What If Trump Loses and Tries to Steal the Election

Last night I was listening to satellite radio and heard an interview of Garrett M. Graff, a journalist, historian and best selling author who has written a very lengthy piece at Politico that looks at what Americans may face if Donald Trump tries to steal the election and/or refuses to leave office.  America has never faced this type of threat before nor has it ever had such a malignant individual occupy the White House. Personally, I have zero faith that Trump will quietly submit to the will of the majority of Americans nor do I have faith that Congressional Republicans will honor their oaths of office since they have ignored them for most of the last almost four years.  Indeed, we may be less than two weeks away from what might in the past have been considered a fictional political thriller. Decent, moral Americans have every reason to fear what the malignant liar-in-chief may attempt.  The best way to prevent troubles is to vote early in person, if possible and hope for a Biden landslide that will forestall Trump's efforts to steal the election - and have the added luxury of trashing Trump's sick ego.  Here are lengthy article highlights:

The coronavirus pandemic was always going to make the 2020 election uniquely complicated, and Donald Trump’s norm-busting style was always going to make it tense, but headlines in recent days have started to read like political thriller plot lines. We’ve seen Iranian skullduggery, dummy ballot boxes and mysterious threatening emails. Congressional Democrats are pleading with the military to respect a peaceful transition of power. A poll shows that barely a fifth of Americans believe this year’s election will be “free and fair.” There’s concern about violence, especially by militias and white supremacists. Some Americans are even laying in extra food and water, fearing what comes next.

Americans have little experience navigating disputed elections at this scale, and none at all doing so with a president hinting he might not leave office if he loses.

So what could we really be in for after November 3? Beyond a vague, crippling sense of dread, a feeling informed by hours of late-night doom-scrolling, what could actually go wrong?

Three months ago, POLITICO Magazine surveyed experts about what could go wrong on Election Day itself—from voter suppression to sinister “poll-watchers” to complete voting chaos—and as the day approaches we asked more than a dozen election, constitutional and national security experts about the concrete problems they’re planning for once the polls close.

Some have already been involved in “wargaming” scenarios for a bitterly contested election; others have been busy gathering legal memos to plan for this contingency or that or enlisting corps of lawyers and observers to deploy on Election Day and to any trouble spots in the days that follow. Their fears run from a narrow election night Trump lead in Arizona to a reprise of the 2000 “Brooks Brothers riot”—this time with AR-15 rifles—to the outsized importance that might weigh on Montana’s sole congressional race if the presidential race ends up in the House of Representatives.

“Every nightmare scenario begins with the early states not being decisive and the absentee vote in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin being outcome determinative. We’ll know within four hours of polls closing whether we live in that world.”

“If Biden wins by 2, 3, 4 points, we’re in this world,” says one Democratic strategist who spoke anonymously to avoid letting on that his group is involved in preparing for a contested election. “The 4-to-6-point range is still pretty significant. Even if there are no shenanigans and it’s a clean count, the Electoral College bias probably requires getting to 3 or 4-point margin of victory for a Democrat before you win the Electoral College too.”

What should we start worrying about, and when? Below, we’ve pulled their insights into a chronological guide: What to watch for in the minutes, days, weeks and months after voting ends on Nov. 3.

Few scenarios seem more likely, and more indicative of trouble ahead, than the candidates rushing out on election night to claim victory long before the votes are fully counted. “If you think about the fog of war in the 24 hours after the polls close, there’s going to be a competition to explain what’s taking place by the candidates, the news media, perhaps even foreign actors,” Stanford’s Persily says.

Changes in voting behavior and reporting patterns in recent years have led to what political scientists have taken to calling the “blue shift” or “red mirage”—a rush of Republican votes reported early that give way to more Democratic votes as more jurisdictions and ballots are counted. . . . . States like Arizona, for instance, have consistently seen a move of about 4 points in favor of Democrats as final votes are tallied. Nationally, when Trump took the stage to declare victory at 2:49 a.m. ET in 2016, he led Hillary Clinton by a million votes—57 million to 56 million—but the final tally had Clinton beating him in the popular vote by nearly 3 million, 66 million to 63 million.

[O]ne major anxiety is that Trump will seize on early favorable results to declare victory—before the election has been called either way—and point to any later shift as evidence of fraud. “After the votes are in, the game on his side is tell a different narrative about what happened—there was fraud and we won—and provoke an antagonistic or violent reaction to precipitate a law and order crisis,” says one election strategist, who worries Trump could then put pressure on states to shorten their counts.

The major social media sites are already planning to take steps to block such premature claims from spreading: Facebook will prohibit post-election “victory” ads on election night that are not backed up by independent assessments, and Twitter is preparing to label tweets that, in its words, “claim an election win before it is authoritatively called.” Activists, though, worry that such moves don’t go far enough: A coalition known as Accountable Tech argues that Facebook’s groups function is ripe to be weaponized by bad-faith claims of electoral victory.

