We Need Patience as Our Neighbors’ Votes Are Counted

I wrote this on election day and circulated as an op-ed, but it hasn’t been picked up. So I decided to post it here.

As the votes continue to be counted in Pennsylvania and other battleground states, it is important for all of us to be patient while we await the results of this historic election. States never finalize their votes on election night. It is news networks that project winners. In fact, states have taken up to a month to certify final tallies in presidential elections. An election projection by the media is not the same as counting votes. And Pennsylvania’s vote was remarkably close in 2016. The President won by roughly 44,000 votes, less than 1% of those cast.

We must ignore the noise and let the process play out. Yes, that process includes the parties fighting and suing over which ballots to count and when. The courts and our election system are robust and up to this challenge. What can be more damaging is the rhetoric that ballots being counted after election day are fraudulent. This undermines our confidence in what is really a robust election system.

We must also recognize that these are the votes of our neighbors. Your neighbors. And voter fraud is rare in Pennsylvania and across the United States. The conservative Heritage Foundation’s database of voter fraud reveals 1,298 cases of since 1992, only 23 in Pennsylvania. For context, more than 1.5 billion votes were cast in that time. Be wary of those who claim to “know” that fraud occurs all the time in Pennsylvania elections. I have heard this time and again as a resident, including from local reporters. We are familiar with the claims of dead relatives voting and ballot drop box stuffing. These cases are extremely rare. In fact, the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice finds that supposed cases of voter impersonation are mistakes made when filling out ballots, including mail-in and absentee ballots. Again, these are honest mistakes made by your neighbors. Or perhaps even by you.

We also need to ignore the noise that isolated incidents of election problems undermine the election. With thousands of polling locations across the nation, problems are bound to happen. Paper ballots run out. Voting machines have errors. Election workers make errors in their instructions. Our system of elections is not perfect, but it has proven robust election after election. The courts, the political parties, and the Pennsylvania Department of State will work to address these issues and what they mean for collected ballots. Yes, this could result in ballots being invalidated for not following the complicated rules set in place for voting. But instead of undermining our confidence in this election, problems like naked ballots, insufficient time for precanvassing, and unclear guidance for how to address curing errors in submitted mail in ballots should prompt us to push for easy to implement reforms.

While emotions in this election run high and a tight race means that we will need to wait for the outcome, we should be celebrating. This was an historic election in terms of turnout. Over 100 million ballots were cast before election day. To put that into perspective 137 million were cast in the entire 2016 election and roughly 160 million have been cast in this one. At 67 percent of the voting eligible population, this stands to be the highest turnout election since 1900.

The United States, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, conducted a robust nationwide election amid a global pandemic. Pennsylvania did so after instituting election reforms that proved to be just in time for the pandemic (recall that mail-in-voting was adopted in 2019, before COVID-19). As both a political scientist and fellow Pennsylvanian, I implore you to not lose sight of the fact that the more than 2.5 million mail in voters in Pennsylvania are your neighbors. They also want their voice to be heard. And many of them are unable to vote safely or healthily due to the pandemic. The fact that the election went as smoothly as it did is a testament to our election system. It has flaws, no doubt, but we can work together to fix them.