Stop The Trump Coup Plot: Just Count The Damn Votes!

Jonathan Swan at Axios reports a Scoop: Trump’s plan to declare premature victory:

President Trump has told confidants he’ll declare victory on Tuesday night if it looks like he’s “ahead,” according to three sources familiar with his private comments. That’s even if the Electoral College outcome still hinges on large numbers of uncounted votes in key states like Pennsylvania.

This hardly counts as a “scoop.” Virtually every news organization has been reporting this is the Trump plan to undermine the election and to send it to the federal courts for over a month.

The pathological liar later denied the Axios report, but in the same breath confirmed it:

Speaking to reporters on Sunday evening, Trump denied that he would declare victory prematurely, before adding, “I think it’s a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election. I think it’s a terrible thing when states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over.” “I think it’s terrible that we can’t know the results of an election the night of the election. … We’re going to go in the night of, as soon as that election’s over, we’re going in with our lawyers.”

Trump’s threat to exclude mail-in ballots that are tallied after Tuesday night runs counter to U.S. law and democratic norms. Benjamin L. Ginsberg, the Republican Party’s lead election lawyer for the past several decades, says Trump’s Attack On Voting: ‘As Un-American As It Gets’:

A longtime Republican attorney who worked for multiple presidential campaigns is calling out both President Donald Trump and members of his own party for their attacks on the election process and ballot counting.

“This is as un-American as it gets,” Benjamin L. Ginsberg, who worked for former President George W. Bush during the 2000 Florida recount and again in 2004, wrote in the Washington Post.

Trump has repeatedly and without evidence claimed of a “rigged” election, attacked voting by mail, and on Sunday said he’s going to sic his attorneys on the various states after the polls close Tuesday to stop the counting.

But Ginsberg said past Republican claims of voter fraud have turned up only isolated cases.

“Proof of systematic fraud has become the Loch Ness Monster of the Republican Party,” he wrote. “People have spent a lot of time looking for it, but it doesn’t exist.”

Ginsberg, who was a co-chair of the bipartisan 2013 Presidential Commission on Election Administration, warned his party’s voter suppression efforts will turn it into a “permanent minority” in the face of changing demographics.

“These are painful words for me to write,” he said.

“My party is destroying itself on the Altar of Trump,” he wrote. “Republican elected officials, party leaders and voters must recognize how harmful this is to the party’s long-term prospects.”

He concluded with a call for members of his party to reject Trump on Tuesday:

“My fellow Republicans, look what we’ve become. It is we who must fix this. Trump should not be reelected. Vote, but not for him.”

Read the op-ed by Benjamin L. Ginsberg, My party is destroying itself on the altar of Trump.

Appearing on CNN, Ben Ginsburg argued that the president’s threats were instead acts of desperation by a president who doesn’t believe he can win if every ballot is counted. Trump just shot himself in the foot with new voting threats:

“Look, there’s a real tactical error, a head scratcher in somebody from the Trump campaign telegraphing this particular strategy,” he said. “Because if he’s going to go in and say it, no matter what the results are, which is the apparent thrust of what they’re saying, it just becomes a transparent line in a script, as opposed to something on the merits of the numbers on election night.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGKdDTOddF0&feature=emb_title

“So you’re suggesting it’s not three-dimensional chess they’re playing, Ben Ginsburg?” asked CNN host John Berman.

“I am suggesting that,” Ginsburg said while laughing. “It’s really puzzling why spokespeople for his campaign would leak things both to Jim Acosta of CNN and to Jonathan Swan of Axios that say that they’re going to do this no matter what. It takes away the authority with which he can declare victory on election night.”

The laws of the United States do not say that the winner of a presidential election must be declared or certified on the same night as the election. (In fact, this has never occurred).The election process in the United States extends for several weeks after the final votes are cast on Nov. 3. Are US Election Results Required To Be Certified on Election Night?

Ellen Weintraub, the commissioner of the Federal Election Commission, responded to the president’s comments on Twitter, writing:

An election is not a reality show with a big reveal at the end. All we get on Election Night are projections from TV networks. We *never* have official results on Election Night. Counting ballots – all of ’em – is the appropriate, proper, and very legal way to determine who won.

While Americans may be used to seeing newscasters call the results of a presidential election on election night, states don’t typically certify their election results for several days (and in some cases weeks) after the election. When a newscaster “calls” a race on election night, this is actually a “projection” — an estimate based on the amount of votes cast so far — and not a legally sanctioned election result.

Election law expert Ricard Hasen explains, Trump Can’t Just “Declare Victory”:

Just count the damn votes.

We are nearing the end of a ridiculous pandemic-laden election season, where we may hit record turnout despite the most blatant attempt to suppress the vote in a generation. More than 90 million people have already voted, and we may reach a record turnout of over 150 million on Election Day. I am sure we would have exceeded that number by millions more votes if President Donald Trump and Republicans had not fought efforts around the country to make voting during the pandemic a little less onerous.

And with Joe Biden ahead in the polls, the Trump end playbook has become increasingly clear: attack the counting of ballots after election night—even if they’ve arrived by Election Day—and prematurely declare victory if Trump is ahead—or possibly even close—in the early count. Indeed, Axios reported on Sunday that “President Trump has told confidants he’ll declare victory on Tuesday night if it looks like he’s ‘ahead,’ according to three sources familiar with his private comments.” This is largely in line with Republican lawsuits this election season, including a request over the weekend by Texas Republicans for a federal judge to throw out more than 100,000 ballots, which is likely to fail. Any such effort to continue this ploy after election night would be a disgusting attempted coup to try to stop the counting and manipulate public opinion, but the good news is it is also very unlikely to work.

