In the Jan. 5 opinion piece titled "Our Flag is still there," Virginia Heffernan, while bucking up our spirits with examples of good news ("The stock market is buoyant") does not fail to acknowledge bad news ("huge number of casualties from COVID ... [and] a serious blow to democracy with Trump's effort to disenfranchise and defraud us"). But her point is this: "[K]ey to these statements is the use of the past tense. ... The breakdown happened, and ... the flag was still there."
I am not convinced that the threats to our democracy are behind us. A recent Star Tribune article ("Wisconsin GOP sows new doubt about vote," Dec. 26) quoted a Republican appointee to that state's electoral commission as saying, "It's really irrelevant whether there was any fraud or not, the point here is that there are many people who do not have faith in the elections ... ." Since countless judicial reviews, audits and other investigations have revealed no fraud, this overseer of elections is really saying that it's irrelevant that widespread voting fraud doesn't exist, the point here is that many people believe it.
Whether the topic is election fraud, the severity of COVID-19 or climate change, Americans don't simply disagree over the nature of these problems, we disagree over their very existence. So long as this is true, future conflicts — rhetorical or physical — lie before us.
Roger B. Day, Duluth
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It's way past time to play hardball. Our intrepid vice president ought to point out clearly that she will be the one presiding over the counting of Electoral College ballots in 2024 — and that she just might be the Democratic presidential nominee whose ballots she's counting. The goal would be to arm-twist the Republicans into modifying the 19th-century electoral count law to ensure that we never again have to rely on the vice president's patriotism in order to not have one person decide who is to be president.
Stephen Partridge, Edina
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