There is "no evidence" the Nov. 3 election was compromised, committees within the Department of Homeland Security that worked on protecting U.S. voting systems affirmed Thursday. In a statement, they also called the 2020 election the "most secure in American history."
"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," members of committees, which include officials from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a joint statement.
"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."
Often I think partisans and the media turn elections into too much of a horse race, thinking that every little vote or action is significant and that any little thing that could change the outcome of a race is important. And while winning versus losing is important to the politician and staff themselves, to the American people and public policy over the long run not so much so. Elections occur every year, and power is divided into many different levels of government. One candidate or party in a closely divided country isn’t likely to have a long legacy.
Let’s say there is a theoretical race where candidate “A” gets 49% of the vote and candidate “B” gets 50% of the vote. Candidate “B” is the winner, whose ideas represent the majority of the electorate? Not really. When a race is that close you might as well flip a coin because either candidate in practice represents a majority of the electorate. Particularities like random error, minor mishaps or fraud, weather or even the location of polling sites or hours might define the winner. Chances are on a race so close the next election things might flip the other way.
Elections shouldn’t be seen a precise measurement of public opinion but more of an estimate of public sentiments.
A lot of people don’t vote and there are all kinds of rules and procedures that distort the outcome of elections. State, county and municipal lines rarely represent communities of interest – often instead they’re historical conglomerations that lead to certain voices not being heard. Legislative districts are subject to gerrymandering and little things like locations of polling places and absentee ballot rules can effect who votes and how much weight their vote gets.
That said, elections do work and do represent a significant amount of the public opinion even if the results aren’t always a strict numerical majority of public opinion. Elections force politicians back to the middle and to be responsive to the public’s interest. Even if a particular candidate or party might not win a certain election, their competive presence makes the winner more accountable to the public by putting fear into them that they may lose the next cycle around.
Was there enough voter fraud in 2020 to make a difference in the presidential election? Probably not, most of President Trump’s claims have been debunked by the media. But regardless, either candidate as winner represents a close approximation of contemporary public sentiment – the split was quite narrow,especially under the rules ofthe Electoral College which create further distortions in the process.
And if you don’t like the outcome of the election, thousands of local and county officials will be on the ballot next year and ultimately there will be state and federal elections in 2022 and 2024.
Mike Sanchez, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder County Clerk’s office, which oversees elections for the county, told The Associated Press that the two men were staff from his office carrying out a scheduled pickup.
“All vote by mail ballot drop boxes were closed and locked at 8 PM on Election Day. Ballots from all boxes throughout the County were picked up the following day,” Sanchez wrote in an email to the AP.
Three days after Election Day, Democratic nominee Joe Biden took narrow leads in Pennsylvania and Georgia, according to The Associated Press, putting him on the cusp of a victory in the Electoral College.
Early Friday, Biden took a 5,500-vote lead in the Keystone State, after trailing President Trump there for days. He also took a narrow lead in Georgia, giving the Democratic nominee the lead in a state that hasn't voted for a Democrat for president since Bill Clinton was on the ticket in 1992.
While the United States is locked in limbo for the outcome of an election that President Trump has already labeled fraudulent and has threatened to challenge in court, the rest of the world is looking on with a mixture of uncertainty, concern and outright alarm.
In America, power is decentralized and messy. But it's the dirt in the gears of democracy that really protects it for the rest of us.
That cynicism doesn’t seem to be motivating them to sit on the sidelines during elections. Instead, younger people are much more likely than older people to report that they or members of their household have experienced barriers to voting, which suggests that they may genuinely find it more difficult to cast a ballot. And that problem could be compounded this year given the extraordinary challenges of voting during a pandemic.
American presidential elections are a strange beast. As the world was reminded in 2016, the candidate who wins the most votes overall won’t necessarily win the White House. For that, you can blame and/or thank the Electoral College.
More than 150 million people are expected to vote in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, but none of them will be casting a straightforward ballot for Donald Trump or Joe Biden. Both those candidates’ names will be on the ballot, of course. But when Americans go to vote for their preferred presidential candidate, they are actually voting for the state electors who have pledged to support that candidate in the Electoral College. Only in December do the 538 members of the Electoral College cast their votes for president, officially deciding who will take the oath of office in January.