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President Trump speaks in the Brady Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, D.C. on Thursday. Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

President Trump speaks in the Brady Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.

Disinformation, foreign interference, a global pandemic and an incumbent president who refused to say he'd accept the results all were concerns headed into the 2020 election.

If those challenges were a test of America's democratic system, did we pass? Jelani Cobb of The New Yorker and election law expert Michael Kang weigh in, with Joe Biden on the verge of becoming the president-elect.

Listen to more election coverage from NPR: Up First on Apple Podcasts or Spotify The NPR Politics Podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.

Email us at considerthis@npr.org.

This episode was produced by Brianna Scott, Lee Hale, Brent Baughman, Jason Fuller, and Becky Sullivan. It was edited by Sami Yenigun and Sarah Handel with help from Wynne Davis and Arnie Seipel. Additional reported from Rob Schmitz and Daniel Estrin. Our executive producer is Cara Tallo.

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The 2020 Election Has Tested American Democracy. Are We Passing? : Consider This from NPR - NPR

To the Editor:

As the United States painstakingly counted its election ballots state by bloody state and agonized over the razor-thin margins between two presidential candidates, the rest of the world was bewildered and asking: Couldnt all this nonsense be avoided if there were no Electoral College and all we had to do was tally the national popular vote?

Ron A. VirmaniCharlotte, N.C.

To the Editor:

Many people have been asking how President Trump received so many votes, even after all of his gross incompetence during the past four years. People have also been lamenting that they dont know what America we are living in.

For answers, I suggest reading Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, by Isabel Wilkerson. I have been doing so during the past two weeks and believe her thesis that Americas social structure is fundamentally a caste system to be quite compelling.

Elizabeth ZuchWhite Plains, N.Y.

To the Editor:

Re Exit Polls Point to the Power of White Patriarchy (column, nytimes.com, Nov. 4):

Charles M. Blow wonders why so many gay people, Black men and white women voted for President Trump, concluding that aspiration to power by proximity must be the reason.

An alternative explanation might be that many Americans, regardless of race, sexual orientation or gender, voted for Mr. Trump because they believed that he was better for the economy code for I fear losing my livelihood, my life savings and my ability to pay for health care more than I fear the virus.

Democrats need to do a better job of hearing those fears and crafting messages that speak to them. If Democrats had been able to persuade Americans that to rebuild our economy, we must control the virus first, there might have been more than a razor-thin margin between Joe Biden and the most corrupt, incompetent president in modern history.

Jane PraegerNew YorkThe writer is president of Ovid, a strategic communications firm.

To the Editor:

It is public knowledge that President Trumps hotels and golf courses are losing substantial amounts of money. Without the presidency to help support the occupancy and use of these facilities by those who would like to curry favor with the president, these facilities would be a financial disaster.

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Opinion | Democracy in America: Counting the Votes - The New York Times

With Democrats accounting for a much larger share of mail-in ballots than Republicans, Mr. Trump has repeatedly challenged the legitimacy of these votes. If he is leading even narrowly on Tuesday night, he could claim victory based only on the votes so far counted even though Joe Biden might well be on course to win when all valid votes are counted. Worse, he might pressure the Republican legislatures in battleground states, like Pennsylvania and Florida, to award him their states electors, even if the formal vote-counting machinery ultimately declares a Biden victory in the state. Then it would fall to the courts and Congress (under the terms of the inscrutable, badly written Electoral Count Act of 1887) to determine who had won in the disputed states.

Such a scenario would be far more dire and polarizing than even the Bush v. Gore nightmare of 2000, with an incumbent president threatening fire and brimstone if the election were not handed to him, while signaling violent right-wing extremists to stand by but perhaps no longer stand down. Many on the left would no longer be willing to let the presidency (in their eyes) be stolen from them again, and far-left groups might revel in the chance to worsen the crisis. The potential for violence would be alarming.

The integrity of the election is further challenged by the rising pace of voter suppression. In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, throwing out the formula requiring nine states (and other localities) with a history of racist voter suppression to obtain federal permission before changing their voting requirements. Since then, these and other Republican-controlled states have imposed legal and administrative changes that have made voting more difficult for Black Americans, Hispanics, young people and city dwellers all heavily Democratic constituencies.

It would be undemocratic enough for the loser of the national popular vote to again be elected (for the third time in the past six presidential elections) by winning the Electoral College. But if Mr. Trump were to win re-election by narrowly prevailing in two or three states through extensive disqualification of mail-in ballots or through voter suppression, the legitimacy of the 2020 election could be questioned far more intensely than those of 2000 or 2016. And if Mr. Trump failed to win the Electoral College but was nonetheless declared president thanks to partisan electors, it would signify a grave breakdown of American democracy even if people remained free to speak, write and publish as they pleased.

The very age of American democracy is part of the problem. The United States was the first country to become a democracy, emerging over a vast, dispersed and diverse set of colonies that feared the prospect of the tyranny of the majority. Hence, our constitutional system lacks some immunities against an electoral debacle that are common in newer democracies.

For example, even though Mexico is a federal system like the United States, it has a strong, politically independent National Electoral Institute that administers its federal elections. The Election Commission of India has even more far-reaching and constitutionally protected authority to administer elections across that enormous country. Elections thus remain a crucial pillar of Indian democracy, even as the countrys populist prime minister, Narendra Modi, assaults press freedom, civil society and the rule of law. Other newer democracies, from South Africa to Taiwan, have strong national systems of election administration staffed and led by nonpartisan professionals.

