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In the early morning hours after election day, the president of the United States showed his authoritarian ambitions. He launched an attack on our democratic system at a moment when it is at its most fragile in recent memory. His lies about the results of the election erode trust in the fairness of the democratic process and risk provoking violence. Now we are dependent on media, especially the outlets most popular with Donald Trumps base, to rein in the chaos he is encouraging.

This grave threat comes from the presidents false declaration of victory, despite no evidence that he had won the election, and with millions of valid votes yet to be counted. He referred to any suggestion that he had lost as a fraud on the American public. In one breath, he declared that we want all voting to stop and that we dont want any ballots to be found at four in the morning. This conflation of voting after election day and counting votes after election day a standard practice in every election is deeply misleading and deeply dangerous.

In this respect, its damage is far worse than many of the many fibs Trump has made while in office. His suggestion is a direct lie, one that comes while millions of voters look to him to understand who our legitimate president will be. In past elections, the media specifically TV networks served as the main gatekeepers of results, but this president communicates directly to his base through social media, avoiding the reputable news organizations that could factcheck him in real time. This means that his unsubstantiated claims of victory and of electoral fraud perpetrated by Democrats are being fed directly to his base. Many will believe him, undermining confidence in the ultimate legitimate results and sowing discord and potentially violence.

The problem of Trumps unfiltered reach coupled with his blatant lying is compounded by social media executives inadequate handling of the situation. Facebook and its irresponsible CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, refused to directly challenge the president, even while receiving credit from some observers for reminding voters that final results may take days. They did not call Trumps statement a lie or take strong steps to counter it. Twitter went far enough to say that the presidents message might be misleading, but it too failed to take a strong and definitive stand on a statement that is not just possibly, but indisputably, incorrect.

Surprisingly, Fox News might be the media outlet that holds the country together. The network called Arizona for Joe Biden around the same time as the Associated Press and has insisted on reporting real numbers, with its reputable non-partisan news anchors leading the coverage. Ultimately, a large number of Trump voters might turn to Fox to decide whether to trust official results or their president, who has told them that those disputing his victory are committing fraud. If Fox continues to say that any early declaration of victory is incorrect, viewers might be more likely to have the patience required to wait for what might be days, with twists and turns as more ballots are reported, until a winner is declared.

Still, it is not only the media outlet that should be tasked with maintaining the publics confidence in our electoral machinery. Part of Trumps pattern of deception to his base involves invoking bizarre and completely erroneous legal claims. On Tuesday night, Trump promised to take up his concerns about ongoing ballot counting to the US supreme court. However, if ballots are received on or before election day, there is no serious legal claim to support Trumps seeming contention that any ongoing ballot counting after the election is fraudulent. Indeed, in a decision the president disparaged on Twitter, the US supreme court refused to undo the Pennsylvania supreme courts decision that even ballots that arrived three days after election day would count as long as they were postmarked by election day.

Trumps claims risk sowing violence, confusion and an erosion of faith in the bedrock principles of American democracy

I cannot overstate the danger of this moment. Right now, it is essential that Republican members of Congress and the vice-president make it clear that the ballots need to be counted. Both candidates and parties should be modeling respect for our democratic process, patiently waiting for the legitimate results, and encouraging all Americans to do the same. Instead, Trumps claims risk sowing violence, confusion and an erosion of faith in the bedrock principles of American democracy.

Amid this chaos, what is left for us to do? Americans who believe that every persons ballot should count in an election must insist on truth and spread this message as widely as possible on social media, at our dinner tables and, if need be, through peaceful demonstrations. That is the only way to counteract Trumps lies and his threat of upending our democracy.

Even if Biden does win and the results are accepted, we will have lived through a moment that showed our democracy is less stable than we assumed. Strengthening it and reinforcing its protections must be a priority of a Biden presidency.

