WASHINGTON — In October, President Trump declares a state of emergency in main cities in battleground states, like Milwaukee and Detroit, banning p
WASHINGTON — In October, President Trump declares a state of emergency in main cities in battleground states, like Milwaukee and Detroit, banning polling locations from opening.
Per week earlier than the election, Legal professional Normal William P. Barr proclaims a legal investigation into the Democratic presidential nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
After Mr. Biden wins a slim Electoral School victory, Mr. Trump refuses to just accept the outcomes, received’t depart the White Home and declines to permit the Biden transition staff customary entry to businesses earlier than the Jan. 20 inauguration.
Far-fetched conspiracy theories? To not a gaggle of worst-case state of affairs planners — principally Democrats, however some anti-Trump Republicans as effectively — who’ve been gaming out numerous doomsday choices for the 2020 presidential election. Outraged by Mr. Trump and fearful that he would possibly attempt to disrupt the marketing campaign earlier than, throughout and after Election Day, they’re engaged in a course of that started within the realm of science fiction however has nudged nearer to actuality as Mr. Trump and his administration abandon longstanding political norms.
“Within the eight to 10 months I’ve been yapping at individuals about these things, the reactions have gone from, ‘Don’t be foolish, that received’t occur,’ to an growing sense of, ‘You recognize, that would occur,’” stated Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown College regulation professor. Earlier this 12 months, Ms. Brooks convened a casual group of Democrats and never-Trump Republicans to brainstorm about methods the Trump administration might disrupt the election and to consider the right way to stop it.
However the anxiousness is hardly restricted to exterior teams.
Marc Elias, a Washington lawyer who leads the Democratic Nationwide Committee’s authorized efforts to battle voter suppression efforts, stated not a day goes by when he doesn’t area a query from senior Democratic officers about whether or not Mr. Trump might postpone or cancel the election. Prodded by allies to elucidate why not, Mr. Elias wrote a column on the subject in late March for his website — and it drew more traffic than anything he’d ever published.
But changing the date of the election is not what worries Mr. Elias. The bigger threat in his mind, he said, is the possibility that the Trump administration could act in October to make it harder for people to vote in urban centers in battleground states — possibilities, he said, that include declaring a state of emergency, deploying the National Guard or forbidding gatherings of more than 10 people.
Such events could serve to depress or discourage turnout in pockets of the country that reliably vote for Democrats.
“That to me is that frame from which all doomsday scenarios then go,” he said.
To ward off such a scenario, Mr. Elias is engaged in multiple lawsuits aimed at making it easier to cast absentee ballots by mail and making in-person voting more available, either on Election Day or in the preceding weeks.
“Since 2016, Donald Trump has shown that he is always ready to sacrifice our basic democratic norms for his personal and political interests,” said Bob Bauer, a Biden senior adviser who is the campaign’s chief lawyer. “We assume he may well resort to any kind of trick, ploy or scheme he can in order to hold onto his presidency. We have built a strong program to plan for and address every possibility to ensure that he does not succeed.”
Mr. Trump’s campaign derided the fears over the election as irrational hand-wringing driven by Democrats’ inability to accept his victory four years ago.
“Hillary Clinton, Stacey Abrams and the entire Democratic Party refused to accept the results of their elections and pushed the Russia collusion conspiracy theory for years,” said Tim Murtaugh, the communications director for Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign. “Now Joe Biden’s allies have formed actual conspiracy committees where they’ll work up new hoaxes to further undermine our democracy. They are wasting their time. As President Trump has repeatedly said, the election will happen on Nov. 3.”
Some Democrats have been cautious about voicing their warnings about potential electoral calamities too loudly, for fear that even the suggestion of a tainted election would depress turnout.
“You don’t want to set up a perception based on the theory that elections don’t matter,” said Ari Rabin-Havt, who was a deputy campaign manager for Senator Bernie Sanders. “You don’t want to tell supporters that nothing you do matters because this guy is going to screw it up.”
Ms. Brooks’s group at Georgetown is hardly the only one forecasting doomsday scenarios for the election. Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonprofit group dedicated to resisting authoritarian government, last year convened the National Task Force on Election Crises, a bipartisan 51-member group that includes Republicans such as Michael Chertoff, the former homeland security secretary. The group is dedicated to envisioning and presenting plans for scenarios that could wreck the 2020 presidential election.
The task force began with 65 possibilities before narrowing the list early this year to eight potential calamities, including natural disasters, a successful foreign hack of voting machines, a major candidate’s challenging election results and seeking to delegitimize the results, and an incumbent president who refuses to participate in a peaceful transfer of power.
Among the scenarios they eliminated when making final cuts in January, ironically, was a killer pandemic that ravaged the country and kept people homebound before Election Day. After the coronavirus struck, the group reconstituted to publish pandemic-related recommendations for state governments to follow.
The group also produced a 200-page document, which has not been made public. Several members of the group said they had worked on specific scenarios but had not seen the complete draft. They said that while many of the possibilities envisioned an incumbent president’s using the forces of government to his advantage, the report’s authors had been careful not to make the document explicitly about Mr. Trump.
“We hope there are safeguards in place,” said Norman J. Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who participated in the task force. “Let’s face it, those safeguards ought to include the Senate of the United States and the Justice Department. There’s reason to be nervous.”
Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University who participated in the task force, said the 2020 election could resemble the contest of 1876, which nearly split the country a decade after the Civil War.
“We’re setting ourselves up for an election where neither side can concede defeat,” Professor Foley said. “That suggests that the desire to dispute the outcome is going to be higher than ever.”