by Jim Duncan
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Is there a chance the election doesn’t actually end on November 8?
Most people assume that once the popular vote for president is cast, a clear winner will immediately be declared. Then, everyone hopes, they can go back to relegating American politics to a partially ignored pastime. But are there any reasons that might not be the case?
Obviously, for the election to not end cleanly on November 8, the vote totals can’t be a landslide in one direction or the other. Any news you currently hear about this election being a blowout by one side however, is probably a bit premature. As Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics notes, Trump has already come back from larger deficits in shorter time, and several polls differ on who is leading and by how much.
As bizarre as this election cycle has been, there are a lot of scenarios where the popular vote could still end up being historically close (consider more Wikileaks dumps). And given the passions involved, the general distrust of both candidates, and the animosity between both bases, if the election’s ending is narrow, then November 8 might not be any sort of conclusion, but the beginning of a much more convoluted and nasty dispute over who actually won. Continuing until… who knows?
So here are four big reasons why your hope that everything quiets down after November 8 might not come true…
1. Both Candidates’ Encouragement to Distrust The Election’s Conclusion
Our country has thus far had a flawless record of peacefully transferring power from one government to the next over the past 240 years. This is largely due to all those participating valuing the idea of the Constitution over their own need to win. Can we expect this same sort of idealistic altruism from our two major party candidates this time?
Already, both candidates’ teams are ratcheting up their accusations that the other side is potentially manipulating the election’s outcome.
Donald Trump has definitively stated on numerous occasions that there is a chance the election will be stolen from him. Multiple times he has encouraged his supporters to watch for it, and to not stand for it.
Hillary Clinton’s team has also strongly insinuated that Donald Trump is actively working with the Russians to hack into secure Democratic information in order to sway the election toward the Republicans.
The most troubling thing is that they are possibly both right. If die-hards on either the right or left are encouraged to see it, finding things that look like fraud in a close popular vote might not be that hard. And what happens then?
A woman at a recent Mike Pence rally even asked the Republican VP candidate if it would be time for a “revolution” if their side lost. Fanatical liberals probably won’t be any happier if they think the election is dishonestly taken from them.
The disputed election of 2000 largely avoided becoming a constitutional crisis because Al Gore accepted the Supreme Court decision regarding Florida and conceded to George W. Bush rather than create a protracted battle over who won. Given the character and temperament exhibited by Bush throughout his presidency, it is unlikely that he would have pushed the need to win to a point of damage for the country as a whole either. Yet even with two largely “reasonable” candidates, that process still took over a month to resolve.
Do we really think Trump or Clinton is going to make a selfless decision if they are in a similar situation? Or will they actually encourage their bases to continue fighting for power?
Obviously, our best chance of avoiding this troubling scenario would be if there were a clear, definitive winner that matches an overwhelming popular vote for one candidate or the other. Unfortunately, just like the election of 2000 reiterated, our electoral system isn’t designed to have that happen.
Which brings us to reason number 2 there could be chaos at the election’s end…
2. The Electoral College is Flawed, and Could Create Massive Confusion
The Electoral College does not have to match the country’s popular vote.
This, in and of itself, maybe isn’t a problem if everyone voting understands that the United States is a Republic, and understands why the Electoral College was created. How though, are the most frenzied supporters on the right or left who don’t understand this, going to act if their candidate gets the most popular votes nationwide, but then doesn’t win? Will they see disenfranchisement? Outright fraud?
The Electoral College has always been a ticking time-bomb for a close presidential election erupting into a crisis, or at least giving a vast number of people in the country a belief that they were robbed of democracy.
This article won’t attempt to explain all of the Electoral College processes to choose our next president, but here’s a list of some of its most troubling aspects which could potentially lead to mass dissatisfaction:
- Only 29 states have laws requiring that the members of the Electoral College vote for the candidate their state popular vote picked, so many electors can completely go against the people’s will (called faithless electors).
