Thanks for your question, which reminds us that this election, like this live broadcast, probably won’t end the day after November 5th.
As you recall, Donald Trump never acknowledged his defeat in 2020 against Joe Biden, accusing the Democrats of rigging the election without any proof. He never committed to acknowledging the results of the next one, suggesting they would be rigged if he didn’t win. That line has been trotted out for months at all levels of his campaign, from his running mate, JD Vance, to senior officials like Chris LaCivita, who said in July: “It doesn’t end on Election Day, it ends on Inauguration Day.” »
In other words, the November 5 vote can be contested until January 20, 2025, the official day of its inauguration, or the 47th.e president of the United States. This is a hypothesis that many observers are betting on for several reasons. First, what journalist Anna Bower calls “the politicization of the certification process at the local level” since 2020. Since voting in the United States is highly decentralized, the results can be contested at the county level and then at the state level, which can slow down the certification of the results “and cause post-election chaos, disinformation and potential political violence”she fears.
Second, it is a strategy clearly supported by the Republican side. In addition to Donald Trump’s rhetoric, the Republican National Committee (RNC) is already involved in more than a hundred lawsuits across the country to challenge the vote. It also launched a program to train and deploy thousands of observers to polling stations to, according to a statement, “beating the Democrats at their own game” and secure “that the democrat party’s trick isn’t working this time”.
Will this be enough to derail the electoral process? Derek Muller, specialist in election law at the University of Notre Dame explains to World to “the counting and certification process is much more robust” compared to 2020, especially with a federal law giving more power to the judiciary to demand results at each polling place. “It is possible that some officials will try to delay the process, but it is unlikely that they will succeed for a long time.”he predicts.
The risk of political violence cannot be ruled out, even if it does not reach the extreme scale of the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Let’s not forget that a majority of Republican voters still believe, according to many polls, that the election was stolen from Donald Trump in 2020. It will largely depend on the attitude of Donald Trump himself.
The federal prosecutor investigating the case against him for trying to illegally overturn the results of the 2020 election released the indictment a few days ago. He accuses the then president of having “prepared the ground” to a rejection of the election result before the end of the voting, telling the advisers that in the event of an advance at the start of the counting of votes, it would be “would declare the winner before the ballots are counted and a winner has been announced”. A little further on, he quotes the testimony of an adviser who heard Donald Trump say to his close associates: “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election, you have to fight like a dog. »
Read also |
This is a major theme in this end of the campaign, which we return to at the end of the week with an article from our US correspondent. Follow along.
