The biggest fear heading into an intensifying election season is that Donald Trump and his cronies will try to steal a win by any means necessary in order to stay in power. Well, a longtime conservative columnist is now warning that Trump is setting up a “nightmare scenario” that he could execute on Election Night before all of the ballots are counted.
As we all know, Trump is currently waging war against mail-in voting, which has existed in the United States since at least the Civil War and has been an effective and safe voting method.
Trump, however, has falsely asserted on several occasions that voting by mail if rife with fraud even though he and several of his family members and staffers have voted by mail themselves for several years.
Voter fraud is extremely rare in this country, as many studies have demonstrated.
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But Trump has already taken steps to sabotage mail-in ballots via his top crony in the Postal Service. He has even admitted that he’s sabotaging the Postal Service to help himself get re-elected.
With that being said, Matt Lewis explained how Trump’s scheme would be put into play.
“Although we can expect that an influx of tens of millions of Biden ballots will start piling up long before Election Day, states have different laws regarding when the mail-in ballots can be counted,” he wrote in The Daily Beast. “And some states—including Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—don’t allow tabulations to begin until election day, which is to say you can’t keep a running count.“
Biden currently leads Trump in the polls in all of these battleground states, which means Trump may be even more motivated to do what Lewis calls a “nightmare scenario.”
“If you’re watching the news on election night—the way we’ve always done it—the first votes to be counted will very likely be Trump votes,” he wrote. “Now here’s where things go from messy to scary. As previously noted, we have all been trained to watch the news on election night—and to expect someone to be declared the victor. Even if we manage to overcome this age-old reflex, broadcasters will be compelled to show the only results they have—the Election Day results. This could give the false impression that Trump has shocked the world again. It’s absurd to think they won’t do this.”
Trump would then declare victory based on those results.
“This may sound pathetic and obvious and lame and defensive on his part, but this is Donald Trump we’re talking about,” Lewis noted. “And maybe 40 percent of the country will believe him. After all, they’re watching the results! And Trump has been warning about voter fraud for months!”
So even if the result ends up being a Biden victory after ALL of the votes are counted, Trump and his supporters are going to cry foul and could even get violent because they aren’t getting their way.
Lewis also pointed out that Attorney General Bill Barr will likely play a role in Trump’s scheme.
“It’s easy to imagine Trump’s attorney general casting aspersions on any ballots that aren’t counted on Election Day and issuing a report declaring Trump the victor,” Lewis continued. “If that happens, I’m 100 percent confident the brave Republicans in the U.S. Senate will stand up to Trump. (‘Uh, we’re gonna have to wait and see,’ said sycophantic Senator X, ‘but it does look like Democrats are trying to overturn the results of a fair election.)”
So, on top of all the other crises our country is facing, we can expect Trump to manufacture another crisis that could shatter our democracy forever.
“Our union is tenuous as it is,” he concluded. “The last thing we need is for another crisis over legitimacy.”
The media needs to take this election seriously and report results responsibly. States also must ensure that all ballots are counted in a timely manner. Trump is going to look for any reason to cry election fraud and declare himself the winner. That being said, this scenario would be harder to pull off if Americans vote in numbers not seen before and give Biden a landslide victory that is indisputable.
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
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