The Trump Presidency

[Jason Thompson]

Briefly, she's a Constitutional originalist.  This means she interprets the Constitution, as did her mentor Justice Scalia, according to the meaning of the text as it would have been understood in the days when it was written.

Were I feeling cynical, I'd suggest that what this actually means is 'in the way they assume it would have been understood a couple of centuries ago based on their own modern prejudices, and only where those prejudices align.' Resistance in some quarters to changing a document that includes well-known amendments is nonsensical, since there clearly is precedent for updating it as situations and understandings change.

And only because it's the one I keep hearing about over this side of the pond, the second amendment seems to be supported by originalists in the context of it being an unchangeable right to own a firearm, but not in the context of the very clear differences between what is now understood by 'bearing arms' compared to what was understood when the amendment was written....

[JayUtah]

You hit two of the major criticisms against originalists with one post.

But first, the position of the originalists is of course not that the Constitution is immutable.  It is indeed amendable, and that is the mechanism by which they argue new constitutional rights and limitations should be added to it.  Want marriage equality?  Write an amendment that says marriage cannot be denied based on the relative sexes of the participants.  Or better, leave it up to Congress or the states to legislate as they see fit, if it's something that might change over time as people come to understand each other differently, or from place to place.  (Except there's the full faith and credit clause to contend with.)

Ditto abortion; the characterization of the right to abortion as one of marriage privacy derives from the important case that defined the concept: Griswold v. Connecticut.  Judge Barrett was adamant that she had no designs on overturning Griswold, which identifies a right to obtain and use contraception.  In doing so, it defined a larger right to privacy from government intrusion, and behind this bulwark sits decades of privacy rulings on a number of subjects.  Originalists hate this case for that, for the fact that it was decided by a 7-2 majority (thus placing originalism historically in the small minority of jurisprudential thought), but mostly because it's an example of the kind of thinking they are dead-set opposed to.

A right to privacy for Americans infamously does not exist as a clear statement in the Constitution.  Instead, the Griswold Court inferred it from other explicit rights.  By requiring the government to obtain a warrant before entering your home, for example, the Fourth Amendment creates a right of more general right to privacy from government intrusion, they argued, in the "penumbra" of that and other explicit restrictions.  Similarly the right to intimate association exists nowhere in the Constitution, but it lives -- says the Court -- in the "penumbra" of the First Amendment.  Specific cases such as Roe v. Wade (the right to an abortion as contraception), Loving v. Virginia (the right to marry a person of another race), and Obergefell v. Hodges (the right to marry a person of the same sex) all either derive from these foundational cases, or echo their reasoning.

In contrast, originalists see no value in trying to reason from vague concepts such as "emanations" and "penumbras." They toss the whole exercise out as reading rights into the Constitution that it simply does not contain.  In their rhetoric these are termed "new" rights, and other justices are acting improperly in the place of the legislature to determine whether these "new rights" should exist or not.  In Griswold, the dissent doesn't dispute that the several examples raised by the majority are valid and vital; it simply says that construing them further to create a generalized "right to privacy" in the periphery of areas touched by those examples is an undesirable form of legal reasoning.  (But in doing so it equivocates the meaning of "privacy" as intended by the majority, so there's a reason it didn't fly as a sound legal opinion.)

One flaw of originalism you identify is its reliance on putting oneself in the intellectual and political shoes of people long dead.  I doubt even the most conscientious and well-read jurist could do that any more than I can convincingly and accurately engineer in the idiom of Isambard Brunel upon command.  It's the same failed argument that fundamental religion makes when arguing that they don't interpret their religious texts, but merely read them literally.  It is impossible to read without interpretation, and it is impossible to immerse oneself in a vision of the past without some amount of imagination, ignorance, and bias.  Under the pretext of scrupulously avoiding conscious reinterpretation of the text, they simply pretend no unconscious reinterpretation occurs.  I'd rather have someone admit his new interpretation so that it can be debated, rather than pretend it doesn't exist.

The other major flaw you mentioned -- but certainly not the end of the flaws in originalism -- is, as you point out, best revealed by the example of the Second Amendment.  A strict originalist interpretation of the right to bear arms struggles to keep its head above water.  Originalists like strictly original interpretations of certain things.  But only certain things.  While an originalist might insist that encrypted computer storage is not "papers" as the Fourth Amendment would have described it, he has no problem arguing that "arms" as written in 1791 can certainly mean a semi-automatic AR-15 assault rifle toted by a disgruntled teenager.  In this and many other instances, it's a Saturday-sinner approach to interpretation.  If the canons of originalist interpretation must stretch to incorporate the new facts of the modern age, and thus create a "penumbra," that accommodates truly terrifying weapons without restriction, then the doctrine loses its purity.  Originalists are simply being just as wishful as anyone else in obtaining desirable rights by judicial fiat.

