By Cameron Joseph
VICE News (12/27/19)
WASHINGTON — Welcome to 2020, which could be President Trump’s final full year in office. But those counting down to election day should probably stop now, because there’s a real chance we won’t know who won until well after Nov. 3.
A close election, possible recounts, and unusual voting laws in key states could very easily delay the results of the election and send the fight to the courts.
For example… If Trump loses Michigan and Pennsylvania, his two weakest states that he won in 2016, but holds onto every other state he won in 2016, he and his opponent will each have 268 electoral votes, two short of the 270 needed for election.
None of these events, taken alone, is super-likely to happen. But in what’s looking like a coin-flip election, any drama in the deciding states could force America to wait days, weeks, and potentially even months before we know who will occupy the White House for the next four years.
This, to put it mildly, would suck — both for campaign obsessives and for the nation as a whole.
Here are three plausible scenarios that could put the 2020 presidential election into overtime. …
(Commoner Call cartoon by Mark L. Taylor, 2018. Open source and free for non-derivative use with link to www.thecommonercall.org )
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The Nightmare Scenario: Trump Loses In 2020 And Refuses To Concede
Kentucky governor’s baseless voter fraud claims have experts worried Trump will do the same.
By Cameron Joseph
VICE News (11/16/19)
WASHINGTON — Democrats pulled off an upset win to take back Kentucky’s governorship earlier this month. So Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin tore a page out the Republicans’ playbook by insinuating voter fraud, refusing to concede, and claiming “a number of irregularities” cost him the election.
Call it the sore loser strategy, one that has become commonplace in the Trump era. Trump has long promoted conspiracy theories and made sweeping and baseless claims about voter fraud, which raises a question for 2020: What if President Trump loses and refuses to concede?
Experts fear at minimum it would further damage voters’ trust in democracy and at worst lead to a constitutional crisis.
“There are reasons to be concerned,” said Ned Foley, a constitutional law professor at the Ohio State University who specializes in the history of American contested elections. “Trump has talked about voter fraud in a way that’s not really reality based. That creates a reasonable fear that he might want to reject numerical results that are objectively [correct].”
Trump has hinted before that he’d reject any election loss. …