In Pennsylvania and across America, retailers are reinforcing glass, hiring guards or retaining teams to barricade and board up buildings to prepare for Nov. 3 – underscoring the fragile state of the U.S. election system
The Pennsylvania Convention Center, a location where ballots will be counted in the upcoming presidential election, is illuminated at night in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., October 20, 2020.
In Pennsylvania and across America, retailers are reinforcing glass, hiring guards or retaining on-call teams that barricade and board up buildings. Citizens of all political stripes are snapping up guns and ammunition in record numbers. “It’s clear that the bullseye is scoping in on Philadelphia as the epicenter of the 2020 general election,” said Al Schmidt, a Republican election commissioner in the city. “We have to be prepared.”
All the fighting over voting and counting rules could end on Election Day if one candidate wins in a national landslide, which would make fighting over the precise results or fraud allegations in individual states irrelevant to the outcome. A clear victory is a possibility for Biden, who has led national polls for months, but state polls show a close contest in many of the battleground states that will decide the election.
Some academics have outlined a scenario in which Trump, using fraud as the justification, calls on Republican-held legislatures in battleground states to appoint their own electors to compete with the electors typically certified by governors. Normally, a state sends to Congress a slate of electors nominated by the party that wins the popular vote in that state.
The two senior Trump campaign officials said the campaign had discussed getting Republican state legislators to submit electors, but only in a last-resort scenario the official said could likely be avoided. They said the campaign would more likely dispute results in court, if needed. Republican leaders of the Pennsylvania legislature said state law gives them no role to play in the choosing electors.
All the contested-election scenarios would play out under the pressure of immovable deadlines requiring states to submit electors to Congress on Dec. 14 and a new president to be seated on Jan. 20.Charles Wells, a retired Florida Supreme Court Justice who presided over the Bush-Gore recount case in 2000, wrote to friends in September warning that the 2020 election posed a grave risk to American democracy.
Joyce Weber, an 81-year-old resident of Montgomery County, has already voted for Biden through a mail-in ballot. She trusts the state’s election system but believes Republicans will seek to intimidate voters at the polls.Trump supporter Bob Howard, 70, is concerned enough about the election’s integrity that he signed up to monitor the polls for Republicans in Allegheny County.
Republicans have argued the procedure, laid out in state law, was essential to voter privacy and fraud prevention. Democrats counter that the rule is a vestige of the past that Republicans are using to disenfranchise voters. The envelopes are not needed to protect secrecy, they say, in an era when machines open ballots and workers can’t identify the voter.
Trump plans to field legions of observers and attorneys to watch election workers count mail-in ballots - making sure those without two envelopes are tossed, according to the two senior campaign officials. But the campaign will need to negotiate access for an unprecedented number of observers with county election officials who oversee poll places in Pennsylvania.
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