Opinion: Election security, or the engineering of distrust? | Ervin Hoskins/The Journal-Courier

By turning voting machines, classified intelligence, and alleged foreign interference into political theater, the Trump administration is preparing voters to distrust an election that has not yet taken place. Donald Trump has never treated elections simply as contests to be won or lost. He treats them as tests of legitimacy whose results are valid only when they confirm his political authority. His planned national address on the “integrity” of voting machines therefore should not be dismissed as another attempt to relitigate the 2020 election. It may represent something more consequential: an effort to establish, before the 2026 midterms, a rationale for challenging any result unfavorable to Republicans. The issue is not whether election systems should be protected. They should. Foreign governments have sought to influence American voters, spread disinformation, and deepen existing political divisions. Voting equipment, like every form of critical infrastructure, also requires testing, oversight, and investment. Read Article

Opinion: Trump clearly doesn’t know how elections are run in US | Chris Brennan/USA Today

It didn't take long for President Donald Trump's latest conspiracy rant about elections, this time dressed up like a national address on July 16, to start falling apart. Trump's claims about China meddling in American elections flopped, even as the documents he declassified inadvertently confirmed that Russia tried to influence our presidential elections in his favor. Ultimately, Trump offered zero proof that any votes had been changed in the 2016, 2020 or 2024 elections. But what really stood out is just how much Trump showed us he doesn't know about how elections are run in America. And this, too, matters – he doesn't seem at all interested in learning the ins and outs of elections, even as he has spent a decade trying to destabilize America's confidence in how we vote. David Becker, a former Department of Justice lawyer who founded The Center for Election Innovation & Research, told me the president's allegations in his speech were "remarkably flimsy." For Becker, a big takeaway was Trump's obvious, and maybe intentional, ignorance. "We've known for some time that the president just doesn't understand how elections are run and is resistant to learning," Becker said. "He has no clue about any of this stuff." Read Article

Opinion: The Roberts court is leading America backward on race | David H. Gans/Slate

Over a century ago, when the Supreme Court helped usher in Jim Crow, Justice John Marshall Harlan took his colleagues to task for betraying the promise of Reconstruction. Dissenting in Plessy v. Ferguson, Harlan insisted that “in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” In the Supreme Court term that just ended, the Roberts court turned Harlan’s anti-caste reading on its head. This court read the 14th Amendment, time and again, as the justification to lock in racial subordination and to immunize bias and prejudice from scrutiny. A big part of the story of the term that just ended is that this conservative supermajority will give the Reconstruction Amendments the stingiest reading possible. Read Article

Opinion | Trump’s Third-Term Jokes Deserve a Serious Response | The New York Times

When Republicans took control of Congress in 1947, they were still angry that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had won a fourth term in 1944, and they set out to pass a constitutional amendment to limit future presidents to two terms. John Jennings, Republican of Tennessee, stood on the House floor and said a 22nd Amendment was necessary to prevent a dictator from taking over the country. “Without such a limit on the number of terms a man may serve in the presidency, the time may come when a man of vaulting ambition becomes president,” Mr. Jennings said on Feb. 6, 1947. Such a man, backed by a “subservient Congress” and a compliant Supreme Court, could “sweep aside and overthrow the safeguards of the Constitution,” he said. Without such a law, a president could use the office’s great powers to tilt the political system in his favor and win repeated re-election. Eventually, that president could come to resemble a king, effectively unbound by the Constitution’s checks and balances. Read Article

Opinion: Trump’s Elections Power Play and the Voting Machines | Bob Bauer/Executive Functions

On March 25, President Trump issued a sprawling executive order on Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections. The order focuses on the “integrity” of federal elections. It repeats but does not substantiate Trump’s claims that our elections are rife with fraud, including extensive noncitizen voting. The order appears to be setting the foundation for presidential intervention in the administration of elections in 2026 (and beyond). And it does so in a plainly unlawful way by supplanting the states’ constitutional authority to regulate the “Times, Places and Manner” of elections except where Congress elects to prescribe its own rules for federal elections. The Constitution does not confer on the president any share in this rule-setting authority. Already 19 states and other plaintiffs have filed suits to challenge the order’s constitutionality. Read Article

