2020/09/23/The Election That Could Break America
- when: 2020/09/23
- author: Barton Gellman
- source: The Atlantic
- topics: US/president/elec/2020 US/president/elec/2000 US/president/elec/1896
- keywords
- link: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if-trump-refuses-concede/616424/
- title: The Election That Could Break America
- summary: “If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result. Who will stop him?”
- Incidental Note: mentions the fact that the US was expecting an Al Qaeda attack when 9/11 happened - "Nineteen summers ago, when counterterrorism analysts warned of a coming attack by al‑Qaeda, they could only guess at a date."
Quotes
This is not a “both sides” phenomenon. In present-day politics, we have one party that consistently seeks advantage in depriving the other party’s adherents of the right to vote.
The 2020 presidential election will be the first in 40 years to take place without a federal judge requiring the Republican National Committee to seek approval in advance for any “ballot security” operations at the polls. In 2018, a federal judge allowed the consent decree to expire, ruling that the plaintiffs had no proof of recent violations by Republicans. The consent decree, by this logic, was not needed, because it worked.
Voter fraud is a fictitious threat to the outcome of elections, a pretext that Republicans use to thwart or discard the ballots of likely opponents. An authoritative report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, calculated the rate of voter fraud in three elections at between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. Another investigation, from Justin Levitt at Loyola Law School, turned up 31 credible allegations of voter impersonation out of more than 1 billion votes cast in the United States from 2000 to 2014. Judges in voting-rights cases have made comparable findings of fact.