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Bill Theobald

Bill Theobald is senior writer at The Fulcrum, where he focuses on everything to do with voting. This December marks his 40th anniversary in the business, and he still believes -- now more than ever -- that the glow from great journalism can truly light the world.

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    Voting

    Plenty of warnings in the turnout numbers, even though voting surged

    Bill Theobald
    November 19, 2020
    Record voter turnout

    Record voter turnout included a doubling in the number of mail-in ballots, including this stack being counted in a school gym in Sun Prairie, Wis.

    Andy Manis/Getty Images

    To quote the great 1970s power ballad: Two out of three ain't bad.

    That Meat Loaf gold record provides a good summation for the record-breaking turnout in the presidential election: It looks like almost exactly two out of every three eligible Americans voted.

    That's an estimated 159.4 million adult citizens, 20.5 million more than the previous high four years ago. And it's the strongest turnout rate since 1900 — when, by the way, women still did not have the franchise and most Black citizens and other people of color were effectively blocked from the ballot box.

    Why the "ain't bad" summary, then? Because the total nonetheless means nearly 80 million people who had the right to vote decided not to. Because this year does not change how the United States still ranks near the bottom of the world's developed democracies when it comes to election participation. And because while the youth vote increased significantly, half of the population younger than 30 still did not go to the polls for a presidential election highly consequential to their future.

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    Big Picture

    National security veterans warn of transition delay as Trump digs back in

    Bill Theobald
    November 16, 2020
    Biden transition

    National Security leaders from both parties are urging President Trump to allow the transition to begin in order to head off another 9/11. Above: Biden watches a live feed of the raid that lead to the killing of Osama bin Laden.

    The White House/Getty Images

    An all-star cast of national security officials from Republican and Democratic administrations on Monday pulled out what they hope will be the "Trump card" that compels the incumbent president to concede the election and permit his successor to start receiving intelligence briefings and build his team of experts.

    Their ace-in-the-hole argument: Remember Sept. 11.

    But the pleas from the likes of two former secretaries of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano and Michael Chertoff, continued to fall on deaf ears. On the 10th day since election results made it clear he had lost, President Trump was back on Twitter claiming "I won the Election."

    Amid his flurry of six tweets pressing various conspiracy theories, Trump's lawyers appeared to abandon their only legal argument involving enough votes to potentially upend the outcome in one of the states decisive in his defeat. In this case, Pennsylvania.

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