The American democratic system - once thought so sturdy and robust, the envy of the world - has never looked so flimsy and fragile.
The Electoral College system itself, Byzantine in its unnecessary complexity and rife with internal inconsistencies, as I have explored in a previous post, is already quite capable of converting a substantial popular vote majority into an effective loss (as we have seen). The whole antiquated system is shot through with what I have charitably termed "vagaries", which are open to exploitation by capable but unscrupilous hands.
Another excellent article by Andrew Coyne in the Globe and Mail lists some of the many ways this system can be gamed or weaponized. Trump's plan, should he lose, is to tie up the election results in certain states in legal knots long enough to prevent the certification of Electoral College votes within the statutory time limit (as far as I can tell from what I have read, this is December 17th). Tame election administrators can be called on to refuse to certify apparently clear vote results, or Republican-controlled state legislators can be pressed into setting aside the results.
If neither party can be legally said to have won the Electoral College, the 12th Amendment of the Constitution allows for it to be thrown over to the newly-elected House of Representatives to decide. Of course, this is not by a normal majority of the House's members, but by a vote of its state delegations, i.e. one vote per state, of which the Republicans will probably hold a majority, regardless of the actual elected Representatives. Other options also exist, such as tossing out electors in some states to manufacture a Republican win despite the popular vote and even the Electoral College vote (yes, apparently it's technically possible). Did I mention Byzantine?
And it doesn't end with the Electoral College. Gerrymandered electoral districts make a mockery of one-person-one-vote rhetoric, and the Republicans in particular have been hard at work manufacturing more such inequities.
A badly-unbalanced Supreme Court is now stacked with extreme partisans willing to sacrifice judicial fairness and ethical judgement for partisan political advantage, as it has repeatedly demonstrated over the last few years. So. if any of the legal wrangling mentioned above ends up at the Supreme Court, you know how it will end before it even starts.
All this is well-known, but Trump and the current band of feckless Republican enablers have blown these weaknesses up into unprecedented dangerous territory with their willingness to pursue suspect and often downright illegal avenues of procedure in their lust for power.
Trump has made no secret that he will not accept a Democratic victory, even one that plays by the rules, Byzantine though they may be. He has repeatedly said that there is no way the Democrats can win without cheating, and has been preparing the way for such a claim for months now, laying the groundwork to challenge the results if he loses.
He is already claiming that election fraud is under way, from millions of fictitious illegal migrants voting Democrat to fraudulent overseas ballots to tampered election machines in swing states. According to him, all of these ploys are supposedly aiding the Democratic vote. None of it is true: despite what Trump says, electoral fraud is exceedingly rare in the USA, as several inquiries and court cases after the 2020 vote have confirmed.
What IS happening is widespread intimidation and harassment of voters and electoral workers by Republican "poll-watchers", who are being trained to be "assertive" and "aggressive" in their work. While monitoring elections might seem like a good idea in principle, extreme partisan monitoring can work against the stated goal of fairness. Armed and mask-wearing poll-watchers like we saw in Texas and Arizona in 2022 are not just trying to maintain fairness, and Republican poll-watchers in North Carolina were accused of blocking access to poll booths and generally disrupting the electoral process.
Some Republican states like Florida, Texas and Missouri, on the other hand, are refusing to let the normal Justice Department election monitors enter polling stations on election day. I'm not sure how legal that is.
The latest security twist comes from the Sheriff Lieutenant of Springfield, Ohio (yes the same place accused by Republicans of eating cats and dogs...), who has vowed not to help Democrats requiring security aid, only Republicans. It doesn't get much more ridiculous than that, does it?
Anyway, you can expect Trump to declare victory on Tuesday, whatever actually transpires. What happens then is extremely uncertain, but it will probably involve weeks of chaos and, quite likely, violence. We here in Canada like to denigrate our own political and electoral systems, and they are certainly not perfect. But God, am I glad I'm not American!
Half of the voting population of the United states appears quite content to vote in a guy they see as a "straight talker" who "tells it like it is" and who will release them from the "woke liberalism" that is strangling their starry-eyed notion of America. They seem oblivious, or wilfully ignorant, of what is happening behind the scenes, even though the information is out there. When the chaos and violence descends on their country, as surely it will, they will all have been complicit.