Let’s start with the counting of ballots. While there has been some dispute about whether state courts such as Pennsylvania’s and Minnesota’s had authority to extend the deadline for receipt of mail ballots that arrive after Election Day (a practice allowed in a fair number of states), there has never been any basis to claim that a ballot arriving on time cannot be counted if officials cannot finish their count on election night.

Indeed, such a claim is preposterous because no state fully counts their ballots on election night. Returns are unofficial and always contain errors. Many states allow military ballots to arrive for days after Election Day. Counting generally continues for days and weeks after Election Day, and results are not certified until weeks after. When it comes to the president, the presidential electors do not cast their official ballots until Dec. 14, and Congress does not count their votes until Jan. 6. This calendar leaves plenty of time to get the counting done.

That’s what makes the Trump campaign efforts to cast doubts on even the counting of ballots after Election Day, even of military ballots, so unprecedented. As Slate’s Will Saletan noted, Trump adviser Jason Miller, speaking on ABC News’ This Week, signaled a legal battle against ballots not yet counted by Tuesday. “If you speak with many smart Democrats, they believe that President Trump will be ahead on election night,” Miller said. “And then they’re going to try to steal it back after the election.”

Counting legitimate ballots is not stealing or flipping the election, and no amount of spin can make it otherwise. But this is part of a broader strategy of Trump, also signaled to Axios, to prematurely declare victory based upon partial vote totals. The New York Times reported that “Trump advisers said their best hope was if the president wins Ohio and Florida is too close to call early in the night, depriving Mr. Biden a swift victory and giving Mr. Trump the room to undermine the validity of uncounted mail-in ballots in the days after.”

The reason this potential opening to prematurely declare victory exists is that more Democrats are voting by mail than Republicans, and in some key states like Pennsylvania, the gerrymandered Republican-controlled legislature has blocked the early processing of mail ballots before Election Day. This means that in some states the early vote count should favor Trump even if he loses by a lot of votes when all the votes are counted. According to calculations by FiveThirtyEight, we could be in a situation where Trump is ahead by as much as 16 points on election night in Pennsylvania, only to see a loss of 5 points or more when all the ballots are counted within about a week of the election: a 21-point swing.

Trump’s blatant telegraphing of this strategy through leaks to Axios is a blessing in disguise. The public is now going to be hearing from the media about Trump’s plans over the next few days and learn more about why election night vote totals are not likely to reflect the final results if the election is close.

The strategy is not going to work. The networks and news organizations are prepared for this, and Americans have learned to discount anything the president says. Most are inoculated against his lies about voting. And assuming there are no major foul-ups in how the rest of Election Day voting goes, it is hard to imagine any legal strategy that will lead courts to order a halt to the counting of ballots that have arrived before Election Day (even if there could still be litigation over late-arriving ballots). So far, all of the Trump and Republican suits aimed at stopping the easing of voting rules during the pandemic on grounds of a risk of fraud have failed miserably, and any postelection attempt on these grounds should fail too.

The mantra for the next few days is: Count all the ballots arriving legally under state law. Ignore premature victory statements. Take a deep breath.

Republican campaign strategist Rick Wilson has some simple advice for Democrats and election officials at the state level: Whatever Trump Says, Reply ‘Fuck You, and Keep Counting’ (subscriber content).

Here’s a summary from Raw Story:

In a blunt column for The Daily Beast, Wilson — one of the principals in the anti-Trump Lincoln Project — explained one of the lessons he learned while working in the trenches over multiple campaigns, “Never, ever, ever, ever, ever concede defeat until the last dog in the fight dies. Never.”

As Wilson explained, “This is the moment of maximum stress for America, and nerves are frayed well beyond the breaking point. No one will sleep much in the next 48 hours,” before adding, “Early, mail, and absentee votes have come in a torrent, blowing past all prior records. Election day in-person turnout is modeled to also be at levels unimaginable in prior years.”

Writing he truly believes Trump doesn’t have the votes to win — based upon the massive influx of early voters standing for hours to cast their ballots — Wilson said the states, with the support of the Democrats, should just keep their heads down and do their jobs no matter what the president says.

Posing the rhetorical question, “What happens if Trump, declares victory early?” Wilson said the response should be simple.

“Fox follows his lead at once. The Trump-right media’s propaganda organs kick into high gear, blasting the joyous news to the eager horde. On Facebook, pro-Trump amplifier system of a million bad ideas, the message will be shared by everyone’s crazy uncle, and the madhouse conspiracy machines of QAnon, Alex Jones, Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, et al. will begin their work of re-educating the Republican masses,” he wrote, before adding, “If votes are still out when Trump declares himself the false winner, the answer is simple: ‘F*ck you. Keep counting.’”

“It’s going to be a long day, a long night, and a long fight ahead. Trump must go, and in the years to follow, so must the pernicious doctrines of nationalist statism and authoritarianism that rest at Trumpism’s rotten core. That fight will stretch for years, as it is part of a global rescission of democratic values around the world,” he wrote. “The day will stretch as you wait, but the wait will be worth more than you can imagine. For every moment you’re tempted to say it’s too much and head home, I hope you’ll be strengthened by the knowledge that Trump is on the verge of either a humiliating defeat or a victory that will destroy this nation.”

“If your spirit flags in the last 48 hours of this march, I want you to remember a mantra that has given me comfort these many months: ‘We will vote. He will lose. He will leave,’” he added before concluding, “Make it happen. The stakes are too high to do anything less.”