Nightmare scenario on election night
What if Trump claims win, then mail-in ballots tilt Biden’s way later?
As returns came in on election night in Florida in 2018, the Republicans running for governor and the Senate took narrow leads in races that were too close to call.
Over the next days, their Democratic opponents began closing the gaps as mailed- i n votes were counted. President Donald Trump raised an alarm. Demanding that the races be called for the Republicans, Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis, he tweeted falsely that “large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere,” adding: “An honest vote count is no longer possible — ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!”
Nothing was fraudulent about the ballots tallied in the days after Election Day. And neither Democrat went on to win his race. Yet Trump has never let go of a baseless accusation that Democrats use mail voting to “steal” elections, a piece of disinformation he has promoted all year, including at the Republican National Convention.
Now, with the coronavirus pandemic driving an explosion in absentee voting, and polls suggesting that far more Democrats than Republicans plan to vote by mail, a nightmare scenario haunts Democratic strategists and elected officials.
What if early results in swing states on election night show the president in the lead because most Republicans voted in person, yet in the days afterward, as mail ballots that tilt heavily Democratic are tallied, states flip to Joe Biden?
Would Trump claim pre
mature victory — as he did on behalf of the two Florida Republicans and dangled as a possibility in a tweet in July: “Must know Election results on the night of the Election, not days, months, or even years later!”
Would the president, joined by allies in the GOP and the news media, sow distrust in the election by arguing that mail ballots that shift states away from him are “rigged”?
Trump has been pushing denunciations of mailed-in votes for months, and his penchant for conspiracy theories is only intensifying, such as saying this week that people in “dark shadows” are behind Biden’s campaign. The nightmare scenario in November is worth preparing for, many Democrats say.
“We’ve certainly seen candidates trying to get out in front of a narrative and declare victory when all the votes have not been
counted,” said Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state, a Democrat whom Trump has attacked for promoting mail voting.
Benson and other Democrats in Michigan and Pennsylvania, both key battlegrounds, are trying to change election laws that prohibit absentee ballots from being processed or counted before Election Day. As of now, mail-in votes from large Democratic cities like Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Detroit are not reported until after in-person votes, sometimes days later. Party lawyers are girding for a worst-case scenario in which Trump fights in courts and state legislatures after declaring a premature victory.
“There has been (rightly) a lot of concern about this,” J.J. Balaban, a Democratic consultant in Pennsylvania, said in an email.
In Michigan, Benson predicted that 3 million votes
would be cast by mail this year, 60% of the total. She has called for changes to let election clerks process absentee ballots early — opening envelopes, contacting voters if ballot signatures don’t match registrations and beginning the counting.
If the changes don’t pass in the Republican-led Legislature, full results may not be known until the Friday or Saturday after Nov. 3, Benson said. “Time is running out.”
Currently, 12 states do not allow mail-in ballots to be processed before Election Day, including the battlegrounds of Michigan, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
A Democratic data group backed by Michael Bloomberg said this week that it was likely that Trump would appear to have won on election night by a landslide, a scenario it called “a red mirage.”
“We are sounding an
alarm and saying that this is a very real possibility, that the data is going to show on election night an incredible victory for Donald Trump,” Josh Mendelsohn, chief executive of the group, Hawkfish, told “Axios on HBO.”
The company’s survey of registered voters concluded that twice as many planned to cast a ballot by mail as ever before, and that they were mostly Biden supporters
spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, Thea McDonald, called Democrats’ concerns about the president prematurely declaring victory “an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory,” adding, “President Trump and his campaign are fighting for a free, fair, transparent election in which every valid ballot counts — once.”
The president has raged against mail voting all year, tweeting in May that “there is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent.”
As Trump demonizes mail ballots, many of his supporters do not plan to use them.
An NBC/ Wall Street Journal national poll last month found that nearly half — 47% — of supporters of Biden planned to mail in their votes, compared with two-thirds of Trump supporters — 66% — who planned to vote in person on Election Day.
In some states, the discrepancy is even more stark. A recent Marquette Law School poll of Wisconsin, another swing state, found that among voters planning to cast a mail ballot, Biden was favored by 67 percentage points. Among those who planned to vote on Election Day, Trump led by 41 points.
Trump himself casts his own Florida ballots as an absentee voter. He has claimed a distinction between “good” absentee ballots and “bad” mail-in ballots, but there is no meaningful difference. His real target seems to be certain states — which this year include California, New Jersey and Utah — where all active registered voters are sent mail-in ballots, not just ballot request forms. Thirtyfour states allow all voters to use an absentee ballot without an excuse, mailing it back or dropping it off.
Elections experts say that absentee or mail voting is potentially more subject to instances of fraud than inperson voting, but that states with a history of all-mail voting have a minuscule number of cases. Wide-scale cheating that could swing a close race would be easy to detect.
“Imagine if you tried to change the outcome in Pennsylvania; you’d need a widespread conspiracy,” said Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine.