The Miracle and Tragedy of the 2020 U.S. Election
Name
SSRN-id3790904.pdf
Description
Submitted version
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1.08 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
4e3cb4c90f0fa8fa028e461ab72ecd89
Author(s)
Persily, Nathaniel
Stewart, Charles
Date Issued
2021
Journal
Journal of Democracy
Publisher
Project Muse
Citation
Persily, Nathaniel and Stewart, Charles. 2021. "The Miracle and Tragedy of the 2020 U.S. Election." Journal of Democracy, 32 (2).
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
The 2020 election was both a miracle and a tragedy. In the midst of a pandemic, election
administrators pulled off a safe, secure, and professional election. Still, lies of voter fraud have
cemented in the minds of tens of millions of Americans that the election was rigged.
As the first wave of the pandemic overtook the nation right as the presidential election season
was beginning, most states responded by delaying their primaries and maximizing opportunities
to vote by mail. We review how the quick actions of many states led to a salvaging of the
primary season, but also led to two cautionary tales, from Wisconsin and New York, that
illustrated the disasters that could befall both mail and in-person voters if the nation did not act
quickly. We recount the combination of actions taken by governors, state legislators, health
officials, judges, and civil society to adapt election administration to the exigent realities of the
pandemic and to cope with the logistical challenges state and local election officials faced.
We discuss metrics of success in the adaptations that took place — record-high turnout,
widespread voter satisfaction, a doubling of mail voting without a concomitant increase in
problems often associated with absentee ballots, and the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of
new poll workers. We also explore how the competing narrative of dysfunction and a “stolen
election,” propagated by President Trump and his supporters, led not only to the insurrection at
the Capitol on January 1, but also to a historically deep chasm at the mass level between
partisans in their trust of the election process and outcome. We conclude by noting that many
states will be considering legislation that re-litigates the election by addressing non-problems,
rather than building on the triumphs of the election.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Political Science
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1353/JOD.2021.0026
