“Donald Trump’s presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we’d be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes.” – From How Democracies Die
Trump is losing by 9-10 points in the national polls right now (RCP and 538) but it appears that the biggest threat of him winning may be via voting shenanigans.
Trump has set the stage to claim victory even if he doesn’t win by:
- Claiming without evidence that voting by mail causes widespread fraud
- Saying that the only way he will lose the election is if it’s “rigged”
- Refusing to say that he will accept the results of the election
- Telling the public that we need to decide the winner on election night, not weeks later
And now it has been revealed what Trump’s plan could be after all. Per AP News (via Brian Beutler):
It’s hard to even fathom the chaos that would happen in our country if Trump lost the election but somehow was able to “win” by getting the courts to incorrectly invalidate a certain number of ballots. And while this scenario is and should be terrifying, it isn’t far-fetched.
Per Pew Research, Biden supporters are much more likely to vote by mail. And because Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin don’t let election officials count vote by mail ballots until election day or the day before, it means that on election day things will temporarily favorable to Trump and then will swing left as those legitimate ballots get counted.
And we know that Trump will likely use this shift to claim that these are fraudulent votes and a fraudulent election.
As I’ve written before, our democracy is very much at stake in this election so please make sure to VOTE!
For more on this topic, I highly recommend this segment from John Oliver:
