Two fundamental elements of American society are on display this week: voting and protesting. Unfortunately, both those expressions of democracy have veered off track in disturbing ways.
This election has, to state the obvious, been unusually fraught. It’s a referendum on one of the most divisive presidents in memory, conducted during a pandemic among a populace distressingly split over issues of race, class and geography at a time of great distrust of essential institutions, beginning with the government itself.
Now, days after the Election Day that capped more than a month of voting in some states, the nation still does not know the outcome. That in itself is neither good nor bad (though definitely frustrating). But President Donald Trump and his advocates, who already sought to subvert the ability of Americans in key precincts and states to exercise their civic duty, are pursuing legal challenges that, among other aims, would stop officials in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and Nevada from counting votes.
We believe in the right to turn to the courts to redress a grievance or correct a wrong, but here Trump and his army of lawyers are trying to use the courts to undercut democracy itself. We hope judges recognise gamesmanship when they see it and resist interfering in situations that do not call for it.
In response to the slow vote count, Trump supporters have been mobilising. In some places they have acted within their rights and American tradition, such as gathering peacefully outside a vote-count site in Las Vegas. But elsewhere things got dicier.
Joe Biden has said that while he is confident that his campaign will win, he will wait for the process to play out (though his team, too, has built a legal brigade). But on Twitter, Trump absurdly claimed Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina “for electoral purposes” (whatever that means), adding, “we hereby claim the State of Michigan if, in fact, there was a large number of secretly dumped ballots as has been widely reported!” That magisterial declaration drew a warning label from Twitter: “Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process.” Might be misleading?
And now the US Justice Department — which under Attorney-General William Barr has morphed into part of Trump’s personal legal team — has informed its attorneys scattered around the country that they have the authority to send armed federal agents to state and county ballot-counting sites to investigate potential voter fraud, a favourite Trump bugaboo that, of course, is not grounded in reality. So far there’s no indication that the government has deployed those agents, and we urge it to resist such a blatant act of intimidation.
This escalation of domestic tensions needs to end. Saner heads must prevail even if the president cannot, once again, control his impulses to goad, exaggerate and destabilise. Our history of peaceful transfers of power must also include a peaceful embrace of the right to vote, and that includes letting elections officials do their jobs and tally the results in peace. Democracy under the threat of violence is hardly democracy at all. (Los Angeles Times) – Tribune News Service