[gillianren]

And of course they definitely ignore all eighteenth-century definitions of "militia" to maintain that the weapons that didn't exist at the time are perfectly okay in the home of any rando who wants them.  Because what they're missing is that "militia" had a specific meaning at the time, the US didn't have a standing army at the time, and that nobody intended what they're currently insisting is the meaning of the Amendment.

Which is another major problem with "originalism."  It doesn't come with a real grounding in history.  If you can get inside the head of James Monroe or similar, the first thing you have to do in order to do it is really learn about not Monroe himself necessarily but the world in which Monroe lived.  You have to learn etymology, to learn what words meant in those days.  You have to learn sociology, to learn what the situations they experienced were like.  You need to study their writings outside just the Constitution, to understand what they were saying to each other and what assumptions they were making.  And originalists aren't doing any of that, because they somehow believe that only the words that actually made it into the Constitution matter to define what the words in the Constitution mean.

And they assume all the Founding Fathers thought the Constitution meant the same thing, which they manifestly did not.  Which, again, they'd know if they ever read the Founding Fathers' writings.

[JayUtah]

As usual, Gillianren's contributions are right on point.

And of course they definitely ignore all eighteenth-century definitions of "militia". to maintain that the weapons that didn't exist at the time are perfectly okay in the home of any rando who wants them.

The individualist faction of the American gun cult essentially ignores the first clause of the amendment altogether.  This is definitely the position of the NRA.  They might just as well argue that every individual American has the absolute right to own any kind of firearm that exists.

The technological difference between today's assault weapons and even the most advanced and effective weapons of 1790 -- say, the Kentucky long rifle -- should not be overlooked.  It takes a fair amount of skill to be able to correctly load, fire, clean, and maintain a muzzle-loading long rifle.  The reason one was part of a "well-regulated militia" is so that a gun owner would be given the means to maintain proficiency.  In contrast, with a few exceptions, a modern handgun is a point-and-click interface.  In 1790, the ability to operate a state-of-the-art firearm at all usually coincided with membership in a group governed by a sense of discipline.

Because what they're missing is that "militia" had a specific meaning at the time, the US didn't have a standing army at the time, and that nobody intended what they're currently insisting is the meaning of the Amendment.

The United States especially eschewed a national standing army precisely so that a despot couldn't use it for precisely what President Donald J. Trump is using federal troops and federal law enforcement for:  to defy state and local authority by means of overwhelming force.  A standing navy was deemed necessary simply for logistical reasons.  But if the need suddenly arose for national defense, the U.S. was expected to compose an army ad hoc from the state militias. Naturally the ability to do that effectively is predicated on a certain kind of organization and training that occurs on an ongoing basis, which is the original footing of the Second Amendment.

More importantly, today's so-called militias have nothing to do with what the Framers understood, and how Congress has historically regulated the concept.  What they understood by "militia" in the day is more properly approximated in modern times by the National Guard.  That's a codified term for modern military units organized in each state, with officers appointed by state governors out of those ranks.  The Framers certainly did not mean reclusive bands of heavily-armed randos, garbed in Cabela's hunting camouflage, beholden to no authority but themselves, riding around in their own trucks running campaign buses off the road.  Frankly, those are more likely to be the "insurrections" a well-regulated militia would be called up to confront.

"Well-regulated," as Alexander Hamilton understood the term, meant it would remain under the authority of the state government, and its officers would derive their authority from a commission or warrant from the state governor.  This concept ties into the Second Amendment by means of a hierarchy envisioned by the Framers that would extend from one extreme of relatively professional "regulars" -- a small number -- down to a militia force of last resort composed, if needed, from all able-bodied young men of the territory.

Hamilton recognized that an effective militia needed to train often enough to be proficient.  Hence he envisioned a small corps of semi-professional soldiers in each state. Then he envisioned the entire male cohort of a state being available to fight in a larger conflict using their own arms and according to skill and discipline built through a less formal, less frequent, and less rigorous training exercise conducted by state-commissioned officers.  Such a citizen militia would be "well regulated" in the sense of coming under the authority of professional officers commissioned by state government authority and more beholden to military decorum than to personal fealty.  Hamilton is clear in his desire that such force be used to protect the state government's concept of law and order, not to wield military force according to a private interpretation of the law.

