Don’t Get Complacent. This Election is Far From Over.
There are Four Scenarios in This Election, and Three of Them Still End With the Death of American Democracy
There are less than ten days to go now.
It’s the most crucial election in American history. Just the other day, Barack Obama warned: “Don’t get complacent. This election is far from over.” He’s right. The American people seem to get it — many of them, voting early en masse, shattering records. The intelligentsia, meanwhile, seems to think the election is already over.
They are badly wrong, and Obama is right. This election is far from over.
I learned something absolutely, gobsmackingly alarming today. The Electoral College technically votes on December 14th, almost six weeks after the popular vote.
That is to say: the electors can change the outcome of the election a month after the people have voted. Those who may want to influence the election have a month after the popular vote to influence electors to change their vote.
Think about how much uncertainty that creates. Given all this chaos, how do electors know which way to vote, when the recounts haven’t stopped, when there’s no clarity? And so maybe along the way a few of those electors minds’ are changed, too.
This terrible design for an electoral system is now creating massive systemic risk for American democracy. For there to be a six week window between a popular vote, and the actual decision by a tiny number of people who really is President is something like a gaping flaw, a wide open backdoor that was always waiting to be exploited by a clever hacker.
So. To understand just how alert we need to be, let me return to my four possible election scenarios.
The first is that Trump wins outright. The nightmare scenario, in other words, for America, the world, and the future. Trump’s Army of American Idiots carries him, jeering, over the finish line. How likely is that? It’s still well within the realm of possibility, as in it has every chance of happening. Look at margins in swing states. In Florida, Biden’s ahead by 3.8 points — in Iowa, by 1.1.
