America’s thousands of election administrators have pulled off another successful one. Votebeat expected this outcome, and so did the election administrators. But so many other people didn’t go into the day with that confidence.
This is a perennial frustration of mine. I started covering elections in 2016, and have run massive collaborative journalism projects in every election year since. Every single time, I assure everyone that in most of the country at least, poll watchers aren’t going to cause chaos, massive technological meltdowns aren’t likely, and local and state election administrators generally do the best they can, which tends to be pretty good. For the vast, vast majority of Americans, voting will be a routine, benign experience. As it should be.
2020 showed us that some events outside of election administrators’ control can darken the experience, like then-President Donald Trump’s allies submitting fake slates of electors or storming the U.S. Capitol. But the job of conducting elections themselves tends to go very smoothly.
Still, every year, activists and even political journalists who do not follow the act of voting particularly closely say this will be the year everything changes. And so far — even with Trump insisting each of those years that he’s going to upend the entire voting system with observers and demands for recounts — it has not. Votes are cast, and voters go home.
There are, of course, a small handful of disruptions: printing problems in Apache County, Arizona, say, or long lines in places like Pennsylvania and Utah. But considering that there are hundreds of thousands of polling places across the country, such occurrences are rare indeed.
Imagine if any other major process had to be arranged for everyone in the country over a three-week period: enrolling every child in a brand new school, for instance, or getting every American’s passport reissued.
The system would break down. We’ve seen that happen with far less ambitious undertakings. Recall the disastrous 2013 launch of the HealthCare.gov website. Processing unemployment benefits was a nightmare during COVID. Applying for federal financial aid for college students goes awry every time officials change it.
This doesn’t happen with voting.
The United States is, in fact, very good at elections. Managing voting is one of the things this country does best, and that simple and obvious fact is routinely ignored by people across the political spectrum who spend the weeks before the election predicting or assuming that mass fraud will take over, or that troublemakers armed with bullhorns will terrorize voters at their polling places. Neither thing happens at scale.
There are a lot of reasons for this. The United States is, really, running 10,000 individual elections at the same time under different rules and in different places. Yes, that adds a lot of complexity, but it also makes it difficult to organize a nationwide or even statewide plan to upend it. The people who may seek to sow chaos are a lot braver behind a keyboard than they are standing in front of their fellow Americans.
Most crucial, I think, is that local election administrators are, on the whole, honest, hardworking people who are good at their jobs and who try as hard as they can to serve their neighbors.
In the eight years I have been covering this space, election administrators have faced down profound challenges: people in their own communities screaming at them; budget shortages; angry state legislatures demanding unreasonable and pointless changes; a pandemic that transformed how this country voted; a torrent of misinformation; and a swelling crowd of people who — led by a presidential candidate and his allies — have come to distrust them and the system itself, for no provable reason. Still, these administrators have pulled off elections without major issues every single one of those years.
It is my firm hope that, at some point, this country will start to see that success for what it is: the product of a system that is well managed by competent people.
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
