ALLENTOWN (TNS) — This week’s election has been referred to by many as the “election like no other.”
I hope that’s true, and what happened this week never happens again. America can do better.
Some images were as if they came from a third-world country. The White House was fenced off. The president predicted violence in the streets. Stores boarded up and closed early. Protesters, some armed, descended on vote counting centers.
It’s great for so many people to be engaged in the political process. Voter turnout was outstanding, with a record 9 million people registered to vote in Pennsylvania.
But our country has forgotten its roots.
America was founded on the concept of tolerance, of encouraging and accepting different beliefs and opinions. That civility turned to hostility too often during the campaign.
It’s one thing to support your candidate. Campaign for them. Donate to them. Stick a sign in your yard or a flag on your truck. Attend a rally.
Having a cult-like obsession as some Trump supporters do is beyond reasonable. Surrounding a moving Biden bus on a Texas highway was intimidation, not enthusiasm. There was plenty of competition for who sunk the lowest, though.
Two women, presumably Biden supporters, were arrested after they were caught on video damaging pro-Trump signs and taking a Make America Great Again hat from Trump supporters they confronted at the Democratic National Convention.
We’ve become a country of “we and us” and “they and them.” Everyone is branded according to their political party affiliation, and expected to fall in line. Heaven forbid that a D votes for an R, or vice versa. You’re labeled a traitor.
We’ve also become impatient.
This was the first presidential election where all Pennsylvania voters were eligible to vote by mail. Other states have allowed it for years. Going forward, we need to accept that means winners seldom will be declared on Election Day.
Tallying up to 3 million mail ballots, as Pennsylvania was doing, takes time. The process should not be rushed. Accuracy is the goal, not speed. The faster things go, the sloppier they can get.
I was glad to see Lehigh County shut down its counting operations Wednesday afternoon. The ballots aren’t being counted by robots. They’re being counted by people. And they deserved a break, after working through the night Tuesday. The counting continued Thursday.
Other counties were criticized for deciding not to start counting mail ballots until Wednesday. Officials running those operations wanted to focus their efforts on the polls on Election Day. Those officials are in the best position to make that call, and they should not be second-guessed.
Again, the count wasn’t a race. If Pennsylvania wants to have most votes counted on Election Day, enough that the likely winners are apparent, it needs to begin counting mail ballots sooner. The Legislature opted not to allow that this time. Counties shouldn’t be pressured to count quickly, then.
The state’s mail voting law needs to be clarified, to prevent some of the legal disputes we’re seeing. The law does not address whether counties can alert voters that their ballot is going to be disqualified because it wasn’t filled out properly.
Prior to the election, the Democratic Party and others sued the state, asking that counties be required to notify voters about mistakes such as not signing the outer envelope and not placing the ballot in the secrecy envelope.
In September, the state Supreme Court ruled counties aren’t required to notify them.
But the court did not address whether counties could voluntarily choose to contact voters. It said the Legislature held the power to address the issue of ballot corrections. But the Legislature did not use that power to clarify the law prior to the election.
On the night before the election, the Department of State advised county election directors that, in an effort to inform voters, they could let representatives of parties and candidates know about bad ballots. That allowed those representatives to track down voters and tell them to go to their poll and vote with a provisional ballot.
Some counties followed that advice. Others did not, believing the law did not allow them to.
So an untold number of ballots now are the subject of a legal challenge.
Hopefully, those votes won’t make a difference, and it’s a lesson learned without repercussions.
Hopefully, at the next election, we won’t have to wear masks while waiting in line, and fear running across others who aren’t wearing a mask and could be spreading a deadly virus. The coronavirus pandemic added another level of stress to an already tense election.
And, hopefully, we will have our trust restored in the Postal Service. We should be confident that mail ballots will arrive in a reasonable time in future elections, so there would be no need to extend the deadline for them to be received beyond Election Day, and add to the political rancor.
Elections in America are supposed to be peaceful events — exciting but not fearful — with winners decided by voters and not the courts. And they largely have been.
It’s time to get back to those roots, and cast this “election like no other” to the history books where it belongs.
(Morning Call columnist Paul Muschick can be reached paul.muschick@mcall.com.)
