While in law school, I attended a lecture from a visiting elections lawyer. Basically he was there to tell us what it’s like to be an election lawyer.
He told us this story:
A volunteer worker in a local election found a box of ballots that hadn’t been counted. She took the box out to her car. It was raining. She forgot to close the lid, so the ballots got wet. She thought about what to do and got an idea.
She took the ballots back inside and put them in the microwave to dry them out. You guessed it. When she finished trying to dry them out, they were ruined and unreadable.
What happened next was that lawyers for the candidates got together to decide how to handle the situation. The point (according to the teller of the story) is that people often have the idea that elections work like clocks: Perfectly.
But they’re usually managed by volunteers and well, things go wrong.
One takeaway: Democracy (rule by the people) is messy and often disorganized.
As a volunteer lawyer, I’ve now helped monitor the voting and tabulation in 3 elections and I’ve done voter protection legal work in 3 states.
I can stand by this as a true statement: The way to win a national election is for people across the country to vote in large enough numbers to offset the inevitable mishaps, unintentional blips, and outright cheating.
Yes, there’s cheating. Lest you think cheating is new, consider that what we now call cheating (keeping minorities from voting) wasn’t illegal before Brown v. Board, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voters Rights Act. It didn’t used to be called cheating. Because it was legal.
A lot of voter suppression is just about making it hard. The assumption is that if 3 steps are required, people won’t do all three. That’s why education and messaging is key.
Sidenote: I believe the phrase “vote early and vote often” is from Chicago under Richard Daley.
I think people tend to:
- overestimate how easy it is to win an election by flipping votes, and
- underestimate how easy it is to suppress voting by making not want to vote, or persuading them there’s no point.
The first is quite difficult. The second is easy and inexpensive.
Our elections are held and monitored locally. Each location does its own. Each state monitors its own. In Putin’s Russia, elections are tabulated centrally, so it’s easy to manipulate the outcome.
It’s important for everyone who can to get involved in their local elections.
MY followers wouldn’t put a box of ballots in the microwave.
Maybe if a few more people had volunteered, someone present would have had a better idea.
Better yet, run for local office. Decisions about how elections will be run are made by state and local officials.
Be one of those.
