The 2020 election may be the most anticipated and heated presidential election in modern American history. Cruelly, it may also be one of the most painfully drawn-out and disputed.
With a historic number of mail-in ballots and early votes being cast, it is possible we will not have a projected winner as early as Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, the typical timeframe surrounding modern presidential elections. This could even outlast the 2000 race between George Bush and Al Gore in which the winner wasn’t declared until December.
Fueling American anxieties is an incumbent president who explicitly undermines the mechanisms of the election and refuses to commit to a peaceful transition of power.
But for the Trump campaign, it’s all part of the plan.
Trump’s repeated baseless attacks on mail-in voting set the perfect stage for him to dispute the results of the election should they not fall in his favor. The president has already staked out his beliefs, stating “it’s a terrible thing when states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over.” Supplement that with GOP efforts to invalidate early and mail-in votes and it’s no wonder that 55% of Americans report feeling unconfident in the fairness of the election.
Ah, remember when we took our democratic norms for granted?
Democrats have been utilizing early voting and mail-in ballots at a significantly higher rate than Republicans. This means early Election Day results may disproportionately reflect support for Trump, providing ammunition for his conspiratorial claims of rigging in the event that the full count shows a different story.
According to reporting by Axios, the president has been privately planning to prematurely declare victory on election night. While it’s an unsurprising strategy for Trump, it is hard to overstate the potential danger of this tactic.
A report from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a group that studies political violence, warns that “militia groups and other armed non-state actors pose a serious threat to the safety and security of American voters,” citing an increase in these groups’ activities over the last several months.
These right-wing militia groups — or, as we should more accurately describe them, domestic terrorists — will become inflamed if Trump refuses to accept or casts doubt on the results of the election. This is especially true when Trump’s advisers are already spewing rhetoric about “post-election Democratic thievery,” which is apparently how the President of the United States views the counting of millions of citizens’ completely legitimate mail-in and early votes.
As anxious as Americans are, it is critically important that we exercise patience around the results of this election. Prematurely declaring a victory on either side would put stress on a country already tearing at the seams.
Some view Election Day as the bookend to a painful and chaotic era, but this next month may be even more difficult than we imagined. With inequalities exacerbated by a pandemic that has stolen over 231,000 American lives, the US is already undergoing the greatest political turmoil of this century. I’m not confident we can handle a disputed election on top of it all.
All around the country, people fear not only for the results of this election, but the health and credibility of our democracy — and that in itself is a damning indictment on this administration.
Let’s buckle up, America.
Claire Sullivan is an 18-year-old coastal environmental science freshman from Southbury, CT.
