US elections: a nightmare scenario in 2020 seems increasingly likely

Trump Says Vote By Mail Creates Mass Fraud 1:47

(CNN) –– There are only 84 days until the 2020 presidential elections in the United States!

Anywhere you go –– especially Twitter–– you'll find these countdowns through November 3. It's almost here! People say. Soon, this will all end! They insist.

I do not think so.

• LOOK: A professor has correctly predicted every US election since 1984: now he says that Trump will lose

Yes, the national vote - whether to re-elect President Donald Trump or to replace him with former Vice President Joe Biden - is technically 84 days from today. But if you think that the election will end that day or the next day (or even the following week), well, you are almost certainly getting a lot of illusions.

As The New York Times noted in a major article over the weekend:

Imagine not just another Florida, but a dozen Floridas. Not just a set of lawsuits, but a wide range of them. And instead of two restrained candidates standing out of sight and leaving the fight to surrogates, an incumbent President of the United States hurling ALL CAPS criticism on Twitter from the Oval Office, while seeking ways to use the power of his office to to intervene".

Bottom line: If you think the 34 days the country waited to find out whether George W. Bush or Al Gore had won the presidency in 2000 were disastrous, you haven't seen anything yet.

The reasons for this virtually certain delay (and the litigation strip) are very clear.

1) The covid-19 pandemic has made the idea of ​​standing in long lines –– especially in closed spaces–– to vote in the fall is less attractive to many. In addition, the coronavirus has raised questions about poll workers, of whom more than 60% in the 2018 elections were 61 years old or older, the group most susceptible to serious illness from virus infection. Those concerns, in turn, led several states to intensify their vote-by-mail and absentee voting efforts. According to The Washington Post , 89 million Americans can now vote by mail. That includes 18 states and the city of Washington, which changed their absentee voting procedures to allow more people to access this alternative due to COVID-19.

2) Trump has exploited vote-by-mail as a way to potentially challenge the election results . "We do not want to have a rigged election, I know that," Trump said Monday at the White House. “And you have to be very careful when you mention, as is constantly done, Russia, or China is mentioned or Iran or others who attack our electoral system are mentioned. And when you have this vote by mail, that is very sensitive, "he completed. The president has sent countless tweets insinuating that increased voting by mail would lead to a "rigged" and "skewed" result. It's worth noting here: There is little evidence of widespread voter fraud when it comes to absentee voting (or voting in person).

3) The early results on the speed of vote-by-mail counting are not encouraging. While many states have changed their voting-by-mail rules to provide options for those who want to avoid going to the polls in person, the process of counting these ballots in a timely manner appears to be labor-intensive. As Edward Isaac Dovere of The Atlantic recently wrote about the New York primaries:

“More than a month after the primary election in New York on June 23, state election officials are still counting the votes. In some legislative districts, they have not even started counting absentee votes. At best, election officials expect to declare winners by the first Tuesday in August, six weeks after Election Day. It could take much longer than that. New York City election officials have already invalidated more than 100,000 absentee ballots, about one in five that were mailed from all five boroughs. And irate candidates are already filing discrimination and disbarment lawsuits. "

• LEE: Analysis | Trump's untruths about voting by mail are part of a broad campaign to discredit the election

“The chaos in New York is a warning about the November elections: the pandemic is transforming the voting. But no state has built a new electoral infrastructure. Neither state has the time or money to make sure the vote counting runs smoothly in November. And almost every state is about to suffer a massive increase in absentee votes.

Add all this up and you can see how bad things are likely to turn out, especially if the elections are close and the systems are reluctant to name a winner on the very night of the election due to the huge uncertainties related to the number of absentee votes.

That would be a problem for any national election, but especially one in which the incumbent president is someone who a) may fall short of his bid for a second term, as seems likely at this point, and b) has shown a fondness for throughout his life for totally refusing to accept defeat in any shape, shape or size.

Since May 2019, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, has publicly warned that her party needed to win "big" at the polls to ensure that the public had faith in the results. "We have to get vaccinated against" Trump claiming the election was rigged, Pelosi told The New York Times at the time. She also stressed that in the days leading up to the 2018 midterm elections, she pressed for a great victory necessary because "if we win by four seats, by a thousand votes each, he will not respect the elections ... He would poison public thought . I would challenge each of the contests; I would say that these people cannot be invested.

Of course, what Pelosi had no way of knowing at the time was that a pandemic would spread across the country - and the world - making gathering in large groups very dangerous. And that winning "big" might not be enough to avoid a massive controversy because, well, it might not be clear that Biden (and the Democrats) have convincingly won or lost for days or weeks after the election.

Even with a more normal president, this would all be worrying. With Trump, it borders on nightmare.

Trump is someone who loves chaos, who tends more to provoke than to calm. And who is, as I pointed out earlier, fundamentally unable to admit that he has ever lost. All of this means that he sees the likely uncertainty over the November 3 results (and guarantee days) as an opportunity to explode. For someone who has a vested interest in preserving the idea that they have always been a winner, the delay in knowing who won, where, and for how long is a golden opportunity. And the longer the result takes to be ratified, the more doubts Trump can sow. And the more effective it will be in doing so.

For those of you counting the days until November 3, then, you may want to mark the end of November (or even later) as the realistic date by which we will know who won. Happy (early) Thanksgiving! You're welcome!

Donald Trump 2020 United States Elections Joe Biden Latino Vote