North Carolina and Florida, two key bellwethers, both will likely report results relatively quickly on election night itself; early victories for Biden in either or both states will hint that Biden might be the clear winner within a day or so. And while a Trump win in either or both states wouldn’t necessarily foreclose an eventual Biden victory, it would likely mean that the nation would be in for a long period of uncertainty. And the longer the uncertainty, the greater the risk of, well, a lot of other problems cropping up.

It’s unlikely that in all but the biggest blow-out victory that the loser will concede this year on Tuesday evening, as is traditional, and so both parties will spend the night hunkered down in their respective legal and political war rooms, analyzing results and receiving reports from the field to determine what, if anything, will be worth disputing in the days ahead. Thus, the major threats in the first 24 hours or so after the polls close will likely take place in the streets or online.

The pandemic has raised numerous concerns this year about the threat from armed right-wing militias—groups more accurately described as domestic terror threats—that are primed to see Democratic or deep-state conspiracies in any results that don’t go their way. How—if at all—this threat manifests itself both during and after the election depends, in part, on where controversy erupts. Michigan and Arizona have particularly active histories with such groups, whereas, for instance, the threat is considered less in North Carolina or Pennsylvania.

Activists on the left have their own “Stopping the Coup” guide floating around online, urging quick action if Trump tries to claim a false victory or shut down an extended vote counting period.

Once street protests over the outcome of the election begin, they may be hard to turn off—particularly if Trump seizes on the civil unrest for a heavy-handed federal crackdown akin to this summer’s protests in Washington, D.C.

McCord says her main concern is that under normal circumstances, the nation’s leaders would be the primary voice for calm—but that this year, Trump has already indicated his willingness to stoke violence. “He’s probably going to egg it on, actually,” she says.

The post-election period will offer a fresh opportunity for [Attorney General] Barr, who has regularly falsely warned of voter fraud and promulgated odd claims to stoke worries about the legitimacy of elections, such as erroneously saying his department had indicted a man in Texas for falsely voting 1,700 times.

In the first hours after the polls close—or even before polls close—Barr’s Justice Department might seize on real, over-hyped or imagined questions of fraud or voting irregularities to publicly launch investigations that would help Trump build a narrative of an illegitimate election.

Earlier this month, more than 1,000 Justice Department alumni, from both Republican and Democratic administrations, signed an open letter saying they were worried about what Barr might do. “We fear that Attorney General Barr intends to use the DOJ’s vast law enforcement powers to undermine our most fundamental democratic value: free and fair elections,” they wrote.

[T]he biggest cyber threat is likely from groups pretending that they changed votes. The period of uncertainty after the election provides a ripe opportunity for malign actors—foreign or domestic—to attempt to undermine Americans’ faith in their own democracy. Accomplishing that doesn’t require the hard work of actually changing official vote tallies—which is hard to do and nearly impossible to do at scale given the decentralized nature of the U.S. voting system. Hackers might target news organization or state election websites to make it appear a losing candidate actually won—Russia attempted this very trick in a Ukraine election . . . .

Given Trump’s demonstrated proclivity to amplify false claims about the election, trouble could particularly arise from the second- and third-order effects of any such claims—for instance, if Trump, Barr, or state election officials use such disinformation to cast doubt on the election, launch investigations and court challenges, or even refuse to certify election results.

The biggest challenge here will likely be closely fought Pennsylvania, which as of a Monday night decision from the Supreme Court, will continue accepting ballots postmarked by election day for three days post-election. Across the country, questions will be arising about which ballots get counted and included in the final tallies. The drama is most likely to take place in counting offices and courtrooms, with legal teams squabbling over signature-matching, “naked ballots” and other suddenly crucial quirks of local election rules.

In Pennsylvania, media and election officials are racing to educate voters—candidates are even literally posing naked—about the need to put their ballots inside a “secrecy envelope” and warning that under an antiquated law so-called “naked ballots” will be discarded; election officials had tried to suspend the rule, but lost a court fight against the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee.

Experts have their eyes on Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, crucial swing states that will likely be slow to report results because of their limited ability to process absentee ballots ahead of time. Nevada is mailing all its voters ballots, resulting likely in a slow count, too. There’s a scenario in which, if Trump wins every state he carried in 2016, he will net 260 electoral votes on election night itself and then the nation will settle in for the count—and the fight over the count—in those four remaining battlegrounds.

[O]fficials and experts worry that this year’s political tension and national backdrop might mean threats or acts of violence or targeted online or real-world harassment of election administrators, both at work and at home. “We expect and fear that there will be intimidation of vote counters,” the NAACP’s Ifill told the Aspen Institute audience last month. “Our fear is that this year rather than wearing khakis, they will be strapped with AR-15s. It’s critical to engage with attorneys general, with governors, to prepare to protect the election counters the week after so that we can ensure that all absentee votes are counted.”

