Trump muddies election process by suggesting votes counted after Tuesday will be illegitimate

It is one of the factors that adds tension to an already red-hot election night.

Donald Trump and his team have been preparing the ground for months to answer the vote count, if it is not favorable to them.

Now, in the final stretch of the campaign, the president casts more suspicion and muddies the ground even more by introducing legal conflicts that, in reality, are nothing more than noise.

But dangerous noise.

"The election should end on November 3, not weeks later," he tweeted.

Something that will hardly happen: even in an election without so much vote by mail, almost no State reports the final results on the same election day.

More than 80 million Americans have already voted by mail and Republicans, who trust that the majority of their voters will cast their ballot on the same election day, flirt with the dangerous game of proclaiming their candidate the winner once the ballot count is complete deposited the same Tuesday.

"President Trump will be ahead on election night," Jason Miller, an adviser to the president's re-election campaign, said on television, counting on the fact that the majority of Democrats have already voted early and the bulk of Republican voters focus on the day of Tuesday.

"And then they will try to steal it after the election," he added, in a dangerous and unusual indictment of Democrats.

Days before, in a campaign event, the president himself had already pointed in the same direction: "We should want to have the votes counted, tabulated and finished by the evening of November 3".

A practically impossible scenario in practice, which has never happened in modern history, and which is not contemplated in any legislation.

When a winner is proclaimed on the same election night, it is not because the recount has been completed, but because the media projections deduce that, even if scrutiny remains, one of the candidates already has an advantage that the remaining votes cannot snatch.

The messages point to the possibility that the Republican campaign decides to wage a legal battle to try to annul the votes by mail that have not been counted before the end of the electoral day.

An attempt to force the States to stop the recount after Election Day through the courts would be an unprecedented subversion of the electoral process, which would take away the right of political participation from millions of citizens who have cast their votes legally and in the established deadlines.

In the midst of a pandemic in which health authorities advise against physical contact with other people, more than 80 million are expected to vote by mail in these elections.

It is more than double what it did in four years, an unusual growth that has focused on the process by which different states verify the identity of voters.

Both parties, as well as activist groups, have filed lawsuits against such verification techniques, often for flaws in the process of notifying voters to correct any errors and give them the opportunity to correct them.

President Trump has gone much further, suggesting publicly, without justifying evidence, that such practices are an opportunity for voter fraud.

Postal votes typically take longer to process than those cast in person on Election Day.

The message of the Trump campaign is to minimize the pandemic and give an impression of normalcy, despite the fact that many states report records of infections these days.

The Biden campaign, on the contrary, exhibits an attitude more in line with the recommendations of the health authorities, the candidates always wearing masks and limiting the events in which there may be a risk of infection.

That is why it is estimated, and this is corroborated by the polls, that the majority of voters who have chosen to participate by mail are Democrats.

Extrapolating conclusions on the final result based on the sense of the postal vote would be as imprecise as doing it based only on the face-to-face vote on Tuesday.

In some states it is anticipated that a winner can be declared on election night.

This is the case of Florida, a key state, without which Trump's options are dramatically reduced.

There the law allows the counting of the vote by mail to begin before election day.

But in other states, including one as important to electoral college victory as Pennsylvania, where many counties will not begin counting the vote-by-mail until Wednesday, the result can take several days.

Which would not be the result of fraud, as the president suggests, but of the normal functioning of the electoral process.

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