The Second American Revolution War of 1812 proved the folly of trying to stand as a national power without a largely professional army.  State militias proved to be too difficult to organize, train, and deploy as an army to defend the entire nation.  The original justification of the Second Amendment mostly disappeared a mere 20 years after being proposed.  And the standardization and specialization of modern military equipment for good reasons has all but precluded the need for potential militiamen to keep and provide their own weapons if called up.  (However, this is how originalists get around the assault-rifle issue; the Framers "clearly" intended the Second Amendment to refer to weapons that could be used to fight a war, however characterized from time to time.)

Which is another major problem with "originalism."  It doesn't come with a real grounding in history.  If you can get inside the head of James Monroe or similar, the first thing you have to do in order to do it is really learn about not Monroe himself necessarily but the world in which Monroe lived. ... And originalists aren't doing any of that, because they somehow believe that only the words that actually made it into the Constitution matter to define what the words in the Constitution mean.

Indeed, the textualists are criticized for the arrogance of presuming what words mean today to the people who hear them today is what should dictate the contour of laws that people today must obey.  They interpret the Fourth Amendment's "secure in their papers" to mean, naturally, all that might today serve the purpose that "papers" did to people in the past:  hard disks, USB thumb drives, etc.  Originalists simply commit the converse arrogance of assuming they can understand a time and place largely removed from their experience well enough to justify binding others to that understanding.  You mention the several fields of scholarship that would have to be mastered.   But that still presumes the information is available to study.  And it also presumes you apply no bias.  As I'll discuss later, the last element is crucial.

The worst form of originalism is intentionalism, which presumes not just to be able to determine what words meant in 1790, but what certain men might have intended in 1790, whether they externalized those thoughts or not.  Imagine having the final say in a capital case, but you base your decision on what you guess people originally intended who lived long ago in a different place.  This is the worst case of government by men and not by laws.  So originalists try very hard not to delve into original intent because of the inherent subjectivity.  This is why they draw a bright line cutting off anything that didn't actually make it into the text of the Constitution.  Everything else is, according to them, and improper attempt to infer intent.

And they assume all the Founding Fathers thought the Constitution meant the same thing, which they manifestly did not.  Which, again, they'd know if they ever read the Founding Fathers' writings.

Originalism tries to escape all its hermeneutical failures by committing still more of them and sweeping them all under an increasingly lumpy rug.  They don't consider extra-textual expressions of the Framers' intent, because that falls victim to speculation and to the academician's selection of sources.

They then don't limit the understanding of the text to that of the Framers, but rather expand it to that of the mythical ordinary, reasonably-educated person of the day.  They think that by broadening the definition of original understanding they escape the need to define who was communicating, and to whom.  This has always baffled me.  I trust that a reasonable scholar can delve into the world of, say, James Madison and come to a reasonably defensible understanding of what Madison might have meant by not abridging the right to keep and bear arms.  But I would not at all trust that Edward Rutledge, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, or Alexander Hamilton necessarily understood the text of the Second Amendment in precisely the same way.  So whose interpretation holds sway, and why?

The originalists then commit the same error as Bible literalists.  They simply treat the text as having been brought down from Mount Sinai in a nimbus of glory that they dare not attempt to penetrate.  They make the interpretational problems worse by expanding the number and type of people whose potential "understanding" needs to be considered as somehow relevant and binding.

The words of the Second Amendment came from Madison's pen.  But they were debated by a number of people without necessarily arriving at a perfect consensus.  Just because the words are Madison's doesn't mean his personal understanding matters more if its authority comes from broad ratification.  Hamilton wrote Federalist 29, which probably gives us the most direct picture of the original debate.  But the originalists say we don't have to consider whether Madison, Hamilton, or the entire group of Framers had a cohesive idea of what the text means. We have to also consider what James Wilson might have understood, or Philip Schuyler, or Samual Seabury, or, for that matter, some guy in the pub, even though none of them had a hand in producing it.  It's not what Madison understood, or the Framers understood, but the entire group of people that included the Framers.  They simply lived at the time and spoke English, so somehow this should be the governing rule.

