You Hold Your Election with the System You Have

And more from this week...

America no longer has an Election Day, really, or even an election week. In some states, voting began in mid-September. In others, a ballot received several days late, via mail, with no postmark, may be counted. Tabulating the votes takes longer still—in 2020, five states had not yet been called by Wednesday evening, and the call of Pennsylvania securing Joe Biden his 270th electoral vote came Friday, 87 hours after polls had closed.

The wisdom of this system is a question for another day. It is the one we have, and the one that will determine who takes the oath of office on January 20, 2025. With that in mind, your one thing to read this week is Ben Ginsberg’s New York Times essay, “I’ve Been Through a Lot of Election Nights. Here’s How Nov. 5 May Go.”

Ginsberg is a legendary Republican election lawyer who spent decades advising the highest-profile campaigns. He played a central role in the Florida recount in 2000 and advised the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004. He co-chaired the bipartisan 2013 Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In other words, he knows what he’s talking about, and he’s not averse to the bare-knuckled legal brawling inevitable to certain election circumstances. So it’s worth listening when he says to “get ready for a long election night—or nights.”

Among the seven swing states, only Georgia, Michigan, and North Carolina count their votes quickly and are likely to deliver a prompt result in a close race. Wins in all three for Harris would almost certainly mean she’s headed above the 270 electoral vote threshold for victory. Wins in all three for Trump would get him comfortably to 266 and portend likely victory in some of the other swing states as well. (To play around with various scenarios, I recommend 270toWin.)

But, without a clean and clear sweep of the quick counters, there’s a good chance we would be headed for a repeat of 2020’s timeline—or worse. “In fact,” explains Ginsberg:

Thanks to a combination of new state laws and the inaction of legislators who could have made vote-counting more efficient — but didn’t — it may take even longer to declare a winner than it did in 2020, when news organizations called the race four days after Election Day. Since 2020, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have either added rules that could slow down their vote counts, or allowed existing rules that contributed to long tabulating times in 2020 to remain in place.

And then there is ballot “curing,” verification of “provisional” ballots, the prospect of time-consuming recounts, and legal challenges to any and all steps along the way.

A final complication, political rather than legal, but no less important to the orderly completion of the process, is that in these messiest of states there are different types of ballots being counted at different times—the early returns that start showing up on television screens when the polls close, and even the up-to-date counts as people resignedly fall asleep in the wee hours of the morning, are not random, representative, and thus predictive samples of the overall vote. In recent elections, notes Ginsberg, “because Democrats have historically made heavier use of mail ballots, Republicans often appear to do better on Election Day, whereas Democrats can appear to surge in the days after the election as mail ballots are tabulated. Still unclear is whether a Republican push this year to have their voters cast ballots early will change this pattern.”

Note that this uncertainty is a double-edged sword. Statistical models are only as good as their inputs and assumptions. With the short history of widespread early and mail-in voting, its track record rather confounded by the worldwide pandemic last time around, and the messaging and strategy of the political parties itself in flux on the matter, projections of “whose ballots are still out,” and thus how much margins may shift, are unreliable. No one should take a razor-thin margin in Pennsylvania on Wednesday morning as decisive and insist that continued counting will not legitimately change the outcome; it might. Nor should anyone look at that same picture and explain confidently that continued counting will legitimately change the outcome; it might not.

We would all enjoy the narrative convenience of some obvious culprit deserving the blame for this state of affairs. But what we have, per Ginsberg, is “a patchwork of new developments and old laws — a few of which are encouraging, but many of which are troubling.” As declared at the outset of the U.S. Constitution’s Article II, the process for choosing electors is that “each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” The punchline from Ginsberg:  

So don’t expect to know the winner of a close presidential contest on election night — and understand that this is because of policy choices made by each state. Delays themselves are not evidence of a conspiracy. They should not breed mistrust. If either candidate jumps the gun and declares victory before the votes are counted, dismiss it as political posturing and know that each state’s rules will decide the outcome.

You hold an election with the system you have, and this is ours. Now it is up to the politicians, the pundits, and the people to conduct themselves within that process in a way that does credit to the nation.

BONUS LINK: Once you’ve read the Republican legal expert in the New York Times, move on to the Democrat legal expert in the Wall Street Journal, unpacking the process after the votes have been counted and the result must then be certified.

BONUS BONUS LINK: And if all this leaves you eager to start thinking about the need for substantial reforms before next time, I recommend this essay (highlighted previously here at U/A) in Tablet, “Broken Ballots.”

THIS WEEK AT AMERICAN COMPASS

Out yesterday, a second wave of results from our survey of 6,000 Americans: The Young Men Up For Grabs. Young non-white men have emerged as a surprising and pivotal swing vote. Historically, analyses grouped these voters with non-white voters generally, residing alongside affluent liberal women at the core of the progressive coalition. But they have defected in large numbers toward the conservative coalition. With good reason, the Harris campaign is clearly alarmed. These men are nearly 10% of the adult population and an especially large share of them have yet to commit to either candidate. But our survey finds that the progressive appeals to the group do not appear well calibrated to their priorities and interests. Read more…

The Compass Point is from the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Clare Morell, on the far-reaching consequences of raising children in the digital world: America On-the-Line

Even for analysts obsessed solely with market efficiency, productivity, and GDP growth, the costs are becoming impossible to ignore. One father I interviewed for my forthcoming book shared that his teenage son, who spends hours online playing video games with friends, had no difficulty emailing with employers about potential job opportunities. But when it came time to walk into a physical establishment to hand in a job application to the manager, he was petrified. He couldn’t handle the face-to-face interaction.

