Your vote is safe, amid uncertainty

Has there ever been an election like this one?

Perhaps. The hanging chads of 2000 certainly caused tremors. FDR’s running for a third term in

1940, then a fourth 1944 shattered norms. And the 19th century was hardly a model of decorum with fractious elections, racist candidates and wildly hyperbolic newspaper coverage.

But that was then, and this is relentlessly now.

The news that President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump tested positive for COVID-19 and that the president would be spending an indeterminate time at Walter Reed hospital was yet another miserable milestone in this year of years.

For the president and his wife, while this diagnosis was somewhat predictable considering the White House’s cavalier refusal to confront the virus with sober gravity, that doesn’t make this development any less sad. And for those Trump haters — and they are legion — who on social media are invoking schadenfreude, or even rooting for his death, are just more evidence of where we are as a country in October of 2020.

No one knows, not even the president’s doctors and certainly not his political advisers, how this will play out. We can only speculate on the fear and bewilderment sweeping through the administration this weekend, much less the Washington political establishment (though in one bit of good news, Democratic candidate Joe Biden and his wife Jill both tested negative for the virus after the Trump announcement).

Will there be any more debates? Many observers were already saying that after last week’s mudslinging fiasco, the remaining two should be canceled. Will Trump, who used his rallies in 2016 to such effect, even be cleared to make personal appearances before Nov. 3?

Trump continued to mock Biden at the debate for wearing a mask, saying, “He could be speaking 200 feet away from them, and he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever seen.” And Trump’s family all removed their masks once they sat down in the audience.

The Biden camp was already attempting to make the presidential election a referendum on the president’s willful failures to limit the devastation caused by the virus. The former vice president may not have to bring it up again. The historical judgment is already being rendered.

The other campaign track raised by Trump has been over the potential for fraud with mail-in ballots. The president and his team know that Democrats will be voting mostly by mail, while Republican voters, older and often living in safe suburbs with easy- access polling places, tend to show up to vote.

With little evidence of fraud in previous elections with mail-in voting, can voters trust their ballots will be safe?

A few points to consider:

• TheMonterey County Elections Department is fully prepared for the upcoming election.

• Yourmail-inballot will need to be signed, by you, and the signature on the ballot envelope will be compared to the signature on file by elections workers, not by computers.

Polling places will be set up with increased safety measures. For all the protocols in place — and we urge you to read through them on the elections’ site — we understand there was uncertainty about this vote, and that these misgivings will only be magnified by the latest turn of pandemic events.

But, the truth is we are all ultimately responsible for taking a role in ensuring that together, we can get through these difficult times. And the most fundamental way to do that is to vote.