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With Democrats accounting for a much larger share of mail-in ballots than Republicans, Mr. Trump has repeatedly challenged the legitimacy of these votes. If he is leading even narrowly on Tuesday night, he could claim victory based only on the votes so far counted even though Joe Biden might well be on course to win when all valid votes are counted. Worse, he might pressure the Republican legislatures in battleground states, like Pennsylvania and Florida, to award him their states electors, even if the formal vote-counting machinery ultimately declares a Biden victory in the state. Then it would fall to the courts and Congress (under the terms of the inscrutable, badly written Electoral Count Act of 1887) to determine who had won in the disputed states.

Such a scenario would be far more dire and polarizing than even the Bush v. Gore nightmare of 2000, with an incumbent president threatening fire and brimstone if the election were not handed to him, while signaling violent right-wing extremists to stand by but perhaps no longer stand down. Many on the left would no longer be willing to let the presidency (in their eyes) be stolen from them again, and far-left groups might revel in the chance to worsen the crisis. The potential for violence would be alarming.

The integrity of the election is further challenged by the rising pace of voter suppression. In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, throwing out the formula requiring nine states (and other localities) with a history of racist voter suppression to obtain federal permission before changing their voting requirements. Since then, these and other Republican-controlled states have imposed legal and administrative changes that have made voting more difficult for Black Americans, Hispanics, young people and city dwellers all heavily Democratic constituencies.

It would be undemocratic enough for the loser of the national popular vote to again be elected (for the third time in the past six presidential elections) by winning the Electoral College. But if Mr. Trump were to win re-election by narrowly prevailing in two or three states through extensive disqualification of mail-in ballots or through voter suppression, the legitimacy of the 2020 election could be questioned far more intensely than those of 2000 or 2016. And if Mr. Trump failed to win the Electoral College but was nonetheless declared president thanks to partisan electors, it would signify a grave breakdown of American democracy even if people remained free to speak, write and publish as they pleased.

The very age of American democracy is part of the problem. The United States was the first country to become a democracy, emerging over a vast, dispersed and diverse set of colonies that feared the prospect of the tyranny of the majority. Hence, our constitutional system lacks some immunities against an electoral debacle that are common in newer democracies.

For example, even though Mexico is a federal system like the United States, it has a strong, politically independent National Electoral Institute that administers its federal elections. The Election Commission of India has even more far-reaching and constitutionally protected authority to administer elections across that enormous country. Elections thus remain a crucial pillar of Indian democracy, even as the countrys populist prime minister, Narendra Modi, assaults press freedom, civil society and the rule of law. Other newer democracies, from South Africa to Taiwan, have strong national systems of election administration staffed and led by nonpartisan professionals.

The American system is a mishmash of state and local authorities. Most are staffed by dedicated professionals, but state legislatures and elected secretaries of state can introduce partisanship, casting doubt on its impartiality. No other advanced democracy falls so short of contemporary democratic standards of fairness, neutrality and rationality in its system of administering national elections.

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Im a Democracy Expert. I Never Thought Wed Be So Close to a Breakdown. - The New York Times

Republican Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker sharply criticized President Donald Trump on Friday for suggesting that there is a national conspiracy afoot to keep him from being reelected.

"At some point, we're in like the 7th or 8th inning of this game," the governor said. "At some point everybody's got to get used to the idea that we need to move forward as a country and deal with all the significant issues we have to deal with here. I think the president's comments that there is some national conspiracy around this aren't supported by any of the facts, and they are damaging to democracy, they cheapen all of those of us who serve in public life and who ran and who were either reelected or defeated based on the will of the people."

"I think the suggestion that this is somehow a conspiracy is bad for democracy," Baker later added.

In-depth news coverage of the Greater Boston Area.

As Joe Biden continues to inch closer to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency, Trump alleged Thursday that his opponents are "trying to steal" and "trying to rig" the election. He also claimed he won Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. NBC News has projected Biden as the winner in Michigan and the apparent winner in Wisconsin, and Biden is currently leading in Trump in both Pennsylvania and Georgia.

He followed that up on Friday by issuing a statement questioning "the integrity of our entire election process."

"From the beginning we have said that all legal ballots must be counted and all illegal ballots should not be counted, yet we have met resistance to this basic principle by Democrats at every turn," Trump's statement said. "We will pursue this process through every aspect of the law to guarantee that the American people have confidence in our government. I will never give up fighting for you and our nation.

Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney said he thinks President Trump should put his big-boy pants on while Pennsylvania continues to count ballots for the 2020 election.

Baker pointed out Friday that most of the states where the ballots are still being counted are led by either Republicans or a mix of Republicans and Democrats.

"I've been in a bunch of close elections. The rules are there, and almost every state in the country went through a major overhaul of the way they handled voting after the presidential election of 2000," he said. "People did take a really hard look at the rules, process and procedures."

"I haven't heard anybody say much at all about the fact that we had the highest participation rate in our nation's history in this election," Baker added. "We should be celebrating this. People took it seriously. They came out and they voted. That's a good thing."

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Baker Says Trump's Election Conspiracy Theories Are Bad for Democracy' - NBC10 Boston

Last night, when it was looking increasingly likely that Joe Biden would muster enough electoral votes to win the presidency, President Donald Trump spoke at the White House.

"If you count the legal votes, I easily win," Trump claimed, citing baseless accusations of election fraud. "If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us."

His fabrications continued for 17 minutes the president providing no evidence to support his allegations that the American presidency was being taken unjustly from him.

Across the landscape, members of the media, pundits and some Republicans quickly described the speech as a low point for American democracy.

CNN's Jake Tapper reacted by saying, "What a sad night for the United States of America to hear their president say that, to falsely accuse people of trying to steal the election, to try to attack democracy that way with this feast of falsehoods."

The major news networks simply pulled the plug on the president and took him off the air.

For more on the US and creeping authoritarianism, The World's host Marco Werman spoke withMasha Gessen. In their book "Surviving Autocracy," Gessen chronicles the rise of Trump and the American political trajectory of the past few years. They are also a staff writer with The New Yorker.

Masha Gessen:Perhaps I'm a little different from people who saw it as something really extraordinary. And frankly, I wasn't surprised. Trump has been telling us that this is exactly what he was going to do, and this is exactly how he perceived the electoral process. And we knew that this is what he was going to do. He was going to cast aspersions on the electoral process. He was going to basically say that whatever votes were cast for him were good votes, beautiful votes, legal votes, and everything else was illegitimate.

Related:Biden ahead in Georgia, Pennsylvania; Trump attacks process

I actually think we need a reinvention, both institutional and spiritual, of democracy. We need to really have a countrywide conversation about what we mean by "democracy." Democracy is not elections. Democracy is not a set of institutions. Those are all instruments of democracy. But how do we create a government of the governed? How do we create a government of the people, by the people and for the people? These are fundamental questions that we haven't asked in a long time. And I think that part of the reason that it has been so easy for Donald Trump to pervert institutions is because we haven't been having this conversation. These are really huge and difficult projects that cannot be accomplished in Washington through Washington means. They're kind of national conversation types of projects. And that's what we really need to do in order to avoid a Donald Trump, or a successor to Trump, coming back in to take advantage of the structural changes that he has made.

You know, at the moment, it's looking pretty bleak. But I think the democratic experiments are often not terribly long lasting because they require reinvention all the time. For example, Poland has had an amazing 30-year run, where a totalitarian regime gave way to something that was really beautiful and representative and thriving for a long, long time. Americans tend to think of democracy as something you build and then inhabit. And I think that the tendency to think that way has actually been more pronounced over the last generation as we refer back to the Founding Fathers as though they invented everything once and for all. But democracy is not that. Democracy is a process of constant reinvention.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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'Democracy is a process of constant reinvention' - The World

The reforms included giving voters in every state a chance to fix an error like a missing signature on a mail-in ballot and ensuring that counting ballots isnt subject to delays. If election officials can begin processing ballots early, this year has taught us, they have time to get in touch with voters to address mistakes on ballots and also complete the count on or close to Election Day.

These are small steps, technocratic rather than visionary, but ones that can help increase participation and trust. Congress could set national standards and fund states to implement them. Its time for uniform rules, said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, Austin. Weve learned a lot about how ballots should be distributed and validated.

Yet in recent litigation about voting by mail, Republican lawsuits have resurrected a theory that could prevent state courts and election officials from enacting changes that protect voters from disenfranchisement. The idea is that the rules for an election must come exclusively from the legislature. It derives from the Supreme Court case that effectively decided the presidential election in 2000 Bush v. Gore. But it has lain dormant since then, because it was never adopted by a majority on the Supreme Court.

Now that could change. During the summer and fall, in light of the pandemic, the state election board in North Carolina and the State Supreme Court in Pennsylvania extended the deadlines for returning absentee ballots; if they were postmarked by Nov. 3, they could be received through the mail days later and still be counted.

