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President Donald Trump is planning to retain power in the event of an electoral loss in November, according to a former Colorado senator.
Tim Wirth published an opinion piece in Newsweek where he exposes his theory, apparently inspired in part by the HBO adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel The plot against America.
The former Democrat senator begins with an accusation that Trump will try to retain power by repressing voters. Wirth alleges that there is a strategy to suppress voter participation by purging voters, especially downtown voters, from registration lists and to suppress postal voting. He also believes that physical voting places will be limited, especially in urban areas, in an effort to create long lines on Election Day and discourage voting.
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Wirth’s allegations that an effort has been made in Republican-led states to remove people from the electoral roll are accurate.
According to the data collected by Mother jonesBetween 2016 and 2018, more than 17 million names were removed from the voter lists. While names are removed from the voter lists each year due to deaths or citizens leaving the state, the number of voters removed from the lists since 2016 has increased significantly.
Between 2016 and 2018, states on average removed 7.6% of their voters from the lists. However, the purge in some states went much further.
Indiana purged the largest number of voters, removing 22.3 percent of the state’s voters from its lists. Both Virginia and Wisconsin eliminated 14 percent, and Maine, Oklahoma, and Massachusetts eliminated between 11 and 12.1 percent.
However, Wirth’s theory of Trump trying to retain power after the 2020 U.S. election does not end at the polls. He believes that, should the president lose, he will allege that the vote was rigged and will rely on a complicated tactic involving emergency powers and compliance by Republican lawmakers to stay in the White House.
According to Wirth, if Trump loses in a scenario where challenger Joe Biden hits him with “decent but not overwhelming” margins in the changing states of Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Trump will declare that the vote was rigged.
He is allegedly to blame mail ballots and Chinese electoral interference for the loss, and will invoke emergency powers to launch a Justice Department investigation into alleged “electoral piracy” in the changing states.
From there, Wirth claims that Trump will stop until December 14, which is the date states must designate their constituents from the US Electoral College, because key states are controlled by Republicans, Wirth. He believes state legislatures will refuse to certify their constituents until the election piracy investigation is complete.
He then claims that Democrats will challenge the investigation and challenge the elections, which will eventually be brought to the United States Supreme Court. Wirth believes the Supreme Court will rule against Republicans, but will admit that Trump’s emergency powers authorize him to continue his investigation. The Supreme Court will also hold that if the decisive states cannot certify their selectors before December 14, for whatever reason, then the Electoral College will have to meet and vote for the president without including the decisive states.
According to Mr. Wirth’s theory, the Electoral College will meet without the swing states under investigation, and neither candidate will receive enough votes to secure the presidency. According to Mr. Wirth, the contested election would move to the House of Representatives, where each delegation can cast a vote for the presidency.
Since there are more Republican-controlled delegations in the House than there are Democrat-controlled delegations (26 Republicans to 23 Democrats), Republicans will be the winners of the vote, and Trump will remain in office.
Wirth claims the plot is not far-fetched, and points to Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to use the US military against protesters in the George Floyd protests, but later notes that “recent resistance from our military establishment it’s an encouraging sign and a necessary component of the ‘people’s firewall’. “
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