![]() ![]() US intelligence agencies have pointed to renewed Russian efforts to influence the election’s outcome and undermine public confidence in the democratic process. So there is genuine concern whether every eligible voter who wants to cast a ballot will succeed in doing so. Millions more Americans will attempt to vote by mail than have ever done so before, and in some states they will face difficulties in applying to get their ballots. The pandemic has made it harder to recruit poll workers and to keep polling places safe. But although we have had many critical elections, none of them since the end of Reconstruction has occurred under anything like the cloud hanging over this quadriennial choosing. On each of these questions, there are sharp differences between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. That would be true even if it were only about the issues: how America will handle Covid-19, racial inequality, immigration, climate change, foreign relations, economic policy, and judicial appointments depends on whom we choose to lead us next. Few of them have been as obviously consequential as the election of 2020. The United States has had fifty-eight presidential elections since George Washington won a unanimous electoral vote in 1788–1789. In Douglas’s words, “Catastrophe was avoided by disaster.” ![]() The price of the deal that gave the Republicans the presidency was their agreement to end Reconstruction-a decision that haunts us to this day. ![]() As Lawrence Douglas, a professor of law, jurisprudence, and social thought at Amherst College, observes in Will He Go?, that was only the beginning of our woes. ![]() It took a special, jury-rigged electoral commission, hardball behind-the-scenes bargaining, and ultimately a concession by Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden to reach closure. The Twelfth Amendment, which lays out the process for declaring the winner of a presidential election, proved inadequate to the task of resolving the dispute over which sets to count, not least because the amendment’s language was susceptible to multiple readings, and Democrats controlled the House while Republicans controlled the Senate. Vote suppression, fraud, dishonest counting of the ballots, and the vagaries of state law had led to Florida, Louisiana, Oregon, and South Carolina each sending more than one set of electoral votes to Congress. Hayes, a Republican-was not determined until two days before the inauguration. When Whitman wrote, the nation was only eight years past the debacle of 1876, during which the winner of the presidency-Rutherford B. In this centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote (at least if they were white, since effective enfranchisement didn’t come to Black citizens in the South until the Voting Rights Act of 1965), voting remains a powerful expression of who counts as a full member of the political community. No, Whitman declared, the “powerfulest scene and show” was “America’s choosing day.” And not because of the men who were selected to govern: “The heart of it not in the chosen-the act itself the main, the quadriennial choosing.” Elections matter because they are a central way in which we constitute ourselves as a nation. “Election Day, November, 1884” argued that the most remarkable feature of the United States was not its stunning natural wonders-not the Mississippi River, nor the limitless prairies, “nor you, Yosemite” (however our current president wants to pronounce it). In October 1884, as a particularly ugly presidential race neared its end, Walt Whitman decided instead of voting to write a poem. ![]()
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