The Fellow Who Counts Ought Not to Be the Fellow Who's Trying to Win

I've been thinking about fences. Not because anything particular happened to a fence, but because a fence is the clearest example I know of a thing that works without being pretty. The posts go in, the wire goes taut, the cattle learn where it is. You don't tear out a working fence because you saw a fancier one in a catalog. You just don't. The catalog people have never met your cattle.

This is relevant, I promise. Stick with me.

Donna Kvalheim has run the polling station at the Chamberlain's Bend Community Hall since the first Bush administration. The older one. She knows every registered voter by their handwriting, checks IDs because she believes in knowing who's standing in front of her, and built her counting system herself out of thirty-some years of noticing what can go wrong. One year the ballot box got damp and she dried every sheet with a hair dryer. One year a dog got in and she counted ballots one-handed while the other hand held a milk bone. The dog was not a registered voter. She checked.

The reason I bring up Donna is that the federal government has lately decided it wants to be her. Or, more precisely, to replace her with something she wouldn't recognize and probably couldn't pronounce.

The administration has spent the better part of this year pushing for greater federal control over elections. It has sued thirty states and the District of Columbia to get their voter rolls, unredacted, turned over to the Justice Department. Those rolls carry your name, your address, your party affiliation if you declared one, your voting history. Every lawsuit that's reached a decision so far has been dismissed. The administration has appealed every one. Some of the officials who've said no come from the president's own party. That word still works, by the way. No. Short word. Carrying a lot of freight lately.

Meanwhile, seventy-five career election officials were pushed out of their positions, replaced by roughly two dozen appointees, many of them tied to the view that the 2020 election was stolen. I won't judge the belief, except to note that if you hire people who've already decided the system is crooked, they tend to find what they came looking for.

There's a woman named Cleta Mitchell who runs a group called the Election Integrity Network. At least twenty-five administration appointees have come through her orbit. She has been pushing legislation that would require proof of citizenship to register, a photo ID to vote, and mandatory transfer of voter rolls to Homeland Security. The Senate has blocked the bill. The president calls it his top priority. I believe him.

Then there's the part that lands hardest out here. The administration floated a plan requiring all mail-in ballots to be sent by certified mail. Certified mail, the kind where you have to be home to sign for it. The people who vote by mail, more often than not, are people who can't get to a polling place easily. Elderly folks. Folks working long shifts. Folks who live forty miles from the nearest polling station and whose truck makes a sound suggesting it may not make the round trip. The idea that all of them would need to be home, during postal hours, to sign for a ballot is the kind of idea that could only come from someone who has never waited for a mail carrier in November. The Postal Service said as much. The administration then proposed having postal workers decide which ballots to deliver and which to toss. The Supreme Court blocked that in September.

This Supreme Court. Worth saying twice.

And here's the part that closes the loop. The Postal Service has been consolidating mail processing into regional hubs, cutting pickups in half at post offices fifty miles or more from those plants. That's us. That's most of the towns I know. The result is that ballots arrive a day or more late, and late ballots get rejected. In five states where the data was clear enough to study, the slowdowns hit hardest in the areas that voted for the president. His own voters are the ones most likely to have their ballots thrown out because of changes his administration encouraged.

Aunt Vi heard all this over the phone and was quiet for a long time. Then she said, "Well. That's what happens when you let the fellow who wants to win be in charge of counting." She's right. She usually is.

The whole point of Donna is that she doesn't want anything from the election except for it to be over so she can go home. She has a casserole in the oven and a husband who wants to know if she's coming back before the news. She's not pulling for anyone. She's not trying to win. She is trying to count. That's the system. Not elegant. Sometimes slow. It works because the person running it has no stake in the outcome, only in getting the numbers right.

Pastor Holmgren, who preaches forgiveness and holds grudges about euchre, once told me that the whole trouble with people in a hurry is they want to fix things they haven't sat with long enough to understand. He said it at a funeral, so I gave it extra weight.

When you put people in charge of elections who have already decided what the right result is, you don't get a better election. You get an election that looks the way they want it to look. That's not a counting problem. That's a different problem entirely, and no amount of certified mail is going to fix it.

Donna shows up. She gets to work. She doesn't need a complicated system. She needs a pencil, a good light, and the kind of stubbornness that comes from caring more about the number than about what it says.

The cattle know where the fence is. Leave the fence alone.

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