Election 2020: Trump’s plan to nullify mail-in votes
Beware the “Red Mirage,” said Trip Gabriel in The New York Times. That’s what pollsters are calling the “doomsday scenario” for Democrats—and our democracy—on election night 2020. Polls show that about half of Democrats, who are more wary of the coronavirus, plan to vote by mail in the presidential election; only 18 percent of Republicans say they’ll mail in ballots. This makes it likely that, absent a Joe Biden landslide, President Donald Trump will hold the lead when polls close on election night, with millions of Biden votes tied up in slower-to-count mail-in ballots. Trump has been “pushing denunciations of mailed-in votes for months” and has already made it clear that he will declare victory when the polls close—and insist that any uncounted votes at that point are fraudulent and should be thrown out. In this claim he’ll have the loyal assistance of Attorney General William Barr; the GOP legislatures in critical swing states Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Florida; and possibly a new 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Given that he’s been trailing Biden in the national polls by about 8 percentage points for months, the Red Mirage might be Trump’s best hope of clinging to power. He all but admitted that last week, saying he was “counting on the federal court system to make it so that we can actually have an evening where we know who wins.”
This is not a hypothetical, said Barton Gelman in TheAtlantic .com. Trump won’t concede the election “under any circumstance,” and Republican operatives are already “laying the groundwork” to invalidate as many mail-in votes as necessary to get him a second term. GOP sources tell me the Trump campaign is even formulating plans with battleground-state legislatures to simply “bypass election results” by invalidating mail-in ballots and declaring Trump the winner. They’ll then send Trump-pledged electors to the Electoral College. If Democratic governors of some of these states send Biden-pledged electors, we will be thrown into an unprecedented “constitutional crisis.” It’s even possible that on Jan. 20, 2021, both Trump and Biden will show up at the Inauguration claiming to be president. This year’s post-election chaos will make Florida in 2000 look tame, said Chris Smith in VanityFair.com. Democrats need to be ready for “mass action” on the streets, a prolonged court battle, and all-out information warfare.
Let me get this straight, said Michael Brendan Dougherty in NationalReview.com. If Biden gets defeated, Democrats already “promise to be sore (and violent) losers,” with rioting on the streets...but it’s Trump who’s the existential threat to democracy? Both sides suspect the other of trying to steal the election, said Shadi Hamid in TheAtlantic.com, but it’s true that Republicans are probably more likely than Democrats to accept a fair defeat. A second straight Electoral College win by Trump, after he’s trailed in the polls all summer by large margins, “is the outcome most likely to undermine faith in democracy.” Enraged Democrats will react with mass demonstrations. Civil unrest may follow.
To make the Red Mirage less likely to happen, said Richard Pildes in CNN.com, Democrats must now embrace three simple words: “Vote in person.” Yes, this cuts against a year of principled fighting for the right to vote by mail. But with Republicans now openly scheming to have mail-in ballots tossed out, “no action is more critical” than to strap on a face mask and go vote. The fate of our democracy may depend on it.