The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Election Day decides it’s fine where it is
Thursday began in an odd manner, even for these times.
The U.S. Gross Domestic Product showed the sharpest quarterly drop in the history of such statistics. This is what George Costanza would call “shrinkage”: a 9.5 percent loss.
Right around the same time, Donald Trump floated the idea of delaying the November election. This was probably not an accident.
Trump cannot afford a conversation about the terrifying condition of the economy. All of his posturing during the spring was directed at the rejuvenation of the economy, even if it meant blowing past the warnings of public health experts.
So where were we on Thursday? After 190 days, the coronavirus had infected 4.4 million Americans; 150,000 had died. The daily infection rate had moved upward to 70,000 and the death rate, briefly tamed, was back to 1,400. And the economy was in free-fall.
It was as if — to avoid hitting a tree — Trump drove the country into a malarial ditch, then backed out and hit the tree anyway.
Meanwhile, Republican businessman and former presidential candidate Herman Cain died from COVID-19. Cain had tested positive nine days after attending Trump’s Tulsa rally at which he did not always wear a mask. Recall that Trump’s advance team started getting infected before the rally even started.
Naturally, Trump shifted focus to the cockamamie idea of delaying the election. This is not our first dance around this maypole. Jared Kushner had said, in May, that November was “too far in the future” to know for sure whether the election would need to be delayed.
Experts were quick to point out that this is not under presidential control. The federal Election Day is established by law as the Tuesday after the first Monday in November.
A second chorus of commenters immediately argued that Trump’s modus operandi is to press hard against legal limits. Recall that in May, he purged five inspectors general, the independent watchdogs who have proven troublesome to him and his appointees. In April he claimed he had “absolute power” to reopen states and threatened to unilaterally adjourn Congress.
I suppose one Trump option would be to eliminate Mondays. People don’t like them anyway. With no Mondays, it would be impossible to schedule the election.
A more realistic source of anxiety is the Postal
Service, where the new postmaster general is a Trump donor who has implemented management reforms that may result in slower delivery times.
For its part, the Postal Service has declared that neither rain, nor snow nor gloom of night will hinder its vital role in the election and sent a comprehensive kit, explaining how to best design and handle mail-in ballots, to thousands of local election officials.
Later on Thursday, former President Barack Obama spoke at the funeral service for U.S. Rep. John Lewis.
In a manner both remarkable for a eulogy and yet not-out-of-place, Obama called out those who currently seek to undo Lewis’ legacy “by closing polling locations, by targeting minorities and students with restrictive ID laws, and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision, even undermining the Postal Service in the run-up to an election that’s going to be dependent on mail-in ballots so people don’t get sick.”
Obama then explained how election officials could use the Postal Service’s Intelligent Mail barcode system to track ballots, adding “The five IMb fields are the Barcode Identifier, the STID, the MID, the Serial Number, and the Routing Code.”
OK, he didn’t really say that part.
Trump’s Election Day trial balloon gave Republican leaders the chance to do something they desperately need to do: put some daylight between themselves and Trump, who increasingly looks like a hobbyist trying out a hang-glider made of lead. His suggestion was forcefully swatted away by Republican Senators Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio as well as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
And, yes, thank you outgoing Connecticut House Republican leader Themis
Klarides for this tweet: “Connecticut’s November 3rd Election will go on as scheduled. We’ve worked in a bipartisan way to adopt short-term changes that provide greater access to keep voters safe and votes secure.”
The nut of it all is right there. The federal government does not run elections. The states do. The bad news: this creates wide variances in basic matters. For example, some states insist that a mailed ballot arrive by Election Day, while others rely on the date of post mark.
In Michigan, a ballot may be as many as six days late if three Kellogg’s cereal box tops are enclosed. OK, that might not be true either.
The good news is the sheer resilience of a 51-part system. Connecticut Secretary of the State Denise Merrill will run our election, not U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr.
(Cue puff of black smoke. Barr, dressed as the Norse god Loki, steps through an inter-dimensional portal. He places his hands on his belly and begins to laugh maniacally.)
Wow. I told you it was a weird Thursday.