How would Succession‘s burned ballots catastrophe actually play out? An election commissioner weighs in
State of Wisconsin Elections Commissioner Ann Jacobs recently broke down Milwaukee-gate
TV Features Writers
Note: This article contains spoilers for Succession season 4, episode 8
In its third-to-last episode ever, Succession’s central heirs ran more rampant than ever, essentially deciding an election in favor of Jeryd Mencken, a far-right candidate whose thinly-veiled fascist beliefs weren’t enough to dissuade Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) from handing him the keys to the castle. Pivotal in the decision were 100,000 missing absentee ballots, which were destroyed in a suspicious fire at a Milwaukee polling center.
“In like 1960 and in the year 2000, in 2016, these unbelievably close election moments kind of keep on coming in the U.S.,” series creator Jesse Armstrong shared during an “Inside the Episode” segment released on HBO Max. “So it felt legitimate to have another one.”
So how would the nail-biter scenario that ended in a Mencken win play out in real life? State of Wisconsin Elections Commissioner Ann Jacobs has some ideas. On Monday, Jacobs shared a thread on Twitter outlining her theories, and breaking down what Succession got right and wrong when crafting Milwaukee-gate.
According to Jacobs, Succession hit a few nails on the head when crafting its Milwaukee ballot-burning catastrophe: the most obvious example being, “fire destroying ballots is bad.” Jacobs also confirmed that having a central count in Milwaukee does mean that all absentee ballots are processed in one place on one day, making the possibility of a well-placed fire genuinely changing political tides a very real one.
However, Jacobs pointed out, the idea that those burned ballots would be impossible to recover isn’t exactly true: in Milwaukee, absentee ballots are logged via a barcode scanner, which allows absentee voters to track their ballots and confirm when they’ve arrived. This also means that, in the event that paper ballots were lost, election officials would be able to find out whose ballots were missing more easily than Succession suggests.
After her initial thread gained some online traction, Jacobs expanded on her comments during a live interview with Wisconsin’s ABC 12 News at 4. The way Jacobs sees it, a real-life epilogue to Succession’s big election night would involve the courts ultimately deciding how to properly consider voters whose ballots were lost.
“My suspicion is we would wind up with some sort of amended deadline for resubmitting ballots or allowing people to vote,” she says. “That certainly would be my hope because if this were to happen, we wouldn’t want to see 100,000 people completely disenfranchised.”
New Succession episodes (of which there are only two left!) air Sunday nights on HBO at 9:00 P.M Eastern.
14 Comments
Wisconsin state legislature sends its own slate of Republican electors to DC.
An election commissioner weighs inBefore I started reading the article, my money was on, “on Twitter.”Jacobs shared a thread on Twitter outlining her theoriesNailed it!
The actual election and vote counting process is surprisingly durable and effective, despite MAGA Republicans striving to undermine it
“Jacobs also confirmed that having a central count in Milwaukee does mean that all absentee ballots are processed in one place on one day, making the possibility of a well-placed fire genuinely changing political tides a very real one.”
Well Jesus fucking Christ don’t tell everyone that!
Did you read the next sentence
This was my biggest complaint about the show: “You’re giving people some very actionable ideas here! Stop!”
In its third-to-last episode ever, Succession’s central heirs ran more rampant than ever, essentially deciding an election in favor of Jeryd Mencken, a far-right candidate whose thinly-veiled fascist beliefs weren’t enough to dissuade Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) from handing him the keys to the castle. This was one of my niggling complaints with the episode. Roman and Kendall didn’t decide the election for Mencken, and it was kind of odd that the show treated it like they did. Network “calls” don’t actually mean anything. They obviously align very well with final results, because the people making these calls are pretty good at their jobs, but “CNN calls Nevada for Joe Biden” has no legal weight whatsoever. No one is required to honor a network call, and it doesn’t impact any of the legal processes that follow. The show kind of treats it as a “narrative” thing, enabling Mencken to declare victory, and that’s not nothing, but the Jimenez campaign would obviously just respond by saying “Fuck ATN, we’re going to court.” And the actual results of the election would come down to how a court (well, a bunch of courts) decided to adjudicate the issue of the burned ballots.
They don’t really say that, but what they’re doing is giving Succession’s George W. Trump ammo to keep it alive in the court system so that ultimately it gets to SCOTUS level where the Succession version of Clarence Thomas can vote in favor of the candidate for whom his wife works on the transition team. Or, ATN just needs to get their civics-failing Fox News-like viewership worked into a lather so that spineless politicians on that side of the aisle feel confident enough to forgo the Constitution and be willing to overthrow precedent and not certify the election.
Yeah, the characters acknowledge a couple of times that their actions don’t mean anything official, but I think there are two decent readings of the show. One is just that the kids are overestimating their own strength and import, which I would argue has been a theme from the beginning. But the other, just tonally, is that the media really does have a huge though technically informal impact on the process. Judges are human beings, and their opinions aren’t some purely logical declaration from the heavens. Wisconsin came within one supreme justice of having the courts overturn its results in 2020, and I strongly suspect that wouldn’t have happened if there hadn’t been a huge right-wing propaganda operation endlessly pushing the baseless idea that Trump’s claims had merit before that. Even if Mencken ultimately loses, the Roys arguably just legitimized his inevitable whinging grievances, which is only slightly less bad than if they actually had the power to make him president.
Yeah, but are we assuming that guy has any pull on the supreme court, in that world? Was that mentioned at all?
One thing worth looking at is the parallels to the 2000 election; Gore actually publicly conceded based on the media calling Florida for Bush and only rolled it back when he realized the results were worth waiting out and contesting. Similarly, remember in 2020 a big ado was made of Fox News (iirc) calling AZ for Biden “prematurely.” I mean, Fox News is still peddling the notion that 2020 went a completely different way and a very real contingent is still buying into it.This sort of thing happens a lot in American politics, and I felt the episode (and the series as a whole) was prodding at the very real ouroboros of the media/government which makes it possible for a news outlet to create and manipulate the stories its meant to simply observe.
“Roman and Kendall didn’t decide the election for Mencken, and it was kind of odd that the show treated it like they did.”
Sorry, who said that they decided the election for him?
Thats what I thought-if ATN called it, every other network would probably say “fuck ATN, its over when every vote is counted, or it’s over in the courts.” Roman and Kendall don’t have any control over the fate of the country, they just think so because they’re out of control egomaniacs.
Next, they need to do an episode about a minority party group finagling the state boundaries in order to stay in power and then working to disregard the state’s population’s vote for national-level elections.