It seems like an ancient story But presidents for most of United States history have allowed the American elections to run their course, and refuse to use their power to tip the balance in their favor. Sure, headlines enjoy the advantage of campaigning from Air Force One, and may try to gobble up the economy to get votes, but they’ve mostly abided by America’s strong democratic norms and traditions of not arming the office powers. against your opponent.
Trump is different. At its core, Ukraine’s scandal last fall stemmed from the president using America’s international leverage for his personal campaign, putting pressure on another leader for dirt, or, more accurately, to create the appearance of dirt, on his most likely rival, Joe Biden. More recently, Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, has been hinting that his investigation of the Mueller investigation will alter things in a way that would benefit his boss.
In recent months, the President has been violently tweeting to undermine the legitimacy of the voting by mail procedures that are being implemented across the country. The president’s campaign against mail ballots has been fierce, regular, and vociferous; In a tweet, he even suggested, without evidence, that foreign countries would print “millions” of mail ballots, a presumption that would be ridiculous, except that he is the president, with millions of loyal followers, and deeply undermines the confidence of Americans. . in their own electoral process.
The truth, of course, is that rampant electoral fraud simply does not exist in the United States, and mail voting has a particularly infinitesimal percentage of fraud. Washington Secretary of State Wyman says they found 142 fraudulent voting attempts of 3.2 million ballots in 2018, or 0.004 percent fraud.
Trump’s rhetoric even worries Republican Party officials, as his tweets could discourage his own supporters from voting by mail, distorting careers and making MAGA-ites less likely to trust a loss. . Both Pennsylvania, where 70 percent of absentee ballot requests come from Democrats, and Indiana, where 55 percent of their mail-in ballot requests come from Democrats, pause Republican leaders.
Despite concerns, Trump’s campaign to undermine confidence in the election shows no signs of slowing down: earlier this month, he tweeted: “Mail ballot fraud was found in many elections. People are now seeing how bad, dishonest and slow it is. The election results could be delayed for months. No more responses to the big election night? 1% not even counted in 2016. Ridiculous! Just a formula to FIX a choice … “
Such comments are troubling not only because of their short-term impact on voting procedures, but because they seem to lay the groundwork for a challenge to the results themselves, particularly if a near loss or general confusion around the election gives you even a remote plausible, albeit exaggerated, excuse to fight. In the same interview with POLITICO last month in which he questioned the vote by mail, he did not answer whether he would accept the election result. “Hillary kept talking about what she was going to accept, and they never accepted it. You know. She also lost. She lost the good, “he said, ignoring that Clinton decisively admitted the day after the 2016 election.
Democrats and Republicans alike are openly asking themselves now: what happens if Trump refuses to budge?
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Taken together, experts anticipate An election in which it is more difficult to vote, more difficult to count the votes, less clear who won and more unpredictable than any election that the Americans have lived. And that if everything goes well.
It is a certainty that voters will complain about lost ballots and if their votes were ever counted; They’ll hear stories about (or endure) long lines, unusable machines, and literal health risks on Election Day. And even on the smoothest national election days, there are random power outages, thunderstorms, fires, and mishaps that could be taken advantage of in bad faith or by the most conspiratorial to condemn the overall result as unfair or manipulated.
Final results are also very likely to take a long time to count, in some states for a week or more, for both local and presidential races, particularly in states that require absentee ballots to be postmarked only on election day. Officials in those states will see the ballots run until the weekend after the election.
As the days go by, and vote-by-mail and absentee ballots are counted, Americans are likely to see the results change, as candidates who appear poised for victory on Election Night have their victories nullified. These changes can be dramatic, like in the June special elections in the 27th Congressional District in New York: there, in a district that Trump won by 25 percentage points, the Republican candidate led 70-28 on Election Night, but he won only 53-45 once all absentee ballots were counted. The opposite happened in Oklahoma in June on a ballot measure to expand Medicaid eligibility: early and absent ballots made it look like it was heading for an overwhelming victory, 75 percent supported the measure, but in-person votes they steadily reduced it on Election Day until it screeched with just 50.48 percent of the vote.
“People need to understand that this is not really a problem. This is how the system is supposed to work, ”explains Dale Ho, director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberty Union. “One thing that worries me is that if those election results are leaked, particularly in those states that were pivotal in the 2016 presidential election, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, you may get some unfounded statements from a few quarters indicating the pace whose results are tabulated. suggests some kind of problem. “
The protests over all that, the feelings of deprivation of rights, the surprising results, the late changes, the accusations of intimidation and electoral fraud, not to mention the obscurity of the accusations and the charges on social networks in the period prior to November, they could become especially combustible and damaging given the charged political environment that has already taken root in the streets of the United States. There are reports that the president’s attacks on the process are already creating problems, as right-wing militias prepare for violence after November, trusting that any Biden victory must be fraudulent. As a senior Democratic campaign official told me: “The question is not what the spark is, it is what is going to burn the fire?”
Any of these past problems could lead to national elections into chaos if a secretary of state, in good faith or in bad faith, takes this into account and refuses to certify his state’s vote count and pushes us into constitutional territory. unknown. Sure, technically we have procedures to deal with such problems (hello, House of Representatives!), But the nation has never really faced a candidate who refused, after the countdown was over, to grant the election. And if there’s one thing the Trump administration has taught us, it’s that even long-standing rules and procedures quickly collapse when a leader simply refuses to recognize them.
If any of that just can’t seem to happen in our system, remember that Donald Trump was a no-brainer candidate when he went down the golden escalator at the Trump Tower in June 2015. Stranger things have certainly happened. outside.