Opinion: We can’t afford to defund election security | Pamela Smith/The Contrarian

As voters head to the polls in state and local elections across the country, a quiet but consequential threat is growing—one that transcends party lines and strikes at the heart of our nation’s most fundamental right: the ability to vote in free, fair, and secure elections. That threat is the weakening of our elections’ cybersecurity. When cyber-attacks are becoming more sophisticated than ever, the federal government is making cuts to the very agencies and programs designed to help state and local election officials defend against them. Chief among these is the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). CISA was created in the aftermath of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Since then, the agency has worked with election officials to combat cyber, physical, and other dangers—monitoring threats, testing systems’ vulnerabilities, providing training on best practices, and supporting rapid response to incidents involving elections at every level. But in February, 130 employees at CISA were fired and over a dozen more were put on leave. That’s only the beginning—the agency plans to cut as many as 1,300 additional employees of about 3,300 in the coming weeks. With these experts removed and installed in their place a teenage hacker, the call is now coming from inside the house. Read Article

Opinion: Stop gutting America’s cyber defense agency | Mark Montgomery and Johanna Yang/The Hill

The Trump administration’s cuts in cyber programs are putting national security at risk. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem defended such cuts in her confirmation hearing, saying that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency needed to be “smaller, more nimble to really fulfill their mission.” She is mistaken. Over the past three weeks, the agency has reduced staff, slashed budgets and terminated programs, with the administration suggesting that these cuts will “eliminate redundancies” and focus its work on “mission critical areas.” However, the cuts, imposed by the Department of Homeland Security, are in fact undercutting the agency’s core mission areas, weakening U.S. national resilience and casting doubt on America’s ability to repel, thwart and deter attacks in cyberspace. Read Article

Opinion: The New Authoritarianism – This isn’t single-party rule, but it’s not democracy either. | Steven Levitsky/The Atlantic

With the leader of a failed coup back in the White House and pursuing an unprecedented assault on the constitutional order, many Americans are starting to wrap their mind around what authoritarianism could look like in America. If they have a hard time imagining something like the single-party or military regimes of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, or more modern regimes like those in China or Russia, that is with good reason. A full-scale dictatorship in which elections are meaningless and regime opponents are locked up, exiled, or killed remains highly unlikely in America. But that doesn’t mean the country won’t experience authoritarianism in some form. Read Article

Opinion: Memory-Holing Jan. 6: What Happens When You Try to Make History Vanish? | Alec MacGillis/ProPublica

On Jan. 10, the U.S. Department of Justice released a 123-page report on the 1921 racial massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which claimed several hundred lives and left the thriving Black neighborhood of Greenwood in smoldering ruins. Only two weeks later, the department took a strikingly different action regarding the historical record of a violent riot: It removed from its website the searchable database of all cases stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol that were prosecuted by the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. These jarringly discordant actions were, of course, separated by a transfer of power: the inauguration of President Donald Trump, who swiftly moved to issue pardons, commute prison sentences and request case dismissals for all of the 1,500-plus people charged with crimes on Jan. 6, including seditious conspiracy and assaulting police officers. Read Article

Editorial: Fifteen Years Later, Citizens United Defined the 2024 Election | Marina Pino and Julia Fishman/Brennan Center for Justice

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court’s controversial 2010 decision that swept away more than a century’s worth of campaign finance safeguards, turns 15 this month. The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called it the worst ruling of her time on the Court. Overwhelming majorities of Americans have consistently expressed disapproval of the ruling, with at least 22 states and hundreds of cities voting to support a constitutional amendment to overturn it. Citizens United reshaped political campaigns in profound ways, giving corporations and billionaire-funded super PACs a central role in U.S. elections and making untraceable dark money a major force in politics. And yet it may only be now, in the aftermath of the 2024 election, that we can begin to understand the full impact of the decision. Read Article

Editorial: Republicans’ New, Dangerous Idea for Breaking the Election | Bob Bauer/The Atlantic

