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Due to the corona pandemic, a record number of Americans are expected to cast their ballots by mail, rather than at a regular polling station this year.
More than 70 million have already voted by mail.
However, there are ongoing political battles over regulations regarding votes by mail and the deadlines for voting and counting.
Now they fear more that there will be legal consequences as a result of November 3 and, in the worst case, that the result of this year’s presidential elections will be decided by the Supreme Court justices.
Listen to a podcast with American expert Hilde Restad on the elections:
Will put lawyers to work
Republicans have long challenged the legitimacy of early and mail ballots in various states, and have initiated legal proceedings to invalidate several of the ballots.
Last Sunday, the Texas Supreme Court rejected a Republican lawsuit to reject nearly 127,000 votes cast from car windows in the Houston area.
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However, during an election campaign rally on Sunday, Trump announced that he would put his lawyers to work on election night.
– We’ll go into election night. “As soon as the elections are over, we will go with our lawyers,” Trump told reporters in the state of North Carolina, according to NBC.
The statement came after the Supreme Court ruled that both the swing states of Pennsylvania and North Carolina can count votes that are postmarked before Election Day, but appear in the days after presidential elections.
This happens if Trump wins
Humor is aggressive
Many more Democrats than Republicans are expected to vote by mail. So Democrats want as many mail-in votes as possible to be counted after Election Day, and they have also mobilized lawyers.
– If Trump wins the election through the Electoral College, due to many rejected postal votes, the Democrats will see red, says Hilmar Mjelde, an American expert and researcher at the Norce research center, to Dagbladet.
– Both parties will view a defeat as unfair. The mood is generally aggressive on both sides, he says.
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Svein Melby, a senior researcher at the Department of Defense Studies (IFS), also says the prospect of a legal settlement after Election Day is excellent.
– They have already prepared well for this for a long time, he tells Dagbladet and continues:
– Of course, it is based on the fact that it is a uniform result. If there are clear margins, I don’t think there is any legal agreement, he says.
Expect chaos with consistent results
Many are now drawing parallels to the famous 2000 presidential election, when Al Gore lost to George W. Bush after 30 days of good counts in Florida and constantly new rounds in court.
Bush won by 537 votes, a controversial result because it was the Supreme Court that finally set foot on the highly unresolved recount. Due to the electoral system, Gore himself lost by more than half a million more votes nationwide than Bush.
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In several states, Trump and Biden are now very even in the polls. It can deliver chaos, according to Hilmar Mjelde.
– With a fairly even electoral result, there will be chaos. There is a real danger that Democrats and Republicans will not accept the result if their candidate does not win. So the United States can resemble so-called autocracies, that is, regimes in which the conduct of elections is not conducted in a peaceful and orderly manner, he says.
New threats: – Let me wait
– The courts are politicized and there will be legal revenge. The military can be mobilized, he says.
The state of Pennsylvania, where Biden currently has a small lead according to opinion polls by ABC News and the Washington Post, could be the starting point for a legal battle in particular.
– If you’re really unlucky, you have this going on for weeks, says Svein Melby.
The weekend that shook the Democrats
Several were rejected
In the 2016 election campaign and the 2018 partial election campaign, about one percent of the votes by mail were rejected, which is equivalent to 750,000 ballots, writes ABC News.
The most common reason was that mail-in ballots came too late to be included in the count. The second most common was that the vote by mail did not have a signature.
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Mjelde points out that both state and local authorities can make mistakes this year, because both sides emphasize the mood.
– Voters will also make mistakes, says Mjelde.
Other reasons postal ballots are rejected is that the signature on the ballot does not match another signature the state has on that voter, or that no witnesses have signed the ballot, which is a requirement in some states.