Corey Brettschneider is a political science professor at Brown. He is the author of The Oath and the Office: A Guide to the Constitution for Future Presidents and the editor of the new book The Decisions and Dissents of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, part of his new series, Penguin Liberty

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Don't underestimate the threat to American democracy at this moment - The Guardian

Artist Mo Willems is leading a doodle session on election night for children and adults. On the Kennedy Center's website, he will encourage self-expression for anyone who tunes in. Mo Willems hide caption

Artist Mo Willems is leading a doodle session on election night for children and adults. On the Kennedy Center's website, he will encourage self-expression for anyone who tunes in.

Don't underestimate the power of doodling. In a democracy, Mo Willems says, "voting is a lot like doodling. It's a form of self-expression, and you discover sort of who you really are as you do it." On Election Day (7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT) on the Kennedy Center's website, Willems will encourage self-expression for anyone who tunes in to Democracy Doodle 2020, regardless of age or political persuasion.

Willems says they'll do three drawing exercises, each accompanied by a different musician from the National Symphony Orchestra. As the Kennedy Center's education artist-in-residence, Willems has been encouraging kids to take regular doodle breaks since the early days of the pandemic.

In a video series called Lunch Doodles With Mo Willems!, he held guided drawing sessions from his studio. He sits at a table, pulls out a blank sheet of paper, selects a marker and starts doodling, encouraging children at home to do the same.

With his oddball sense of humor, Willems calmly answers kids' questions and talks about his career as an animator and writer for Sesame Street and creating The Pigeon and Elephant & Piggie books. Lunch Doodles has been so popular, Willems followed it up with similar series: Thank You Thursdays, The Yo-Yo Mo Show with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and, most recently, The Small Works Project.

"I tend to think of my books as questions I don't know the answers to and these videos are sort of me reflecting," Willems said in an interview. "I'm going to be anxious on Nov. 3. And I know that they're going to be a lot of families and kids learning new vocabulary words, while parents are yelling at the screens. And I thought, you know, 'I could use a break, and if I could use a break, then maybe other people could as well.' "

Willems says he's prepared three "really simple exercises for us all to do together and to share while we listen to this music being performed." The National Symphony Orchestra musicians Mahoko Eguchi (viola), Abel Pereira (horn) and Jamie Roberts (oboe) have each selected a piece of "music to doodle to." The pieces aren't necessarily traditional patriotic music intended to celebrate democracy.

For Willems, "Any time we express ourselves, that's a form of patriotism." Just like voting.

Willems hopes the 20-minute, election night doodle session will be cathartic for everyone, himself included. He says, like so many others, he's "muddling through these years, these months. I'm doing my best." But he adds, "My battery is running at 20%."

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Mo Willems' 'Democracy Doodle' Will Help You Get Through Election Night - NPR

NEW YORK: As we await confirmation of the result of the US presidential election, it is easy to forget that, beyond the delays, confusion and misinformation, the truth of the contest and its result was precisely determined days ago and remains safely sealed in the ballots that remain to be counted.

About 130,000 of those ballots are in the pivotal state of Pennsylvania, where Joe Biden pulled ahead on Friday after steadily erasing a large initial lead built by Trump on election day.

Democrats were, therefore, in a cheerful mood in the early hours on Friday, as the counts of those final ballots started to trickle in, many of them from blue strongholds: 37,000 from Allegheny County in Pittsburg, for example, and 20,000 from Philadelphia.

Support for Biden was trending much higher than the percentage point lead he needed in the remaining ballots to win those counties. This appears to be thanks in large part to a high turnout by suburban women and mothers, arguably the demographic most affected by the coronavirus crisis. Women have borne the brunt of the pandemic nationwide; in September alone, nearly 1 million women lost their jobs. Many sacrificed their careers to care for locked down or quarantined children.

But even the tallies of remaining mail-in votes from traditionally Republican counties in Pennsylvania were favoring Biden. He netted 2,500 votes in Mercer County alone last night.

Trumps supporters rallied outside tabulation centers under the slogan Stop the Steal, and described mail-in ballots as write-ins that were received after election day. Election officials have segregated ballots that might be challenged in court later.

As Biden edged past Trump in Pennsylvania, TV news networks faced a politically fraught question: when would they call the race? Prominent statistician Nate Silver encouraged them to do so, and fast.