Only months before November’s elections, the Republican National Committee has launched a new legal attack on the rules that govern federal elections. Supported by 24 states, the RNC is seeking, on an emergency basis, a Supreme Court ruling that the United States Congress lacks the constitutional authority to regulate presidential elections—congressional elections, yes, but not elections held to select presidents. The petitioners’ immediate goal is to allow the state of Arizona to impose a “proof of citizenship” requirement as a condition of a person’s right to vote for president. If they are to succeed, the Court will have to suddenly, with mere weeks left before people start voting, abandon or explain away a decision it rendered in 2013—that Congress has the power to establish rules for voter registration in presidential elections. But even if the suit fails, it risks achieving some success in sowing doubt about the integrity of elections, highlighting claims of illegal voting by immigrants, and laying a foundation for post-election allegations of fraud and related legal challenges. Read Article

‘I felt ready to throw in the towel.’ Election officials are being chased from jobs | Tonya Wichman/Columbus Dispatch

Across the nation, election administrators are calling it quits. In addition to the everyday demands of overseeing elections, these officials are experiencing unprecedented harassment, intimidation, abuse and, sometimes, even death threats for doing their jobs. Their jurisdictions often lack sufficient staffing and resources to carry out their responsibilities amidst a hostile work environment. As a result of all this, an estimated one in four election administrators will conduct their first presidential election this year. Since 2015, I have been the board of elections director for Defiance County, leading my team in conducting local elections. Within my community and beyond, I advocate for our nation’s democracy, which is being shaken by a deepening distrust in the electoral process and the rampant spread of disinformation and misinformation. Read Article

Editorial: Threats on election workers surge ahead of presidential year | The San Antonio Express-News

Any threat against an election worker is a threat against democracy, and with the 2024 presidential election looming, the peril is real and chilling. Self-styled freedom fighters, confusing anarchy with patriotism, are attacking our single most important right — the vote. The polls give the people a voice, a say, in how government is run. To pervert that process is to squander our legacy of democracy. The targets are election workers who keep the machinery of democracy running. Some are well known, including secretaries of state who lead the effort throughout the country, but most are anonymous, and for good reason. They do their jobs so well that they attract little attention, whether positively or negatively. Read Editorial

Editorial: Conservative Supreme Court justices are threatening a post-election coup | Laurence H. Tribe and Steven V. Mazie/The Boston Globe

After handing down orders in a spate of challenges to states' efforts to make voting easier during the coronavirus pandemic, the Supreme Court is catching its breath. But the pause may be short-lived. In several opinions that conservative justices have issued over the past week, a radical idea is rising from the ashes, resurrecting language from one of the most fraught decisions in the court’s history. Four justices — Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas — have resuscitated a half-baked theory three justices espoused in Bush v. Gore to let Republicans trash ballots after Election Day. Chief Justice John Roberts has not joined his four colleagues in this misadventure. But if the recently seated Justice Amy Coney Barrett sides with the quartet, America could be in for a battle that makes Bush v. Gore look tame. By shutting down a recount in Florida that could have put Al Gore over the top in the 2000 election, the Supreme Court effectively handed George W. Bush the keys to the White House. The majority reasoned that disparate methods for interpreting the infamous “hanging chads” on Florida’s punch-ballots denied the state’s voters the equal protection of the laws, violating the 14th Amendment.

Full Article: Conservative Supreme Court justices are threatening a post-election coup - The Boston Globe

Editorial: The absurd legal theory conservative judges are using to restrict voting | Neal Katyal and Joshua A. Geltzer/The Washington Post

