If He Loses, Here’s How He’ll Win
< the election|300|35|The many ways Trump could steal the election>
Donald Trump could win a second term as president outright, but if he doesn’t, he and his legions of supporters intend for him to win anyway. In preparation for stealing the presidency, they have purged voter rolls of persons likely to vote Democratic, made registration of new voters difficult, installed partisan election officials throughout the country, pressed for hand- rather than machine-counting of ballots to make cheating easier, filed over a hundred lawsuits to challenge election results, and spread lies about migrants voting as a way to destroy public trust in the United States electoral system.
Trump has laid down a surfeit of falsehoods to portray the Democrats as the actual malefactors. At a rally in Wisconsin:
”They’re going to cheat. They cheat. That’s all they want to do is cheat, and when you see this, it’s the only way they’re going to win.”
In Arizona, Trump told rallygoers,
“The only way they can do anything is if they cheat like hell, and we’ve been victims of that.”
He said much the same in North Carolina, and again in Michigan.
“The radical left Democrats rigged the presidential election in 2020, and we’re not going to let them rig the presidential election in 2024”.
No examples of cheating nor evidence of rigging are ever offered, and Trump, caught off-guard, had to admit to a reporter’s question the other day that he wasn’t so far aware of any cheating. But it works with a right-wing electorate that never questions whatever Trump tells them. The New York Times canvassed some Trump adherents at an Ohio county fair and heard from one elderly couple from Medina that, “Democrats are crooked, and they’re stooping to all sorts of ways to try to stay in office. It’s obvious”. That it was Trump who tried to stay in office seems to have been scrubbed from memory. A woman, age 55, said of Democrats cheating, “Why wouldn’t they do that? Anything to further their agenda, which is to get into office and stay there.”
the great purge
Since the 2020 election and for years before, Republicans have worked to make it difficult for certain groups to vote – groups who tend to vote Democratic.
Activist Republicans have for years been challenging state voter rolls — to force removal of however many voters they can in liberal counties. In Pittsburg a single Trump activist has filed challenges to more than 25,000 people, mostly those whose address changed.
True the Vote, the group that produced “2,000 Mules” (and had to admit in court that the film had no evidence to support its fraud claims) equipped volunteers with a web-based app that supposedly “identifies ineligible records”. The group says this has resulted in 640,000 challenges across 1,322 counties.
In Georgia alone there have been several hundred thousand challenges over the last few years, a state where the margin of loss for Trump in 2020 was less than 12,000.
Restrictions, repressions
Since 2020, 36 states have passed laws that expand voter access through measures such as mail-in ballots, drop boxes, and fast track voter registration. Working against that, 27 states have increased restrictions, such as tightening voter ID requirements and shortening the window for early voting. Georgia infamously banned distributing water to voters at polling sites. Tennessee and Alabama banned registration forms pre-filled with a voter’s name and other details to make registering easier.
Under the pretext of stopping non-existent fraud, Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation that imposes fines as steep as $250,000 if the exacting rules for submitting new registrations are violated. A fine of up to $2,500 can be levied for nothing more than a mistake on a submitted registration form.
Proponents say the law is to punish companies in the business of signing up voters who have an incentive to boost fees by creating phony registrations. But fear of fines has caused new sign-ups by volunteer groups to plummet — far more among Blacks, Latinos, and college students — groups more likely to vote Democratic — than Whites. Through May there were only 5,900 new registrants, per the Florida Department of State, compared with figures as high as 63,000 in one of the five years preceding.
n Kansas, which passed a similar law, “Now, we haven’t been able to register anyone”, according to the head of a group created to mobilize the state’s young voters.
That’s the stage that’s been set for November 5th.
Election Day
Just as in 2020, Donald Trump will declare himself to be the winner on election night.
In that election, a number of states had eased mail-in ballot restrictions so that voters would not have to cluster in lines while Covid-19 raged. Cautious Democrats availed themselves of the mail-in option far more than Republicans, who preferred in-person voting on Election Day. Mailed and drop-box ballots take time to count, with final results unknown until days later; Pennsylvania, for example, doesn’t allow counting even to begin until Election Day morning.
