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2020 elections: an expert on why you should be worried about your vote in 2020

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  1. Kuromantis
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    Admittedly none of this is particularly surprising at this point, but it is as worrying as always, because if you can't vote someone out of office you become practically powerless to stop anything...

    Admittedly none of this is particularly surprising at this point, but it is as worrying as always, because if you can't vote someone out of office you become practically powerless to stop anything they do without 2nd amendment usage.

    "Can Americans trust our electoral process?"

    If the answer isn’t an unequivocal yes, we’ve got a major problem. A free and fair election system is the bedrock of any democracy — without it, the legitimacy of the entire system is thrown into question.

    Recent events have certainly given citizens cause for skepticism. There are good reasons to think that voter suppression played a key role in the 2018 midterm elections. Voter fraud scandals like the one most recently in North Carolina are likely to increase in future elections. And, of course, the president has asked two countries, Russia and Ukraine, to actively interfere in our election process.

    So where does all that leave us?

    Richard Hasen, a law professor at UC Irvine, has written a new book laying out the major threats to our election system. He focuses on four in particular: voter suppression, electoral incompetence, dirty tricks, and escalating rhetoric about “stolen” or “rigged” elections. Not all of these threats are equally worrisome, but collectively they paint a worrisome picture.

    What would you say is the greatest threat to electoral integrity in this country?

    I would say that Donald Trump is the greatest threat to election integrity because of the fact that he has been calling lots of elections rigged without any good evidence, and because he’s in charge of a federal government that needs to be taking very serious steps to ensure that we don’t have internal or external forces that are trying to disrupt our elections.

    And of course there’s the fact that he’s now invited two countries, Russia and Ukraine, to actively interfere in our election process. So, yeah, that’s uniquely bad.

    A democracy can’t work if people don’t have faith in the electoral process and if the losing side doesn’t accept the legitimacy of the winning side. If you’re right, there are good reasons to be suspicious of the process.

    So where does that leave us?

    I’m afraid it leaves us with the election administrator’s prayer, which is “Lord, let this election not be close.” The best thing to deal with the problem is an overwhelming victory.

    In fact, Nancy Pelosi, in an interview with the New York Times on another subject, dropped what I considered to be a bombshell, which is that she did not believe that Trump would have accepted the Democratic victory in 2018 in the House of Representatives unless Democrats won by a convincing margin.