[ad_1]
Despite the suspicions left by the 2016 elections regarding opinion polls, the data on voting intention strongly shows that Donald Trump will lose again in the popular vote.
The Republican will need the Electoral College to stay in power. Still, except for a historic upheaval, he’s more likely to lose there as well. The crucial thing is knowing how.
If Joe Biden wins the Electoral College easily, based on a wide margin in several pendulum states, there should be no problem. Trump will claim that fraud has occurred and will not acknowledge the result, but he cannot do much against American democracy.
A close victory for Biden changes history. This involves not only the catastrophic scenario of 2000, when the outcome depended on hundreds of votes in Florida, but also the possibility of a serious Electoral College victory – supported only by small margins in the states, as in 2016 – or something close. to the reelection of George. Bush in 2004, decided with 118,000 votes in Ohio.
In all three scenarios, there is the possibility of a long and dangerous dispute, fought in state courts and legislatures, that will come to a Republican-dominated Supreme Court after the appointment of Trump-appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
There may be more items from this war, but nothing tends to beat voting by mail. According to the Electoral Project of the University of Florida in the United States, more than 91 million citizens requested ballots this year, 66.7% of the total votes in 2016.
Even if many of these voters vote early, as they already do, the number of votes by mail will be staggering, on the order of tens of millions, and it will seriously depend on Biden.
Desperate to stay in the presidency, Trump will fight fiercely to nullify as many votes as possible, based on absurd conspiracy theories.
In practical terms, your campaign will use the technicalities – minimal differences in signatures and addresses, problems with witnesses, errors in envelopes and postal items – aided by confusing rules that can still be changed by the judiciary.
It remains to be seen how Biden will react if Trump goes all the way. In 2000, the crisis did not end when the Supreme Court ordered Florida to stop counting, but when Al Gore gave victory to Bush, refusing to transfer the dispute to Congress, the final arbiter of the presidential election.
Times are different now, starting with the methods of Trump’s Republican Party, light years away from Bush’s. In such a polarized context, it’s hard to imagine that Democrats would agree to the cancellation of hundreds of thousands of votes.
A dramatic scenario like this will be a real litmus test for the American institutional anachronism, which still lacks non-politicized bodies specialized in judging electoral disputes at the federal and state levels.
It remains to clench its fists so that the United States does not have to fall into the abyss for urgent reforms of its political system to be carried out, protecting the country and the world from a Trump-like abyss in the future. Folha Online, (download Rador).
