5 ways the 2020 election threatens our democracy

Stephen H. Provost is a former newspaper editor, columnist and reporter. He’s the author of two books about Donald Trump: “Political Psychosis” and “Media Meltdown.” Both are available on Amazon.

The media continue to cover the 2020 election as though it’s typical. Voters continue to assume it is. We continue to blithely believe that “the system will work” the way it always has. This is more than just naïve. It’s an exercise wishful thinking that crosses the line into denial.

These five factors virtually guarantee a constitutional crisis, if not an outright failure.

The Virus

The most obvious of these is COVID-19, which has created a climate in which both sides are liable to question the results.

Democrats are far more likely to be concerned about COVID than Republicans are. This is in part because of policy/ideology. Democrats tend to be more concerned about health care, while Republicans are more likely to have libertarian leanings that emphasize personal freedoms over the common good.

Because partisan voters tend to play follow-the-leader, the gulf is even wider. Republican Donald Trump has repeatedly downplayed the risks posed by COVID (“I wanted to always play it down”). He typically refuses to wear a mask and holds rallies where social distancing is nonexistent. Democrat Joe Biden, meanwhile, hasn’t held any big rallies and usually does wear a mask.

As a result, Democrats are far more likely to vote by mail than Republicans, who have been spooked by Trump’s unfounded criticisms of absentee voting. In short, Democrats are afraid of the virus, while Republicans are scared of voter fraud, so they’re headed in opposite directions — to the mailbox on the one hand, and to the polls on the other.

Many states can’t start counting mail-in ballots until Election Day, and some can’t even start processing them (verifying signatures) until then. Four key swing states — Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire — fall into both these categories.

Other potential swing states, such as Colorado, Arizona, North Carolina, and Florida, can start verification and counting before Nov. 3, although no results can be announced until then. Ohio, which is likely but far from certain to break for Trump, but not falls into this category, too. And Texas, also a likely-but-not-certain Trump state, can verify ballots early but can’t start counting them until Nov. 3.

The upshot is that it’s possible for Trump to be leading, perhaps substantially, in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and New Hampshire when the polls close on Nov. 3. He flipped the first three of those to win in 2016, when he barely lost New Hampshire. So it’s possible that, on Election Night, Trump will be leading in more than enough states to claim a majority in the Electoral College, only to watch those leads evaporate as counting of mail-in ballots continued.

This would be less of a concern if Biden were to win five or six of the key states that allow early counting. But as of this writing, it’s entirely possible that he could lose five of them, with only Colorado appearing fairly solid for the former VP.

The Incumbent

Even if the results show a fairly clear victory for Biden on Election Day, Trump is likely to question the validity of all mail-in ballots, not just those that were counted late. Before a single vote was cast, he was calling the election “rigged,” signaling his supporters to reject the results if they didn’t favor him.

He and his donor/appointee, Louis DeJoy, created a post office crisis that blew up confidence in the USPS, giving rank-and-file Republicans further ammunition to dismiss any mail-in votes.

Trump has every incentive to discredit the results. For one thing, he risks losing his protection against criminal prosecution if he loses and is forced to leave office. For another, he can’t stand losing on a psychological level. He’s so averse to it that he never accepts it; rather, he claims victory, even when the facts clearly show he’s lost.

He’s done this time and again, most famously with the coronavirus. If he can insist that millions of infections and 200,000 deaths are a success and that the virus will just miraculously disappear, claiming victory even if the numbers say he’s far more than merely conceivable. You can count on it.

The Courts

Because Trump has a history of using the courts to escape the consequences of his failures, it sets up the likelihood that the courts will have to rule on the results. And they’ll have to do so quickly, because the Electoral College is set to meet on Dec. 14, barely six weeks after the election, and the electoral votes are scheduled to be tallied on Jan. 6.

In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Florida to stop a recount of votes mandated by that state’s high court and, in effect, declared George W. Bush the winner. That was nothing, though. Imagine that challenges in half a dozen states this time haven’t been resolved by Dec. 14.

