The Washington Post - USA (2020-11-22)

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A27

N

o one ever realistically expected President Trump to con- cede to President-elect Joe Biden quickly or graciously. Trump never acknowledges defeat. To his critics, he’s a spoiled, petulant child throwing a temper tantrum when he doesn’t get his way. To his admirers, he’s a boxer who refuses to throw in the towel even when his opponents are insisting the fight is over. But the fight is over. So close was the outcome in numerous states that no reasonable person could deny Trump time to wait until all votes were counted and examine various allegations of fraud. That time has come and gone. It is irresponsible to dismiss suspi- cions of fraud out of hand, as too many have done, including in Pennsylvania. Chris Matthews, formerly of MSNBC and a Philadelphia native, used to brag regularly about the old-school tactics used in his hometown. On his show “Hardball,” just days before the 2016 election, Matthews described the last meeting before every election of the Democratic City Committee of Phila- delphia where “in a close campaign... it’s the street campaign backed by street money that turns out the vote and wins the big elections.” “Street money” or “walking-around money,” as it’s sometimes called, was — and maybe still is — a campaign staple in countless states. The 2006 book, “Don’t Buy Another Vote, I Won’t Pay for a Landslide” tells the story of decades-long corruption in West Vir- ginia, where cash and favors flowed freely. The title is a quote that John F. Kennedy jokingly attributed to his father, Joseph Kennedy, in connection with JFK’s victory over Hubert Hum- phrey in the 1960 West Virginia pri- mary. Not everyone took it as a joke. Reforms have cleaned up politics to some degree, but human dishonesty can never be entirely eliminated. Story after story in recent weeks has claimed “no evidence” of voter fraud, which is not true. Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s lead attorney, has scampered down one too many rabbit holes, the deepest on Thursday, but he is right when he says that sworn statements testifying to firsthand knowledge are evidence. They might eventually be dismissed or disproved, but they are evidence. But while there are undoubtedly legitimate instances of mistakes, election workers deserve appreciation and praise, barring proven allegations of wrongdoing. The claims about how far Trump was ahead early in key states on election night, only to see Biden roar back and mysteriously take the lead are nonsense — and showcase a problem in how we report elections. Early in the evening in Ohio, networks reported that Biden “led” by as many as a half-million votes. When the counting ended, Trump had won by nearly as many. Should Biden claim chicanery in the Buckeye State? There are gloating critics who claim that Trump is unable to accept being the thing he hates most — a loser. A loser? In 2016, Trump was an amateur politician who bested the Republican establishment and a crowded field of experienced GOP opponents. He was given no chance against a formidable Democratic Party establishment candidate, but celebrated one of the great- est upsets in presidential election his- tory — in part by putting into play states long believed lost to the GOP, but now up for grabs for years to come. He kept campaign promises in the face of overwhelming resistance that began even before he was sworn in, outlasted politically driven investiga- tions and an impeachment, crafted a judiciary largely in his image and nearly pulled off another upset against the predictions of pollsters who f orecast a Biden blowout. If that’s the definition of a loser, we should all sign up. But now, Trump must do that which he abhors — the traditional and the expected. He must acknowledge that Biden is the president-elect, begin co- operating in the transition, host the Bidens at the White House, and stand quietly and respectfully to the side on Jan. 20 to demonstrate to the world that even the Great Disrupter respects the United States’ tradition of a peace- ful transfer of power. Failing this, Trump forfeits his right to wield influence or reengage in our political process, either as candidate or kingmaker. He squanders the deep reserve of political capital he has earned courtesy of the unparalleled devotion of nearly 74 million supporters, a new generation of swamp- f ighting Trumpian candidates and of- ficeholders in his image, and the re- making of a Republican Party from a haven for country-club blue bloods to the populist home of blue-collar A mericans. It is said that Trump brought mil- lions into the political process who were never before involved. They have learned what they know of politics from him. His final lesson to them as president should be how to effectively embark on the first chapter of a new journey — t he Art of the Comeback, Part Two. But to come back, you must first leave. Mr. President, it’s time to pack. Twitter: @AbernathyGary

