The Midterm Elections Aren’t Over Yet
Final results still aren’t tallied in a lot of places. That isn’t stopping the president or his party from making wild accusations about fraud.
Evidence, please?
Photographer: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
We’re in overtime now on the 2018 elections, and despite millions of words analyzing and punditing about what happened, we don’t actually have anything like final results yet. The original counts aren’t done in many states. There are mandatory and requested recounts in some close contests. And it’s beginning to get ugly.
There are essentially three parts to this story, and I’m going to mostly pass on two of them. One is the ethical issues involved in elected officials overseeing their own elections — notably Georgia’s now-resigned secretary of state, Brian Kemp, a gubernatorial candidate, and Florida Governor Rick Scott, a Senate candidate. A second is legal maneuverings by the candidates and parties in Arizona, Florida and Georgia. Candidates and parties are entitled to protect their legal rights; the courts, not the contestants, have the responsibility of protecting democracy. (There’s yet another concern about rules and practices that make voting harder, especially those that target political opponents and groups that have historically faced barriers to the ballot box. That’s somewhat separate from these overtime issues but certainly not irrelevant to questions about democracy and elections.)