A novel legal theory is surging among conservative judges and justices. The notion is that, under the Constitution, only state legislatures — without any input from state executives or courts — may set the rules for presidential elections. This theory is clearly a misunderstanding of constitutional election law. But it’s actually worse than that: It fundamentally misapprehends how law itself functions. To imagine that the work of legislatures can be wholly isolated from the work of other parts of our government is a fantasy untethered from an inescapable feature of the American legal system: Law represents an interplay between legislators and those who must interpret and implement their handiwork, including judges and executive branch officials. Here’s what everyone agrees on: Article II of the Constitution says that “[e]ach State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct,” that state’s representatives to the electoral college, which chooses the president. No one disputes the basic reality that state legislatures typically take the lead in setting rules for the statewide elections that choose electors who, in turn, choose a president. But in the past couple of weeks, the focus on two words in that constitutional text — “the Legislature” — has been taken to fanatical extremes. Most recent — and most absurd — is a decision on Thursday by a federal court of appeals that, five days before Election Day (too late for the state to do anything to respond to it), abruptly changed the rule for Minnesota voters from a requirement that their mail-in ballots be sent by Election Day to a requirement that those ballots be received by Election Day, thus unsettling at the last moment both the law and voters’ expectations.

Full Article: The Minnesota voting ruling relies on an absurd conservative legal theory - The Washington Post

National: Who Owns Our Voting Machines? | Sue Halpern/The New York Review of Books

Buried in a dense government report from 1975 is an observation that has come to haunt the American system of voting. “Effective Use of Computing Technology in Vote-Tallying,” a hundred-page compendium of all that can go wrong when digital technology is used to register and count votes, was written by Roy Saltman, a computer scientist, at the behest of the National Bureau of Standards. At the time, computerized election technology was a shiny new thing, primed to replace time-honored manual ways of voting. But as Saltman observed, because this technology was beyond the comprehension of most election officials, they had little choice but to put their trust in, and cede authority to, equipment manufacturers. As a consequence, he wrote, “when vendors assume more responsibility than they should, due to the jurisdictions’ lack of in-house capability, situations may be created in which conflict of interest is a serious concern.” This is still true. The ever-increasing sophistication of digital election technology has left election officials ever more reliant on the vendors (and under the sway of their lobbyists), who play an outsized and largely hidden part in both the administration of elections and the ways we exercise our most fundamental right as citizens in a democracy.

Full Article: Who Owns Our Voting Machines? | by Sue Halpern | The New York Review of Books

We have to guard against foreign election meddling — real and imagined | The Washington Post

One week away from the 2020 presidential election, the United States finds itself in almost the opposite predicament from four years ago: Far from ignoring foreign interference, we’re in danger of imagining more of it than exists — and that in itself could cause big problems. Adversaries from Russia to China to Iran are indeed assailing our democracy, a reality that should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention — but the good news is that this time, our government is paying attention. Influence operations on social media sites are getting caught before they can gain much ground. What the hack-and-leak experts have dreaded so far hasn’t happened; even if investigators do find a link between the Kremlin and the dubious Hunter Biden laptop story published by the New York Post, the tale hasn’t caught on because cautious mainstream media organizations haven’t let it and many American voters have grown warier. President Trump has refused even to acknowledge what happened last time around, yet that hasn’t stopped top security agencies from taking action. The Treasury Department has sanctioned multiple individuals who have attempted to meddle, including Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach for acting as a Russian agent to launder disinformation through U.S. sources discrediting former vice president Joe Biden; this step, in turn, empowered platforms like Google and Facebook to kick the criminals off their sites. The State Department has revoked the visas of similar actors. U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency are preemptively keeping malicious botnets off the Web to prevent ransomware attacks and other nefariousness on Nov. 3.

Full Article: Opinion | We have to guard against foreign election meddling — real and imagined - The Washington Post

Editorial: Kavanaugh has wild ideas about voting. They likely won’t matter on Election Day. | Richard L. Hasen/The Washington Post

Should we panic about Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion in the Wisconsin voting case that the Supreme Court decided Monday night? Does it mean that the Supreme Court is going to do something crazy that will hand the election to President Trump even if Joe Biden is ahead in the count?The short answer is that an intervention by the Supreme Court to decide the presidential election is still extremely unlikely — but if the extremely unlikely happens, there’s great reason to be worried about the court’s protection of voting rights and the integrity of the vote.As I have been watching all the election litigation as it works its way up and down the courts, I did not expect the Wisconsin ruling to be a major one. The Supreme Court had sent a consistent signal before deciding this case that federal courts should not be easing voting rules even during the pandemic and that there should be deference to state rules. A federal-district court had extended the deadline for the receipt of absentee ballots in Wisconsin because of delays in delivering mail during the pandemic, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, following the Supreme Court’s lead, reversed that order. Democrats and voting rights groups, inexplicably thinking they would do better before the voter-hostile Supreme Court, took the case up and lost Monday night.

