The Only Metric That Matters for the 2020 Election Is "Count All the Votes"
August 6th 2020
Mail-in ballot from 2012 (hjl)
By Michael Waldman
We know how election night usually goes. At 11 o’clock on the East Coast, the news anchor breathlessly announces a winner. Maybe it drags into the early hours. It’s a cathartic conclusion to a drama.
That probably won’t be the way it works this year. Barring a landslide victory, Election Day could become Election Week or even, heaven help us, Election Month. Vote-by-mail counts, long lines at the polls, and efforts to make voting safe for everyone despite the coronavirus are expected to slow results. Given the stakes, Brennan Center Senior Fellow Daniel Okrent, who spent years editing major magazines and served as the first public editor at the New York Times, has some words of advice for his colleagues in the news media: don’t engage in the usual cutthroat competition to announce the winner first.
Instead, the news media should have only one metric for success, and that’s “being certain that all the votes that count have been counted” before declaring either Joe Biden or Donald Trump president. The need for such due diligence and media restraint has become a patriotic duty.
We live in polarized times, and the possibility that Fox News calls the election for Donald Trump, or MSNBC for Joe Biden, before all the absentee ballots are counted sends shivers down my spine. President Trump has demonstrated little interest in the norms of behavior that have been the underpinning of our centuries of peaceful transfers of power, and the potential for a full-blown constitutional crisis is real. As the New York Times’ Ben Smith put it, “the last barriers between American democracy and a deep political crisis may be television news and some version of that maddening needle on The New York Times website.”
For the media executives out there, being first and wrong could be catastrophic to the republic. Better to abide by the Hippocratic oath and promise to “do no harm.” Being last but right should be the only option if Election Day ends with no winner in sight and millions of mail ballots left to count.
Posted with permission