Trump can't cancel the election – but he will try to stop people voting
‘Let’s be clear,” Hillary Clinton tweeted this month. “Trump does not have the power to cancel or postpone the November election.” That tweet did not come out of nowhere. Covid-19 has already disrupted the Democratic primaries, with 16 states postponing their primary elections because of public health concerns. There has been some worried speculation in recent weeks that Donald Trump may exploit the coronavirus crisis to indefinitely delay the US presidential election.
While you imagine Trump would love to unilaterally crown himself king of the US, he doesn’t have the power to postpone an election, as Clinton noted. Since 1845, federal law has mandated that presidential elections be held on “the Tuesday next after the first Monday in the month of November”. Only Congress can change that – and it would be an arduous process, even before you factor in the House of Representatives being controlled by Democrats. Even if Congress did postpone the election, there would still be an expiry date on Trump’s term. The 20th amendment to the constitution dictates that if an election does not happen, or Trump refuses to step down, his presidency will automatically end on 20 January 2021. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, would then become acting president.
Trump does not have the power to cancel the election, but he does have the power to corrupt it. Indeed, there are already signs that the Republican party will do everything it can to ensure a low turnout in November – it is well established that fewer people voting means a higher chance of that party winning. Most Republicans don’t like admitting to their voter-suppression advantage, but Trump, who has a well-documented problem with keeping his mouth shut, recently said the quiet part out loud. Last month, he went on the Fox News programme Fox & Friends to talk about the Democrats’ attempts to push through measures that would make voting easier during the pandemic. “The things [Democrats were proposing] were crazy,” Trump exclaimed. “They had … levels of voting that, if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
Unless a miracle happens and the coronavirus disappears, only the implementation of measures such as voting by mail and expanding early voting can ensure a free and fair election in November. This may be why Trump and the Republicans are fighting such reforms tooth and nail.
If you want a preview of the pandemonium that could characterise the general election, look at the entirely preventable chaos that unfolded recently in Wisconsin’s Democratic primary. Last Monday, the US supreme court’s conservative majority blocked a court order that would have extended the window to return absentee ballots. This forced people to go out to vote in person, which resulted in dangerously long lines at the five polling places that were open – there should have been 180. (Happily, a liberal judge, Jill Karofsky, defeated the conservative incumbent for a seat on the state’s supreme court a week later, which could prove important in future voting rights cases in the swing state.)
Republicans are not only trying to make voting harder, they are also trying to discredit postal votes. “Mail in ballots substantially increases the risk of crime and VOTER FRAUD!” Trump tweeted on Saturday. This is a lie: voting fraud via mail ballots is rare. Never mind that Trump voted by mail in Florida’s primary in March. But that does not count, because inconvenient facts never count.
Anyway, if undermining confidence in mail ballots does not work, there is also the option of underfunding the US Postal Service (USPS). The USPS is on the brink of financial collapse and the Trump administration is refusing to bail it out. It is hard to vote by mail if there is no public mail service, after all.
Let’s be clear: Trump can’t cancel November’s election, but that does not mean we should rest easy. The Republicans will weaponise coronavirus in whatever way they can. The US loves invading countries in order to “install democracy”. But who, one wonders, is going to save the US from itself?