Whichever network calls this first will look good in retrospect, he tweeted. That is not such an easy task for networks given that this is a highly unusual election. Fox News, for example, already took a lot of heat from the Trump campaign after calling Arizona for Biden early on in a very close race.

Biden, meanwhile, already looks like someone who has taken on the mantle of president.

Democracy can be messy, he said during a press conference on Friday as he again called for patience and reiterated that every vote will be counted. He then moved on to discuss the COVID-19 briefing he had just received. Biden had made the pandemic the main focus of his campaign and today the US hit a record high of 116,000 new cases.

Meanwhile, pundits were wondering where Trump was. He has largely remained out of the public eye but emerged on Thursday evening to make a statement in the White House. His stance was quite a departure from Bidens, as once again he called the integrity of the election into question, made claims of widespread voter fraud and threatened to take his fight to the highest court in the land. He described media polls as election interference aimed at creating the illusion of momentum for Biden. As he was speaking, the captions on TV screens were being updated with the latest nationwide vote shares: Biden 50 percent, Trump 48 percent.

In a highly unusual move, some networks cut away from the conference, telling viewers they were doing so because the information given by the president was misleading.

Trumps camp has been hinting for some time that no one should expect him to concede defeat gracefully. This election is not over, a campaign attorney said.

The presidents eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., blasted Republicans who are not supporting Trumps efforts to discredit the election, going so far as to suggest that this should be remembered when the 2024 Republican presidential primary comes around.

Everyone should be watching who is actually fighting this flagrant nonsense and who is sitting on the sidelines, he said in a message posted on Twitter. The total lack of action from virtually all of the 2024 GOP hopefuls is pretty amazing.

Aside from a few lukewarm statements of support from South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, for example, and Vice President Mike Pence most Republicans have remained silent about the commotion surrounding the results. Many observers believe this illustrates the dilemma they face between supporting their partys candidate while also respecting the democratic process.

The Trump campaign also ratcheted up its pressure on election officials, accusing the states that remain uncalled of being run by Democrats even though the governors of Arizona and Georgia are Republican. Since 2005, the GOP has also controlled the latter states representation in the House of Representative and Senate.

Despite the noise from protesters outside, election officials and poll workers continue the thankless task of counting votes as if inoculated from the reality outside. Election commissioners have suddenly found that everything they utter becomes breaking news, as they continue to reassure the people of America there is no evidence of voter fraud.

Normally anonymous secretaries of state have also found themselves in the spotlight as they battle misinformation. The latest example was Sharpiegate, a conspiracy theory that went viral claiming that ballot papers filled in using a Sharpie, a particular brand of pen, were invalid. New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver offered a detailed explanation of how tabulation systems are designed to scan ballots correctly under a variety of conditions.

Democrats dismiss all of this as a distraction from the reality that Biden is inching toward victory.

What, then, are the remaining pathways to the White House for the candidates? Biden has many. With 253 Electoral College votes already in his pocket, winning the 20 on offer in Pennsylvania alone would clinch the election. Victory in Arizona and Nevada offers another way for Biden to reach the magic 270 Electoral College votes he needs to secure the presidency. In fact, any two from North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia will do. Trump currently leads only in North Carolina.

Keep an eye on those states. Pennsylvania promises to have enough votes counted to call a winner any time now. Arizona said counting will not be completed before the weekend.

But no one in the US is under any illusion that this election will be over in a day or two, even if all the votes have been counted. All eyes are on states but also on the rival camps as they gear up for what could be a protracted legal battle for the Oval Office.

Excerpt from:
Democracy in the balance as the US election edges toward a result - Arab News

After a record number of popular votes cast more than 140 million Joe Biden has been elected the 46th president of the United States.

We at the ACLU of Northern California applaud all of those who stood up, to make their voices heard in the most critical election of our lifetimes, waiting for hours in line in some instances, and adapting to major changes in the way we vote due to COVID-19. In a victory for democracy, historic numbers of Americans cast ballots in spite of rampant voter suppression targeting people of color, young people and immigrants, and in spite of an outgoing president who tried to divide us by casting doubt on the legitimacy of the democratic process.