In a bizarre twist of rhetorical gymnastics, neither the original author of the Second Amendment nor its most eloquent (thought, it turns out, misguided) defender is specially relevant.  While this agnosticism broadens the scholarship that can be brought to bear to discover historical meanings, it doesn't guarantee that the meaning will be any better refined (likely the opposite), nor that the breadth of scholarship will actually occur, nor that the meaning arrived at will be anything more than the statistical centroid of a linguistic shotgun blast.

The Fourteenth Amendment originally had a very narrow application.  We know this because the guy who wrote it in the mid-1860s left us plenty of his own scholarship to help us understand it.  Its original limited application is why the Mormons didn't bring it to bear in litigating polygamy before the Supreme Court.  For decades it was widely understood that it had only a limited role in allowing Congress to compel states to honor the emancipation of Black slaves.

Now, of course, it's the HP Brown Sauce of constitutional litigation -- it gets applied to everything.  And the originalists don't stand in its way.  Practically nowhere in their treatment of Equal Protection do you read John Bingham's name or see a summary of important questions like federalism and incorporation of Constitutional rights against state government.  Instead, an originalist today will try to argue that modern applications of the amendment to "sex" cannot be stretched to include "sexual orientation," as if either term were even on Bingham's horizon.  What they consider "original" on that point came much later.

Remember it took until the Nineteenth Amendment for a basic right like voting to be upheld regardless of sex.  Clearly sex descrimination was not originally part of the Fourteenth Amendment.  But so-called originalists have no problem with the non-Constitutional concept of a "protected class" arising "in the penumbra" of the Amendment.  Why? Because one of the protected classes is religion, and originalists tend also to favor expansive defense of freedom of religion.  It's the desired outcome, so they simply define the origin of Equal Protection at a point considerably along its life cycle and stake their position there.

Or the originalist will argue that the particular set of facts arising in one state should be governed by an original 18th-Century interpretation of one of the Bill of Rights, omitting that the very incorporation of those other rights against the states via the Fourteenth Amendment was not originally a foregone conclusion.  Incorporation is what the originalist argument should be.  The cases turned on incorporation, which is a Bingham doctrine, not on, say, whether garroting would have been allowable punishment in Madison's time.  But it's harder to argue originalism when the origin in 1866 has so much more around it to prevent the waters from getting muddy enough to support the desired outcome.  It's much more fun to pretend one's argument is the rhetorical successor of such luminaries as Madison and Hamilton.

The Second and Fourteenth Amendments are the best examples of why originalism fails as the best overall way to interpret a constitution.  You can't posture it as something that proposes to take human bias and sentiment out of the equation, and then just ignore it when sentiment dictates.

Without question the textualist interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment is the correct one, and the one that most closely fits classical American ideals.  That it cannot be supported in its present form by an originalist argument is a testament not to John Bingham's failure to elaborate his cause, but to the failure of originalism to decide outcomes that customers of the judiciary recognize as equitable and well-reasoned.  (We could get into the whole Dead Hand of History argument, but this is already monumental.) The very existence of an ongoing, vital judiciary in the American system is evidence that the Framers probably did not expect originalism to be the order of the day going forward.

And how judiciaries work is really the final nail in the originalist coffin.  You submit a set of facts to a court because the facts, as eventually established, identify an area of conflict between two laws or legal principles.  The right of the people to bear arms will always stand in conflict with the right of the people to life and liberty.  There are numerous laws in my state which, the Second Amendment notwithstanding, criminalize various ways in which firearms may be possessed, carried, and discharged.  Any court in the United States will recognize these as reasonable attempts to balance the individual's right to own a firearm with his neighbors' right to be reasonably free from the risk of undeserved bodily harm.

Most court cases are unremarkable because they present no new difficulties in interpreting the scope of one law versus the other.  The cases that present interesting new sets of fact are those that rise to the level of attention in high courts.  I have in my collection of law books a tome -- a "reporter" -- dated 1702 of the various cases of the illustrious S^r. Hen. Pollexfen, K^t., Late Lord Chief Justife of the Court of Common Pleas. Together with divers decrees in the High Court of Chancery.  There's a surprising amount of material in there about sheep.  But even in 1691 the jurisprudence is, "This law or custom says this, but this other law or custom says something different; which should hold?"  And the decisions, in all their ligatured glory, draw a thin, often circuitous line among the facts and determine the boundary of the laws on facts of this ilk.  This is the essence of Common Law, which in each case is the essence of precision.

