Election night: buckle up
To the Editor,
Donald Trump is significantly underplaying the risk of new COVID infections and significantly overplaying the risk of fraud from potentially illegitimate mail-in voting. As a consequence, proportionally, far more Republicans are likely to vote in person on November 3, while Democrats are much more likely to vote by mail. The consequence of this is that the top-line reportable result on election night may well give the impression that Donald Trump won the popular vote. This will be an illusion.
It will take days for most of the mail-in ballots to be counted. Trump will demand an immediate concession by Joe Biden and say that waiting for “fraudulent” mail-in ballots is wrong. The result will be chaos and great uncertainty that may present us with a constitutional crisis, a crisis that only the Supreme Court can resolve.
When the mail-in ballot count, powered by Democratic voters, shows a reversal of the preliminary election night outcome, all hell will break loose. Buckle up, America, you ain’t never seen anything like it before.
Ken Derow
Swarthmore