The Day the Music Died

Well, it almost died. We almost lost democracy, as we know it, yesterday. It came down to four votes.

Although over 150 million votes were cast in the presidential election, the fate, or at least the integrity, of the election hung on the decision of the four members of Michigan’s state canvassing board, as they considered whether to certify the results of Michigan’s presidential vote and the fate of Michigan’s 16 electoral college votes. All 86 counties had certified their county votes, but even that was not without controversy and a Republican stance seen as racist by many. Two Republican members of the Wayne County canvassing board initially voted to not to certify the county’s votes, and only walked that back after angry denouncements by voters and others. Almost 900,000 ballots were cast in Wayne County, many of them by Black Americans.

And certification by the state board was not guaranteed, at all, but hung in the balance of politics. In a brazen act of political influence, Trump invited Michigan state legislators to the White House – and they went – to discuss…what exactly? What do you think they discussed?

One Republican state canvassing board member, Norm Shinkle, initially indicated he would vote against certification, and ended up abstaining, a dereliction of duty that allowed him to save face among die-hard Republicans. Thank god the other Republican on the board joined with the two Democrats in voting for certification, and democracy prevailed. Barely.

Had the state board locked up in their certification vote, had the two Democratic votes for certification been countered by two Republican votes against it, all hell would have broken loose. A judge might have ordered the canvassing board to do its job and certify the election results. The Michigan governor could have appointed new members to the board. The Republican-dominated state legislature could have sent a group of Trump-voting electors to the Electoral College, and the governor could have sent a competing group of electors. Which in turn could have sent the election to Congress to be resolved, in an unclear process untested in recent times.

Even had the process ultimately resulted in the seating of a new President, the chaos would’ve added to Trump’s continuing efforts to delegitimize Biden’s win and hamstring the new administration’s efforts to achieve anything.

Are these aspects of the system, the politically-tinged certification process and the Byzantine contingencies following any failure in that process, adequate safeguards against anti-democratic efforts to steal an election? Or are they merely rearguard actions hastily concocted to protect the vote, but ultimately vulnerable to influence? It is a system that relies, ultimately, on the good intentions, the democratic tendencies, of actors, but we have seen this year that many do not have those tendencies. Starting at the top of the Executive Branch, and extending well down into his party.

Is it a smart feature of the system? Or is it a fatal flaw, born of or aftereffects of the same compromise that gave us the Electoral College itself? A compromise (literally, the 3/5 Compromise) that is directly attributable to the successful efforts of slave-holding states to retain their inhumane slaveholding practice, Jefferson’s “human stain”. It does not go unnoticed that the Trump campaign attempted to disenfranchise millions of Black American voters by targeting vote certification and alleging fraud in heavily Black-populated urban areas of states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia.

 That the fate of this cherished democratic feature – a regular national election of the president – should be so tenuous, so vulnerable to any influence other than the votes themselves, is worrisome, to say the least. Precedent has been set, at least for one party. If you don’t like the results, throw everything at it, even if it’s based on nothing, in an attempt to delay certification and send it to the Supreme Court or Congress.  In this grotesque spectacle of bad actors, we may be seeing the future of Presidential elections.

I fear for the Republic.