by Michael Fruitman and Jim McCarthy
Other than the continued inanity of conspiracy theorists and theories about the theft of the 2020 presidential election, we may be grateful in this post-Thanksgiving moment that our ballots in that contest mattered and prevailed.
Virginia turnout was 75% of registered voters (4.375 million). The Democrat garnered 2.413 million votes and the Republican 1.962 million, the largest and most significant result in the Commonwealth’s history and testimony to the vitality of citizen participation in the electoral process.
Nationally, the results were not dissimilar to those in Virginia, with 81.3 million popular votes for the Democrat and 74.2 million for the Republican. However, for a small handful of voters who happened to be members of the U.S. Congress, the popular results were not acceptable. On January 6, 2021, and into the early morning of the 7th, members of Congress conducted another vote to overturn the popular results by legislation, rejecting the Electoral College vote count. Continue reading