When the counts of mailed-in ballots rolled in across the night, eclipsing his lead, Trump said that was proof of the claims he had made for months that there would be hundreds of thousands of fraudulent mailed-in ballots. Claiming that the election had been rigged against him, around 2:00 a.m. of the following morning he stood before his supporters and said, “Frankly, we did win this election”.
This carefully planned ruse would become the principal basis for the claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Tens of millions of Republicans cling to the myth and forego any attempt to find evidence because there is none to be found.
On election night we can expect the same drama. Despite the Republican Party encouraging use of mail-in ballots in this year’s election to try to even the ratio, the Democrat-Republican skew remains much the same. Trump will lead early in the night and declare victory. Then the mailed ballot counts against him will begin to roll in. Given how close the race is, though, this time the Democrats’ mailed ballots might not overtake him.
Let’s say they do, for the sake of predicting what Trump will do if declared the loser. Let’s say that Harris wins enough unofficial Electoral College votes to put her over the top.
Groundwork
To get on court dockets some 125 lawsuits have already been filed by the Trump campaign, said one press report. Fraud claim will this time contend that Harris won illegitimately because Biden has allowed hordes of migrants into the country to vote the Democratic ticket. Countless times, Trump has said,
”Right now you have illegal aliens coming into our country and many from prisons, and many from mental institutions, and they wanna give them votes.”
Republicans offer no instances of Democrats fraudulently registering undocumenteds to vote, but Trump said, in the debate with Kamala Harris:
”They’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in practically and these people are trying to get them to vote.”
In Michigan:
”They are working full time to sign these people, many of them murderers, to vote so they can cheat on the election.”
Even the Speaker of the House shills for Trump, saying on CBS’s “Face the Nation”, “I think there is going to be some cheating in this election and I think non-citizens are going to vote”.
For the record, it is illegal for a non-citizen to vote or attempt to in a federal election. What is seldom said out loud, however, is that most jurisdictions throughout the United States require only that a person swear to citizenship; proof in the form of a passport or a birth certificate is seldom required. Still, why would an undocumented person swear citizenship in the face of fines, prison, and deportation? John Oliver, the British transplant commentator, lampoons the absurdity of the contention:
”You really think people would flee their homes, travel under dangerous conditions to enter this country, just to vote?”
The number of non-citizens who have wrongfully cast ballots is miniscule. Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, who was on the other end of the phone call by Trump in 2020 asking that Raffensperger find 11,780 non-existent votes so that Trump could win that state, had a complete audit of the state’s voter list done as recently as 2022. Out of millions of voters, only 1,500 were found to lack proof of citizenship, and of those the number who had voted in elections was zero.
However unsuccessful, lawsuits alleging, with no evidence, that non-citizens are voting in large numbers serve a second purpose. They will instill the belief among Republican voters that the American election system is a fraud. Trump’s lie has already succeeded. A Scripps/Ipsos poll asked “How concerned are you about non-citizens voting illegally?” 51% said they are concerned. For Republicans it is 83% — proof enough that so many Americans are ignorant of how elections work and just believe whatever Trump tells them. Convinced that non-citizens have been allowed to vote will have them believe that any and all further action by Trump to overturn the election is justified.
refusal to certify
For the coming January 6th, the Trump campaign has put in place a weapon superior to the one that failed four years ago. This time, an assault on the Capitol won’t be needed.
Instead, the Republican Party has implanted officials on election boards all across the country who are poised at the local level to block certification of the vote if Trump is not victorious. An investigation by Rolling Stone identified…
“In the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania . . . are at least 70 pro-Trump election conspiracists currently working as county election officials who have questioned the validity of elections or delayed or refused to certify results.”
We will hear claims that something was not right, that there are “irregularities”. Recounts or court challenges are the available means to settle disputes, but “I think we are going to see mass refusals to certify the election”, lawyer Marc Elias told Rolling Stone. “Everything we are seeing about this election is that the other side is more organized, more ruthless, and more prepared.” Elias is in charge for the Democratic Party of combating this widespread subterfuge, of developing a counterforce of lawyers to take the deniers to court.
