Two fundamental elements of American society are on display this week: voting and protesting. Unfortunately, both those expressions of democracy have veered off track in disturbing ways.
This election has, to state the obvious, been unusually fraught. It's a referendum on one of the most divisive presidents in memory, conducted during a pandemic among a populace distressingly split over issues of race, class and geography at a time of great distrust of essential institutions, beginning with the government itself.
Now, days after the Election Day that capped more than a month of voting in some states, the nation still does not know the outcome. That in itself is neither good nor bad (though definitely frustrating). But President Donald Trump and his advocates, who already sought to subvert the ability of Americans in key precincts and states to exercise their civic duty, are pursuing legal challenges that, among other aims, would stop officials in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and Nevada from counting votes.
We believe in the right to turn to the courts to redress a grievance or correct a wrong, but here Trump and his army of lawyers are trying to use the courts to undercut democracy itself. We hope judges recognize gamesmanship when they see it and resist interfering in situations that do not call for it.
Meanwhile, public distress over Trump's verbal assault on the voting process has added fresh energy to monthslong protests — including in Los Angeles — over racial injustice that were touched off by high-profile shootings of Black people by police. Some of those protests again spun off acts of vandalism in Portland, Oregon, and elsewhere Wednesday night, an unacceptable mutation of our right to peacefully gather and make our voices heard.
And in response to the slow vote count, Trump supporters have been mobilizing. In some places they have acted within their rights and American tradition, such as gathering peacefully outside a vote-count site in Las Vegas. But elsewhere things got dicier. Trump supporters besieged a counting center in Detroit on Wednesday demanding access to watch the count (there were already a few hundred observers inside the facility) and another one in Phoenix where a few protesters openly carried firearms, an unacceptable act of intimidation in that context.
Remember, Trump earlier this year cheered on armed protesters who entered the state Capitol in Lansing, Michigan, to protest COVID-19 restrictions and a state mask mandate, tweeting, "Liberate Michigan!" And he mocked Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer after federal agents disrupted an alleged plot by self-styled anti-government militia members to kidnap her and try her on charges of treason.
Whitmer later argued, rightly, that Trump's words made a tense situation worse and endangered elected figures in that state. And introducing firearms into moments of public contention is a recipe for disaster, which the nation saw play out with shooting deaths in Wisconsin and Oregon during protests over police violence against Black citizens and broader issues of systemic racism.
Former Vice President Joe Biden has said that while he is confident that his campaign will win, he will wait for the process to play out (though his team, too, has built a legal brigade). But on Twitter, Trump absurdly claimed Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina "for electoral purposes" (whatever that means), adding, "we hereby claim the State of Michigan if, in fact, there was a large number of secretly dumped ballots as has been widely reported!" That magisterial declaration drew a warning label from Twitter: "Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process." Might be misleading?
And now the U.S. Justice Department — which under Attorney General William Barr has morphed into part of Trump's personal legal team — has informed its attorneys scattered around the country that they have the authority to send armed federal agents to state and county ballot-counting sites to investigate potential voter fraud, a favorite Trump bugaboo that, of course, is not grounded in reality. So far there's no indication that the government has deployed those agents, and we urge it to resist such a blatant act of intimidation.
This escalation of domestic tensions needs to end. Saner heads must prevail even if the president cannot, once again, control his impulses to goad, exaggerate and destabilize. Our history of peaceful transfers of power must also include a peaceful embrace of the right to vote, and that includes letting elections officials do their jobs and tally the results in peace. Democracy under the threat of violence is hardly democracy at all.
