Voting feels pretty great this year, especially a vote for Joe Biden

Illinois is bluer than Lake Michigan. Joe Biden will win here for sure on Tuesday, and you might be wondering what’s the point of voting if you haven’t already gotten around to it.

But we hope you do vote, come cold weather or long lines. Just wear a mask. And we encourage you to vote for Biden, whom we endorsed way back on Aug. 21, seeing no reason to hold off.

Biden had been a capable and honorable public servant over many years, and we figured that wasn’t about to change in the final two months of this election. We were right about that. Biden has gained our respect only more.

We also knew Donald Trump was beyond hope, as any child could see, and sure enough he has grown only more deplorable since.

We urge you to get out and vote for Biden though he’s already a certain winner in Illinois and, for that matter, already the likely winner of the national popular vote. The bigger the popular vote for Biden, the more difficult it will be for anyone, strictly as a matter of perceived fairness, to hand a victory to Trump by stacking the vote in the Electoral College or handing down politically motivated court rulings.

The bigger the popular vote for Biden, the greater his mandate will be to move boldly as president should he be elected. And the smaller the mandate will be for Trump, should he eke out a victory in the Electoral College, to continue his reign of destruction.

Post-election subterfuge

Trump repeatedly has made it clear he is unlikely to accept the results of the election unless he wins. He has sowed doubts about the integrity of mail-in ballots, and he’s sure to insist that any mail-in ballot received after Nov. 3 not be counted. His best reelection strategy is to suppress the vote.

How the Supreme Court will respond to such legal challenges is anybody’s guess. The court last Tuesday refused to allow an extension for the counting of mail-in ballots in Wisconsin, as requested by Democrats because of the pandemic. But then the court on Thursday did allow for an extension of the deadline for receiving mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

The big unknown is whether the court’s newest member, conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, will participate in deciding any post-election challenges by the president who appointed her, Trump.

Equally worrisome, election experts have posed a scenario in which Republican-controlled state legislatures, claiming that an accurate ballot count is impossible, could attempt to appoint fraudulent Trump electors to the Electoral College, ultimately denying Biden his rightful victory.

The more massive the popular vote for Biden, it stands to reason, the less likely such schemes will be contemplated, though we’re not naive. Power politics is power politics.

A team worth voting for

This year’s record high early voting has been fueled, no doubt, by a passionate desire among fed-up Americans to throw the bum out. We get that. The case against Trump — his utter lack of character, his mendacity, his racist dog whistles, his trashing of foreign alliances, his fawning over autocrats, his self-dealing, his siccing government agencies on political opponents, his bigoted attacks on immigrants, his reprehensible handling of the pandemic, his turning us against each other at every opportunity.

Well, hell. It is simply overwhelming.

But as we first wrote in August, we endorse Joe Biden on his own merits. He’s not just a getaway car from Trumpism. His long and capable career as a senator and vice president has preceded him in this race, and he has campaigned every day with substance and class.

In Biden and his vice presidential running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris of California, we see an eminently qualified team — and an agenda — well worth voting for.

Pick a day, any day

Pick a day at random — any day — and compare what Trump and Biden had to say. How about Oct. 23?

Here’s what Trump said, talking about Biden and the pandemic:

“All he talks about is COVID, COVID, COVID because they want to scare people,” Trump said at a rally in North Carolina. “And we’ve done so well with it. Now it’s 99.8%. I mean, you look at what’s going on and we’re rounding the turn. We’re rounding the corner. We’re rounding the corner beautifully.”

Rounding the corner beautifully? On Oct. 23, another 82,900 COVID-19 cases were reported in the United States, an all-time daily high. More than 900 people died. Hospitalizations had risen 40% in a month.

And here’s what Biden had to say that day:

“Folks, we can only do this if we come together as a country. Abraham Lincoln told us that a house divided cannot stand. Today, trust is ebbing. Hope seems elusive. And instead of healing, we’re being ripped apart. I refuse to let that happen. We need to revive a spirit of bipartisan in this country. A spirit of being able to work with another.”

We urge you to vote, and to cast your vote for the candidate who still believes we can “come together as a country.” Drop your ballot in a secure election drop box — not in the U.S. Mail at this late stage — or vote in person.

Trust us. Voting feels really good this year.

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