, for the Presidential election, all this stuff is just the starting point. Don’t tell our President, please. He doesn’t want to wait for official results. I know because he said so.

Anyway, we get one more delay. It’s that Electoral College thing.

People who vote for a presidential candidate are really voting for electors who are pledged to vote for the named candidate when the Electoral College meets. Now there are 538 electors in the Electoral College, and a candidate needs 270 votes to win.

You can look it up yourself. It’s right there in the Constitution - Article II, Section 1, Clause 2.

You will also learn that every state gets enough electors to equal the total number of its members in the House and  Senate, and that the District of Columbia gets the same number of electors as the nation’s least populous state, which is currently three.

Now here’s the last detail. The Constitution says that all the electors meet on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, to cast their votes for president. Those results are counted by Congress at a joint meeting during the first week in January.

That’s when it all becomes official. Unless, of course, someone complains about something and it ends up in the Supreme Court. And, who knows if they would even take the case.

There is one other thing we need to keep in mind. No matter what happens, or doesn’t happen, the President’s term in office ends on January 20. No questions about it. It’s in the Constitution, and all the recent Republican appointments to the Supreme Court said they were strict Constitutionalists.

That wonderful founding document also spells out who would take over if the electors fail to reach agreement, and no one gets those 270 votes.

That would be the Speaker of the House of Representatives. You know, Nancy Pelosi. It’s right there in the Constitution too.

So, how long do you want to wait for the final election results? You know, it could be months and months before the Post Office delivers all those mail-in ballots and they are all reviewed by election officials in all 50 states. But, don’t worry. Donald Trump’s appointee to run the Post Office is on the job.