Trump’s Mail voting sabotage could result in “Nightmare Scenario”

Screenshot_2020-08-11trumpattacksMAILVOTINGYOUTUBE-GoogleSearch

[2020 Election]
Paul Gronke: “That is my nightmare scenario…he’ll claim victory, or he’ll start to claim malfeasance and fraud, lawyers will be climbing into airplanes and arriving in all these small jurisdictions, and it will be not good.”
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Imagine this election night scenario: With a decisive number of mail ballots yet to be tallied, President Donald Trump enjoys a narrow lead over Joe Biden. But before all the votes can be counted — a process that could take days — Trump declares victory, citing purported irregularities with mail-in votes.

You can even picture Trump insisting that the preliminary election night tally must stand as final with a tweet that reads similarly to the one he posted in November 2018, when Florida’s US Senate and gubernatorial elections were still undecided.

It might be hard to fathom that sort of authoritarian power grab happening here in the United States, but it’s a scenario that election experts are worried about.

“That is my nightmare scenario,” said Paul Gronke, professor of political science at Reed College in Portland and director of the Early Voting Information Center. “We gotta slow down. Trump’s gonna be tweeting, the media, you, all of your counterparts, have to slow down. Because he’ll claim victory, or he’ll start to claim malfeasance and fraud, lawyers will be climbing into airplanes and arriving in all these small jurisdictions, and it will be not good.”

Gronke’s concern was echoed by Ari Berman, a senior reporter at Mother Jones and author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America.

“Trump is still trying to tell his voters that they should vote in person, and Democrats are telling their voters that they should vote by mail,” Berman said. “And mail ballots take longer to count then in-person ballots. So you could very much have a situation where the initial returns make it seems like Republicans are way up, because the mail ballots that are largely cast by Democrats haven’t been counted yet.”

“If you had a situation where Republicans are up and Democrats take the lead based on mail ballots, even if that’s a totally normal situation, Trump is absolutely going to try to weaponize that, and claim it’s evidence of some sort of voter fraud or rigged election,” he warned.

Read the rest of this Vox story here: https://www.vox.com/2020/8/11/21358960/trump-mail-voting-sabotage-explained

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