Full Article: Brett Kavanaugh’s opinion on voting rights doesn’t mean the Supreme Court will swing the election to Trump - The Washington Post

‘Just like propaganda’: the three men enabling Trump’s voter fraud lies | Sam Levine and Spenser Mestel/The Guardian

One night in late February 2017, Hans von Spakovsky, a lawyer at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank in Washington DC, fired off an email.The White House was creating a commission to investigate voter fraud, an issue von Spakovsky had long pursued. But he was concerned the Trump administration was considering Democrats and moderate Republicans for the panel, and “astonished” no one had bothered to consult with him or J Christian Adams, a friend and fellow conservative lawyer.

“There are only a handful of real experts on the conservative side on this issue and not a single one of them (including Christian and me) have been called other than Kris Kobach, secretary of state of Kansas. And we are told that some consider him too ‘controversial’ to be on the commission,” he wrote. “If they are picking mainstream Republican officials and/or academics to man this commission it will be an abject failure because there aren’t any that know anything about this or who have paid any attention to this issue over the years.”

The email eventually made its way to Jeff Sessions, then US attorney general. A few months later, Kobach, von Spakovsky and Adams were appointed to Donald Trump’s commission.

It seemed inevitable. For years, all three men had used their positions both inside and outside of government to peddle the myth that American elections are vulnerable to fraud. Though this idea has been debunked repeatedly, and despite the ultimate failure of Trump’s commission, these men continued to promote the idea that widespread voter fraud justified stricter voting regulations.

“We’ve seen this going on for the last few decades,” said Richard Hasen, a law professor and election expert at the University of California, Irvine. “These ideas have moved from the fringes to the center of many Republican arguments about reasons for making it harder to vote.”

Editorial: Actually, Americans Do Want to Wear Masks to Vote | Joshua A. Douglas and ichael A. Zilis/Politico

Over the next couple of weeks, as around 60 million Americans arrive at polling places to cast their ballots, they’ll face an array of safety protocols to protect them from the risk of Covid-19. Most states will require them to stand at least 6 feet apart and observe social-distancing requirements. And most will require masks for both poll workers and voters.But not all. With the mask and other pandemic safety measures remaining a political issue, several states have explicitly said masks aren’t required, or are leaving the rules loose.South Carolina’s rules on masks in public explicitly exclude voters and election workers. Texas’ attorney general recently reminded voters that the state’s mask mandate does not apply while voting. (In its July primary, some poll workers in Texas left when their fellow poll workers refused to wear a mask.) Indiana will provide face masks to poll workers and voters who do not have them, but it is not clear how much pressure there will be to ensure that everyone complies. Indeed, one Indiana official in charge of local elections is refusing to wear one during early voting. Alabama will allow anyone to switch to an absentee ballot by citing Covid-19 concerns—but will not require either poll workers or voters to wear a mask.

Editorial: The 2020 election could permanently change how America votes | Patrick Howell O’Neill/MIT Technology Review

More than 29 million voters have already cast their ballots in the 2020 US elections, and we’re still more than two weeks from Election Day itself. At the same point in 2016, the number of early votes was about 6 million. But while a great deal of this is the result of the ongoing (and worsening) covid-19 crisis, America’s top election official says that the shift to early and mail-in voting could be permanent—even when the pandemic is over.“One of the things that we've consistently seen over time is that as more Americans get exposed to convenience voting options like early voting and vote by mail, the more they like it and the more they want to keep doing that,” says Benjamin Hovland, chairman of the Electoral Assistance Commission, which helps administer and advise on voting guidelines around the nation.Learning from the pastHistory has lots of lessons to tell us about this process. The first mail-in ballots were cast during the Civil War, and today five states hold their elections almost entirely that way.Oregon is the one that really blazed a trail for American mail-in voting. When the idea first popped up in 1981, there were skeptics and opponents everywhere. By the end of the decade, the state was moving at speed to embrace mail-in voting, first for local elections and then for state and national ballots. A partisan fight over the issue was resolved in 1998, when Oregonians themselves overwhelmingly backed a ballot measure to make the state vote entirely by mail.

