Trump’s call to postpone the election may presage November chaos

So, we’ve finally arrived at a point that many of us have been anticipating (dreading?) for a long time. After a recent series of bad headlines, and with poll after poll showing him getting crushed by Joe Biden, the president of the United States is now threatening to postpone the country’s general election and ramping up baseless accusations that allowing people to vote by mail this fall will lead to rampant voter fraud:

Setting aside the fact that this was likely done to distract from the latest bout of bad news — and also that there is virtually no difference between absentee and mail-in voting — it’s important to note that the president cannot unilaterally postpone an election. Thankfully, the founders were wise enough to vest that power in the hands of the Congress. Moreover, there is zero evidence to suggest that the process of voting by mail is ripe with fraud (more on this in a minute).

Nonetheless, Trump’s goal here is clear: to condition his voters to view November’s election results as illegitimate if he loses. This isn’t new: he did the same thing in 2016, coyly suggesting he may not accept the results of the election, something that every major candidate for the office had previously done — even when it was hard to do. That is, of course, until the results showed that Trump had actually won. (And even then, he continued to promote unfounded claims of voter fraud.)

Trump’s renewed efforts to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the upcoming election may be a preview of an even darker scenario that could happen in November. While it’s certainly possible that Trump could pull himself out of his polling rut and come back to win, it is looking increasingly likely that Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States. However, that may not be apparent on election night, and this is where Trump could (and likely will) try to create chaos and discord and encourage voters to question the election’s outcome.

First, a quick note about voting by mail. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, many states are expanding the option for people to vote using a mail-in ballot rather than risk going to the polls in person. Voting by mail is not new; in fact, it is a method that has been used since as far back as the Civil War. Many states currently offer mail-in voting as an option to all voters. Five states — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington — have even conducted all of their elections by mail for several years without issue.

It’s also important to note that vote-by-mail historically has not given an advantage to either major political party. However, there is evidence to suggest that Democratic voters are far likelier to want to vote by mail in this election than are Republican voters, the latter of whom Trump has groomed to distrust the process.

So, here is what could happen on election night, as explained by Business Insider:

In every US presidential election since 2000, the United States has been used to most Americans voting in-person on election day and getting the results that night. In 2016, for example, 17% of Americans voted early in-person, nearly 24% cast ballots by mail, and 59% voted in-person on election day.

This year, experts expect that that dynamic to be reversed, with tens of millions of voters casting ballots well before election day and the results taking far longer to process due to the significant expected increase in voters casting mail ballots. […]

Given the trends seen so far, it looks probable that in many…states, the in-person vote released on election night could favor Republicans while the later arriving mail ballots shift those races towards Democrats.

In other words: It is very possible that the early results on election night may show Trump leading, but that as mail-in ballots are slowly counted over subsequent days, Biden could overtake him.

If Trump knows this is a possible outcome going into election night, he may be prepared to say or do whatever it takes to leave people around the country questioning the outcome. For instance, if election night returns from in-person voting show him in the lead, he could prematurely declare victory. If the final tallies actually show Biden to be the winner, it could send our electoral system — and our country — into an unprecedented constitutional crisis. As law professor and election expert Rick Hasen explains:

As Trump drives more and more of his supporters to vote in person and away from vote-by-mail, it’s quite likely that we’ll see Trump getting many more votes on election night, the votes that are counted on Election Day. Then, four or five days later, if Biden becomes the winner as the absentee ballots are counted in Philadelphia or Detroit, that’s a recipe, if it’s close, for a really ugly election scenario. […] Rhetoric about stolen elections feeds a growing cycle of mistrust and delegitimization of the election process. A democratic polity depends on losers accepting election results, even if the election was not conducted perfectly.

This is, of course, fine with Trump, who no longer sees himself as a small-D democratic leader (if he ever did) but as an unitary executive who can act with impunity and do whatever it takes to maintain power — checks and balances be damned. (And let us not even entertain the question of whether he will try to remain in office if he loses.)

As this morning’s tweets demonstrate, Trump continues to be a threat to the stability of our democracy. Thankfully, it seems a clear majority of Americans agree.