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Stores are blocking shop windows, students in the capital are supposed to stock up on emergency supplies, and the ballots of millions of postal voters have yet to arrive. Countless reports of what could go wrong add to the unrest.
On Saturday, nearly 59 million mailed vote-by-mail ballots were returned. More than 32 million votes are still pending.
After eight months of the Covid 19 pandemic, nerves are not only on edge in the United States. But in addition to the epidemic and its economic consequences, there are months of protests against police violence against African Americans and various horror scenarios regarding the upcoming elections: that millions of votes will be invalidated, that there will be violence in polling stations, that there will be endless lawsuits. against the result and that the president will not accept a possible defeat. Even people with stable nerves sometimes find it difficult to resist the pull of panic.
Prepare for protests
The media is aware that reports on this development satisfy a need for information on the one hand, but also provide feedback and increase discomfort on the other. Over the weekend, reports from several cities, including New York, Chicago, Washington and San Francisco, reported that merchants were using particle board to secure their windows because they feared protests and looting on or after Election Day.
US merchants use protective wooden walls in front of their store windows to prepare for potential riots and looting. Pictured is a barricaded shop on Boylston Street in Boston.
One group has already called protests in the capital, Washington, and authorities have received several requests for demonstrations. It is impossible to say how much response the appeals will receive in the face of nervousness. After all, the leadership of the renowned George Washington University instructed students to stock up on emergency food and medicine, as if a hurricane or blizzard were approaching.
An avalanche of ballots in the mail
Reports on what could go wrong with the election and the vote count seem increasingly breathless. There are basically three main causes for this. The first is that due to the crown epidemic, an unprecedented number of ballots were sent for vote-by-mail. According to the University of Florida Elections Project in the United States, nearly 59 million mailed ballots were returned on Saturday, but no more than 32 million. The “Wall Street Journal” came to the – not very reassuring – conclusion that, especially in highly competitive states, which in 2016 voted for Donald Trump with tens of thousands of votes, “millions of votes are in jeopardy.”
In fact, it is not entirely clear what the high number of absentee ballots means. Perhaps it is negligence, perhaps the voters involved never intended to cast their vote, perhaps the widespread delays in mail delivery are responsible for this, or the fact that, precisely because of these delays, some people decided to vote in person. That would be understandable, because in many places the authorities have been bombarding the population for days with warnings that the deadline for guaranteed postal delivery of their ballots has finally passed.
The second main cause is that President Trump has been claiming for months that the vote will undoubtedly be falsified due to the high number of votes by mail. Both major parties have mobilized an army of lawyers to take legal action over anything that arises. Finally, the third reason is that there is a real danger that the first partial results will suggest a different result than that produced by the subsequent counting of the votes by mail.
Red mirage, blue shift
There is talk of the “red mirage”, which could attribute the first successes to Republicans because their voters are more likely to vote personally than Democrats. However, with the counting of the mail ballots in the following days, there could be a “blue shift” reversing the provisional result. The important thing would be how Trump and the Republicans in Congress behave in such a case. There are hardly any arguments in favor of the forecast that the president would approve a certificate of completion.
