U.S. vote must be decisive

The most important thing that needs to happen in Tuesday’s U.S. election is obvious: For the good of both their own country and the entire world, American voters must choose Joe Biden over Donald Trump.

That’s the absolute minimum, the bare starting point, necessary to begin repairing the damage of the past four years and put the United States back on a course toward something approaching political normality.

But it’s not enough. U.S. voters need to do something more if they truly want to start healing their nation. They must deliver a clear and unambiguous result, a decisive repudiation of the shambolic reign of the 45th president.

Anything less — a close or uncertain outcome in a few battleground states, another nail-biter of an election that tips only narrowly to Biden in the end — risks opening the door to a whole new world of pain.

Trump has been making it plain for months that he won’t go quietly if the outcome of the election goes against him. He’s been on a campaign to delegitimize the vote, saying he can lose only if the whole process is “rigged.”

He’s the only president in memory to refuse to sign on publicly to the most basic tenet of American democratic life: that both sides will respect the will of the people, and the outgoing president will co-operate in the peaceful transfer of power. Asked that question directly, he’s refused to concede even the possibility that he will lose.

At this point, it’s not just anti-Trump alarmists who are raising the prospect of serious unrest after Tuesday, even violence. Look, for example, at a report from the cautiously mainstream Brookings Institution titled “Why the risk of election violence is high.”

Its diagnosis: “The national mood appears dark” and Trump has been fanning the flames of discontent both among his wider base and an array of far-right groups that flourished during his presidency. And it’s gotten even worse in this pandemic year:

“The broader pool of potential extremists has grown during COVID, with Americans at home and online, consuming vast quantities of propaganda and disinformation. So even if a relatively small percentage of people might actually mobilize to violence, the milieu from which they will emerge has metastasized significantly. The November election is increasingly perceived as a ‘winner-take-all’ contest, with no room for those who don’t identify with a specific side.”

The federal justice department, reports the Washington Post, has set up a command centre at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., to co-ordinate response to any electionrelated violence. Stores in U.S. cities have boarded up their windows for fear of a violent explosion after the vote.

This is frightening stuff in a country that, whatever its other failings, has at least managed to accomplish the fundamental task of changing governments without anything like this degree of fear. When the Bush-Gore deadlock in Florida put the result of the 2000 presidential election in doubt for weeks, the result was a battle of lawyers that eventually ended up in a Supreme Court decision in favour of the Republican. But this could be something of an entirely different order.

Trump himself won’t turn down the heat. His entire political record shows he’s willing to amp up tensions to serve his own purposes.

He’s spent months spreading lies about the supposed dangers of mail-in voting, used by more voters than ever this year, and is already talking about dispatching squads of lawyers to states where the outcome is close.

The best way, maybe the only way, for American voters to head that off is to make sure the result is truly decisive, the kind of landslide that leaves no doubt for all except those who simply refuse to see.

That would prevent the legal and political wrangling that could cloud the next 79 days until the new president is sworn in.

More importantly, it would minimize the kind of social upheaval that Trump appears to be welcoming, but all others should dread. For the sake of American democracy, Trump must be not just defeated, but demolished.

At this point, it’s not just anti-Trump alarmists who are raising the prospect of serious unrest after Tuesday, even violence