Posted on 07/01/2020 10:07:50 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
We’ve had close elections before, but political experts are bracing for events that might be unprecedented come November.
Surprisingly large portions of both Republicans and Democrats seem poised to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election if their side loses. Some even favor authoritarian rule over elections as the best way to run the country. And a new worry for 2020 is the risk that more mail-in voting could delay official results well past Election Day, leaving voters wondering whether it will be Donald Trump’s agenda or Joe Biden’s, once January arrives.
New research by the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group finds that 38% of Democrats favor a do-over election if their candidate, Joe Biden, wins the popular vote this year but loses the electoral vote, as Hillary Clinton did in 2016. Among Republicans, 11% favor a do-over if Biden wins the electoral vote but President Trump wins the popular vote. In the U.S. system, electoral votes are awarded for each state a candidate wins, rather than for the national tally, and there’s no provision for a repeat election if there’s a split decision. The electoral vote carries the day.
If Trump wins and there’s credible evidence of interference by a foreign government—as there was in 2016, we now know—57% of Democrats say they’d back a do-over election. And if Trump lost but claimed there was voter fraud, 29% of Republicans say it would be appropriate if he refused to leave office.
“There are multiple contexts in which people might plausibly be mobilized to reject the legitimacy of the election,” political scientist Larry Diamond of Stanford University, who co-authored the Democracy Fund analysis, says in the latest episode of the Yahoo Finance Electionomics podcast.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
Will happen.
Wouldn’t that allow Trump to still be president while they fiddle who won the mail ins for 4 more years?
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