Vote Fraud

Donald Trump suggested in a tweet this week that due to the risks imposed by the threat of the coronavirus with in-person voting and in an abundance of caution about the possibility of fraud due to mail in voting, perhaps the November election should be postponed.  He doesn't have authority to do it, but it's not far fetched to think that he inspired the Hong Kong government who the next day announced that they would be postponing their own elections for a year to the objections of the pro-democracy opposition.

The reasons behind Trump's sudden concern about the threat of COVID-19 in the context of voting (he hasn't demonstrated a great deal of concern about the virus in any other contexts to this point) can easily be discerned by a glance at the polls.  At the moment, as the walls come crumbling down, the country is registering disapproval at Trump's handling of the crisis.  The economy is tanking.  People are hurting worse than they were at the end of his predecessor's 2 terms in office and voters are not happy about it.  Things can and will change in the time left in the 2020 campaign -- it would be foolhardy to guess how at this juncture-- but if the election were held today, or alternatively if things don't improve in the next 100 days, the results may not be as ambiguous as it would benefit Trump for them to be.

The aesthetics of a president postponing his own election in an ostensible democracy are not good.  Donald Trump couldn't care less about aesthetics or democracy, but it's legitimate to ask the question, what would be the harm of delaying the election? These are unprecedented times-- do they not call for unprecedented measures?   Indeed whereas 49 countries have proceeded as planned with their 2020 elections, 68 have postponed planned elections due to concerns about the coronavirus.  But the arguments for it are not just suspicious in the American president's case, but weak.

It would of course be too much to ask this administration to take the lead in ensuring that states actually secure a safe, fair, on time and accurate election in the face of the COVID-19 threat-- a threat largely of the administration's own making.  That initiative would require some vision, competence and leadership-- three qualities that were never seriously promised by the president, never demanded by the constituency that elected him and certainly not about to be delivered voluntarily at this stage of the game.  In the vacuum of leadership, many states have already been stepping up.  The 2020 primaries in many states were postponed during the first peak of the virus (not before Joe Biden's nomination was secured of course) but many states acted rapidly to tweak the process to promote voting by mail as a socially distanced alternative to in person voting, with virtually no fraud reported.

In spite of all evidence to the contrary, Trump and his minions persist in casting aspersion on the concept of mail-in voting.  Their goal is to delay the inevitable at worst; at best to stall until the economy can be propped up enough to make the inevitable somewhat avoidable.  Failing the postponement of facing the vote, they aim.not to ensure the integrity of the process but to undermine public confidence in the outcome.  It is all but a foregone conclusion that the proven effectiveness and fairness of mail-in voting will make it a primary feature of how the November election will be carried out. Credit for the success of the process to date is at least partially due to the US Postal Service itself-- one of the Federal Government's most consistently excellent public services.  Naturally the current administration would love to add dismantling the Postal Service to its list of dystopian accomplishments before November, but the clock is running out.

Tampering with an election should be more than an aesthetic violation in a democracy, but you have to wonder, is this a democracy?  Donald Trump was elected in 2016, and Hillary Clinton lost, because there was arguably a case to be made that Donald Trump as an amateur would have to be better than the more-of-the-same-and-then-some  that Hillary Clinton represented.  As it turned out, Trump was not a revolutionary; just an incredibly incompetent pretender and the results of his incompetence are lying in embers all around us.  Bernie Sanders offered himself as the locus for a bottom-up revolution that would restore the government to the hands of the people where it has always wanted to be, but in spite of the power of his message and the growing momentum behind the movement, the members of the political class united behind Sleepy Joe Biden, the elder (and I'm talking elder) representative of their tribe as their standard bearer, the rank and file obligingly fell into place and the dreams of  the "Not Me, Us" revolution were postponed yet again.  I'd like to know if revolution is possible as the ballot box.  If it is, then you have a democracy.  If it is not, then you do not..  

I fear we do not.