Go vote!

It is finally election day in the US. Registrations to vote have soared to over 200 million, but turnout in the past has been under 60% of eligible voters. There is no compulsory or automatic registration in the US, as there is in other countries. Nor is anyone required to vote. Moreover, Americans move often, which means that many will be registered twice, since little effort is made to shift registrations, in particular from one state to another. So the number of registrations may be significantly larger than the number of actual people.

The entire national election process is run not by the Federal government but by the states: they prepare the ballots, set up the polling places, and tabulate the results, which are accumulated in a state-by-state process. Disputes about the process or the results are generally handled first in state courts, not in Federal courts. Fraud is not unheard of, but because the voting, counting and tabulating is transparent and both main political parties participate, it is rare, and impossible on an industrial scale. The system is not “rigged.”

The president is actually elected in the “electoral college,” which meets on December 19 in the various state capitals (not all together). Each state has a number of votes in the “electoral college” equal to its number of senators and representatives in the Congress, with the exception of the District of Columbia (Washington DC). It has three electoral votes even though it has no senators and a single representative (who cannot vote on the floor of the House). The Electoral College essentially favors less populous states, which are often more rural states, but it also means the election will be decided in the relatively few “swing” states (no more than 15) where the outcome is in doubt before election day.

The voting rules, including the time when polls close, are determined by each state. As it happens, most of the states in which polls will close early are expected to vote for Donald Trump, so early returns will likely show him in the lead. Don’t you be misled. From about 9 pm Eastern Standard Time onwards, returns will start to come in from the northeastern states, which generally favor Hillary Clinton.

What are the odds? They favor Clinton at least 2/1. The stock market rose sharply yesterday as her odds appeared to stabilize when the FBI director reaffirmed that he has to reason to indict her for mishandling classified materials. Her likely margin in the popular vote may be not much bigger then 3%, but there is a pretty good chance that Trump won’t break 200 electoral votes, because Clinton is favored to win in so many swing states. That in my view would constitute a “landslide,” given how closely divided the electorate has been in recent times.

Who will vote for whom? Clinton is favored among college graduates, women, minorities, and younger people. Trump is favored among non-college educated whites, men, and older people. Many cities will favor Clinton, rural areas will favor Trump, and the suburbs will be split.

What difference will it make? The choice is stark. This:

Or this:

It will make an enormous difference on foreign policy. Trump is erratic, inconsistent, and hyperbolic. He wants to put America first, which he has defined not only as ignoring others and doubting America’s alliances but also destroying the international trading system and illogically pursuing a bromance with Vladimir Putin. Clinton is committed, studious, and internationalist, all perhaps to a fault. She wants to maintain the stability of the international system and restore American authority surrendered by President Obama in his effort to retrench.

I obviously chose some time ago and voted early (by mail) in the District of Columbia, which I imagine will break 90% for Clinton. I’ll spend part of the day briefing at the State Department’s Foreign Press Center. Then I’ll retreat to friends’ houses and stay up far too late. I went to bed in 2000 thinking Gore had won, only to awake to find he had indeed won the popular vote by hundreds of thousands of votes but would eventually lose Florida by a few hundred, causing him to lose in the Electoral College.

This has been an ugly campaign, marked by the kind of identity politics that I witness in many countries suffering internal strife. We need to bind up the nation’s wounds. That should be possible with Hillary Clinton. But first she has to win. Go vote!