We need to trust something … so please trust the results

As cataclysmic as the prospect of a second Donald Trump or a Kamala Harris presidency may seem to you, either one is better than blood on the streets.

That may seem like cold comfort because you’ve invested so much mental energy into it. It’s been months of political chatter. Months of anticipation. Months of doing work for the party or a particular candidate. Months of non-stop news coverage.

My head is about to explode with scenarios and polling and interviews and personal visits and TV ads and stories and emails and text messages and ...

KABOOM!!!

Sorry. That’s the oatmeal I left in the microwave too long. Punched in six minutes instead of three. That’s where my head is. It’s somewhere else. Now it’s on the kitchen mess that needs cleaning up. Soon, it won’t be.

Now it’s back on Nov. 6, the day after the election. The sun will come up that day (God willing). And the day after that.

We’ve all been super-juiced up to believe the results of this election will be the most important of our lifetime (when haven’t we heard that?). If the wrong candidate wins, life will be DANGEROUS.

But history shows that this country won’t disintegrate into a smoldering pit based on the election of a disagreeable president. Our lives, for the most part, won’t change at all.

Take the economy, for example.

Since World War II, we’ve had seven Republican and seven Democratic presidents. Who produced the better economy?

The numbers show Democrats had more job creation, but Republicans didn’t rack up the national debt as much.

Democratic presidents oversaw a slightly higher annual Gross National Product and lower inflation rate than the Republican presidents, but not by much.

The differences are so slight that there’s no reason to drop into the five stages of grief.

And, more important, there’s no reason to cook up a conspiracy theory that something was “fixed” or “rigged” or any other nonsense.

Let’s say someone wanted to rig an election. How would this even be done?

Get a couple of people on the inside? Get the Russians to hack into hundreds of independently operating voting tabulators that aren’t connected to the internet?

To pull off any large-scale fraud would entail a lot of public employees and officials looking the other way at the local, county and state levels. And then the irregularities would need to go unnoticed by the losing political party’s battalion of attorneys, law enforcement and the news media.

Four St. Clair Shores voters tried to vote twice — once absentee and once on Election Day — during the August primary. All four are looking at five years in prison. The three clerk employees who absent-mindedly gave them the second ballot are facing charges, too.

Handling ballots is not some slipshod operation. Ballots aren’t just “showing” up to be counted. You can’t take a ballot to Kinkos, run off 1,000 copies, fill in the bubble and drop them off to a ballot counting location.

There is a meticulous process that a lot of people must follow to make sure one vote belongs to one person. We all vote on paper ballots. They all move through the system in a certain way.

We need to trust this bedrock to our democracy works. Without that trust, we don’t have much of anything.

We’ve had elections with challenges. The election of 1876. The election of 2000 and the hanging chads. The election of 1800. Look them up.

Each of them had at least some legitimate questions posed.

The election of 2020 smelled heavily of make-believe hysteria ginned up by a sore loser. The judges all threw out the meritless claims. They fined the attorneys for making them.

Unless presented with solid evidence to believe otherwise, we need to trust our electoral system is fair and accept the election results, win or lose.

Blood on the streets isn’t a better option.

(Kyle Melinn is the editor of the Capitol newsletter MIRS. His email address is melinnky@gmail.com.)