If there are major legal fights post-election and challenges about vote counts, it’s almost certain that such disputes will end up at the doorstep of the Supreme Court. If Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed in the coming days, as the Republican Senate seems set to do, that would mean a decisive 6-3 Republican majority on the court, three of whom are Trump appointees. Trump has already made clear that’s exactly the line-up he wants to be judged by amid any election problems. . . . . The key figure to watch here could be Chief Justice John Roberts, who has worked carefully in recent years to preserve the court’s reputation as a neutral arbiter, even if that means siding with the more liberal justices on controversial issues, and would be under immense pressure from both sides in any post-election court cases.

Trump has attempted to throw all manner of sand into the gears of American democracy—hinting, if he wins, he might run for a third term, refusing to commit to a peaceful transition of power and repeatedly preparing his supporters for a moment where he refuses to concede the election.

Most voters don’t realize that the official process of counting, reporting and certifying state election results takes weeks every election, even when the winner is perfectly clear. If an early winner emerges in November, it’s unlikely (but not impossible) that the election will be derailed by this process.

Precise dates vary by state, but sometime in November or early December, each state has an official like the lieutenant governor or secretary of state officially certify the results, the official stamp-of-approval that makes clear who the electors are bound to vote for on December 14. Given enough controversy over voting results, or some nakedly partisan proclivities to usurp the process, it’s possible to foresee a scenario where state officials in, say, Florida, might refuse to officially certify the results—thereby casting the validity of state electors into doubt and potentially robbing a winning candidate of the 270-vote majority necessary to be declared president-elect.

Such a move, though, would hardly take place in a vacuum—it would almost certainly be preceded by a series of cascading problems or controversies upstream in one or more crucial states, and would almost certainly be met with legal challenges. And, it’s ultimately up to Congress to decide which electors to accept, so it’s not even clear that such a move would have a meaningful impact on the outcome.

This year, though, there’s a potential different twist in the Electoral College: The threat of Republican legislatures replacing Democratic electors before they have a chance to vote at all. In an article earlier this fall in the Atlantic, Barton Gellman reported that Republican operatives and the Trump campaign are “discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority. With a justification based on claims of rampant fraud, Trump would ask state legislators to set aside the popular vote and exercise their power to choose a slate of electors directly.” Those loyal electors, chosen by the state legislature, would then presumably vote for Trump over Biden, actual results be damned.

Any such plan, however far-fetched and damaging to democracy, would hinge on (a) Trump’s losing, (b) his or the GOP’s casting enough doubt about the outcome and real vote totals that state legislators would feel OK enacting what would be a constitutional coup, and (c) the validity of those electors sustaining an inevitable court and congressional challenge. . . . . And the Supreme Court itself has already said in an unrelated case this year that “legislatures no longer play a role” in choosing electors, which would make the court battle to sustain a legislature overruling the popular vote an uphill battle in the extreme.

Many aspects of the election would have had to go sideways before Congress get involved in any more than a ceremonial way, but the 12th Amendment outlines a narrow set of circumstances in which the House of Representatives and Senate end up choosing a presidential victor if there’s no majority in the Electoral College . . . . The congressional election of a president is a process that’s known as a “contingent election,” and it hasn’t been used for the presidency since 1825. In the scenario of a “contingent election,” the House votes for the president and the Senate chooses a vice president, meaning it’s entirely possible, if the opposing parties each control one chamber of Congress, for the two to be of opposing parties.

In the House, each state gets a single vote—meaning that the presidency would likely fall to whichever party controls the majority of state delegations come the new Congress. (The District of Columbia, which normally gets three electoral votes, would be sidelined and cut out of the process in the House.) Nancy Pelosi is already laying the groundwork for such a fight: Right now, Democrats are outnumbered 22 states to 26; Pennsylvania’s delegation is equally split, and Michigan’s delegation is complicated by the wild card of independent, and Trump, foe Justin Amash. “We’re trying to win every seat in America, but there are obviously some places where a congressional district is even more important than just getting the member into the U.S. House of Representatives,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a constitutional lawyer, told POLITICO last month.

If the election looks likely to come down to the House in January, pay special attention to the outcome of state congressional races where Democrats currently hold just a one- or two-seat advantage—places like Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada and New Hampshire—as well as Florida and Wisconsin, where Republicans currently hold a narrow lead in the state’s delegation. Pennsylvania is already expected to become a majority Democratic delegation in November, and if Democrats manage to flip the sole congressional seat in either Alaska or Montana, those single at-large seats would secure an entire “delegation” vote in any continent election. A Democratic wave at the congressional level might prove decisive come January 6.

As much as catastrophists and nervous Democrats skitter about the possibility of a defeated Trump refusing to leave office, the reality is that even if he proves a sore loser, the worst-case scenarios seem vanishingly unlikely.

Presidential power shifts automatically under the Constitution at noon on January 20—it’s not like Trump has to sign a resignation letter or turn over the keys to the presidential limo—and there’s nothing that Trump could do to delay that or prevent his successor from then utilizing those powers. If he loses, as of noon on January 20, Trump would be trespassing at the White House, subject to arrest and removal by the Secret Service the same as anyone who jumps the Pennsylvania Avenue fence.