Continue reading…

Also on The Commons

Democracy and Culture on the Ballot: Micah Meadowcroft on democracy as the means to vital ends, and its emptiness as an end unto itself.

Elite Misalignment: Aaron Renn on the conflict of interest between elites and the nation they are supposed to lead.

Is Academic 'Wokeness' in Remission?: John Sailer on the continued threat of campus indoctrination despite recent signs of progress.

And, on the American Compass Podcast this week, Morell joins me to discuss the challenge posed for market fundamentalism by business models premised on addicting users and selling their attention.

WHAT ELSE SHOULD YOU BE READING?

Re: Mud Poisoning… in Compact, a dispatch from EPPC’s Brad Littlejohn After the Flood

You may recall an encouragement last month from U/A to support Brad’s efforts to deliver supplies in Asheville. He raised more than $30,000 and is back now with a heart-wrenching account of what he saw, the extraordinary efforts of both local residents and fellow citizens from around the nation, and the pathetic failure of state capacity. I spend a lot of time writing about how elites must earn the right to pursue their ambitions for a dynamic and open society by demonstrating first that they care about and can deliver the basics of security and stability for the average American. Brad highlights a vital corollary—that any hopes at restoring and building upon confidence in our democratic institutions must begin with those in power getting their most basic and indispensable tasks right. There’s scant evidence, unfortunately, that it’s anyone’s priority.

Re: Shelf Life… in the Wall Street Journal, Trader Joe’s employees cry for Help! We’re Trapped in a Trader Joe’s Union

At the first Trader Joe’s to unionize, the labor leaders cost workers their bonuses while bargaining over “pronoun pins” and abortion coverage that the health plan already provided. Now, because the union has filed unfair-labor-practice charges against the store, the NLRB is refusing to proceed with a decertification vote. It’s a textbook example of the distance between being “pro-worker” and “pro-union,” and the need for fundamental labor reforms that foster more constructive forms of worker power.

Bonus link: And lest you think this is just the Journal op-ed page making the union sound bad, here’s the Amherst College newspaper’s story managing to make it sound even worse.

Re: Actual Investment Sighting!… the Wall Street Journal reports Boeing to Raise $21 Billion in Equity

Most Americans are under the wrong impression that when they buy stock in Boeing they have “invested” in the company. Of course, no such investment has occurred. Rather, two people with no relationship to Boeing (the buyer and seller in the stock market) have exchanged two piles of assets (the buyer’s cash and the seller’s Boeing equity). Boeing is not affected at all. Note then that, for all the talk of financial markets being vital to productive deployments of capital, most of what happens there is merely trading piles of assets in circles—indeed, on balance, the financial sector sells stock back to companies and extracts capital from them in return (“stock buybacks”) far more often than it actually facilitates corporate stock sales that raise capital.

But here we see that rarest of endangered species: a company that actually wants to raise capital benefiting from financial markets that will help it do so. Sure, the company is Boeing, which has put itself into this position through absurd financialization and mismanagement. But beggars can’t be choosers. I, for one, was excited to participate in the offering—the rare opportunity to channel my own savings toward a productive investment.

Re: Wide Open Space… Jon Askonas and Jonathan Berry suggest How to Free Elon Musk’s SpaceX From Federal Red Tape

Look, people are getting a little bit carried away with SpaceX. Members of the American Compass team tried to convince me the other day that getting to see the successful catch of the Starship booster was the equivalent of watching Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. So let’s all calm down a bit. That said, there’s no question that the company (along with others in the industry) are delivering innovations critical to American economic progress and national security, and that sclerotic federal regulatory processes—NEPA review in particular—are imposing unacceptable obstacles. Askonas and Berry’s proposal for an interstate compact to regulate launches is itself innovative, and an idea worth pursuing. Politically, it’s also a great mechanism for prompting action and forcing progressives to take a side on the tradeoff between needed industrial progress and pointless procedural reviews.

New Feature: The Rob Report!

American Compass policy fellow and U/A research assistant extraordinaire Rob Clawes works diligently behind the scenes with me on your weekly roundup of what to read. It’s past time to get him out there on stage. So we’ll be featuring an item from him each week—hopefully he can add a dash of fresh Gen Z energy to my staid Millennial tastes. This week, New York Magazine asks Can the Media Survive?

RC: Among the many challenges highlighted in this feature on insiders’ views of the media’s challenges, the issue of generational conflict caught my eye. Most industries have friction between seasoned employees and green ones, often heightened by generational differences: The youth are lazy, entitled, and soft. The old are disconnected, stubborn, and selfish. But in media, these are metastasizing, from substantive differences on issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to procedural power struggles manifested in union organizing, to diverging conceptions of what journalism is even for. The industry’s economics seem easy to fix by comparison.

Enjoy the weekend!