Looking at the highlights from the January 6 Commitee hearing this week, there were two key takeaways from this week hearings — both related to the vote counting process.
First, as anybody who has been involved with campaign at any level knows, votes are not instantly reported at the same time. Instead, election results roll in as precincts turn in their results and counties count absentee and “federal” ballots (ballots case by military and overseas voters that just cover federal and statewide elections). More importantly, results by precinct and by county are not random — either in timing or in the vote counts. There is a regular patten by which results are reported and an expected result by precinct and county.
To use my home county for an example, it is a small county that typically has between 12,000 and 15,000 votes. While the exact number of precincts has changed, it has always been between 15 and 20 precincts. In the years that I have lived, there have been changes. We have gone from a central counting process in which the ballot boxes in each precinct were just ballot boxes and the counting machine was in the courthouse to a precinct counting process in which the ballot boxes are also counting machines and the central counting part of the process is simply downloading the results from each precinct and adding the results together. This change has speeded up the process (as the county election authority no longer has to run 15,000 ballots through the counting machine and reset the machine for each precinct) and we typically have the full results by 8:30 p.m. (ninety minutes after the polls close) rather than 11:00 p.m. Additionally, the results are posted on-line as soon as the printout of a precinct’s result can be scanned and uploaded thereby eliminating the need to sit around the courthouse waiting for a copy of the printouts. But what hasn’t changed is that there is a rough sequence in which the precincts are reported. In most elections, the first precincts to report are the smaller towns close to the county seat (in the north central part of the county). Those precincts get to the courthouse first because they are only 5-10 minutes away from the courthouse, and — given their small size — they tend to have few people in line at 7 p.m. and can quickly get to the process of closing the precinct and packing up the ballots and counting device to take to the courthouse. On the other hand, the five large precincts in the southeast and southwest of the courthouse tend to be the last ones to get to the courthouse as they have the furthest to go and tend to have lines at 7 p.m. (and thus take longer to close as the closing process does not begin until the last person has voted). In short, while the exact sequence may change some from election to election (as the exact time when the election judges get to the courthouse depends on how long the lines are).
More important than the semi-predictable order in which the precincts are reported is the simple fact that precincts have tendencies. While, as with other rural counties, my home county has shifted red (going from a swing county to a 60-40 county that favors Republicans), there are still differences between the precincts. Back when we were a swing county and Democrats could win races, we had target numbers for each precinct. The north central precincts were Democratic precincts as were the southwest precincts while the eastern and northwestern precincts were Republican and the south central precincts were toss-ups. The Democratic precincts tended to be larger permitting Democrats wo win by piling up large margins in those precincts even though there were more Republican precincts. But the key thing is that certain precincts were expected to favor Democrats by 60% to 40% and have 2,000 votes while other precincts were expected to favor Republicans by 70% to 30% and have 500 votes. The temporary lead at any given moment in time depended upon which precincts had been reported, but you could calculate what the lead should have been based on those precincts and determine who was “really” ahead. In short, those who had been through the process before knew that the lead in counted votes was not a true lead and would change as the later precincts were counted.
And as the former Fox News election analyst testified (and as we saw by analysts on the various networks looking at the vote count and outstanding votes), the same as true on the state level. Certain types of votes and certain counties tend to get reported first based on size and counting process in the different states. Other types of votes and counties take longer to count. The current state of the count has meaning as the size of the lead impacts whether there are enough outstanding vote to change the result but who is in front in the raw vote matters less than how that raw vote differs from the “expected” margin. If I am up by 1,000 votes in the raw count but there are 5,000 votes left in areas where my opponent should get two-thirds of the vote, I am actually likely to lose.
In 2020, this expectation of shifts as additional votes were counted was supercharged due to the rules about the counting of absentee ballots in some states, the larger than normal number of absentee votes, and a higher than normal partisan difference in the use of absentee votes as a result of disinformation from the Trump campaign. But every election expert knew in advance that the count would be slower than normal and that it might take three or four days to get a clear picture of who had won the swing states. Despite this being expected, the Trump campaign and President Trump decided to falsely claim that fraud was occurring if the late counted votes resulted in Democrats taking the lead in the swing states. Crucial here is that late counted votes are not votes discovered after the election but votes that were in the stack on election night but could not be counted quicker due to the lack of resources.
The other lesson from this week is how fragile our election system is to partisan manipulation. Things are better than they were fifty or sixty years in one aspect. At the local level, we have tended to require bipartisan counting teams. As long as both sides follow the rules, bipartisanship in our election processes creates a check that things are honest, and there is no fraud. If one party, however, does not care about the rules, bipartisanship could become a method to frustrate honest counting. (We recently saw this in New Mexico where — despite no evidence of any problem with the counting machines — Republican officials required to certify the vote refused to do so because of false information being put out on Trumpist websites that those machines were not trustworthy. And at the top level, both nationally and in many states, the final word on certifying the count comes from elected officials. While the task is supposed to be ministerial (and thus, as in New Mexico, court orders can enforce the duty to certify), the system depends on partisan officials putting the rules above politics. If the people who ultimately control the count decide that the actual count does not matter and all that matters is that their party wins, the system could break down. Most countries avoid this problem by turning elections over to nonpartisan agencies/officials, but we still believe that the best way to run elections is to have partisans with an interest in the results running things. The day may be quickly coming where disaster is inevitable.
I am sure that the remaining hearings will provide other information about issues that need to be addresses for the future. But the bottom line from this week is that the Trump campaign knew that the election was honest and expected the count to take days with the Democrats gaining ground as the last votes were counted but the President either ignored what his campaign was telling him or did not care what the truth was and that the President was willing to rewrite the rules and break the law to be declared the winner even though he had lost under the traditional rules. Whether there is enough to charge President Trump with a crime is still up in the air and will be decided by the Department of Justice, but it is clear that President Trump is unfit to hold any office in the future.
