COUNTING THE VOTES

Joseph Stalin famously remarked that in an election, "Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." While stakeholders in our democratic system insist that our votes count, in reality, given our electoral system, which consistently features two major political parties, in many states the result of a presidential election contest is fairly predictable. There are currently only seven states in which the outcome remains competitive: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada. And it is precisely in those states that followers of former President Donald Trump have taken Stalin's remarks to heart. Individual voters in every state essentially vote for a slate of electors that are nominally committed to a specific candidate. To win the presidency a candidate needs to amass the majority of 538 electoral votes, distributed to states based on their size, from across the country - a total of 270. To maintain its continued viability, our system depends on the peaceful transition of power following each and every election. The 2020 election was peaceful until Mr. Trump's supporters invaded Congress, dozens of lawsuits challenging the outcome across the country were dismissed, and a scheme introducing alternate slates of electors was foiled. However, a significant slice of the GOP base continues to pursue the issue, and it appears to be prepared to preemptively react to potential defeat in this year's election. Mr. Trump has steadfastly refused to definitively affirm that he would accept the election results no matter who wins. He suggested he would, but only if "it's a fair and legal and "good" election." Many of us read into this to mean that he will accept the results if he wins. He continues to maintain that the only way he can lose this fall is if Democrats cheat. While continuing to rehash the 2020 election, the former president, on his social media platform "Truth Social," called for the Constitution to be terminated. He also proclaimed to a conservative Christian group that, if they vote for him, they won't have to vote again after four years, because "we'll have it fixed so good." Troubling words indeed. After four years of listening to Trump's regular drumbeat that he won the 2020 election, the GOP base is mobilizing at unprecedented levels to monitor the election under the pretext that the process is unfair and corrupt. Nearly three dozen officials who have refused to certify elections since 2020 remain in office, and will play a role in certifying the presidential vote in nearly every battleground state this fall. Since 2020, county level officials in key states have tried to block the certification of vote tallies in both primary and general elections - unsuccessful thus far. According to election and national security experts, former president Trump's efforts to undermine confidence in this year's election are reminiscent of the tactics he used during the 2020 campaign, and indicate how he could again seek to invalidate the results if he loses, setting the stage for another combustible fight over the presidency. According to Joshua Matz - an attorney on the board of CREW, (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington), "the legal ground game that was brought to bear against the election in 2020 was junior varsity compared to what we are going to see this year. There is now a much better organized, much more sophisticated, far better funded and far more intentional effort to thwart the smooth and steady certification of election results required by law." We should be strapping in. Our system could be under assault again. Many officials who count the votes in battleground states are primed to dispute the outcome. Theo Wierdsma

WILL IMPLICIT GENDER BIAS AGAIN IMPACT ELECTION RESULTS?

On June 3 of this year Mexico elected Mexico City's Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo its first female president. By doing so it joined dozens of other countries that have been led by a female executive at some point in their history. Nevertheless, there still are a significant number of nations that have never had a woman at their helm. Gender bias continues to reign in multiple places. More than 100 countries, including the United States, have never been led by a woman. Sri Lanka became the first country in modern times to elect a female prime minister, backing Sirimavo Bandaranaike in the country's 1960 election. Throughout the 1960s, Indira Gandhi of India and Golda Meir of Israel rose to leadership positions in their respective countries. Dozens of others would follow throughout the succeeding decades. In 2016, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton became the first woman to be a major party's presidential nominee in the U.S.. In 2020, Kamala Harris became the first woman to become Vice President of our country. Both women cracked the "glass ceiling," but, thus far, neither managed to shatter it. With current President Joe Biden bowing out of the race for president this year, and after the ascension of Vice President Harris, who is slated to become the candidate of the Democratic Party and who is competing in a tight contest with former President Donald Trump, the question already being raised is: Are we ready this time to elect a female president, who, by the way, also happens to be a member of an ethnic minority? In 2015, in a survey conducted one month after Hillary Clinton declared her candidacy, 63% of respondents declared to be ready for gender change at the top. Sheryl Sandberg, former C.O.O. of Facebook, went on record a few years later, declaring that "some great progress" had been made during subsequent years. However, after President Biden dropped out of the race, a poll designed to assess the electorate's beliefs surrounding "gender bias," and Vice President Harris' chances in November, concluded that the sentiment expressed in 2015 had actually dropped by 9%. Respondents agreed that both Harris and Trump were equally qualified to do the job, but 30% said they were not ready to vote for a woman, and 41% assumed that more than half of their fellow countrymen would not be willing to vote for a woman over a man even if the two candidates were equally qualified. Respondents to a survey conducted by the PEW Research Center, in July of 2023, were asked to compare their opinion about the relative leadership qualities of men vs, women. While considering leadership characteristics, on the majority of evaluated traits - 53-60% of participants indicated that gender did not matter. Interestingly, while expressing their opinions about a fairly significant number of attributes, contributors expressed the opinion that, when considering some leadership characteristics, like: working out compromises, maintaining a respectful tone in politics, being honest and ethical, standing up for what he or she believed in and working well under pressure, women would actually do better than men. Even though the outcome generated by this polling sample appears rational, it does not translate into national acceptance. Our country has struggled to overcome gender bias in electoral politics. The condition generally stems from an unconscious or implicit bias. Some of us unconsciously assign certain attributes and stereotypes to candidates based on preconceived assumptions or prejudices about gender rather than facts, competence and performance. For many this reflects a psychological disorder which, over time, we seem to have culturally normalized and generally accepted. Although several nations unquestionably demean the role and status of women, throughout history multiple societies and cultures have been able to bypass, or perhaps never had, concerns about placing women in executive positions. Witness for instance: Catherine the Great of Russia (1729-1796), Egyptian Pharaoh Hatshepsut (1507-1458 BC), or Queen Liliuokalani - the last monarch of Hawaii. More recently we experienced quality leadership from Angela Merkel in Germany, Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand, and now Mexico's newly elected President Claudia Sheinbaum, who is joining the ranks of active female leaders of state and prime ministers around the world - eight in Europe alone. We should be less concerned about our cognitive biases and preconceptions, and be more focused on substance and competence. We should at least allow history to take its course and permit our glass ceiling to be shattered if a candidate is deemed qualified. Theo Wierdsma