Biden/Harris 360 v. Trump/Pence 178

Princeton, Oct. 9, 2020. The 2020 elections are shaping up to be a blowout according to the Princeton Consortium, probably the best polling source of information in the country. Dr. Sam Wang, head of the Neuroscience Center, compiles 200 or more polls and submits them to a many-faceted series of statistical procedures. He called the 2008 and 2012 elections on the money, and missed only the effect of Russian meddling in the 2016 elections. This time, he has the expected Russian influence in his calculations. He currently sees Democrats with a 53 to 47 majority in the new Senate, and they will be adding a few more seats to their overwhelming majority in the House. Biden/Harris are expected to win the popular vote by about 10 million votes.

That’s the good news.

According to many reporters, Trump is preparing legal challenges now to be presented to a new Supreme Court that includes his latest nominee. He apparently believes the new 6 to 3 majority of conservative justices will rule in his favor that the election was rigged against him. That assumption could be in error from the start. Senate confirmation of a new justice requires that each senator must vote in person on the floor. But 6 Republican senators currently have tested positive for the Covid-19 virus, and are in quarantine. We will have to wait and see how that “fly-in-the-ointment” plays itself out.

Another of his arguments is that wider use of mail-in ballots makes them instantly suspect. He claims that countries like China can reproduce millions of fake ballots and send them in.

FactCheck.org debunks Trump’s assertion. There is no history of any such use of fake ballots. Moreover, the U.S. has many checks and balances in place to catch any such attempt. According to FactCheck.org:

Voting experts told us at the time that there are numerous logistical hurdles, such as reproducing ballots in multiple jurisdictions, and security safeguards, such as bar codes and signature checks, that would prevent a foreign government from slipping large numbers of fraudulent ballots past election officials. Those safeguards make such a plan highly unlikely to result in fraudulent votes being cast, experts say, and certainly not enough to sway a presidential election.

Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine School of Law and author of “The Voting Wars,” told us that the kind of massive fraud described by Trump is “farcical.”

What if Trump declares by “Executive Oder” that the elections were fraudulent and he simply refuses to move or to acknowledge any decision by the Supreme Court that he doesn’t like?

There is always Amendment 25 that gives his cabinet the authority to declare him incompetent and to have him removed by force, if necessary. Do they still use Straitjackets?