[The Soup Nazi]

And now, more details on the doomsday scenario. Tighten up for this one. From NPR (I also recommend reading in full "The Election That Could Break America", the article by Gellman linked below):

Trump 'Will Not Accept Any Result That Is Not A Victory,' 'Atlantic' Writer Says

October 1, 2020 2:37 PM ET
Heard on Fresh Air


In the first presidential debate, President Trump was asked if he would refrain from declaring victory until the election has been independently certified. He refused to make that commitment.

Atlantic writer Barton Gellman was not surprised.

"That's a man who won't leave," Gellman says. "There are many aspects of his past behavior and, frankly, his pathology that lead me to think this is an immutable decision on his part."

Gellman writes about the 2020 presidential election — and how he thinks it could trigger a constitutional crisis — in his latest article for The Atlantic. He notes that typically elections are ended when one candidate concedes to the other. It's a system, he says, that "presumes good behavior and presumes that a rational and well-meaning candidate will accept reality when it comes."

But Gellman does not trust a scenario that relies upon good faith from the president: "Trump is making as absolutely plain as he can that he will fight the mail vote, that he will try to get the vote count stopped, and that he will not accept any result that is not a victory for him."

At a rally over the weekend, Trump mocked the media for raising alarms about his earlier answer to a question about a peaceful transfer of power after the election. "Then they say, 'He doesn't want to turn over government' — of course I do. But it's got to be a fair election," he said, before repeating unfounded claims about widespread voter fraud.

Gellman says if the election is close, it could take weeks to determine the results in key battleground states as mail-in ballots are scrutinized for technical flaws and counted. If the president cries fraud and his supporters take to the streets, state legislatures could resolve to set aside the popular vote in their states and choose their own partisan delegations to the Electoral College.

While officials are preparing for a worst-case scenario, many believe the casting and counting of ballots will proceed normally, albeit more slowly, on election night.

"This is not going to be a normal election," Gellman says. "I think that preserving its legitimacy is going to take extra effort this year. Democrats are certainly aware of Trump's proclivities. They're certainly concerned about possibilities that he will cheat or try to hang on to power by means other than winning the most votes and counting all the votes. Trump has made it absolutely crystal clear that he does not want all the votes to be counted."

Interview Highlights

On a common misconception regarding Trump's threat to refuse to concede

It's a subtle difference, but an important one: The usual way people say it is that they fear that Trump will refuse to leave the White House if he loses. He'll refuse to give up the reins of power. And Joe Biden says, well, that's an easy one. If he loses and he stays there, someone will evict him. That will most likely be the Secret Service or the military. They'll say, "Excuse me, sir, but your lease has expired on this office. It's 12:01 on Jan. 20, and we're going to now assist you in departing." That works if there is a clear winner or loser.

The greater danger is that Trump is capable of using the powers of the presidency, and the powers of his invincible decision not to concede, to raise doubt whether a winner or loser has yet been established — that he can prevent the achievement of a decisive outcome, which is a far greater risk to the American system.

On the fact that mail-in ballots skew in favor of Democratic candidates

It is true that for about 20 years now, the so-called overtime count, which is the count of the late reporting precincts, the provisional ballots and the mail-in or absentee ballots, that overtime count has shifted towards Democrats for reasons that are not entirely explained by the literature, but are technical ones. ... Trump has accentuated that this year by signaling to Republicans that he's against mail-in ballots and that they're corrupt, and by signaling to Republicans as well that the COVID pandemic is not as serious as the scientists say it is. And so Democrats, concerned about their health, are intending to use mail ballots at much higher rates than Republicans are, because Republicans have been pushed away deliberately by Trump from the mail-in ballots. So that now a mail-in ballot by proxy is likelier to be a Democratic ballot, because of underlying circumstances and because of Trump's shaping of the electorate. So his lawyers will know that if they are stopping the count of mail ballots, they are, on balance, almost certainly helping the president.

On how some states have to wait to process mail-in ballots until Election Day

Some [states] say Election Day morning. Some [state laws] even say ... they can't start until Election Day evening. And it has been part of the Republican litigation strategy in 41 states over the past year to prevent state law from allowing more time in advance of the election to open the early arriving ballots.

So the Trump campaign has actually helped make it less likely that those ballots will be counted on time on election night, because if they said you could start two weeks earlier ... if the administrators could do all the verification and simply leave them ready to feed into the machine for counting, they could do that as they came in, as they can, for example, in Florida, because of state law there. ... The Florida vote is expected to be pretty well-known by the end of election night, because Florida will have presorted all the mail-in ballots. That's what state law says there. But the Trump campaign has opposed that method when other states have proposed to change it right now.

On how representatives might go about challenging mail-in ballots

Both Democrats and Republicans are allowed to have a representative at the time that these ballots are processed. The Republican strategy is going to be to challenge each and every mail in-ballot if they can find any reason at all to do so. And so the administrator will pull out one ballot from this, this pile of hundreds of thousands in any given state, or millions given the state, and they'll do this by county, I suppose. And the Republican representative will say "Object. Signature doesn't match." And then everyone will sort of squint over the squiggly lines [and], without the benefit of any expert training, have to try to decide is that signature a good match or not a good match? "That postmark is illegible. You can't prove that it was mailed in time." So I think you may see postmarks or missing postmarks or poorly printed postmarks becoming the new sort of hanging chads of this election. That's the way the vote-by-vote challenge is going to go.

On both parties being ready for litigation

The two sides have each hired hundreds of lawyers and recruited thousands of lawyers as volunteers for what they believe is going to be a multistate cluster of litigation on the scale that took place in Florida in 2000, which was monumental. That was one state. The expectation is that there could be several states on which the result hinges and the vote is close, and the margin of litigation is sufficient that both sides are going to pour in all the effort they can in litigating the rules and the vote count.

(continues...)