An honest count is not fraud

Tomorrow, when you vote, do America a favor. Thank a poll worker for a job well done, for serving all of us with the finest form of patriotism — protecting the integrity of elections. No one does that job to get rich or famous; they do it as good citizens.

Every Election Day is long for them, getting ready for the first voter, counting ballots after the last one is gone. Yet our neighbors show up year after year to assure an honest count. This year, as never before, they have something new: a fear of violence and personal danger.

Charges of widespread fraud, the script written by Donald Trump, repeated by toadies and paranoid politicians without shame, is accepted as truth by millions of Republicans. Since the charge always lacks specifics, our fellow Iowans and poll watchers everywhere, have become suspect. One election official put it simply, “We feel like targets.” In the past two years, the U.S. Department of Justice has investigated over a 1,000 threats, including some that “might merit charges”

It takes a lot of people to count a lot of votes. And they all are possible targets. Nationally, 917,694 election workers will have counted or read off a voting machine at 116,990 voting places, all operated locally without ‘Big Brother” messing with the results. Fifty 6 percent of poll workers are at least 61 years old. Not one has served time for petty theft or grand larceny or voter fraud.

Polling places are usually plain, quiet, adapted for the moment by folding chairs and tables. With help from Donald Trump, this election will see entry buttons at doors in hopes of keeping gun carriers out, and bulletproof glass, guards, metal reinforced walls to keep those inside, including voters like you, safe. What has been tranquil space is now a bunker.

None of this would be out there without Trump and silent elected officials who will be on the ballot tomorrow. They lack the courage to speak the truth. Our Iowa senators and congressmen and women ought to have been defending our election system and its workers. In a simple fashion and without equivocation, they must say “There was no widespread fraud in 2020. Our party lost.” The votes were counted accurately by people — generally like you. Their silence is not golden, but craven, a word I cannot mutter without shaking my head in sadness.

For two years now, our electoral public servants have listened to the charge of “widespread voter fraud” as if it were fact, not fiction. A former president began the assault on the integrity of several million Americans, split evenly between the parties, who get up early on Election Day and stay late, not to make America great again, but to embrace what has never been gone. When voting results are announced, they are the result of honest, accurate, and careful nonpartisan work. Are there a few errors from time to time? Of course. But error is not manipulation, or fraud.

That those who know better, like Sens. Ernst or Grassley, letting Donald Trump get away with charges they know are false is the intellectual and moral fraud that is the only widespread one.

Norman Sherman of Coralville has worked extensively in politics, including as Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s press secretary.