- Very few people (mostly party insiders) have any say in picking who these electors are.
- Even when the Electoral College works as designed, it can still allow an extreme scenario of someone winning the presidency with as little as 22% of the popular vote and only eleven states supporting him or her.
- Also when working as designed, there are multiple scenarios where the Electoral College can tie, or lock, meaning that no candidate reaches the magical 270 number to declare an electoral winner on November 8th.
As stated earlier, none of this matters in a blowout; it’s only in a very tight race where the Electoral College starts to cause issues. If there isn’t a landslide though, there’s always a chance of a 269 to 269 tie for the two major party candidates, regardless of the popular vote totals. And this year, because of the abhorrence many people feel for both Trump and Clinton, there is a real chance that one of the third party candidates (Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, or Evan McMullin) will garner enough votes to win a state, or at least take away enough votes in a swing state to flip it from one candidate to the other. If that were to happen, then it is very possible that no one would reach 270 electoral votes needed to win.
So what happens if no candidate gets 270 electoral votes? According to the 12th amendment of the Constitution, the new House of Representatives picks our next President, and the new Senate picks the Vice President. Those idiots in Congress? Yep, those guys. And neither of these bodies have to abide by the popular vote either, only choose from the top three vote-getters for President, and the top two for Vice President.
This means, depending on who wins the seats for the new Congress, we could potentially have a President who didn’t come close to winning the popular vote, or even a President and Vice President of different parties. The potential jockeying scenarios and misdeeds over this scenario that could arise going into the New Year are enough to make Frank Underwood from House of Cards blush. And this is all if the system just works “properly.”
Imagine if something actually goes wrong. Which brings us to reason 3 why there could be chaos this November…
3. There Has Never Been a Greater Risk for Mass Election Fraud
Given the inherent confusion of our electoral system for many people, and both candidates already sowing the seeds of distrust at the election’s result, now imagine what would happen if there were also an actual orchestrated attempt by an unknown party to illegally influence the election’s outcome? Well, it’s already happening, we just haven’t voted yet.
Over the past few weeks, a probable foreign power has been hacking into Democratic communications to create Wikileaks dumps, and possibly into two state’s voting systems. In Politico’s article prior to these most recent hacks, they stated that nearly twenty states have at various times been attacked. Since the early 2000s most American states have switched from paper ballots to the cutting-edge, utterly secure science of electronic voting machines. The only problem is that the machines aren’t cutting-edge, and they’re not even remotely secure.
Stephen Spoonamore, a cyber security expert for the banking industry and government has been screaming about this problem for years. He states:
“There is no electronic system in the world that can’t be hacked.”
and
“You can’t make voting machines less vulnerable, but only make them transparent.”
Except, many of the country’s voting machines are still apparently lacking in transparency because their software is proprietary and privately owned by just a handful of companies like Diebold (Premier Election Solutions/Dominion) and ES&S, who refuse independent audits of their results or programming (odd, huh?). Diebold also happened to be indicted for massive fraud by the FBI in 2013. So even if there isn’t a hack by an outside power, who’s watching the guys running the machines?
In his interview, Mr. Spoonamore cites multiple (not just one), ways to hack into their systems, with most of them as easy as what any teenager with an online connection could accomplish. The truly frightening thing about all this is that the upcoming presidential election could be manipulated by almost anyone from around the country, or world, with an internet connection. This includes the Russians, ISIS, or that kid that stole your debit card last spring.
Keep in mind that this article isn’t talking about how someone could successfully completely overthrow the election, that might be a tall order, but is only exploring what the odds are for confusion and chaos at its end. And as The Atlantic spells out, the advent of electronic voting without uniform paper tracking or auditing has opened up a huge degree of risk that our vote totals will be suspect, whether or not they are actually fraudulently influenced.
All it takes is for one state to be strongly disputed, and then we’re right back in a situation like 2000, but arguably far worse given points 1 and 2. The only way its conclusion will not be disputed is with proper, accurate, trusted information, from objective third parties.