Considering Trump’s penchant for litigation, that’s a very real possibility. He’s used the courts to avoid releasing his tax returns, prohibit members of his administration from testifying to Congress, and (in his private life) intimidate would-be opponents. The idea that he’d use them to challenge the results of the 2020 election isn’t speculation, it’s a virtual certainty.

The Public

Whichever way the election turns out, one side is bound to feel robbed.

Trump has preemptively declared the election rigged, assuming he’ll lose. He’s energizing his supporters to protest the result if he does, even giving a wink and a nod to heavily armed militia members such as Kyle Rittenhouse.

But if Trump wins, he’ll likely win the Electoral College but not the popular vote. That’s how he took office in the first place, and it’s also the formula George W. Bush used to win in 2000. If Trump were to win in this fashion, it would mark the third time in six elections that the presidency has been decided this way. So much for “one person, one vote.”

Protests would be sure to follow, making the women’s marches of 2017 look like small potatoes by comparison. And Trump has already indicated he’ll use force to suppress them.

So, violence is likely either way, whether it’s perpetrated by Trump-enabled militias or by authorized by Trump against protesters.

The System

The flaws of the Electoral College have been clear for some time, but the problem goes beyond this.

Gerrymandering — the act of creating “safe” districts for one party or the other — has resulted in rock-solid congressional districts that have given rise to more extreme candidates on both sides. The safer you feel, the more comfortable you are expressing your most extreme views. As those views are affirmed, the more rigid they become, and the more people are encouraged to believe them. As a result, socialism is no longer a dirty word among Democrats, and QAnon conspiracies are going mainstream in the GOP.

Gerrymandering is inherently anti-democratic. With fewer and fewer competitive districts, voting becomes irrelevant in many cases, just as it’s irrelevant in the vast majority of “solid” red and blue states, thanks to the Electoral College. As votes become less relevant, fewer people see a reason to vote. This trend feeds the decline of democracy further.

As the system becomes increasingly undemocratic, is it any wonder that elections are put at risk? Or that autocratic tendencies, the opposite of democracy, gain a foothold?

The system wasn’t built to deal with this. It wasn’t built to handle partisan politics at all: Washington, Adams, Hamilton, and Madison all warned against parties or factions and worked on the assumption that they wouldn’t arise. It was a faulty assumption.  

The founders took it for granted that Americans, who had just united to free themselves from a common enemy, would remain united from that day forward. They didn’t count on the fact that, without that common enemy, we would turn against each other — most prominently during the Civil War, but also in the segregated South and during Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist purges.

Like the founders, we’ve have taken for granted that partisans would put their country first, too. The Civil War was an anomaly, we tell ourselves, and the McCarthy era was a brief blip. We persuade ourselves, despite the evidence, that racism is a thing of the past. But such denials have blinded us to the dangers inherent in partisan fundamentalism. This is what happens when people on both sides stop viewing their political opponents as the loyal opposition, and start seeing them as “the enemy.

Trump’s divide-and-conquer mentality has fed this process. He came into office determined to shatter norms, much to the delight of his base. But those norms were there for a reason. Political opponents respected one another because they believed that both sides wanted the best for America, even if they disagreed on how to achieve it.

The system worked because of this implicit understanding, just as a sporting event works because both teams — though adversaries — agree to follow the same rules. They compete fiercely from start to finish, but once the game ends, they shake hands and accept the result (as Al Gore did following the Supreme Court’s decision in 2000). If you throw the rules out and refuse to accept the results, the game becomes meaningless.

That’s exactly what Trump has done repeatedly, and in doing so, he’s destroyed the guardrails that kept the system working. In asserting that the election is “rigged” before any votes are even cast, he’s flouting the rules, even as he manipulates them by using the courts to his advantage.

For all these reasons, it’s virtually guaranteed that the 2020 election will be at best a mess, at worst a constitutional failure.

I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am.

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Featured photo by Ted Eytan, Creative Commons license. Secondary photo by Tom Arthur, Creative Commons license.