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For two consecutive days, Wednesday and Thursday, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, has refused to say that he will recognize the validity of the vote in the November elections if the result is against him. He spoke about it Wednesday at a White House press conference, when Brian Karem, a reporter from Playboy, asked him if he was willing to commit “here and today in a peaceful transfer of powers after the November elections.” Trump responded “We will see what happens”, adding that the voting system is “out of control”; and then he said that perhaps “there will be no transfer. Honestly, there will be a continuation.
The next day, Thursday, another reporter asked Trump: “Are election results legitimate only if you win?” The president responded: “We want to be sure that the elections are fair and I am not sure that they can be.” Then he said again: “We’ll see.”
It is not the first time that Trump has said that he may not recognize the election result or that he is trying to question its validity. Last month, at the Republican Party convention, he said “the only way they can get us out of this election is with a ballot scam.” During an interview with Fox News In July, when asked by reporter Chris Wallace with some insistence if he would definitely accept the result of the November elections, he replied: “No, I am not just going to say yes. I’m not even going to say no, and I didn’t even do it last time. ‘ Trump has never accepted the fact that Hillary Clinton approved it in the popular vote in 2016, and claims that there was fraud, never proven, even in the election he won.
Also in July, although the numbers of infections due to coronavirus were very high in the United States, Trump also advanced the possibility of postponing the elections due to the health emergency, but he threw everything back after even the Republicans criticized him, and when he understood not having the authority to do so.
Yet for months, with many statements and many tweets, Trump has argued that the election will be rigged and that the vote will be “a big scam.” The main controversial target is voting by mail, which Trump says is particularly vulnerable to fraud. In reality, voting by mail in the United States has been done for decades, and there has never been evidence of large-scale electoral scams – but this, according to Democrats, could be irrelevant to Trump’s desire to challenge, weaken, and then use it as a pretext. accept no defeat.
2020 APPROPRIATE CHOICE: MILLIONS OF MAIL TICKETS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!
– Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 22, 2020
On Wednesday, just before the announcement of the result of the vote, Trump also said he plans to name a replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court Justice who died last week, as soon as possible, because he expects the presidential vote to be contested and that the final decision on who will be the winner of the elections will depend on the Court, although it is not clear how it should happen.
– Read also: What about the Supreme Court now?
The possibility that Trump will not acknowledge the election result, and even make sure to make the voting process as bumpy as possible to question its validity, has been feared for months by analysts and election strategists from the Party candidate’s campaign. Democrat, Joe Biden. Already in May of this year, an article on the New York Times He was talking about a group of Democratic Party officials who considered those scenarios. Among the hypotheses were: an open investigation against Joe Biden a week before the election by Attorney General William Barr, a known and unscrupulous ally of the President; a declaration of a state of emergency in the main cities of the most contested states, such as Milwaukee and Detroit, which prevents the opening of polling stations or militarizes the streets to keep voters out; an explicit refusal by Trump to leave the White House following a narrow victory for Biden, perhaps obtained by replacing the initial disadvantage thanks to the vote-by-mail ballot.
The pandemic complicates matters: both because, as Democratic officials envisioned, it gives Trump an excuse to apply any emergency measure; and because it increases the possibility that Americans decide to vote by mail, greatly extending counting operations that will already be laborious because of anti-COVID regulations. For this reason, it is very likely that the night of the elections will pass on November 3 without it being clear who won. The final count could be delayed by even weeks, adding to the confusion and the possibility that the election will be contested, especially if the result is not clear (or if Trump seizes the night of voting, only to end up reassembled a few days later. ). However, in the event of a landslide victory for one of the two candidates, it would be almost impossible to question the vote.
The article that best explains how the Trump administration was able to take advantage of the confusion during and after the elections, and how it could amplify it, came out a few days agoAtlantic and was written by three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning political journalist Barton Gellman. It is very long, very detailed and argues with interviews and gives some disturbing hypotheses.
First, Gellman recalls that the US Constitution does not guarantee a peaceful transfer of power, but presupposes it, as legal expert Lawrence Douglas puts it. This means that, for everything to go well, it is necessary that at some point the loser is recognized as such. Gellman also recalls that in the last case of contested elections, those of Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000, contrary to what many remember, it was not the Supreme Court that decided the result of the vote. The Supreme Court decided the outcome of the recount in Florida, but Gore could have continued his legal battle: The day after the court ruling, however, he decided to surrender, “in the name of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy.” This is the speech Trump may never deliver.
