As the sun rose the morning after Election Day 2020, the victor in the race for the presidency remained in doubt. Hundreds of thousands of ballots cast by mail in key battleground states were uncounted and likely to remain so for another 24 to 48 hours.
Not so in Harvard. In spite of the estimated 1,747 ballots either mailed in or deposited at Town Hall before or on Election Day—40% of the total votes cast—Town Clerk Marlene Kenney was ready to announce preliminary results by 11 p.m. Tuesday, even though she and her team had not begun counting until that morning.
The number of mail-in ballots this year was unprecedented, according to Kenney, propelled in part by fear of contracting COVID-19 at the polls and perhaps by the sheer convenience of the method. While the percentage of voters who chose to bypass the U.S. Postal Service by depositing their ballots directly at Town Hall was not known when this edition of the Press is being prepared for publication, their fear that mailed ballots might be lost or arrive late no doubt fueled growth in their number.
In Harvard, ballots that arrive by Nov. 6 can still be counted, provided they are postmarked Nov. 3. Here and elsewhere there is nothing new or unusual about prolonged vote counts. In 2008, as The New York Times noted Wednesday in its lead story, it took two weeks for Missouri to be called for John McCain. In 2012, it took four days for Florida to be called for Barack Obama. “There was no dispute about the legitimacy of these results; it simply took time to finish counting the votes,” wrote Times reporter Mary Astor. “And one of President Donald Trump’s own cherished victories, in Michigan in 2016, was confirmed only after two weeks of counting.”
Every vote that meets the requirements of state election law deserves to be counted. And Kenney, Assistant Town Clerk Catherine Bowen, and their team of volunteer poll workers deserve the thanks of every Harvard citizen for a job well done. They did their duty, as did the estimated 90% of active Harvard voters who took part in this year’s historic election. Regardless of whom you voted for, every vote cast was a vote for democracy, the bedrock of our republic. Now it’s up to the election officials still counting ballots in scores of districts across the country to do their part. What comes next is, for the moment, out of our hands.
