Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that Americans are approaching a presidential election like no other in our nation’s history.
Over the coming weeks, thanks largely to our current president, there will be anger. There will be lies. There will be claims of fraud. There will extended vote-counting, well past Election Day, and a push to discard as many ballots as possible.
There may even be worse, much worse — including a chilling possibility that the Trump campaign could subvert the Electoral College.
“Writing for The Atlantic, Barton Gellman war-games a grim post-election scenario. Absentee ballots which will broadly favor Biden will need to be counted, day after day, and Trump’s team will blanket the count with lawyers questioning every ballot they can,” says the Washington Post.
Gellman’s article is titled “The Election That Could Break America.”
Could it, really?
One key element of Gellman’s argument suggests the answer is yes — at least for the familiar America, where hard-fought elections end with winners and losers who, sometimes reluctantly, accept the will of the people.
“If we are lucky, this fraught and dysfunctional election cycle will reach a conventional stopping point in time to meet crucial deadlines in December and January,” Gellman writes. “The contest will be decided with sufficient authority that the losing candidate will be forced to yield. Collectively we will have made our choice—a messy one, no doubt, but clear enough to arm the president-elect with a mandate to govern.”
That’s if we’re lucky.
But what if one side convinces members of the Electoral College to ignore the voting public?
State legislatures have the Constitutional power to choose the 535 Electors who, unlike the public, will cast the ballots that actually count. Longstanding convention decrees that Electors vote for the presidential candidate who wins in their state. But that’s not required by law — and it should be obvious that this is not a moment to rely on convention.
Gellman reports that state and national Republican sources tell him the Trump campaign is already discussing contingency plans “to bypass election results and appoint loyal Electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority.”
Trump has pounded away at the notion of election fraud for years now in an effort to sow doubt about any outcome that isn’t a victory for him.
On Tuesday night in Pittsburgh, Trump told one of his raucous, mask-free rallies that the Democrats already “have these fake ballots, millions and millions of ballots,” ready to go. This is an outright lie.
“With a justification based on claims of rampant fraud, Trump would ask state legislators to set aside the popular vote and exercise their power to choose a slate of electors directly,” Gellman writes.
This scenario, Gellman says, “looks uncomfortably like a coup.”
If Republican state legislators reject the Trump campaign’s pressure and cede victory to Joe Biden, “Trump’s base would exact a high price for that betrayal.”
That price? An abrupt end to their political careers.
Republicans control both legislative chambers in the six most closely contested battleground states; two — Arizona and Florida — have Republican governors, with Democratic governors in the other four — Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Asked if the Trump campaign is indeed planning to circumvent the popular vote, one official slipped past the question and — characteristically — went on the attack:
“It’s outrageous that President Trump and his team are being villainized for upholding the rule of law and transparently fighting for a free and fair election,” Thea McDonald, the campaign’s deputy national press secretary, wrote in an email. Trump is fighting for a trustworthy election, she wrote, “and any argument otherwise is a conspiracy theory intended to muddy the waters.”
If that’s the case, Democrats and the mainstream media are too late. Trump himself has already done an A+ job of shoveling mud into the election waters.
So our future is very much in doubt.
“The danger is not merely that the 2020 election will bring discord,” Gellman writes, saying that many Trump opponents “take turbulence and controversy for granted.”
But our times, and especially this calamitous year of 2020 — the pandemic, outrage over racial injustice, wildfires and hurricanes, a Postal Service vandalized by its own administration, voter-suppression efforts, and more — signal anything but a light at the end of the tunnel after Nov. 3.
As Gellman says, it’s “a trainload of lawsuits … bearing down on the nation’s creaky electoral machinery.”
And after that … what?