Originalist arguments, based on a statistical, linguistic abstract of original meaning, can't be holding the stylus in a very steady hand.  The jurist must choose one precise meaning out of several possibilities, and use that to draw his line.  But if his method casts a broad net over murky waters filled with varied meanings, there is no guarantee his preferred meaning is any more the product of a dispassionate exercise than occurs in textualism.  Moreover, all the originalist has to do is selectively present the historical reasons for his decision; rebutting an originalist then requires an affirmative argument and its own original research.  Textualism may be inventive, but its inventions are on display for all to see, to agree with, and to rebut.  If, in the end, all you can say is, "But that's not what people in Madison's time meant," then maybe you should consider that the hundreds of judges since Madison, collectively, with their eye on evolving times, can be considered a better judge than Madison (or the person channeling him) on what should be the case today.

Oh, by the way, the guy in 1691 got his sheep back.

[Obviousman]

https://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/us-politics/is-america-on-the-brink-of-a-second-civil-war/news-story/538195d2b05052f6842e297208a7c9f8

[JayUtah]

Some are already calling it the Cold Civil War.

I think some of the analysis is overblown.  It's claimed that the U.S. is in an unprecedented crisis.  I think the U.S. is in crisis -- a serious crisis.  But I don't think it's exactly unprecedented.  We just haven't seen it recently.  We've had severe wage inequality before.  We've had race divisions before.  We've had violent social activism before.  These are actually chronic problems in the American experience.  In one sense it's just more of the same.  In a different perspective, maybe it's unique in that all of it is coming to a head at once.

I agree that the outcome of the election will have little effect on the underlying social, political, and economic factors.  These have been building up for decades, and have previously shown no sign of being abated by political effort.  I agree that there will likely be violence in the streets starting Tuesday night into the rest of the week, regardless of who wins.  And there is likely to be continued violence until the social and economic inequalities are addressed.

I predict that if President Trump loses reelection, he will challenge the results in the Supreme Court using Bush v. Gore as his template.  The legal scholars I've spoken to agree that Bush v. Gore was badly reasoned, but stare decisis applies.

Apropos to the Fourteenth Amendment (see wall o' text above), votes should be counted according to a uniform process of resolving ambiguity in paper or punched ballots.  Florida election law provides that for the initial election, but didn't do it effectively for manual recounts.  On the other hand, by federal law [3 U.S.C. § 5 (1948)], controversies regarding Electors for President have a deadline.  Despite assurances that uniform standards could be established to govern a recount, it couldn't be implemented before the deadline in law.  The Court ruled that the law superseded, and that since a properly regulated recount couldn't practically occur before then, none should be attempted.

According to many legal scholars -- and all the scholars I've spoken to personally -- this was wrong.  A more straightforward application of the Fourteenth Amendment is that every lawfully cast vote must have effect, regardless of the difficulty or delay in counting it.  Any law that prevents a state from counting its votes in a way that guarantees Equal Protection in suffrage would be what's unconstitutional.  The Constitution overrules laws made by Congress or representations made under law by any state.  The Bush Court sends the message that a timely, convenient counting of votes is more important than counting every lawfully cast vote.

This doctrine will undoubtedly factor into the 2020 election.  As many states have scrambled to provide new safe voting options, the notion of what constitutes a lawfully-cast vote will almost certainly be challenged in a way that selectively disenfranchises unwanted groups of voters.  Let's be clear:  there will be irregularities vote counting.  It's an inevitable consequence of trying new polling methods for the first time.  And nearly all of them will be innocent and correctible.

But Bush v. Gore paints a target on them anyway.  And this time around, the lawyer who wrote some of the winning briefs in that case is now sitting on the Court alongside similarly predisposed newcomers.  If this goes to litigation, it will be a mess and no one will be happy.  My primary fear in the next two months is that the Supreme Court will hand President Trump a second term in flagrant disregard of the vote, and of good law.  My secondary fear is a repeat of 2016:  polls showing Hilary Clinton in a clear lead that simply fails to materialize in the Electoral College.  I think it's unlikely Pres. Trump will win the popular vote this time around either, but he still may manage to eke out another Electoral College win.

[Ranb]

The individualist faction of the American gun cult essentially ignores the first clause of the amendment altogether.  This is definitely the position of the NRA.  They might just as well argue that every individual American has the absolute right to own any kind of firearm that exists.

