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In almost daily tweets, interviews and speeches, for months he has been making allegations about mail-in ballots that lead to massive voter fraud.
Democrats, and even some Republicans, say he is making these accusations, despite failing to present evidence, to undermine confidence in the election results should he lose. His campaign team filed a lawsuit to stop an expansion in Pennsylvania this month.
“You have to wonder to what extent any of the players … are trying to use the delay as a tactical advantage or chaos,” said Ned Foley, director of election law at The Ohio State University Moritz School of Law.
“Some parties might benefit, or think they benefit, from moving the ship because they think they are going to lose or they think they want to create a narrative that the system is unreliable.”
Postal vote chaos sets the stage for Trump
Trump created the narrative and argued that mail-in ballots are vulnerable to fraud. Critics say he sees them as more likely to result in Democratic votes, although the evidence is mixed on that point. Some see laying the groundwork to question the result.
Norman Ornstein, a scholar with the American Business Institute think tank and a member of the National Task Force on Election Crises, another bipartisan body that conducts worst-case election planning, is concerned about timing of results statements.
Normally, states have maybe four to five percent of their electorate voting by mail, Ornstein said, but this year that number was much, much higher.
“We may have election results that do not arrive for a week, 10 days or more after the election because it takes a long time to count,” he predicted. “We know that the president would not hesitate if he lost in those circumstances in crying and saying that the election was rigged.”
The delayed counts have added to the confusion. One fear was that the media could call out a state one way on election night, only to back down and give it to the other candidate after the postal ballots are counted, fueling the conspiracies.
Trump asked states to stop counting postal ballots because they were illegitimate, something he came close to doing in a close race during the 2018 midterm elections.
“The Florida elections should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis, as a large number of new ballots appeared out of nowhere,” Trump said at the time, reviewing the names of Republican candidates for Senate and Governor. as the count continued. He stated that “an honest vote count is no longer possible.”
Read more: What will Donald Trump do now?
Preparing ‘for the unthinkable’
Some have already turned to lawyers for advice. Coleman, the former Republican congressman, was so concerned that he contacted a prominent constitutional scholar about the mechanism to forcibly remove Trump from office.
“For more than 200 years, the above has probably never been thought of,” the scholar replied, according to Coleman.
“But we don’t live in normal times, and Trump is certainly not a normal president. We must be prepared for the unthinkable.”
A sitting Republican warned that with the changes in the postal vote, the coronavirus and recent civil unrest, there was “a hint of uncertainty” surrounding the election. “I fully anticipate that there will be legal challenges everywhere, just like in 2000,” he said.
Trump has filed a series of lawsuits in key states on the battlefield: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada, where the votes couldn’t be closer.
The team behind the war games sees value in their work. They hope to share their learnings from the exercises with decision makers in the electoral process, such as state governors, poll administrators, and broadcast chiefs.
“The purpose of these exercises is not just to give people nightmares about the dissolution of the United States, but to make sure this doesn’t happen,” said Brooks, co-founder of the Transitional Integrity Project.
“The hope was that these exercises could prevent these catastrophic results.”
We will know very soon if that has been proven correct.
2020 U.S. Election Results, Maps and Analysis
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