GARY ABERNATHY

It’s time

for Trump

to pack up

T

his nation’s empirical and inquisi- tive Founders considered information conducive to improvement, which is one reason the Constitu- tion mandates a decennial census. And why James Madison soon proposed expanding the census beyond mere enumeration to recording other data. Today, the census provides an ocean of information indispen- sable to understanding this complex soci- ety. And it determines the disbursement of $1.5 trillion annually from the federal government. On Nov. 30, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a census-related case concerning a question of large philosophic interest and practical consequences: Was it constitutional — 22 states, 15 cities and counties and other entities say no — for the president to order the exclusion of unauthorized immigrants from the enumeration of states’ populations used for apportioning congressional seats? Apportionment was the initial reason for the census, and remains its only constitutional function. The president says: Because the census’s original and fundamental purpose con- cerns Americans as a political community, it would be incongruous to give congressional representation to illegal immigrants who are subject to removal from the country. Foreign tourists should not be counted, and military personnel stationed abroad should be, because the former are not, and the latter are, members of the political community. This argument, though interesting for a political philosophy seminar, is insufficient for the Supreme Court, which must con- strue the two constitutional provisions concerning apportionment. One (in Article I) mandates an “actual Enumeration” of “persons” other than “Indians not taxed.” The second (in the 14th Amendment) says seats in the House of Representatives shall be apportioned among the states counting “the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed.” An amicus brief by two constitutional scholars, Ilya Somin of George Mason University and Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas, demonstrates that neither provision allows the exclusion of unauthorized immigrants. The Framers understood “persons” broadly, with the sole exception of Indians not taxed because they were considered noncitizens with an allegiance to distinct political communities: their tribes. The Framers would not have expressly excluded Indians not taxed if “persons” excluded foreigners or others with an allegiance to a government other than the U.S. government. So, the Framers clearly meant “persons” to include immigrants. Most of the Framers, say Somin and Levinson, did not believe the federal government had the power to exclude immigrants — there was no significant federal immigration restriction until 1875 — so they could hardly have intended to exclude from apportionment “illegal” immigrants. Furthermore, the Framers expected that the congressional apportionment count would include the more than half the adult population that was not entitled to vote because of gender, or property require- ments. Members of Congress, Somin and Levin- son argue, have always been thought to represent the interests of many persons — in 1790, at most 70 percent of White men, and few others, could vote — “to whom they were not directly accountable at the ballot box.” Today, most states deny the vote to children under age 18, and some felons, yet these groups are counted in congressional apportionment. The 14th Amendment, which stipulates the enumeration of “the whole number of persons,” elsewhere uses the term “citi- zens.” So, by “persons” the amendment’s authors denoted a broader category. The Supreme Court has held that in this amendment “persons” refers to the “total population,” including immigrants, “whatever” their “status under the immigration laws.” The court has repeatedly held that the “person[s]” the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause protects (“No person” shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”) includes aliens in the U.S. population. And unlike foreign diplomats or tourists, the United States is the usual residence of unauthorized immigrants. The 1787 Constitutional Convention’s Committee of Style replaced “inhabitants” with “persons,” so supporters of excluding unauthorized immigrants from the census’s enumeration for apportionment argue, implausibly: The Framers considered the two words synonymous, and that foreigners by definition cannot be inhabitants. But Somin and Levinson say that in its original public meaning, “inhabitants” meant “people who intend to stay somewhere indefinitely.” Therefore, these facts matter: More than 60 percent of the esti- mated 10.5 million unauthorized immigrants have lived here more than 10 years, and more than 20 percent for more than 20 years. Republicans would benefit from not counting illegal immigrants for purposes of apportionment: This would reduce congressional seats (and electoral votes) in mostly blue states (27 percent of such immigrants are in California) and shift power away from cities. Republicans generally say, however, that the Constitution should be construed according to the text’s original meaning. Forced to choose be- tween power and principle, well... [email protected]

GEORGE F. WILL

Where the

GOP and

the Framers

disagree

D

o you even know what 250,000 people looks like? Because I don’t. I have been trying to imagine it, and f ailing. The closest I can get is imagining something I have seen: Yankee S tadium, filled to capacity with a World Series crowd — multiplied by five. Then comes the hard part: I imagine all of them locked into the stadium and dying, mostly alone and terrified, of heart attacks or strokes or kidney failure or slow suffocation, while their families wait weeping in the parking lot. And then I imagine that happening on a live stream so the country can witness the horror. That’s what it would look like if you could see all the Americans who have died of covid-19 since last March. I can tell myself that everyone dies, which is unhelpful. I can tell myself that the great majority of the victims are old and many would have died of something else relatively soon — but then again, many wouldn’t, and I personally don’t think of the last decade or so of life as a sort of useless appendix. More usefully, I can tell myself that there was probably never a window when we could have completely con- trolled this virus. By the time we knew it was a problem, it was already here, silently circulating. I can look at the death rates in places such as Italy and console myself that it could have been worse. But that’s not much consolation, because we should have done so much better. Back in the spring, I listed many ways that the United States was uniquely well-positioned to fight this

virus. Americans generally demand a lot more personal space than people in other countries; we stand farther apart, our houses are bigger and our public spaces tend to be larger and better ventilated than those in E urope. We drive rather than take mass transit. We are richer and can afford to spend more on virus- p roofing our homes and businesses — or paying for the ones that can’t be virus-proofed to be closed until the pandemic ended. We have more inten- sive care beds per capita, more e quipment and more pricey specialists than almost anywhere else. We have a fantastically innovative biotech sector. Two major American assets I didn’t list, and should have, were weather and time. America’s weather was more favorable to fighting covid-19 because more of our landmass falls in southern latitudes where it’s comfort- able, for most of the year, to spend time outside. Moreover, we had time to figure all that out, because Europe got hit hard first, giving us a valuable preview of horrors to come. That bought us priceless extra days — only we squandered them and every other advantage we started with. Sure, America doesn’t have the absolute worst death rate in the industrialized world — not yet, any- way. I’m not sure we’ll be able to say that after Americans celebrate our extra fall holiday, then leap from Thanksgiving to Christmas. Either way, we’ll still be doing much worse than we could have — and much worse than we should have. And I mean all of us, not just President Trump. Yes, Trump was by far the worst bungler in this whole affair. But there