Gellman writes that the Republican Party could hamper the vote. This year is the first election in 40 years in which Republicans do not need a judge’s authorization to conduct “voting security operations” at voting centers. Authorization from a judge had been mandatory since 1981, when there was controversy because in New Jersey’s gubernatorial election, Republicans tried to intimidate the minority vote by hiring off-duty police officers to guard polling stations.
In 2018, however, a judge ruled that the obligation was no longer necessary, and this year the Republican Party brought together 50,000 volunteers in 15 contested states to monitor security at polling stations. Even without using intimidation techniques, these volunteers could challenge the vote of anyone who appears “suspicious” by slowing down or stalling the voting process. There is also the potential for extremist organizations to provoke violence at polling stations, as the Boogaloo group did during the Black Lives Matter protests.
Then there is what Gellman calls the Interregnum, which is the 79 days between the elections and the inauguration of the new president. The Constitution foresees in those days a whole series of formal passages and votes that usually count for little, because the winner is already clear to everyone since the night of the elections and the loser congratulated him. But if the vote is uncertain, or if the loser does not accept the result, the formalities can become very important.
Among the many possible hypotheses, Gellman focuses on the fact that the US Constitution does not explicitly state that it is the popular vote that determines the large voters that each state selects to be part of the electoral college, that is, the group of people who then actually elect President. The Constitution says that each state can nominate the electors of the college in accordance with the directives of the state Congress.
– Read also: How the President of the United States is Elected
For centuries this power has been left to the popular vote, but if this year’s elections were very controversial, if the final result took a long time to arrive and in the meantime a campaign was mounted that denounces fraud and irregularities during voting, it would not be impossible for some Republican-led states may decide to declare the popular vote invalid and select large electors of their nomination to the electoral college. Gellman spoke with three senior Republican Party officials in Pennsylvania, who told him the hypothesis is up for debate. Republicans control the House and Senate in several hanging states.
Gellman speculates that the Electoral College may be formed on December 14 without a common consensus on its composition, and that even two Electoral Colleges with two different majorities vote differently, one for Biden and one for Trump.
At that time it would be up to Congress, which meets on January 6, 2021, to resolve the issue. But the Constitution and ordinary laws are so smoky or complicated that it opens up a “maze” of hypotheses, for a case that no one had ever thought of. To take an example, in one of the many possible alternatives, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, becomes president pro-tempore. The most likely solution would be a rather brutal clash between the constitutional powers, in which the party that dominates the Senate eventually wins the presidency.
The best thing American voters can do, according to Gellman, is to avoid voting by mail and go to vote in person, to ensure that there is a clear and immediate result on election night. Paradoxically, Trump also says the same, but for other reasons: He hopes that many voters scared by the pandemic will not vote, counting that historically low turnout has favored Republicans.
On Wednesday, after Trump’s remarks, Joe Biden responded in a light tone. “What country are we in?” He asked ironically, and then: “Look, he says irrational things, I don’t know what to say.” In June, however, Biden said during a televised appearance: “The president will try to steal the election. It is my greatest concern. Second Vanity fairHis election campaign officials have spoken to managers of major television networks asking for caution in declaring victory in different states on election night and are developing other countermeasures in preparation for lengthy legal battles.
A few hours after Trump’s words, some senior Republican Party officials also reacted. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tweeted that there will be an orderly transition, “as has happened every four years since 1792,” but then declined to comment and avoided questions from reporters.
The winner of the November 3 elections will be inaugurated on January 20. There will be an orderly transition as there has been every four years since 1792.
– Leader McConnell (@senatemajldr) September 24, 2020
Republican Senator Ben Sasse told reporters: “The president is talking nonsense. The transition of power has always been peaceful. This will not change. Mitt Romney, who among Republican senators is the most outspoken critic of Trump, said: “There is no question that all those who have sworn to uphold the Constitution will ensure that there is a peaceful transition of power.” Yet even he did not explicitly condemn Trump, nor did he mention him by name.
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