For far too long and with the worst of intentional design, the warring of our political divide has left a permanent wound in the body of America, and we have no one left to blame for the crippled country except those who don’t look like us, who don’t think like us, who don’t believe like us and those who don’t vote like us.

Yes, we said, permanent; our nation’s electoral politics is in the form of a hobbling man, grunting through the grinding pain and refusing even the slightest help out of obstinate fear that doing so would reveal vulnerability. We have become a nation without compromise, without acceptance, who refuses to believe that each of us is, on occasion, prone to defeat.

Witness the events of Jan. 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C., when the 45th President of the United States and his most ardent supporters bulldozed their way to the U.S. Capitol Building in an attempt to wreck the pieces of our democracy.

So as we provide summaries of our most recent elections in this issue of the Chester County Press, imagine our general surprise at the news that the Chester County Democratic and Republican parties are expressing their unified support for the continued counting of votes from last week’s election by Chester County Voter Services (CCVS).

This across-the-aisle for a vote reconciliation stemmed from a discrepancy between the numbers of ballots received and the number of votes tallied after last Tuesday’s election.

To immediately address the discovery, ballot counting was suspended on Nov. 5, and last weekend, CCVS performed a reconciliation of the number of ballots received in the many different categories with the number of ballots counted. Counting of ballots continued on Monday.

This olive branch of cooperation arrives like a giant wallop of sweet air – a cleansing of sorts – a true bipartisan effort to find a solution.  

In a letter to his constituents, Republican Committee Chairman Dr. Gordon Eck said that digging deep into the voting results “should not be a partisan issue,” and called the discrepancies “major issues that threaten the very integrity of the election, and that every option is on the table.

“Our goal is not to change the outcome of the election, but to guarantee that every legitimate vote cast in Chester County, regardless of party affiliation, will not be lost, stolen, diluted, or rejected through either intentional maleficence or administrative mistakes,” Eck wrote.

In a letter she wrote to her constituents, Democratic Committee Chair Charlotte Valyo wrote, “We applaud the fact that all of this has been done in an open, bipartisan environment that provides the confidence to everyone that our democracy has again functioned as it should – in the open and with the goal of counting every eligible vote.”

The parties have a willing partner: on their website, CCVS stated The County Voter Services Department is working alongside both the Chester County Democratic and Republican Parties to ensure every vote is processed accurately and in accordance with the law.

We often take our lessons from the unlikeliest sources. How refreshing it is to know that three of those sources are in Chester County.