Owatonna, Minnesota Correspondent — Responsibility is distributed, which is an unsatisfying answer and I think the correct one.
Some of it belongs to the way the count unfolded. Several states forbid clerks from processing mail ballots before Election Day, so the in-person vote reported first and the mail vote followed, and the mail vote ran heavily one direction. That produced a lead that reversed over several days. It was entirely predictable — analysts predicted it publicly for months — and it was still the single most disorienting thing most people watched.
That’s a legislative choice, not a conspiracy. Michigan and Pennsylvania could have permitted early processing and chose not to. Florida did, and reported by midnight, and nobody has a theory about Florida.
Rebuilding confidence starts there. Let clerks open envelopes early. It’s a dull fix for a problem that has become anything but dull.
Gastonia, North Carolina Correspondent — I’ll take my own trade’s share first, because I think we earned it.
Coverage of this treated the audience as a problem to be managed rather than as adults who could follow an explanation. When outlets characterized every question as debunked without walking through why, they persuaded nobody who wasn’t already persuaded and they confirmed a suspicion for everyone else.
The word “baseless” appeared in more headlines this autumn than any explanation did. It’s a conclusion, not an argument, and it does no work on a reader who doesn’t already trust you.
Then there’s the candidate’s share, which is larger. A president who says in advance that a loss can only mean fraud has predetermined the response of his supporters, and that’s a choice he made in August and not a reaction to anything he found in November.
Rebuilding confidence would take an audit regime that runs every time, in every state, win or lose, so it isn’t a concession to anybody.
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina Correspondent — I watch information move for a living and I’d point at the speed.
A claim about a specific precinct could reach millions of people in an hour. The correction, which required somebody to obtain a record and read it, took three days and reached a fraction of that audience. That asymmetry isn’t a bias. It’s arithmetic, and it will produce the same result every cycle regardless of who’s making claims.
Nobody has a fix for that and I’d be suspicious of anyone who says they do.
What I’d say about rebuilding is that it can’t be done centrally. The trusted source, if there is one, is a county clerk somebody can meet. Every effort I saw this year to correct the record from a national platform made things worse, because the platform was itself the thing in dispute.
Sheffield, Jamaica Correspondent — I’ll offer an observation the room may not enjoy.
My region has considerable experience of disputed elections, and there is a pattern to how a country recovers from one. It is never the losing side that restores confidence. It is the winning side, by conducting itself as though it might lose the next one.
The instinct after a contested result is to treat the doubt as an illness in the other half of the country, to be corrected by better information. That has never worked anywhere I have observed it. What works, slowly, is administration so plainly even that the doubt becomes expensive to maintain.
I would also say this. A great many of us watched the American courts this autumn — including judges appointed by the president — hear these claims and rule against them, repeatedly, and then watched those rulings be complied with. From where I sit that was not a failure. That was the part that worked, and it is not a small thing. Countries lose that capability and do not easily get it back.
Jacksonville, Florida Correspondent — Florida ran a clean, fast, uncontested election with more people voting by mail than ever, in a state everyone expected to be the disaster. So I’d start by saying this was solvable, because we solved it.
We solved it by processing mail ballots weeks early, by having a statute rather than a court order, and by having spent twenty years being publicly humiliated into fixing it.
Responsibility for the doubt: partly the states that didn’t do that and had four days of counting on television. Partly a candidate who told people in advance what to conclude. Partly a press that couldn’t distinguish between a procedural objection and a fraud claim, and treated everyone raising either as the same person.
Rebuilding is mechanical. Report faster. Publish the reconciliation. Let observers in from both sides and give them something real to do rather than a rope line to stand behind. Confidence follows a process you can watch.
Las Vegas, Nevada Correspondent — This state was one of the slow ones and I heard about it for a week.
I’ll give the gaming answer, because it’s the only expertise I have. Our regulator’s authority doesn’t rest on being trusted. It rests on the fact that every device is logged, every dispute has a procedure, and any patron who thinks he was cheated can trigger a review that produces a record. Nobody has to take anyone’s word.
Elections are run closer to the opposite. The count is honest, as far as I can tell and as far as anyone has demonstrated in court, and it is also largely unwatchable. A citizen cannot personally verify anything. He is asked to trust, and trust is the thing currently in short supply.
So rebuild it the way a regulator would. Risk-limiting audits everywhere, automatically, not as a concession when somebody complains. Post the reconciliation for every precinct. Make the process boring and legible and repetitive.
And I’d say to my own side that a claim you bring sixty times and lose sixty times is a claim you’ve tested. That’s what courts are for. I’d have accepted the result if it went the other way and I’ll accept this one.
Knoxville, Tennessee Correspondent — Responsibility is shared, and the share I’d emphasize is the one nobody wants: the machinery was underfunded for twenty years by everybody.
We ask county clerks to run a national event on a budget that would embarrass a public works department, with volunteers, on equipment purchased in 2005, and then we’re surprised when it doesn’t inspire confidence. I’ve sat in the meetings where that line item got cut. It’s always the easiest cut in the budget because nothing visibly breaks until it does.
The president’s conduct made it worse and I’ll say so plainly. Telling people the only honest outcome is a win is a thing you can’t take back, and it will outlast his presidency in the minds of people who believed him.
What rebuilds it is money and process. Paper everywhere. Audits every time. Clerks paid enough to be professionals. Nobody will campaign on that.
Long Island, New York Correspondent — I spent ten years around a district attorney’s office, so let me be exact about what happened in the courts, because it’s the part being described least accurately by everyone.
Roughly sixty cases were brought. Nearly all were dismissed or withdrawn. In a substantial number, the campaign’s own lawyers stated in open court that they were not alleging fraud, because alleging fraud carries obligations — evidence, witnesses, sanctions if you’re wrong. What was argued in the filings and what was argued in the press were different cases.
That distinction is the whole thing. In a courtroom you have to produce it. Outside one you don’t.
So where does responsibility sit? With whoever chose to make in public a claim they declined to make under oath. That’s not a partisan observation. It’s how the system distinguishes an allegation from a grievance, and it did its job this year.
I’d add the harder half. A person who watched the rules change by court order in September, watched a lead reverse over four days, and doesn’t have a law degree is not being irrational to feel that something was off. The feeling is reasonable and the conclusion isn’t, and telling him the feeling is illegitimate is how you keep him.
Rebuilding takes procedure that a non-lawyer can watch. Early processing so results arrive the same night. Automatic audits. Legislatures writing the rules in advance. None of it requires anyone to concede anything about November.
