Stop the count meme As we enter Day 3 of election counting in the United States, the world is watching with bated breath, all of us waiting for the flood of legitimately cast mail votes to be delivered and tallied so American citizens can learn which presidential candidate they’ve chosen to lead for the next four years.
And as one hour stretches into two hours, stretches into 62 hours, so stretches the urgency of the American people—of both wearied state poll workers ripping open envelopes and of the entranced public with news websites pulled up on their computer screens, refreshing election result pages again and again as if to encourage them to “count, count, count . . .”
Except, of course, for President Donald Trump, who has seen his lead in several crucial swing states diminish as millions of mail votes, which tend to be heavily Democrat, are gradually tallied. On Thursday morning, the president tweeted, “STOP THE COUNT!”:
It’s a last-ditch effort from Trump, who has falsely claimed that votes arriving or counted past Election Day are somehow fraudulent, even though election rules state otherwise.
So as you know, I know, and Sesame Street knows, you can’t stop the count:
And with that, Sesame Street’s iconic Count von Count, a Dracula-esque vampire Muppet who loves to discover exactly how many of any given thing exist, has become a battle cry for the 2020 election. Known simply as “the Count,” the fuzzy puppet has been teaching children to enumerate since 1972, when he made his debut on the PBS television show. (He also stopped by the Fast Company offices along with the rest of the cast in 2017, to remind us about the value of kindness. We love him—even if his favorite password is “1234”.)
The rest of the world clearly loves him too, as evidenced by countless (sorry, Count!) memes emerging on social media:
You can’t stop the count. That’s what he does. pic.twitter.com/KwRVY2DBim
— StoneHeadof (@StoneHeadof) November 5, 2020
To their point, it’s critical to count every vote in order to let every American’s voice be heard in our democracy. Because as the Count himself has said, voting is “the number one way that we can all help change the world . . . no matter where you live, or how you do it—by mail or in person.”
