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The transfer of power we usually take for granted has several intermediate steps, and they are fragile. It is a temporal no-man’s-land between the presidency of Donald Trump and an uncertain successor-a second term for Trump or a first for Biden. Call it the Interregnum: the interval from Election Day to the next president’s swearing-in. This year, if election analysts are right, we know when the trouble is likely to come. Nineteen summers ago, when counterterrorism analysts warned of a coming attack by al‑Qaeda, they could only guess at a date. Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede. But few people have actual answers to what happens if the machinery of democracy is used to prevent a legitimate resolution to the election.” Let us not hedge about one thing. “We talk about it, some worry about it, and we imagine what it would be.
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“We are not prepared for this at all,” Julian Zelizer, a Princeton professor of history and public affairs, told me. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the president’s term in office “shall end” at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. He could seize on that uncertainty to hold on to power. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all.
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If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. They generally conclude, as Biden has, that in that event the proper authorities “will escort him from the White House with great dispatch.” They frame it as a concern, unthinkable for presidents past, that Trump might refuse to vacate the Oval Office if he loses. Gore case.”Ī lot of people, including Joe Biden, the Democratic Party nominee, have misconceived the nature of the threat. “The kind of election meltdown we could see would be much worse than 2000’s Bush v. Hasen, a professor at the UC Irvine School of Law and the author of a recent book called Election Meltdown. “We could well see a protracted postelection struggle in the courts and the streets if the results are close,” says Richard L. We have no fail-safe against that calamity. Close students of election law and procedure are warning that conditions are ripe for a constitutional crisis that would leave the nation without an authoritative result.
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But in this election year of plague and recession and catastrophized politics, the mechanisms of decision are at meaningful risk of breaking down. Collectively we will have made our choice-a messy one, no doubt, but clear enough to arm the president-elect with a mandate to govern.Īs a nation, we have never failed to clear that bar. The contest will be decided with sufficient authority that the losing candidate will be forced to yield. If we are lucky, this fraught and dysfunctional election cycle will reach a conventional stopping point in time to meet crucial deadlines in December and January. Barton Gellman spoke with Adrienne LaFrance about what could happen if the vote is close, live on September 24.