Not anymore.  Since Trump has imposed his anti-gun agenda, the NRA in their zeal to support him have abandoned the position that Americans should be able to own any kind of firearm they wish.  They have stepped back to only support those kinds that Trump approves of.

[raven]

The individualist faction of the American gun cult essentially ignores the first clause of the amendment altogether.  This is definitely the position of the NRA.  They might just as well argue that every individual American has the absolute right to own any kind of firearm that exists.

Not anymore.  Since Trump has imposed his anti-gun agenda, the NRA in their zeal to support him have abandoned the position that Americans should be able to own any kind of firearm they wish.  They have stepped back to only support those kinds that Trump approves of.

"Don't Tread on Me, Except With Trump Brand Boots^©", eh? Not so pithy, admittedly. How about, "From my cold, dead hands, except for with your small, little ones"? Snarky jokes aside , the amount of cult of personality Trump has acquired rather alarming. Like, threatening to leave the country if he doesn't win. To the rest of us, "Great!" but to the cult members, the idea of their Messiah leaving must have felt crushing and a call to do anything to keep him in power.

[Ranb]

Cult member is right.  When I complain about Trump's anti-gun crap, the typical Trump supporter responds with the usual kind of (no one needs that kind of gun) stuff we're used to hearing from Clinton, Brady, Biden and Buttigieg.  When I mention this, they tend to clam up and refuse to discuss the issue any further. 

[Peter B]

The individualist faction of the American gun cult essentially ignores the first clause of the amendment altogether.  This is definitely the position of the NRA.  They might just as well argue that every individual American has the absolute right to own any kind of firearm that exists.

Not anymore.  Since Trump has imposed his anti-gun agenda, the NRA in their zeal to support him have abandoned the position that Americans should be able to own any kind of firearm they wish.  They have stepped back to only support those kinds that Trump approves of.

"Don't Tread on Me, Except With Trump Brand Boots^©", eh? Not so pithy, admittedly. How about, "From my cold, dead hands, except for with your small, little ones"? Snarky jokes aside , the amount of cult of personality Trump has acquired rather alarming. Like, threatening to leave the country if he doesn't win. To the rest of us, "Great!" but to the cult members, the idea of their Messiah leaving must have felt crushing and a call to do anything to keep him in power.

To be fair, a lot of Clinton supporters said the same thing in the first few months after the 2016 election.

[gillianren]

I know people who did.  I know a lot more people who can't afford to this time around, either.

[LunarOrbit]

Clinton/Biden supporters would be welcome in Canada. I can't say the same about Trump supporters.

[grmcdorman]

The National Post, and Conrad Black in particular - who writes op-eds for the National Post - are trying to promote Trump. I don't think it will go over very well, something like north of 80% of Canadians don't like Trump. (Black is also a climate change denier, among other things.)

[Ranb]

I know people who did.  I know a lot more people who can't afford to this time around, either.

Why would someone do that instead of sticking around to change things?  I can understand the desire to seek refuge in another country for security or economic reasons, but to protest the election of a politician?

[Jason Thompson]

As many states have scrambled to provide new safe voting options, the notion of what constitutes a lawfully-cast vote will almost certainly be challenged in a way that selectively disenfranchises unwanted groups of voters.  Let's be clear:  there will be irregularities vote counting.  It's an inevitable consequence of trying new polling methods for the first time.  And nearly all of them will be innocent and correctible.

As a Brit, I have to say I stare in slack-jawed amazement at the system in the US that allows politicians and courts to mess around with how votes are collected and counted during an election. Challenging the outcome is one thing, but actively seeking to count or discount votes that have been cast, changing how many polling stations are set up in any given county, and arguing over when the final result is actually in and valid, all while votes are being cast, is just incredible to me.

When I vote in an election, I know what day to go to the nearest polling station, and I know we have so many in the area that if I go to my local one at any given time of day the chances are I will have to stand in line for maybe ten minutes if at all. We have had so many elections in the last few years for one thing or another over here, and I haven't had to stand in line once. No-one, not politicians, not courts, gets to challenge how an election is conducted during it. Calls for reform may happen after unpopular outcomes (as they often do), but never in my lifetime have we had anyone try to change how an election is carried out and how votes are considered valid while one is actually taking place. That's not to say the system is perfect, far from it. But at least it is stable and I have no reason to be concerned that my vote will not be counted if I either mail it in by the appropriate deadline or go to a polling station on election day.