An Election Is Coming. Washington, Being Washington, Has Formed a Task Force.

When it rains, you don’t chair a committee about the rain. You get a coat.

But an election is coming — November 3, eight days after this column’s deadline, which is itself a kind of joke the calendar plays on us twice every four years — and Washington, to its endless credit, has done what Washington does best. Congressional Democrats are forming an election protection task force.

Let me be clear that I take the concern seriously. One party fears the other party will interfere with the counting. The other party fears the first party is frightened of losing, which is how you know the first party has read the polls. Both parties have formed apparatuses. The apparatuses have subcommittees. The subcommittees have names.

And somewhere in that chain of love, the actual election has gone missing — because the actual election is not an apparatus. It is a school gymnasium. It is a scanner that jams once and gets fixed by a volunteer named Barb who has worked seven cycles and fears nothing on Earth except the precinct machine that double-counts. It is a woman at 6:15 a.m. with two jobs and one ballot. It is, and has always been, the least powerful room in the American system, guarded by people who get paid in cake.

The task force, meanwhile, is the most powerful room, guarded by people paid in titles. The Senate Democrats’ version just released a report on vote-counting timelines in fifteen states, which is a magnificent document about the schedule of other people’s work, and I say that with respect, because Washington producing paperwork about November is the oldest tradition in November. Both parties know this game. Republicans spent a cycle certifying their own watchers; Democrats are certifying theirs. Watchers watching watchers watching — at some point the election becomes a support function of the oversight industry.

Here is what protecting an election has always actually required: printing enough ballots, training enough Barb-types, funding the county clerks, and — hardest of all — conceding when you lose. Two of those are logistics. The third is character. Not one of them is a task force.

A task force is what an institution builds when it cannot supply the character and has already funded the logistics badly. It converts a problem into a meeting, and a meeting into a memo, and a memo into a budget line that makes next year’s task force possible. It is, in its way, the only branch of government that has never once missed a deadline.

My proposal, which I expect to chair: give the county clerks the money. Publish the timelines — the Senate report did, thank them, mail it to the counties that already know theirs. Then, and this is the radical part, get out of the gymnasium.

It opens at 7 a.m. on a Tuesday. It has opened on that Tuesday since before the first Washington committee had a nameplate, and it will close at 8 p.m. sharp, eight days from now, with or without us, as it has always, stubbornly, been.