When Joe Biden announced during the US election campaign that the Democrats had an extensive "voter fraud organization", taken completely out of context (as the video itself shows), was this something rather prescient? From what we have seen since the polls closed last Tuesday night there are many who are seizing upon this as evidence that impropriety has indeed taken place - Attorney General Bill Barr has now ordered an investigation after multiple claims and affidavits from election officials testifying to witnessing wrongdoing - meaning the presidential election race cannot be called fully and firmly just yet even if the press and the world's leaders have crowned Biden as the victor.
All this is an extremely sad indictment of a voting system that needs to be examined closely, and makes me proud that despite its flaws the UK election system is light years ahead of that across the pond.
This post will attempt to draw comparisons between the voting systems here and in the US, look at the flaws in the US system (especially during the pandemic), and try to make sense of what happened.
The UK - imperfect but streets ahead...
I have been involved in the voting side of elections in the UK since I first counted votes in the 1998 local elections (and referendum on whether we wanted a Mayor in London), and as such have taken a keen interest in psephology and the system we use here.
In the twenty or so years since we have seen an increase in postal voting, which in turn has led to an increase in questioning the validity of voting - personally I am against postal voting for all bar those who physically cannot be at the polling station on election day, but I appreciate I'm probably in the minority on that one. From my perspective every step you take away from fully verified in person voting the more chance there is of voting imperfections. The US commentator Tim Pool describes this as the "chain of custody".
The Electoral Commission published a report in 2014 into voter fraud in the UK - thankfully the conclusion is that it's not widespread but pointed to the postal system being problematic, and called for the introduction of voter ID at polling stations (in line with most democracies) - something that the current government has pledged to introduce. For me this is not before time. At the moment as long as I know the name and address of a voter I can walk into their polling station, say I am said person, and cast their vote for them. I can cast my vote by post (so "invisibly"), then be the first voter at my polling station and give my downstairs neighbour's name and address. Anecdotal evidence (I have no physical evidence of this so won't claim otherwise) has claimed that whole busloads of people have been ferried around from polling station to polling station, told who they are to pretend to be at that station, voted, then got back aboard and moved to the next one. As I say, this is totally unverified so I cannot claim that this is true.
But when all is said and done, there is little evidence to say postal voting or non-ID voting has actually swung an election in the UK (there were calls to investigate the Peterborough by-election last year but no evidence was found of wrongdoing), and long may it continue.
...and the US - imperfect and streets behind
And then there's the US. While it's not the first time the system in the US has been thrown into chaos ("hanging chads", anyone?), the 2020 election has blown everything wide open and, to my mind, needs root and branch reform. There are so many moving parts that this will be difficult, nigh on impossible perhaps, but it needs to be examined so there is a clear and unambiguous winner without recourse to the courts.
Starting right at the beginning - why is there a need to declare party affiliation at the point of registering to vote? What works here is the fact every household registers anonymously (we do need to do better at ensuring the people registered actually live there, but again it's not considered a widespread issue), everyone then gets a ballot card. The moment you have party affiliation on your ballot registration is the moment voters can be "accidentally" disenfranchised.
Next is the age old "Federal vs State" debate - which means the voting system is decided at State level. Whoever controls the State controls the voting system. This led to a number of changes, mainly in Democrat-run States, that had the opposition crying "foul" before a single ballot was cast. It may be that there was nothing untoward in what was done, but once a seed of suspicion is sown (and Trump was particularly aggressive on that score throughout), it does nothing but germinate.
Following on from this is the approach to, and viability of, postal voting in the US. One of the key arguments following last Tuesday is how to count, or whether to count at all, certain votes cast by post. One issue is the US Postal Service itself - when I spent a year living in the US I despaired at just how inefficient their service is. It's understandable in a country as huge and disparate as it is, but at State level there's no excuse for post to take so long to be delivered. Here in the UK I have confidence in the system that if I post something before a certain time on Monday, it will arrive on Tuesday. So surely it's not beyond the realms of possibility that a ballot posted on Monday in the US will reach the local counting office on the Tuesday? And yet we see states accepting, and counting, votes long after election day. Voters can even post their ballot on election day itself and still be counted. To my mind this is absurd. Another comparison to make with the UK is that here, your ballot needs to have been received by the close of polls in order to count. If it hasn't arrived, tough.
Another rather tinfoil-hat bit of conspiracy theory around postal voting is around how people post items in the US - if you wish to post something you don't need to find your nearest post box, you simply put your items in your letterbox at home and put the little flag thing up, so when the postman comes to deliver the mail, they see your flag up and remove the items from your letterbox. What is to stop a postman who supports party X seeing a property with a board supporting the party Y candidate and accidentally "losing" their ballot? Reports have been posted about ballots being found dumped, so perhaps it's not so fanciful after all.
The counting of votes itself is also vague at best. In the UK, what happens is that come 10pm the ballot boxes are sealed, and opened only in the counting venue. At that point the votes are firstly verified to ensure that the number of ballot papers in the box tallies with the number of votes registered at the polling station (with several recounts of the box if necessary). Once all the votes in each box have been successfully verified, the votes are then counted, in full view of agents from each party who can intervene if a mistake is made or a ballot is regarded as "doubtful". The count then ends only when each vote is counted and allocated to each candidate and the result of the vote is declared.
