Muddle getting messier

Friday 6th November 2020

The US presidential election full of suspense is like a Hollywood thriller; it has kept everyone on the edge of his or her seat across the globe. Democratic candidate Joe Biden was inching towards victory with several key states remaining to be called, at the time of writing. The winner may be known shortly. Biden has already broken Barack Obama’s 2008 record for the most votes; Obama received as many as 69,500,000, and Biden had polled more than 73,330,000 votes by yesterday evening. (The increase in the US population since 2008 should, however, be factored in, and it is too early to compare percentages.) President Donald Trump, who declared victory prematurely on the election night itself, is preparing for a legal battle.

The bone of contention that has marred the US election is the delayed arrival of mail ballots in some states. There are two schools of thought anent this issue. One that represents the Republicans insists that the postal votes that reached the counting centres after the close of polling should not be accepted; the other that favours the Democrats is of the view that such action amounts to the disenfranchisement of voters and, therefore, mail ballots postmarked either on or before the polling day should be considered valid and counted; and this is what the elections officials have chosen to do much to the consternation of the Trump camp, which claims there has been a fraud.

The current pandemic has upended the whole world, and a need has arisen for extraordinary measures to ensure safe elections, and therefore, many Americans, troubled by COVID-19, which has carried off about 235,000 people in the US so far, opted for mail-in voting. The Democrats and the Republicans are divided on how to tackle the pandemic.

The Democrats, who abide by the health guidelines recommended by the World Health Organisation, promoted postal voting, and the Republicans follow Trump, who encouraged his supporters to vote in person. So, the mail-in ballots, many of which arrived late were for Biden and narrowed Trump’s path to victory in the states, where he had an early lead, thus, prompting him to protest against the counting of those votes and threaten legal action. It is only natural that the Democrats want every vote to be counted. The counting process has got protracted due to the mail-in votes arriving late.

Sri Lanka overcame the challenge of voting amidst a national health emergency, a few moons ago, thanks to the Election Commission, which acted with foresight and took all possible precautions to ensure the safety of voters without leaving anything to chance. In big countries, the challenge is even more difficult, but the issue of delayed arrival of mail ballots in the US could have been avoided if a serious effort had been made to ensure that they would reach the counting centres without undue delay so that there would be no room for objections.

Trump, who has publicly declared that he hates losing, is already a bear with a sore head, and he is sure to act like a bull in a china shop if his dream of reelection is shattered officially. An epic legal battle is bound to leave the US electoral process scarred the way it happened when the 2000 presidential election was taken to the Supreme Court over the contentious recount in Florida. Following intense sparring between the lawyers of George W. Bush and Al Gore, the court settled the election in favour of Bush although it was widely thought that the other one deserved victory. That’s the way the cookie crumbles in courts.

No country should labour under the delusion that the various systems in place to safeguard its democracy are strong enough to take care of themselves, for humans, especially those in positions of power, are greedy and overbearing by nature, and their actions have a corrosive effect on such mechanisms. The unfolding drama in the US serves as an example.