The Coming Election Nightmare
JAMAAL BOWMAN, A PROGRESSIVE, SCORED AN upset victory over longtime incumbent Eliot Engel in New York’s 16th Congressional District. The primary took place on June 23rd, but the contest wasn’t officially decided until more than three weeks later—and then only because Engel finally conceded.
The problem wasn’t that the vote was close: Bowman held a 25-point lead in the early returns. It wasn’t because of a recount: there wasn’t one. The trouble was in simply counting the votes. More than 400,000 New York City voters mailed in their ballots—five times more than did so in the general election of 2008—burying election officials in paperwork. Engel finally conceded on July 17; had he chosen to challenge the mail-in ballots, you’d be reading this story without knowing the results.
If only this were just a New York issue.
The general election on November 3 may not end quite so cleanly. President Trump, whose poll numbers have been in decline for weeks over his messy response to the coronavirus pandemic, seems unconstrained, at least rhetorically, by the American political tradition of the peaceful transfer of power. On Sunday, he tweeted a call for "immediate litigation" over mail-in voting in Nevada, after Republicans there accused the Democrats of attempting "to steal our election." On July 30, he floated the idea on Twitter of postponing the election. He has said, with no basis in evidence, that he will consider mail-in votes to be fraudulent, setting up a post-election case for rejecting the results. He told Fox’s Chris Wallace, when asked if he would respect the election results, “I have to see.”
President Obama has warned of the threats that 2020 poses to American norms. He told attendees at a fundraising event with actor George Clooney on July 28 that he worries most about voter suppression and the danger of Trump questioning the election’s legitimacy. In his eulogy for Rep. John Lewis, he criticized lawmakers who have “unleashed a flood of laws designed specifically to make voting hard,” calling it “an attack on our democratic freedoms.” Trump may be weak politically but the office of the president commands enormous power. As commander in