is plenty of blame to go around: the public health folks who told us not to wear masks; the journalists who told us to worry about the flu or racism or anything except the pandemic spread- ing out of China; the politicians who didn’t pass enough stimulus; the skeptics who refused to revise their skepti- cism when new evidence emerged; the refuseniks who treated their own noncompliance as proof that distanc- ing measures can’t work; anyone who treated a forecasting model as a proven fact; everyone who blessed some gatherings while condemning others; the Republicans who humored Trump; the teachers unions and gov- ernments that pushed unnecessary, damaging school closures; everyone, left or right, who turned this into a political battle with their fellow Amer- icans, rather than a desperate fight our country needed to unite to win. I include myself in that number. I think of all the times I lost my temper with covid skeptics, even though I knew it was counterproductive, and I regret every one of them. I look back at my columns and wonder if I should have advocated for less intrusive pol- icies that might have garnered broader support, or if I would have con- vinced more people if I’d evinced a little more humility in my conviction that America needed to take radical action immediately. I’ll never know, of course, but I’ll always wonder: How many people could we have saved if everyone, from the president on down, had acted as if saving American lives from a deadly virus was the most important thing we had to do this year? How many stadium seats could we have filled with the people who didn’t have to die? Twitter: @asymmetricinfo

MEGAN MCARDLE

America had every advantage

in fighting the virus — and blew it

DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG NEWS A medical worker administers a covid-19 test at a drive-through testing facility in San Francisco on Thursday.

BY BRAD RAFFENSPERGER

Georgia’s elections have received a lot of unfair and unwarranted criticism over the past two years, much of it spurred by disinformation. The success- ful November election and the smooth hand recount have proved our critics wrong. Since I took office, we have made great strides in improving election security, reliability and efficiency in Georgia. After years of disastrous elections in Fulton County, we effectively eliminated voting lines. This Election Day, voters waited on average only three minutes statewide. In the months since covid-19 upended elections, the state of Georgia built the infrastructure to accommodate record levels of absentee voting by mail and record early in-person voting. Georgia’s voting system has never been more secure or trustworthy. A newly implemented statewide voting system gave Georgia voters paper ballots for the first time in nearly 20 years. This month, voters could review those paper records and verify that their choices were correct before casting their ballots. Partnerships with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Georgia Cy- ber Center at Augusta University, ex- perts from Georgia Tech and election security specialists from around the country help ensure that Georgia’s election system remains secure from whatever threats loom on the horizon. In Georgia, signatures for absentee ballot voters are verified twice to ensure that each voter gets one vote — and only one vote. Voters who request an absentee ballot through the state’s new online portal provide a driver’s license number for verification. Voter rolls are main- tained to ensure that only living and

qualified voters remain on the registra- tion lists — and, importantly, that each ballot goes to the correct address. Georgia just finished its first statewide hand recount, a cutting-edge process that was developed for verifying the accuracy of election results and that is considered the gold standard in election integrity. The General Assembly passed legislation that allowed time to match signatures on ballots as well as creating guides for automatic recounts. The closeness of the presidential race in Georgia required that all ballots be hand-recounted — a process that is in place to ensure the machines are work- ing properly and every ballot has been accounted for.

Nonetheless, some politicians and pundits have tried to mislead voters here and elsewhere about Georgia’s outcome. Since we selected the new voting system in 2019, partisan activists and their allies in Washington took steps to undermine the integrity of our election system at every turn. While the recent — and unfounded — attacks on Georgia’s election system might seem new, partisans on the opposite side of the aisle wrote the playbook almost word-for-word over the past year.

Disinformation about the reliability and security of Georgia’s voting machines had been percolating since 2018 — long before we even selected a system. A failed gubernatorial candidate refused to accept the outcome of an election she lost by 50,000 votes — and is praised for it by media pundits to this day, even as they attack a presidential candidate for running the same playbook. When I was elected Georgia’s secretary of state in 2018, I committed to overseeing Georgia’s elections with integrity — every legal ballot would be counted. I knew that after any election, somewhere around half of the voters would be happy and the other half would be sad. But I wanted all voters to feel confident in the outcome. The truth is that the people of Georgia — and across the country — should not have any remaining doubts about who was elected governor two years ago or who won the presidential election earli- er this month. The presidential outcome was remarkably close, but the new paper-ballot system, the strong election security and integrity mechanisms in place, and the audit and hand recount should combine to put to rest any doubts about the final outcome. My office and my colleagues at the county and local levels worked with integrity to ensure that Georgia’s voters had a secure, reliable and efficient election this month. As we move toward two closely watched, high-stakes U.S. Senate runoff elections on Jan. 5, I am confident that we will again be able to deliver the secure election and reliable results that the people of Georgia deserve.

Brad Raffensperger is Georgia’s secretary of state.

Georgia’s election results are sound

The people of Georgia — and

across the country — should

not have any remaining

doubts about who won the

presidential election.

The Washington Post - USA (2020-11-22)

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