The 2020 presidential election has turned out to be an edge of the seat thriller with President Donald Trump falsely claiming victory even while simultaneously threatening to appeal to America’s Supreme Court to stop the counting of tens of millions of valid votes.
In contrast his challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, who as of this broadcast was leading the decisive electoral votes 237 to Trump’s 213, called for patience saying ‘we know it was going to be long.”
With Trump and Biden making diametrically opposite statements as the backdrop let me give you my personal take.
The American public has been historically primed by the broadcast media to expect decisive election results on the very night of their being concluded. This is despite the fact that counting of votes is an arduous process that often takes days and sometimes even weeks.
For instance, in 2008, it took two weeks for Missouri to be called for then then presidential candidate, Senator John McCain. In 2012, it took four days for Florida to be called for President Barack Obama.
More to the point President Trump’s own much celebrated victory in Michigan in 2016 was confirmed only after two weeks.
Counting mail-in ballots is a physical process that requires opening of tens of millions of envelops and verifying them for authenticity, including signatures. They are then sorted according to whom the senders have voted and then counted.
Merely because we have a president who wants to win and win the very night of the election and announce it instantly on Twitter does not change anything. If anything, that unseemly and politically expedient rush undermines the country’s democratic process and in fact disenfranchises a large number of citizens.
It is entirely possible that once every legitimate vote is counted irrespective of how long that takes, President Trump would be re-elected. The opposite is equally possible. That is the nature of electoral democracy and particularly one as unnecessarily complicated as what we have here in America because of the long-outdated practice of the electoral college.
Perhaps we will soon do a segment on the electoral college but for today let me just say this. The Electoral College consists of 538 electors. A majority of 270 electoral votes is required to elect the President. Each State has the same number of electors as it does Members in its Congressional delegation: one for each Member in the House of Representatives plus two Senators. That was according to the national archives.
It is true that with the advent of social media and all the 24/7 hyperventilation citizens have become accustomed to a degree of instantaneousness that is often so unhealthy. However, even for social media and the freedom of speech and expression to survive it is important for a healthy democracy to survive and for a healthy democracy to survive it is absolutely imperative that every single legitimate vote is counted irrespective of how it might impact the outcome of any election, particularly this one.
Speaking of the freedom of expression and speech and 24/7 hyperventilation , India’s most vehement and often bizarrely hyperventilating news anchor Arnab Goswami has been arrested by the Mumbai police on the charges of abetting a suicide.
Goswami, a fire-breathing news anchor and founder editor of Republic TV, was practically physically dragged from his Mumbai apartment, a mobile video of which is being widely circulated in keeping with his style of broadcast journalism.
While it is plausible that the arrest is an act of political vendetta for Goswami’s weeks-long fulminations of fantastical conspiracy theories over the suicide death of the popular Hindi cinema actor Sushant Singh Rajput on June 14, in a sense it also underlined how the kind of activist broadcasting he has pursued is a double-edged sword.
The abetment of suicide charge relates to the death of an interior designer named Anvay Naik in 2018. In his suicide note Naik was believed to have named Goswami accusing him of not paying him his fees.
Akshata Naik, the widow of Anvay Naik, said her husband had worked hard on a design project for Republic TV. Not being paid for it for over a year had left him penniless and forced him to commit suicide.
“We also want justice. My husband died because of Arnab Goswami, Mrs. Naik was quoted as saying.
The arrest was seen by many journalists as an act of political vendetta by the Mumbai police which has been at th receiving end of Goswami’s almost theatrical wrath on Republic TV since mid-June over the handling of the Sushant Singh Rajput death which he had darkly hinted to be part of a larger gangland conspiracy. Recently the death was concluded as a suicide by both the All Indian Institute of Medical Sciences as well as the Central Bureau of Investigation.
During the course of his crusade in the Rajput case Goswami had been trenchantly critical of the Mumbai police openly daring its chief Param Bir Singh.
The Editors’ Guild of India has called Goswami’s arrest extremely distressing and condemned it. It called on Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray to ensure that the journalist is treated fairly.