The American system is a mishmash of state and local authorities. Most are staffed by dedicated professionals, but state legislatures and elected secretaries of state can introduce partisanship, casting doubt on its impartiality. No other advanced democracy falls so short of contemporary democratic standards of fairness, neutrality and rationality in its system of administering national elections.

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Im a Democracy Expert. I Never Thought Wed Be So Close to a Breakdown. - The New York Times

Republican Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker sharply criticized President Donald Trump on Friday for suggesting that there is a national conspiracy afoot to keep him from being reelected.

"At some point, we're in like the 7th or 8th inning of this game," the governor said. "At some point everybody's got to get used to the idea that we need to move forward as a country and deal with all the significant issues we have to deal with here. I think the president's comments that there is some national conspiracy around this aren't supported by any of the facts, and they are damaging to democracy, they cheapen all of those of us who serve in public life and who ran and who were either reelected or defeated based on the will of the people."

"I think the suggestion that this is somehow a conspiracy is bad for democracy," Baker later added.

In-depth news coverage of the Greater Boston Area.

As Joe Biden continues to inch closer to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency, Trump alleged Thursday that his opponents are "trying to steal" and "trying to rig" the election. He also claimed he won Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. NBC News has projected Biden as the winner in Michigan and the apparent winner in Wisconsin, and Biden is currently leading in Trump in both Pennsylvania and Georgia.

He followed that up on Friday by issuing a statement questioning "the integrity of our entire election process."

"From the beginning we have said that all legal ballots must be counted and all illegal ballots should not be counted, yet we have met resistance to this basic principle by Democrats at every turn," Trump's statement said. "We will pursue this process through every aspect of the law to guarantee that the American people have confidence in our government. I will never give up fighting for you and our nation.

Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney said he thinks President Trump should put his big-boy pants on while Pennsylvania continues to count ballots for the 2020 election.

Baker pointed out Friday that most of the states where the ballots are still being counted are led by either Republicans or a mix of Republicans and Democrats.

"I've been in a bunch of close elections. The rules are there, and almost every state in the country went through a major overhaul of the way they handled voting after the presidential election of 2000," he said. "People did take a really hard look at the rules, process and procedures."

"I haven't heard anybody say much at all about the fact that we had the highest participation rate in our nation's history in this election," Baker added. "We should be celebrating this. People took it seriously. They came out and they voted. That's a good thing."

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Baker Says Trump's Election Conspiracy Theories Are Bad for Democracy' - NBC10 Boston

Last night, when it was looking increasingly likely that Joe Biden would muster enough electoral votes to win the presidency, President Donald Trump spoke at the White House.

"If you count the legal votes, I easily win," Trump claimed, citing baseless accusations of election fraud. "If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us."

His fabrications continued for 17 minutes the president providing no evidence to support his allegations that the American presidency was being taken unjustly from him.

Across the landscape, members of the media, pundits and some Republicans quickly described the speech as a low point for American democracy.

CNN's Jake Tapper reacted by saying, "What a sad night for the United States of America to hear their president say that, to falsely accuse people of trying to steal the election, to try to attack democracy that way with this feast of falsehoods."

The major news networks simply pulled the plug on the president and took him off the air.

For more on the US and creeping authoritarianism, The World's host Marco Werman spoke withMasha Gessen. In their book "Surviving Autocracy," Gessen chronicles the rise of Trump and the American political trajectory of the past few years. They are also a staff writer with The New Yorker.

Masha Gessen:Perhaps I'm a little different from people who saw it as something really extraordinary. And frankly, I wasn't surprised. Trump has been telling us that this is exactly what he was going to do, and this is exactly how he perceived the electoral process. And we knew that this is what he was going to do. He was going to cast aspersions on the electoral process. He was going to basically say that whatever votes were cast for him were good votes, beautiful votes, legal votes, and everything else was illegitimate.

Related:Biden ahead in Georgia, Pennsylvania; Trump attacks process

I actually think we need a reinvention, both institutional and spiritual, of democracy. We need to really have a countrywide conversation about what we mean by "democracy." Democracy is not elections. Democracy is not a set of institutions. Those are all instruments of democracy. But how do we create a government of the governed? How do we create a government of the people, by the people and for the people? These are fundamental questions that we haven't asked in a long time. And I think that part of the reason that it has been so easy for Donald Trump to pervert institutions is because we haven't been having this conversation. These are really huge and difficult projects that cannot be accomplished in Washington through Washington means. They're kind of national conversation types of projects. And that's what we really need to do in order to avoid a Donald Trump, or a successor to Trump, coming back in to take advantage of the structural changes that he has made.

You know, at the moment, it's looking pretty bleak. But I think the democratic experiments are often not terribly long lasting because they require reinvention all the time. For example, Poland has had an amazing 30-year run, where a totalitarian regime gave way to something that was really beautiful and representative and thriving for a long, long time. Americans tend to think of democracy as something you build and then inhabit. And I think that the tendency to think that way has actually been more pronounced over the last generation as we refer back to the Founding Fathers as though they invented everything once and for all. But democracy is not that. Democracy is a process of constant reinvention.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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'Democracy is a process of constant reinvention' - The World