The Constitution gives legislatures the main role of setting rules for elections. (Each state, Article II says, shall appoint its representative to the Electoral College in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.) But as in every other area of law, state officials outside the legislature have traditionally figured out how to apply rules for administering elections, and state courts are sometimes asked to decide a challenge to a particular practice in consideration of their state constitutions, almost all of which explicitly protect voting. (Many broadly provide for free or free and equal or free and open elections.)

And yet, in Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court interfered with the usual lines of authority over state elections. The justices stepped in to end a recount of the Florida vote ordered by the Florida Supreme Court. Two of the justices signed onto a concurrence, written by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, arguing that the Florida recount had to end, despite the Florida Supreme Courts order, because Article II meant that only the legislature could provide a means to contest the results of the election. But in 2015, a majority of the Supreme Court went in the opposite direction, holding that the meaning of Legislature in Article II encompasses a states general lawmaking power. That ruling allowed Arizona to create a nonpartisan redistricting commission through a ballot initiative, rather than a law passed by the legislature.

And yet in the weeks before this election, Rehnquists narrow interpretation of Article II gained support from four conservative justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas when Republicans challenged the deadline extensions for mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, and also in Wisconsin. Justice Amy Coney Barrett did not take part in these cases.

So far, these legal developments are a skirmish. At press time, the deadline extensions appeared to have little effect, because the number of mail-in ballots that arrived after Nov. 3 seemed small. But the cases laid the groundwork for future battles over election rules, large and small. This is now at the top of my list, Hasen said. The federal courts are threatening to become the greatest impediment to election reform.

Outside the courts, the usual challenge to improving how elections are run is sustaining our attention. Now we also have to bridge the partisan divide that turned the basic task of counting ballots into a lengthy, unnecessary drama. One lesson of Election Day was that record turnout doesnt just lift Democrats; the enormous wave of voters wound up buoying Republican candidates too, including Trump. But his relentless assaults on the integrity of the election now risk cementing the idea that for Republicans, attacking democracy itself, along with disenfranchising voters who dont support them, is the path forward. Instead of listening to Trump, look at and learn from the workers whose determined efforts made the election, despite everything, a success.

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Democracy Worked This Year. But It Is Under Threat. - The New York Times

The question Americans faced in this election was clear. What were they prepared to do to protect their democracy?

Americans saw the hail Trump Nazi salutes shortly after his election in 2016. They have endured the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists that have killed police, massacred Jews in a synagogue, plowed a car into a crowd in Charlottesville, killing a young woman, slaughtered Latinos in El Paso, sent bombs to those whom the president blasted as his enemies, and murdered African Americans in Louisville.

Americans witnessed Trumps nonchalant attitude as domestic terrorists plotted to kidnap and put on trial a governor who dared to stand up to him. They were barraged with his brags and taunts about how he had packed the US supreme court to intervene if he wasnt declared the winner on 3 November. They heard him repeatedly intimate threaten, even that if the votes didnt go his way, there just might not be a peaceful transition of power. They have also seen his absolute inability to denounce the white supremacists whom he summoned to stand back and stand by on election day.

But Americans had to fight more than just Trump. The Republican National Committee, recruited a 50,000-member army of poll watchers who are little more than a goon squad used to intimidate voters in 15 states, particularly in minority precincts.

Then there were the Republican governors and secretaries of state, who tried to weaponize a global pandemic and make it another barrier to the ballot box. By election day, Covid-19 has killed more than 230,000 and infected at least 9 million Americans. But instead of working overtime to protect their citizens health and right to vote, like the Jim Crow politicians of days of yore, they were determined to make people choose between casting their ballot or avoiding death. The CDC noted that with indoor transmission, people farther than six feet apart can become infected by tiny droplets and particles that float in the air for minutes and hours, and that they play a role in the pandemic.

In Mississippi, those basic public health warnings were shredded by a policy that made masks optional at polling stations and also gave poll workers the latitude to ask voters to remove their protective face coverings to verify identity. South Carolina, Alabama and Texas went to court multiple times to ensure that a viable solution to voting during a pandemic absentee ballots would become less and less viable. They fought numerous legal battles to require absentee ballots to be notarized, or have witness signatures, or be used exclusively by those over 65-year-old. Texas was clear. Voters under 65 must have a valid excuse to receive an absentee ballot. Fear of contracting Covid-19, however, was not one.