Which brings us to reason 4 why there could be chaos at the election’s end…
4. Few Trust the Media Anymore, Often With Good Reason
If we did have an extremely close election, with both candidates claiming victory and/or evidence of election interference from a third party, is there any single news organization that a majority of Americans can all agree is an objective source of truth regarding the election’s outcome?
As noted by the US News, trust in media is at an all-time low. A lack of credibility by most major news sources in Americans isn’t necessarily an immediate problem if, again, the election is a landslide and they will all basically say the same thing, but what if it’s close and they aren’t in agreement? What if there has been evidence of illegal activity?
Over the recent decades, the separation between news and entertainment has become blurred, and those traditional sources of information dubbed “main stream media” have become increasingly suspect in their objectivity of facts. Numerous cases of both liberal and conservative bias in cable news channels have become readily apparent, with evidence of much more “objective oriented” goals in how they cover politics than merely trying to get at unbiased truth. For example, take the recent Wikileaks information that the media is coordinating with Hillary Clinton.
The Republican side is certainly not any better. Over recent years, they have responded to the suspected liberal bias against them not by taking a high road of insisting on integrity and objectivity in news reporting, but by fighting fire with nukes. The conservative-candidate bias of FOX News is off the charts, and this year, the Republican campaign has gone so far as to actually merge with the ultra-right-wing Breitbart News. How long until we have a state-run media, which is exactly in opposition to the spirit of the 1st amendment and free speech being a check to power?
As the lack of trust continues to erode between mainstream media and the average citizen, Americans have turned to the internet to gather additional “news.” Unfortunately, instead of the internet offering an alternate source of unbiased information in a large number of cases it seems people are simply finding even more extreme peddlers of bias to serve as echo chambers for their most fearful, paranoid, and extremist tendencies. Disinformation is defined as “the willful manipulation of information to achieve a desired outcome.” It’s somewhat telling that the word was only accepted by English dictionaries in the 1980s, right when internet was being created. The void of trust with traditional media has been filled through a sea of openly biased and fraudulent political propaganda sites.
All of this collectively just means that no one is really sure who to trust anymore. And if no source of news, or any other power or person can be trusted to be objective on a day to day basis, what happens in a crisis? Given the mounting craziness against a clean and sensible end to the 2016 election, what can we do as individual Americans to mitigate the chance of chaos now and into the future?
The answer…
Vote with integrity, for integrity.
If the system is inherently flawed, disinformation and misinformation are rampant, both candidates are claiming the other cheated, and we quite possibly might have some sort of illegal interference with the election results, the only right answer on how you should act is the same that it has always been: vote for integrity. Refuse to participate in the lies and political games, the bitter voting against one person and party rather than for the best person. Only vote for a candidate that you think has the integrity to put the Constitution and the country as a whole above their own need to win. Personally, I don’t see that being either of the two major party candidates.
Many people don’t realize that it wasn’t a certainty the United States would have an office called “president” when the founding fathers were debating its creation. Many of them saw an executive position of power, held in a single individual, as a grave threat to the democracy they hoped to create. The only reason why everyone was swayed into trusting that the power of a president would not be abused was because George Washington agreed to be our first president. Washington’s integrity was so well known, his reputation for “never telling a lie” so legendary, that all of the Founding Fathers agreed our fledgling Constitution would be safe in his hands.
Maybe it’s too late for this election, and we are destined to have one of two very corrupt and dishonest individuals as our next President. Or maybe the election will even end with some sort of chaos. But all any of us can do is exactly what we should have been doing from the start, refuse to participate in their corruption and lies, and vote for the person with the greatest integrity over any certain concern for a particular party winning. I know who that is for me, I just ask you to sincerely think about who that person is for you.
The good thing is that no one has voted yet, so there’s still a chance for us all to make the right choice.