Editorials: Trump lets on that his attack on voting-by-mail is fake | Jennifer Rubin/The Washington Post

President Trump’s attack on voting by mail — a practice in effect since the Civil War, and used exclusively by some states and widely by others with virtually no sign of fraud — has been a transparent attempt to discredit an election he looks likely to lose. It has also been counterproductive, as Republican state and local officials have discovered. The Post reports: “President Trump’s unfounded attacks on mail balloting are discouraging his own supporters from embracing the practice, according to polls and Republican leaders across the country, prompting growing alarm that one of the central strategies of his campaign is threatening GOP prospects in November. Multiple public surveys show a growing divide between Democrats and Republicans about the security of voting by mail, with Republicans saying they are far less likely to trust it in November.” Apparently, this has set off alarm bells among Republican operatives in Florida, where many if not most voters in the mammoth elderly population will not go to the polls in person. What if they do not vote at all?

Editorials: What Happens When Trump Refuses to Accept an Electoral Loss? | Lawrence Douglas/LitHub

Trump’s tweet from Thursday should concern all Americans, regardless of political affiliation. We have never had a delayed presidential election in our history—not during the Civil War, not during the Second World War. The fact that Trump lacks the power to delay an election—only Congress could do that—provides cold comfort. The very idea that he would float the idea smacks of the kind of threat to peaceful succession that is the focus of my book. Imagine the following scenario: It’s November 3, 2020, election day. The most expensive—and nastiest—presidential race in US history is over. Turnout is light but only because the COVID-19 outbreak has led tens of millions to vote by absentee ballot. By the time polls close on the West Coast, the race remains too close to call. President Trump carries the crucial swing state of Ohio, keeping his chances of a second term alive. But shortly after midnight, CNN projects that Joe Biden has won Pennsylvania, giving him 283 electoral votes, 13 more than the 270 needed for victory. Wolf Blitzer announces that Biden has been elected the 46th president of the United States. The other major networks also declare Biden the winner, with one exception—Fox. At 2 am, Biden delivers a short speech to his jubilant supporters. He notes, to a chorus of boos, that President Trump has not yet called to congratulate him and expresses the hope that he will be hearing from the president shortly. His wait is in vain; the call never comes. And so begins a constitutional crisis of unprecedented gravity. Trump’s refusal to accept defeat is not possible or even probable—it is all but inevitable.

Editorials: How Has the Electoral College Survived for This Long? | Alexander Keyssar/The New York Times

As our revived national conversation on race has made clear, the legacies of slavery and white supremacy run wide and deep in American society and political life. One such legacy — which is particularly noteworthy in a presidential election season — has been the survival and preservation of the Electoral College, an institution that has been under fire for more than 200 years. Our complicated method of electing presidents has been the target of recurrent reform attempts since the early 19th century, and the politics of race and region have figured prominently in their defeat. It is, of course, no secret that slavery played a role in the original design of our presidential election system — although historians disagree about the centrality of that role. The notorious formula that gave states representation in Congress for three-fifths of their slaves was carried over into the allocation of electoral votes; the number of electoral votes granted to each state was (and remains) equivalent to that state’s representation in both branches of Congress. This constitutional design gave white Southerners disproportionate influence in the choice of presidents, an edge that could and did affect the outcome of elections. Not surprisingly, the slave states strenuously opposed any changes to the system that would diminish their advantage. In 1816, when a resolution calling for a national popular vote was introduced in Congress for the first time, it was derailed by the protestations of Southern senators. The slaveholding states “would lose the privilege the Constitution now allows them, of votes upon three-fifths of their population other than freemen,” objected William Wyatt Bibb of Georgia on the floor of the Senate. “It would be deeply injurious to them.”

