As States Certify Ballot Totals, An Extraordinary Election Comes To An End

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Voters fill out and cast their ballots in Bangor, Maine on Nov. 3. More than 150 million votes were cast in 2020, the highest voter turnout rate in more than a century.





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2020 Election: Secure Your Vote
Despite More Than 2 Dozen Legal Losses, Trump’s Lawyers Press On With Election Fights

Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina put the final stamp of approval on their official vote counts, as workers re-tallied millions of ballots in Georgia and Wisconsin to assure the Trump campaign that the initial count was accurate. Courts in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere reviewed and almost uniformly, rejected legal challenges for lack of merit.





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Macon-Bibb County, Georgia Elections Supervisor Jeanetta Watson, third from left, takes questions from poll monitors during a test of the county’s electronic ballot scanning system on the first day of the Georgia presidential ballot recount.





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An election worker scans mail-in ballots at the Clark County Election Department on October 20, 2020 in North Las Vegas, Nevada.





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The company has become the recent focus of unsubstantiated allegations of vote tampering by the Trump campaign and right-wing conspiracy theorists.

A Democratic board member, Peter Ouellette, was equally passionate. He argued that no problem with the election was serious enough to «justify disenfranchising 156,000 voters in Luzerne County….Personally, I feel the strategy of unsubstantiated lawsuits, legislative maneuvering, conspiracy theories and outright lies to undermine public confidence in our most basic right to expect our votes to count is at the very least unpatriotic.

More than 500 miles away, a similar scene was playing out in a windowless conference room in Lansing, Michigan. The state canvassing board had convened to certify the election results, a routine job that this year acquired unusual significance.

The board ultimately agreed to the count, but over the objections of one Republican member, who called the election, in which some tallies didn’t add up, a «national embarrassment. The board agreed to his proposal to ask the legislature to conduct an in-depth review of the state’s election process so «this never happens again.





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A voter marks his ballot at a polling place in Dennis Wilkening’s shed on November 3, 2020 in Richland, Iowa.





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Poll workers wear face masks while preparing voter ballots at the Nederland Community Center in Nederland, Colo. on November 3, 2020.





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The Coronavirus Crisis
Need A Witness For Your Mail-In Ballot? New Pandemic Lawsuits Challenge Old Rules

From the voting rights advocate who I watched help poor, disabled Black voters in rural South Carolina this spring, as they struggled with their mail-in ballots, then proudly attached «I voted stickers to their shirts, and rose in unison to sing the gospel song, «I’m on the Battlefield for My Lord.



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‘We’re Rolling With It’: Election Workers Scramble To Adjust To Changing Voting Rules

To the election worker in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, who tirelessly combs through local obituaries and death records each day to ensure the accuracy of the rolls — and whose most painful moment came when she had to remove the name of her father.





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Voters enter a polling place at dusk to cast their ballots at Sherman Township Hall, a former one room schoolhouse, on November 3, 2020 in Zearing, Iowa.





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Voters enter a polling place at dusk to cast their ballots at Sherman Township Hall, a former one room schoolhouse, on November 3, 2020 in Zearing, Iowa.


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To the tens of thousands of volunteers who helped out at the polls and the millions of voters who showed a belief that their votes still mattered by standing in countless lines. In fact, despite everything, more Americans turned out to vote than ever before.

Michigan voters were especially poignant, as one after the other pleaded this week with the state canvassing board to certify the results and validate their votes.

Sumner Truax, of Ann Arbor, was a nonpartisan observer of the vote counting in Detroit. He said he saw no signs of fraud, just hundreds of workers performing their duties. He called it the sign of a healthy democracy that so many people turned out in the midst of a global pandemic to ensure that the system would work.

«But it’s healthy only if those votes matter and it’s healthy only if their work matters and it’s healthy only if the gatekeepers, who are you, people like you, do their jobs, he told the board. «And as so many others have said today, your job today is not a political exercise, it’s a democratic one.