For the past four years, the ACLU has fought the Trump Administrations non-stop assault on our civil rights and liberties.

In Northern California, we have challenged this Administrations blatant racist targeting of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. After Trump authorized the xenophobic Muslim ban in 2016, our attorneys rushed to airports to protect travelers who were detained and separated from loved ones. More recently, we have gone to court on behalf of our local immigrant communities, whom Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has rounded up and detained in crowded, life-threatening conditions at immigration detention facilitiesthis even in the midst of a global pandemic, when social distancing and masks have proven key to safety and survival.

Since 1934, the ACLU of Northern California has worked to make equal justice a lived reality for everyone rather than merely a symbolic ideal in our Constitution. This election sends a clear message that the People want a new path forward that is led by the values that we share: the advancement of a democracy that is truly representative and just, and that empowers those who have historically been silenced.

Were optimistic that the Biden Administration will move swiftly to repair the harm caused by the Trump Administration and craft policies that benefit all Americans, not just the wealthy and connected. Were also hopeful that, unlike Trump, President-elect Biden will use the tremendous power of his office to protect, not trample, peoples constitutional rights.

Yet let us be clear. No matter who our president is, our role at the ACLU remains the same: to hold our leaders and institutions accountable. Through litigation and advocacy, we will hold the Biden Administration accountable, and stand ready to continue defending our rights and expanding upon the gains we have already wona battle that began long before Trump was elected and will continue long after his departure.

Following this victory for our democracy, we will persist in our work to build a more perfect union.

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The People Have Spoken: Joe Biden Elected US President after Record Voter Turnout | ACLU of Northern CA - ACLU of Northern California

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Democrats all over the world wait anxiously for themuch-deserved departure of Donald Trump. It could be a long wait and could well extend to another four years. At the time of this article being published, the vote count appears to be leaning towards Trump. Yet, those who care for democracy,must be grateful toTrump for something. He has singlehandedly demolished one of the biggest myths of our time: the myth of the greatness of American democracy, the idea that the US was as an exemplar of democracy, a model for others to emulate. This may be a painful realisation for many. In the last instance, this is good news forDemocrats.

Now, Trump should not get all the credit for demolishing the American model. He simply ensured that the whole world woke up tosome of the most poorly kept secrets of American politics. Above all, he left no room to doubt that, like everywhere else, some of the top leaders in this great democracywere intellectually and morally challenged. That someone like himcould bullyhis way to the White House and, perhaps, retain it foranother term reveals something very disturbing about the American public.His mishandling of thecoronaviruspandemicblurred the imaginary distinction between the first and the third world.His appointment to theSupreme Court, just before the elections,threw light on what a scandal apex judicial appointments in the US are. Hisnot-so-hidden support forWhitesupremacists in the face of the #BlackLivesMatter movement exposed the underbelly of racial divisions in the US.Finally, the global attention he brought tothe presidentialelection 2020 has served to expose the shoddy electoral system in the US. Clearly,the US could learn a thing or two from India on how to conductelectionsand carry out a quick and clean count of votes.

In sum: Thanks to Donald Trump, the world learnt that the US isjustone of the democracies in the world. It has its strengths and its weaknesses. It needs to learn from other democracies before it preaches the same to the rest of the world. No matter who emerges victor, the process and the outcome of the current election is bound to reinforce this lesson.

Also read: Americans face stark choice as election day 2020 dawns

I learnt this lesson much earlier, thanks to my friend-cum-co-author-cum-teacher, the late Alfred Stepan. A great scholar of comparative politics, Professor Stepan (and the late Juan J. Linz) could talk about intricacies of authoritarian regimes in South America, the Catalan issue in Spain or the Russian minority in Ukraine with as much ease as he would discuss theLiberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)in Sri Lanka or the Burmese transition to democracy. He was passionate about India (an M.F.Husain in his drawing room reminded everyone of his India connect) and curious to understand every single detail of Indian politics. (He travelled to Mizoram to understand how the state returned to normalcy after 1987). I learnt a lot from him and Professor Linz while co-writing a book,Crafting State-Nations.