Editorials: Trump Can’t Postpone the Election—But He’s Trying to Destroy Its Legitimacy | David A. Graham/The Atlantic

In his latest assault on the American electoral system, President Donald Trump today proposed postponing the November election. “With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history,” Trump tweeted, offering no evidence for a debunked assertion. “It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???” As Trump may or may not know, the date of the election is set by law, and would require an act of Congress to be overturned. Trump probably cannot postpone the election, the bedrock of American democracy, but the greater danger is that he can destroy its legitimacy. The idea of a delay has been floated previously, though usually vaguely and in response to questions. Jared Kushner refused to rule it out, and the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, has warned that Trump would try to postpone the election, though the president has previously affirmed November 3 as Election Day. This time is different, because Trump is raising the idea of his own volition.

Editorials: Trump’s call to postpone elections is an outrageous break with American faith in democracy | Michael Waldman and Harold Ekeh/The Washington Post

President Trump suggested Thursday that the 2020 elections be postponed. To be clear: Trump does not have the power to reschedule voting. Election dates are set by statute dating to 1845, and no U.S. presidential election has ever been postponed. Trump’s call for a delay is an outrageous break with American faith in democracy. This year won’t be the first time Americans have voted amid disruption and crisis. U.S. democracy has functioned through wars and previous public health emergencies, as history shows. In November 1864, the Civil War still raged, with hundreds of thousands dead or wounded. President Abraham Lincoln thought he was likely to lose the election to former general George McClellan, who proposed ending the war with slavery intact. Lincoln was so gloomy about his chances that he wrote a memo to his Cabinet, to be unsealed only after Election Day, that assumed he had lost. (He urged his officials “to save the Union between the election and the inauguration, as [his opponent] will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.”) Last-minute military victories, especially the Army’s capture of Atlanta, swung support toward Lincoln. Voting was not easy, and circumstances led to innovation. The first widespread use of absentee ballots let Union soldiers vote, providing Lincoln’s margin of victory. Two days after his reelection, Lincoln spoke to a crowd serenading him at the White House. There were “emergencies,” he noted. “But the election was a necessity,” he declared. “We can not have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.” That faith in democracy has been evident when Americans have voted during other national emergencies.

Editorials: Trump’s call to postpone elections is an outrageous break with American faith in democracy | Michael Waldman and Harold Ekeh/The Washington Post

President Trump suggested Thursday that the 2020 elections be postponed. To be clear: Trump does not have the power to reschedule voting. Election dates are set by statute dating to 1845, and no U.S. presidential election has ever been postponed. Trump’s call for a delay is an outrageous break with American faith in democracy. This year won’t be the first time Americans have voted amid disruption and crisis. U.S. democracy has functioned through wars and previous public health emergencies, as history shows. In November 1864, the Civil War still raged, with hundreds of thousands dead or wounded. President Abraham Lincoln thought he was likely to lose the election to former general George McClellan, who proposed ending the war with slavery intact. Lincoln was so gloomy about his chances that he wrote a memo to his Cabinet, to be unsealed only after Election Day, that assumed he had lost. (He urged his officials “to save the Union between the election and the inauguration, as [his opponent] will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.”) Last-minute military victories, especially the Army’s capture of Atlanta, swung support toward Lincoln. Voting was not easy, and circumstances led to innovation. The first widespread use of absentee ballots let Union soldiers vote, providing Lincoln’s margin of victory. Two days after his reelection, Lincoln spoke to a crowd serenading him at the White House. There were “emergencies,” he noted. “But the election was a necessity,” he declared. “We can not have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.” That faith in democracy has been evident when Americans have voted during other national emergencies.