Compare and contrast with the mess of the count in the US, which has given rise to suspicions of foul play - computers mysteriously deleting and re-allocating votes, vote counts going up when the counting isn't taking place, new ballots being "found" - and one can at least begin to understand why supporters of the "losing" party might think all is not right.
The context in 2020...
The 2020 US Election was always going to be a particularly strange one. Trump essentially won in 2016 because while there was a massive movement against him, there was also the factor of having a Democrat candidate who was absolutely despised by large sections of the electorate. I saw this for myself when my brief residency in the US coincided with her tenure as the First Lady - the running joke was around announcing "The President, and her husband Bill".
While Trump in the intervening years did little to assuage the fears of those diametrically opposed to him in terms of his bombast and generally divisive attitude, he did seem to solidify his support base by essentially doing what he set out to do (whether a positive or not) while his foreign policy, often baffling, yielded several landmark deals involving Israel that could positively impact the Middle East in the long term, while dialogue has been taking place with North Korea that could lead to it opening up in future. The US economy seemed to be on the right track too heading into 2020. Pundits were suggesting that having finally brushed off Impeachment, he'd win fairly comfortably especially given his opponent.
Then Covid happened, and all that changed. Trump's handling of the pandemic has been widely criticised, which brought the election back into play.
As for Biden, well there was very little overt enthusiasm for him, but nor was there the anger at him that there was towards Clinton. While there were fears both around his cognitive abilities and whether he was having his strings pulled by the far left of the party (as evidenced by his choice of running mate), these fears nor the fears around Trump weren't really enough to sway the vote decisively either way.
And that is perhaps the crux of the issue. The context is that the Democrats pushed, in these pandemic times, for voters to vote early by mail. The Republicans, who have generally treated the pandemic less seriously (many perhaps due to living in less densely populated areas), said this was a recipe for fraud and to therefore vote in person. This was then evidenced by the on-the-night counts themselves. Those states where mail in votes were counted immediately saw the Democrats leap out into the lead then be clawed back as in person votes started to be counted. And vice versa for those states where mail in votes weren't counted until after the in person votes. This meant that it was incredibly difficult to judge the mood on the night and to call winners, then the suspicious-looking stuff happened. There may well be a logical explanation for why Biden's totals in some states would leap up while Trump's totals stayed static (especially if this happened while people weren't actually counting votes, as is alleged), but if you've been drilled into thinking the vote was going to be rigged, seeing things like this would only reinforce that view.
Had there been clear evidence on the night that either Trump or Biden was heading towards a decisive victory, it would have been easy for one to be declared the winner and for the other to concede graciously (or as graciously as one might expect in certain quarters...!). However, the close races in key states have magnified the claims of voting impropriety, which means that nothing is done until everything is done. Furthermore, when looking "down ballot" at the results in the House, Senate, Governor and State legislature votes, which showed a generally strong Republican performance, Trump supporters have further ammunition (rightly or wrongly) to cry foul. How come Biden received so many votes that had absolutely no votes registered "down ballot"? This could be perfectly reasonable especially given a demographic who were said to be voting "against Trump", but suspicions remain and questions raised.
It is an embarrassment that one of the world's great democracies is having its name dragged through the mud, but so too is it embarrassing that people are trying to say "move along, nothing to see here". While I *totally* buy the idea that every (legal) vote should be counted, so too do I believe that if there is suspicious activity, it should be investigated. If it is investigated and found that a) there was nothing naughty, or b) there were pockets of activity but not enough to alter the result, then fine, let's get on and welcome Joe Biden as the 46th President after he won fair and square, and good luck to him.
Lest we forget, meanwhile, that the Democrats spent most of the Trump term questioning the 2016 result and generally refusing to accept Trump won by fair means. Another four years of suspicion, this time from the Trump side of the fence, would be counterproductive to the long-term political stability of the country - so like every vote being counted, so too should every suspicious vote pattern be investigated.
Lessons to be learnt
If future US elections are to have the increased postal voting engagement we saw in 2020 due to the pandemic, there needs to be a realignment of their voting system and restrictions. How votes are collected and counted needs to be put under the spotlight, with control perhaps shifting from State to Federal. Votes should be received by the time the polls in each state close, and votes should be counted in one go like they are in the UK. Voter registration should be verified more closely (no dead people!) with tighter controls on the issue of ballots (an estimated 100,000 incorrect ballots were sent out in New York, for example). There needs to be greater transparency at vote counts themselves. Using a common set of guidelines and principles will go a long way to ensuring there is less recourse to the courts to decide outcomes.
I'm sure that in the end everything will be resolved, and I'm sure also that the result will not be overturned by the various legal challenges by the Trump team. Hopefully in 2024 with two less divisive candidates/parties, and after a root and branch review of the voting system, we won't be left wondering beyond election day. Meanwhile we in the UK can continue to show the way to a gold(ish) standard election system.
