I put this down as a marker ahead of Nov. 3: like every free and fair election, this election is not over until we have counted every vote.
We hold ourselves up a democracy, so we will count every vote.
It doesn’t matter if it was cast by a lifelong Republican or a former felon with restored rights. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Libertarian’s mailed ballot postmarked Nov. 2 and arriving Nov. 4 or an independent’s ballot voted in-person at 8:59 p.m. on Nov. 3. We count them.
We count every vote, and we haven’t decided a winner until they’ve all been counted.
Every vote in Iowa. Every vote in Texas. Every vote in Alabama. And in Pennsylvania. In Ohio and in Florida. We count every last vote.
We will count every vote because we’re a democracy, and this is how we, the people, decide our leaders.
Voters, not candidates, decide winners. Voters, not judges or even justices of the United States Supreme Court, decide winners. To declare a winner but not count every vote is authoritarianism. To declare yourself a winner without counting every vote is a coup.
Because democracy means counting every vote.
A complete count can take us days or weeks, but we will count every vote, and then, not a moment earlier, we will have elected our leaders.