Imagine the scene. It’s the morning of 4 November, 2020. After a long night waiting for the election results to trickle in, 

 is addressing the country on national TV, thanking Americans for re-electing him as president. But as some viewers change the channel in disgust, there’s something strange going on. Trump’s rival for the White House, former vice president Joe Biden, is also on TV, addressing raucous supporters at his Philadelphia campaign headquarters and thanking the nation for electing him the 46th president of the United States.

A little over 12 hours earlier, the major TV networks had started the steady march of declaring winners. Just after 7pm Eastern Time, Indiana and Kentucky go to Trump and Vermont goes to Biden. So the night continues with no surprises as reliably Republican states fall to Trump and Democrat stalwarts line up behind Biden. The first real signs that 2016 could be repeating itself come at 10.47pm, when CNN declares Florida for Trump. Americans settle in for a long evening.

The path to the White House once again meanders through the cornfields and the former industrial heartlands of the Midwest. But this cold autumn evening in 2020 is different from its 2016 counterpart. The networks refrain from calling Midwestern swing states for either candidate, despite flashing results from Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan showing comfortable leads for Trump. Democrat governors in those same states address TV cameras saying their election boards will not declare a winner until all of the absentee ballots — estimated at 40% of total votes cast — are counted. This could take up to a week.

Thus begins more than a month of legal filings and PR battles, as both sides try to gain the upper hand not just in terms of votes cast but also legitimacy in the minds of most Americans. The nation’s and the world’s eyes are trained on beleaguered staffers reviewing ballots in places like Ypsilanti, Allentown and, yes, Kenosha. Meanwhile, an army of lawyers on both sides battle it out in the courts, while world leaders wait with bated breath for a result.

Ultimately, Wisconsin and Michigan turn blue. As in 2000 when Florida hung in the balance, the result comes down to one state — Pennsylvania. ‘Naked ballots’ become the ‘hanging chads’ of 2020, as many Pennsylvanians forget to mail their absentee votes in extra ‘secrecy’ envelopes. This time election officials are more sympathetic to voters’ intentions, and Biden surges into the lead while Trump’s lawyers file appeals all the way to the US Supreme Court.

But time is running out. In a nasty bit of irony for the Trump team, the justices, including a newly minted Amy Coney Barrett, cite the precedent of Bush v Gore (2000) and call time on the vote count. The decision of Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State, Kathy Boockvar, to award Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes to Joe Biden stands. On 14 December Joe Biden wins the Electoral College 280 to 258.

All the while Trump remains in the White House, decrying the actions of election officials in states run by “crooked” Democrat governors, while crowing “I told you so” about the problems of postal voting. His lawyers prepare more suits and his most ardent supporters in Congress take to the airwaves. Right wing citizen militias walk the streets of Lansing, Madison and Harrisburg to protest what they see as a stolen election. Even as the Democrats plan inaugural balls, world leaders call on Trump to honour the result of the election. Their entreaties are met with silence and disdain. Counter protests erupt in Berkeley, Portland and New York City.

With 20 January, Inauguration Day, just days away, the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff declare they will honour the constitutionality of the election result and the Supreme Court’s decision. Joe Biden will be their next Commander in Chief once he takes the oath of office from Chief Justice John Roberts, which he dutifully does at the Capitol but with the absence of the 45th president. Meanwhile, at the White House, the Joint Chiefs march into the Oval Office, and chairman General Mark Milley utters the now famous words, “Mr President, we’re here to escort you from the building.”

That such a scenario seems more than plausible says all you need to know about the state of US politics in 2020. And, if the last nine months have taught us anything, it is that all bets are off. In a year of pandemic, economic meltdown, environmental disaster and social unrest in the streets of America, a disputed US presidential election in this simulation-game-gone-mad of a year seems only fitting, doesn’t it? However, while such flights of (almost) fantasy are in themselves extremely entertaining — 

 — they are increasingly looking less likely.

Rather than gazing ahead a few months, let’s go back to the beginning of the year. The Trump re-election campaign looked like a juggernaut and was sitting on the longest economic expansion in US history and a $1 billion war chest. Joe Biden wasn’t even his party’s third choice as presidential nominee. Even once southern primary voters decided that Biden was their party’s only hope of regaining the White House, the former senator from Delaware emerged from a bruising primary campaign relatively broken.

Fast forward a few months and the tables have turned. The economy is in shambles and Trump’s campaign is in disarray, having blown through over $800 million with powerfully little to show for it. The campaign has even ‘gone dark’ — not running campaign ads in major markets — in key swing states for weeks at a time, a veritable no-no in any presidential election. His tempestuous performance at Tuesday’s debate has done little to help his chances, with opinion polls in key states again moving in Biden’s favour.

The conventional wisdom is that the closer the election the more likely Trump is to not only contest the result but to refuse to recognise it. With that as the metric, the chances that the US escapes from its dystopian nightmare without a constitutional crisis are looking better all the time. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight — the website that takes its name from the number of electors in the Electoral College and was the least wrong of election prognosticators in 2016 — puts the chances of at least one swing state being close enough to contest at 5%.

But this is Trump, after all. Hasn’t he always defied conventional wisdom? Now he is raising the bar for outrageousness by raising the alarm over voter fraud, especially with postal ballots. Add his failure to answer questions about honouring the results of the election and promising a peaceful transition of power and you have the makings of a toxic political cocktail quicker than you can say ‘constitutional crisis’ or ‘dysfunctional democracy’.

To say that the current situation is unprecedented may be the understatement of the century. Never has the US voted during a pandemic. And never has the US had a president seemingly so willing to do away with constitutional norms and tradition.

That doesn’t mean there haven’t been contested elections in the past. In fact, less than straightforward election results were relatively common in the 19th century and into the first two decades of the 20th. The most disputed election of all time occurred in 1876, when an inconclusive result in the Electoral College ended up in a specially created bi-partisan Electoral Commission. A compromise agreement saw the Republican triumph, but in return for ending Reconstruction, thereby setting the stage for the modern civil rights movement and ultimately Black Lives Matter.

Author Matthew Sherwood of Factual America


In other ways, the departure of another embattled, mentally unbalanced Republican president may hold more relevance. In 1974 facing impeachment hearings and likely removal from office, senior Republican congressional leaders met with Richard Nixon to persuade him that in the interest of the nation he should resign. While his vice president and successor, Gerald Ford, promptly pardoned Nixon of any high crimes and misdemeanours, one could see a magnanimous Biden doing something similar, if he can keep the more rabid elements of his party from pursuing vindictive investigations.

But does Trump potentially have a point? Could he become the victim of electoral fraud, or at least the frailties of an antiquated voting system. Just a few days ago the 

 reported that over 100,000 would-be voters in New York City had received absentee ballots with incorrect personal information. Richard Mawrey, a former judge in the UK election court that exposed serious fraud in Birmingham council elections, notes that fraud has the potential to swing the election if it comes down to a few hundred votes in certain districts, as was the case in Florida in 2000 and a handful of Midwestern states in 2016 and quite possibly again in 2020.

, “None of this is to say that fraud will happen, only that it can happen and happen easily. President Trump may be wrong to say it will happen but the Democrats are certainly wrong to say it can’t.” For the sake of us all, let’s hope it doesn’t.

Matthew Sherwood is co-producer and host of the 

The most pivotal moments in presidential debate history…

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