Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images
At 2:30 a.m. on November 4, 2020, Donald Trump claimed he had already won the presidential election over Joe Biden. He warned that the huge number of outstanding ballots still to be counted were tainted by fraud and said the U.S. Supreme Court needed to stop their tabulation. His bizarre argument that the election should be deemed finished when he was temporarily ahead did not surprise a lot of us who had been warning for months of a “red mirage” scenario whereby the votes first counted (mostly ballots cast in person on Election Day) would predictably tilt Republican, while the next big wave (mostly mail ballots that, in some cases, had to be opened and processed before they could be counted) of votes would tilt Democratic, in part because Trump had been demonizing voting by mail all year. But Trump’s actions on Election Night set the stage for the battle to overturn the results that culminated in the Capitol riot of January 6.
In this year’s presidential contest, which at the moment looks dead even, we already know that Trump is laying the groundwork for again contesting any defeat. He has said again and again that the election has already been “rigged” by those who accused him of committing crimes and those who denied him a rematch with Biden. He has also repeated past lies about noncitizens being herded to the polls by Democrats to vote illegally and (even though his party is encouraging early voting) about voting by mail being inherently fraudulent.
So can we expect a repeat of Election Night 2020? If Trump gets an early lead that he knows is fragile, will he claim victory anyway and begin the process of encouraging his supporters to back whatever steps he takes to overturn a defeat?
Here, some things to think about in assessing the likelihood of another nightmare like the one Trump engineered four years ago.
It’s unclear if the “red mirage” will be as strong
What produced the large disjunction between early and later returns in 2020 was a combination of historically high voting by mail (nearly doubling between 2016 and 2020 to a total of 46 percent in the latter year) and a big partisan split in mail-ballot use (58 percent of Biden voters used mail ballots as compared to 32 percent of Trump voters, Pew estimates). While voting by mail has steadily increased in recent years, it spiked in 2020, in part because of temporary arrangements many states and localities made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The levels should be down this year (partially because of the lapse or revocation of COVID-19-related measures), and election officials are also more accustomed to dealing with voting by mail. The partisan split should decline, too, since Republicans (occasionally including Trump) have been more positive about voting by mail and because the split reflected different reactions to the risk of Election Day voting in person during the pandemic.
All the factors may reduce the likelihood of an early Trump lead in the battleground states that he can exploit to prematurely claim victory while also reducing the number of ballots that cannot be counted until days later.
There could be other vote-counting problems
While the situation in election offices will vary by state and even by county, it’s safe to say that the Trump-RNC “election integrity” initiatives are designed to slow down vote-counting in a variety of ways. Republicans are deploying an unprecedented number of poll-watchers (150,000, according to Axios) and others trained to challenge voter eligibility and compliance with election laws. This could interfere with the mechanics of Election Day voting and the pace of vote tabulation. Team Trump lawyers can also be expected to challenge certification of the results in jurisdictions with sizable Democratic majorities, thus slowing down the state certifications that will eventually determine the winners.
As the Dispatch notes in an overview of battleground-state election procedures, there are other issues that could slow down the count:
Two states will not start counting ballots received in the mail until polls have closed on November 5: Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. That could mean a repeat of the 2020 election, when major media outlets did not declare a winner of the presidential election until it was clear Biden had won Pennsylvania, four days after polls had closed …
The Republican-controlled state’s elections board voted last week to approve a rule requiring each voting precinct conduct a second counting of ballots by hand on Election Day and to resolve discrepancies with the machine count. Republican officials, including Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Attorney General Chris Carr, said before and after the board’s vote that they oppose the new rule, which could face legal challenges. But if the board has its way, it could take much longer than usual to get results, in-person or absentee, from Georgia …
Since the 2022 midterm elections, Nevada has sent a mail-in ballot to every registered voter who has not opted out, making it the only 2024 battleground state to have essentially universal vote-by-mail. Ballots postmarked on or before Election Day can be accepted as long as they are received no later than four days after Election Day.
The Trump campaign has been fighting in court in Nevada and elsewhere to prohibit the counting of mail ballots postmarked by but received after Election Day and, in fact, is pursuing a Mississippi lawsuit designed to put the question before the U.S. Supreme Court before Election Day. This litigation adds some uncertainty to the rules in Nevada and 16 non-battleground states that follow the same practice.
Election Night referees may be timid
Another factor that could influence whether Trump claims a premature victory on Election Night is whether the media arbiters of who has won what contest could be a bit timid in quickly calling any state in the presidential race. The Associated Press and the major TV networks didn’t call the 2020 election for Biden until November 7, four days after Election Day (the website Decision Desk HQ called it a day earlier). A New York Times report suggests that election-callers are very worried about their credibility this time around:
Almost every major news organization is putting contingency plans in place to push back against a gale-force storm of misinformation and ensure that audiences trust their coverage. Their efforts will probably stretch far beyond Nov. 5, as absentee ballots are counted and close races potentially face legal reviews.
An atmosphere of mistrust and uncertainty would certainly be a playground for Trump if he chooses to exploit it.
We don’t know the Trump election-denial strategy
The biggest problem in predicting what the former president might do on Election Night if he’s in danger of losing is that we don’t know what his strategy might be to ultimately overturn an adverse result. If the big idea is to toss out a hundred legal challenges in hopes that the Supreme Court will smile on Trump, as it did in this year’s presidential-immunity case, then you can expect him to muddy the waters as much as possible and as early as possible. But if, on the other hand, he hopes to cast so big a shadow over the results that Congress cannot confirm a winner in January and the race goes to the U.S. House, then he might encourage his minions to disrupt the casting and counting of votes so that no one really knows who won. If that’s the case, we may have more to worry about on Election Night than a false victory claim.