Georgia is the most pronounced example of the decertification stratagem. A majority of three “fervent Donald Trump loyalists”, by one account, sit on the state election board that has adopted a rule allowing any of the local election boards of the state’s 159 counties to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” before certifying their election results. They have followed this with another rule that allows those local boards to demand “all election-related documentation” before certifying the results. Donald Trump has praised the trio calling them “pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.”
Georgia law unequivocally says those local jurisdictions “shall” certify the vote counts. A judge has stepped in to say certification is mandatory. But there are six other battleground states and the clear intent of the Trump campaign is to enlist local county boards in a scheme to drift past deadlines and fail to certify citizens’ vote. The Republican Party is out to capture the country by any means. They have already tested the scheme by refusing to certify in 10 counties in the 2022 primaries. These few lost in court, but after November 5th, there would be Elias’s “mass refusals” to deal with. And the Democrats’ lawyers will bump up against Trump-appointed judges.
Here’s the scenario: Harris leads narrowly in a battleground state. The Trump campaign swoops in with a barrage of ads and lawsuits claiming fraud, that thousands of non-citizens have voted, that uncounted ballots should be thrown out. The Trump campaign pressures counties where they’ve installed Trump-partisan officials to slow-walk certification past the December 17th deadline when the 3,000 counties across the U.S. must submit election results. Missing districts, the state does not qualify for all its electoral votes. The state’s governor submits a slate of electors voting for Harris as the statewide winner (the governor in five of the seven battleground states is a Democrat). But capitalizing on failure to certify, or simply going rogue on its own against the opposing party governor, the state’s Republican-controlled legislature steps in to override the voters’ choice and picks its own slate of electors to submit to Washington.
January 6th
Vice President Kamala Harris, momentarily in the role of president of the Senate, is charged by the Constitution to count the Electoral College votes. In 2022, Biden and Congress reformed the Electoral Count Act of 1887, making it more difficult for certification to be disrupted. It makes it unequivocal that the vice-president’s role is no more than ceremonial, with no privileges beyond counting the votes; it replaces the rule that a single House member and a single senator can together challenge a state’s submission with the requirement that a fifth of each body’s members must ally to do so. Still, given the lock-step subservience to Trump that Republicans show, rounding up the 87 House members and 20 senators that the new rule requires might not be all that difficult.
It’s an open question what Vice-President Harris should do should she be confronted by two competing elector rosters from a state. Should she turn it back to Congress, then and there in joint session, to vote? Should she favor the governor’s submission, because that has always been how it’s done? Or the legislature’s slate, because Article II of the Constitution gives oversight of the choice of electors to a state’s legislature.
To resolve this conundrum, the Supreme Court might invite itself, and we would have another 2000 election as when the Court stopped the count in Florida and handed the presidency to George W. Bush. With its 6-to-3 conservative imbalance, it’s not hard to see whom the Court would pick.
Or, finally, if the Trump campaign succeeds to cause a state or two to fail certification causing removal from the Electoral College tally, the worry is that neither candidate will reach the 270 votes needed to win the presidency. That is a more than conceivable strategy by the Trump plotters because the vote for who is to be named president would then go to the House of Representatives. There, the Constitution gives each state just one vote. Wyoming, with its population of 584,000 gets one vote, California with 39 million gets one vote. Republicans control the majority of the states — the governorship, the state senates, the state legislatures. Trump supporter and House Speaker Mike Johnson, who led 147 in Congress to vote for Trump on January 6th of 2020, gavels Trump as the next president.
Trump disciples will of course believe fraud is the reason for decertification, having been told nothing of the conspiracy by the media sources they follow exclusively. From the missteps after the 2020 election, Trump and his allies determined to seize power have learned how to exploit the weaknesses of the American system and its Constitution. He will take office this time with the license conferred by the Supreme Court to violate with immunity from prosecution any law he chooses.
