U.S. Election: Waiting For The Truth
civics ·Daily, I see different people saying “Why doesn’t he concede? He lost! What a baby!..” These same people keep telling me that the election is over. It’s been called. The votes are in. Why can’t people accept this?
I won’t go into the inner workings of the election process right now, but the bottom line looks a little like this. The Media has told everyone that the election is over, but the Media doesn’t control our voting process.
Our Constitution, and state Constitutions, define our elections. According to our Constitution, once a state’s votes have been legally certified by the Secretary of State for the State, then the electors are appointed to the Electoral College to register the final vote.
At the time of this writing, only seven states have certified their results. With a highly contested election, and razor thin margins in many key states, each state has a responsibility to “get it right”. And, each side has the right to contest results, if they can prove that there is just cause to do so.
So the question then becomes “What’s the holdup?”
Right now, there are court cases being filed in multiple districts, of multiple states, alleging a wide range of presumed illegal actions being taken. Well over a million votes are currently in question of their validity, because of these allegations, and (with such slim margins) a final determination in any of these cases can change the official vote count enough to change the overall result in one direction or another.
More than a million votes in question, in key states, that could, possibly, effect the final outcome of the election.
In the end, all of these allegations must be proven true or false. And everyone should be concerned with these investigations, regardless of what side of the fence you sit on. At this stage, it isn’t even about who the “winner” is, but about maintaining and ensuring the integrity of our process.
But “Why?” Why should anyone care about these allegations? It’s really very simple. 70+ million people voted for one candidate, and 70+ million people voted for another. If we do not investigate, and do not find the truth of these allegations (“truth” being that the individual allegations are found to be either valid or not), then the integrity of the entire process will be in question, and the individual voter will begin to believe that their vote no longer matters.
The thing that should bother every voter is not that the election isn’t over, but the apparent lack of responsible reporting from our Media, about these allegations. The majority of Media outlets appear to be ignoring these allegations completely, instead focusing on a lack of Peaceful Transition of Power in a currently still undecided election. Instead of investigative reporting of allegations, the apparent Media response has been to blow off all of these allegations by continually saying they are “unfounded”, with no reported investigations of their own.
Since the very beginning of our Nation, we have relied upon our journalists to present fair, balanced, and unbiased reporting of the news and events around us. Investigative journalism has helped us change and grow, as a Nation, by finding and highlighting crime and corruption in the public and private sectors, calling out subversive actors in government, business, and more. We have relied on them to inform us about “what’s really going on”, so that we could make informed decisions.
And yet, we do not appear to be getting this same level of journalism today. When we should see non-stop coverage of the investigations into election irregularities, and should see an intense effort to investigate and report the facts and ensure the integrity of our Constitutional process, we instead seem to see a concerted move to influence the end result of the election itself, and “cancel” (and even blacklist) anyone with a dissenting opinion. Instead of verification, we seem to see our Media attempting to control the narrative and the populace.
The American people must know that every legal vote does count, regardless of the final result. Our representatives, in both parties, should not only welcome these investigations, but fight for them to be done and done right. While the result is important, confidence in our elections is the true goal. Your candidate (whoever that might be) may have won the election. We have to know that the process is done right, and that it works.