Trump added to the difficulties by deliberately kneecapping the US Postal Service. He bragged about withholding funds from the agency so that it would be unable to handle the exponential flood of mail-in ballots. He appointed Louis DeJoy as the postmaster general, who then ordered the dismantling of sorting machines, banned most overtime, commanded that trucks leave on time even if the mail was not on board. Then the president and the Republicans, after wreaking havoc, went to court to force states to invalidate ballots that the post office could not, would not deliver by election day.

The disdain for democracy dripping from Trump and the Republicans has done its damage. They had subverted and perverted many of the pillars of democracy the protections of democracy. A US Senate run by flag-lapel wearing saboteurs let bills rot that would have expanded accessibility to the ballot box, blocked foreign interference in our elections, and repaired the Voting Rights Act. That same Republican-led Senate stacked a federal court system whose rulings aided and abetted voter suppression and packed a US supreme court that planted a poison pill in the Pennsylvania decision that it would be more than willing to decide the merits of mail-in ballot deadlines after the election (apparently if the vote totals were close enough to tip it towards Trump in this electoral college-rich swing state).

While the forces arrayed against the United States looked formidable, they were not invincible. Instead, they ran into something that is even more powerful than a president, a senate, or the US supreme court. The American people themselves and their belief in and devotion to democracy.

Of course, the hints were there all along that this regime and its supporters were in trouble. In 2016, there was so much wrong with that election, including Russia, that Trumps victory had a huge, de-legitimizing asterisk beside it, starting with 2.9 million more votes for his opponent. Then there was the 2018 mid-term, which was a referendum on and repudiation of Trump when the House of Representatives flipped and the Democrats picked up more than 40 seats. What became obvious, as the Republican party shrank, as Never Trumpers gained an important toehold, and as he could only speak convincingly to his base supporters, what Trump brought to America simply was not acceptable or accepted. Then, what he did to America the lies, the corruption, the stoking of white supremacist violence, the damage to the nations international reputation, the debasement of its institutions, the stealing of Americans joy and celebrations, the contempt for their lives sealed his and his enablers fate.

Americans used, in the final words of Congressman John Lewis, the most powerful nonviolent change agent at their disposal, the vote, to fight for this nation and this incredible democracy. And fight they did. Americans maneuvered around, under, and over every barrier to get to the ballot box. With the help of an impressive array of legal and grassroots warriors, like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU, the League of Women Voters, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, March for Our Lives, FairFight for Action, Black Voters Matter Fund, Voto Latino, the Native American Rights Fund, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the New Georgia Project, the NAACP, Democracy Docket, VoteRiders, and more, Americans fought for this democracy.

They stood in lines up to 11 hours.

They covered themselves in plastic to wait to vote and protect themselves against those who defined freedom as the right to hurl a deadly virus at innocent bystanders.

They volunteered and they donated, in the midst of an economic recession, with millions of people out of work, more than a billion dollars to fund candidates who did not have nor want access to unseemly dark money.

They used their age to motivate them in the war for democracy. A married couple in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, both over 100 years old, sang Swing Low, Sweet Chariot while waiting to ensure that their votes counted. Indeed, Black people 65 and older, clearly with memories of Jim Crow, voted in higher numbers during early voting than they had overall in 2016. And, Americans between 18-29, seeing a planet ravaged by climate change and their very future imperiled, came out in force to ensure that democracy and Earth had a fighting chance.

Americans refused to be stopped by all of the court shenanigans and bureaucratic rabbit punches. While Trump threatened the ability of the Post Office to deliver the ballots on time and the courts put an electoral timebomb on the due dates, the majority of Americans launched a pre-emptive strike and sent their ballots in even sooner, often weeks before the deadline. Others, leery of the disruption that Trump, DeJoy, and the courts had caused, bypassed the Post Office altogether and took their ballots to local boards of elections or put them in drop boxes. Tens of millions of ballots.

Americans were not going to be stopped. Those who did not or could not vote in 2016, cast their first ballot ever in 2020 and accounted for 20% of the record-breaking early voter turnout for this election.

In the end, every maneuver by Trump and his enablers was met with a more powerful and effective counter-maneuver. It had to be. One voter out of the record-breaking millions who braved Covid-19, the assault on mail-in ballots, the threats of violence at the polls, and the reality of what four more years of an anti-American regime would mean, explained simply: This election is for saving the US.

Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies at Emory University and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy. She is a contributor to the Guardian

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Millions of Americans have risen up and said: democracy won't die on our watch - The Guardian