Towards the end of his life, Professor Stepan started reflecting on his own country, the United States, by placing it in a comparative perspective. He was no Left-wing critic of American capitalism. He was quintessentially American and passionately liberal-democrat. His conclusion, much before Trump was anywhere on the scene, was unambiguous: if the world is to democratise, the US is not a model to emulate.

I was an easy convert to this view, as I have always suspected moral claims from the global North. ButI have found this a tough lesson to take across in a world obsessed with the US of A. Trump made my job easier. Today may be the right day to mention four key reasons why the US is not a model for a democracy. The first two are related to institutional design and the other two are about the nature of politics.

Also read:India wants US-style govt system, but forgets America doesnt have one nation, one election

The first is the famed but deeply flawed presidential system of the US. It is well known that the US-style presidential system institutes regular conflict between the legislature and the executive, leading to routine deadlocks. Alfred Stepan theorised it differently: the real problem with the presidential system of government is that it makes power indivisible and coalition making that much more difficult. This comes in the way ofthepower-sharing so necessary for the accommodation of diversities. Also, the American system leads to several veto points.Stepandemonstrated brilliantly that the greater the number of veto points in a political system, the higher the inequality in that society. He never failed to remind us that among thelong-standing democracies, the US was the most unequal country. That is why any attempts to replicate the US-style presidential model, whether in South America or in the ex-USSR countries, has mostly been a disaster.

The second element of the US model is its unique federalism. In the US, every power is assumed to be with the state, unless specifically given to the centre. You can see this even in how they conduct national elections. Each state has its own rules of who can vote, under what procedure, when and how. Not just that, each state has its owntimetableof when they would count results, whether votes received after today would be accepted and what would be the deadline for completing the count. The states zealously guard these rights in a societythatis otherwise increasingly homogeneous. This was held out to a pure model of federalism. Stepan reminded us that thiswas by no means a model, that it was a feature of a certain kind of coming together federalisms and need not be replicated by countries where various units were already together before they adopted federalism.

The US is a textbook example of what political scientists call symmetrical federalism. Every federal unit hasexactly the same powers. Every state, tiny or gigantic, has two seatsin the USSenate. And theSenate is more powerful than the House ofRepresentativesthat reflects the population strengths of various states. Stepan pointed out that accommodation of deep diversities requires special situations to be recognised and given special treatment. Therefore,asymmetrical federalism of the kindwe have in Canada and India is more suited for living with deep diversities. Here, too, the US is not a good model.

Also read: How counting of votes takes place in US states & why we shouldnt expect a final result soon

Trump has added two more reasons to the list of why the US is not a model for democracies. One, Trumps presidency has exposed how hollow the American two-party system is. Both the major parties are devoid of ideological orientation or organisational depth. Far from providing a choice, the two-party system is a model of choicelessness. Even if Biden were to win this election, he would be a paler copy of Trump, minus the vitriolic. Two, the last four years have proven how fickle, gullible and manipulable the American public opinion is. Alex de Tocqueville had noticed it more than two hundred years ago. Trump proved that the onset of mass media and social media has made it worse. Whether he wins or not, he has shown that you can get away with lies, hatred and bigotry. Worse, he has shown that you can do so in the face of the most powerful media in the world that repeatedly called him out.Clearly,free speech offers little assurance that truth shall prevail. The US is not the first place in the world to offer this sombre lesson. India is among the long list of countries to offer similar lessons.

The world awaits a new theory of democracy. Meanwhile,we can begin by celebrating the demolition of the US-ledmodel of democracy. Not just because the dismantling ofany hegemon brings vicarious pleasure. But because this realisation sets us on the right path. There is no model of democracy. There is no golden route to the finished product called democracy.

Democracy is a treacherous journey where youclear the path as you go along. This is as true ofDonaldTrumps America as it is ofNarendraModis India.

The author is the national president of Swaraj India. Views are personal.

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Why the US is a model of how not to be a democracy - ThePrint