Editorials: How to minimize 2020 election chaos | Jennifer Rubin/The Washington Post

President Trump warned us this past week: He will not pledge to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election. We should pause to examine the magnitude of this blatant violation of our democratic norms. The head of the executive branch, sworn to uphold the Constitution, which enshrines the process for electing the president and provides for the peaceful transition of power, effectively tells us, Maybe I’ll go along with the results. Maybe not. His comments have not been sufficiently condemned. Trump has already begun to cast doubt on an election that every public national poll and virtually every poll for critical swing states say he is losing, and losing badly. He has repeated the falsehood that voting by mail, which will be used more widely this year than in any previous election in U.S. history, is subject to fraud. The Post’s fact-checking team has repeatedly debunked this assertion. Salvador Rizzo recently explained:

Documented instances of voter fraud are exceedingly rare in the United States, the odds being lower than those of being struck by lightning, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. More than 250 million votes have been cast via mail ballots since 2000, according to the Vote at Home Institute. In 2018, more than 31 million Americans voted by mail, representing one-quarter of election participants. Five states — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington — use mail ballots as the primary method of voting.

The percentage of ballots that are even potentially cast fraudulently, rather than as the result of errors, each year is minuscule. As Elise Viebeck explains, “A Washington Post analysis of data collected by three vote-by-mail states with help from the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) found that officials identified 372 possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of deceased people out of about 14.6 million votes cast by mail in the 2016 and 2018 general elections, or 0.0025 percent.”

Editorials: The November Election Is Going to Be a Mess Disaster is avoidable—if lawmakers act now | Norm Ornstein/The Atlantic

American voters face a nightmare in November. The recent stretch of primary elections has raised a slew of red flags of glitches, missteps, incompetence, and worse that could plague the national elections in November. In Wisconsin, the failure of election officials to send out absentee ballots requested by voters and the failure of the United States Postal Service to deliver them in time forced those voters to physically go to the polls during the pandemic. Once there, they faced long lines in part because of the sharply reduced number of polling places. In Georgia, a similar situation occurred. The state had a major shortage of election officials, poll workers, and functioning voting machines. All of these glitches produced lines of many hours, and authorities broke their promise to provide enough paper ballots to ameliorate the crunch. Voters witnessed a perfect storm of bad luck, malfeasance, and ineptitude. Kentucky was lauded for its relatively snag-free primary, but also saw an alarming number of votes by mail disqualified on narrow grounds. These states are not the only ones with obvious problems in their election systems. The offenders are not all red states—or ones whose elections are run by questionable partisans. New York, among many others, has long been plagued by mismanagement of its elections, and it is also having problems fulfilling absentee-ballot requests; as the pandemic has caused tax revenues to plunge, the resulting fiscal shortfall may not leave election officials with the resources to print the ballots. The Postal Service is stretched thin and facing a hostile Republican reaction to its pleas for more money, and the perennial poll-worker shortage will likely be exacerbated this year by the reality that poll workers tend to be older and thus more vulnerable to COVID-19 and the flu. Many signs indicate that the spread of COVID-19 this fall could be severe—even more so if all schools are open—and a bad flu season could add complications.

Editorials: America has to count on more than prayer in the case of close election | Edward Foley/The Hill

Many of us remember the 2000 election and the time of doubt between November and the concession of Al Gore after his Supreme Court defeat in December. None of us were alive for the even more controversial 1876 election. The results were unresolved for months until Congress declared Rutherford Hayes the winner only days before the inauguration. We all hope this year ends up nothing like either of those precedents. But there is an increasing chance that the results of the 2020 election could remain uncertain for weeks because of delays in counting mailed ballots in the midst of the coronavirus. What can our leaders in the government do now to avoid a bad repeat of those calamitous precedents? One answer is to say the prayer of election administrators that the results are a landslide. If the early returns are so lopsided that uncounted ballots will not make a difference in the end, the networks may be able to call an unofficial winner that night. However, realism forces us to recognize that the race could be close enough with the volume of uncounted ballots to prevent a typical Election Day call, with the race going into overtime. At that point the prayer for a landslide fails. What happens then? In this regard, it is worth comparing the 1884 election and 1916 election, on the one hand, with the 1876 election and 2000 election, on the other. No one thinks of 1884 and 1916 as years when the election for president was disputed, and that is the critical point. In both years, however, the results remained unsettled for two weeks, yet the losing side ultimately accepted the final count to be the official choice of the people.