Trump Can’t Stop Talking About How He Plans to Steal the Election

With six days to go until the 2020 election, Donald Trump seems to have realized he has little chance of winning based on votes alone. So he‘s hoping that this year, the process by which the victor is determined plays out a little differently, in that not all the ballots are counted. Last night at a rally in Michigan, he once again baselessly suggested that mail-in voting is rife with fraud, asking the crowd “Who’s sending them? Where are they going? Who’s sending them back?” And on Wednesday, he just gave up the entire game:

“We’ll see what happens at the end of the day [on Election Day],” he told reporters. “Hopefully it won’t go longer than that. Hopefully the few states remaining that want to take a lot of time after November 3 to count ballots, that won’t be allowed by the various courts.”

Of course, in America, unlike in dictatorial countries that hold sham elections just for show, we count all the ballots that are cast. That’s particularly important this year, with COVID-19 scaring many people off from voting in person, and with the postal service curiously taking longer than usual to deliver stuff. And clearly, someone has alerted the president to the fact that the majority of ballots being sent via mail probably aren’t for him:

Democrats have amassed significant leads over Republicans in pre-Election Day voting in key states, raising the stakes for President Donald Trump, who will need blockbuster Election Day turnout to close the gap. Party registration doesn’t predict how individuals will vote. But the data shows that Democrats are following through on their strong preference for mail-in voting, while many Republicans still plan to vote in person on November 3.

Wednesday was obviously not the first time that Trump has explicitly described how he might steal a second term, regardless of the actual outcome of the election. Asked last month if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power even if he lost, the president told reporters, “Well, we’re going to have to see what happens. You know that. I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots, and the ballots are a disaster. Get rid of the ballots and…we’ll have a very peaceful—there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation. The ballots are out of control. You know it.”

As The Guardian notes, despite Trump’s open calls for the Supreme Court to determine the election, the most likely scenario is that voters will decide who is the next president, even if it takes a little while.

For all its flaws and added complications this year from the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. elections system has basic features to ensure a high correlation between the vote that is cast and the result that is announced. It is highly decentralized, with thousands of jurisdictions staffed by members of each major party, all using different technologies and independently reporting results, which can be reviewed or recounted, with both sides and the media watching out for irregularities before, during and after election day. It might take awhile, and the tragic story of disenfranchisement in the United States continues, but elections officials have vowed to deliver an accurate count.