The immediate priorities.
President Trump took to Twitter on Wednesday to air his frustrations with an election that doesn’t seem to be going his way, firing off baseless accusations that Democrats were stuffing ballot boxes in key Midwestern states. |
The president’s fact-free fear-mongering is particularly galling because there actually is an organized effort underway to subvert the integrity of our representative democracy — but not by Democrats, and not by padding the vote. |
Mr. Trump and other Republican officials fought hard before the election to discourage Americans from voting, and they are still fighting to prevent votes from being counted. |
Republicans neutered the Voting Rights Act, purged voter rolls, shuttered polling places and kneecapped the Postal Service, preventing the timely return of hundreds of thousands of ballots. There is no way to know how many people might have voted if their government had sought to help rather than to impede them. |
Republicans also sought to undermine public confidence in the integrity of the election by concocting fantasies about widespread voter fraud. And in Pennsylvania, Republicans prevented the counting of early votes before Election Day, ensuring there would be plenty of time for corrosive rhetoric and legal challenges. |
As the editorial board writes, the immediate priority is to ignore the president’s provocations, win the courtroom battles and count the votes. |
But after the votes are counted, politicians need to get down to the business of making it easy to vote. Some state and local governments took promising steps forward this year, for example by sending ballots to all registered voters and by expanding early voting options. But there is plenty of room for improvement, including in places like New York where voting remains embarrassingly difficult even though there are no partisan obstacles to reform. |
I hope I never see another story about people delivering pizzas to voters stuck in long queues. It reminds me of the internet fund-raisers for Americans who can’t afford cancer treatments. It’s nice that people are nice, but it would be a lot better to solve the underlying problem. |
Americans have grown accustomed to the idea that voting is hard. It does not have to be. |
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