From two months ago (06 September 2020), and here we are…
Democrats Hold Secret Edge If Election Is Too Close to Call
Twenty years ago, as Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush battled for weeks over who’d won the U.S. presidential election, Florida’s Republican secretary of state, Katherine Harris, helped hand the White House to Bush by declaring an end to recounts that showed him clinging to the slimmest of leads.
If the outcome of November’s election comes down to fights over counting mail-in ballots and claims of fraud by President Donald Trump, Democrat Joe Biden may have a quiet advantage: the top election officials in many of the key states that could decide the election are Democrats.
In Michigan and Pennsylvania two Democratic-leaning states Trump won in 2016 the top elections officials belong to Biden’s party. That’s also true in Arizona, which Trump carried but Biden is now leading in the polls, and Minnesota, which the president has targeted as a potential pickup.
Trump, who trails Biden in national polls, has tried to undermine the public’s confidence in the election. He claims that mail-in ballots are rife with fraud, and that the election will be rigged against him. This has led Democrats to worry about a scenario where Trump is ahead in the election-night count from in-person voters and declares himself the winner before all outstanding mail-in ballots are tallied.
Should that happen, it will be up to the secretaries of state to preside over the counting of mail-in votes and certify the final outcomes, a process that could take days or even weeks. These relatively anonymous state officials could prove a bulwark for Biden as they cope with what’s expected to be an unprecedented surge in mail-in ballots because of the coronavirus pandemic.
They will also be on the front lines in countering any claims by Trump or his allies that the election is somehow rigged.
“It will be all hands on deck, but defending election results will definitely start with secretaries of state as the chief election officer,” said Alex Padilla, a Democrat who was elected to serve as California’s secretary of state. “In my mind, it’s definitely good that we have secretaries in swing states committed to strengthening and defending the voting system.”
Election officials insist that they’re non-partisan and oversee voting according to the law. But J. Kenneth Blackwell, a former Ohio secretary of state, said it’s impossible to avoid politics when elections officials have to make tough decisions.
Blackwell was in charge of Ohio’s voting in 2004, when Democrat John Kerry delayed conceding to Bush until the morning after Election Day because of outstanding provisional ballots.
“You can’t take politics out of politics,” said Blackwell, now a member of the Trump campaign’s board of advisers. “It’s the way our system is set up. I don’t all of a sudden become a non-Republican when I have to make a judgment associated with my job in the political sphere.”
“These mail-in ballots are a disgrace and they know it,” Trump told supporters at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Thursday evening, speaking about Democrats and suggesting they could manipulate mail-in voting. “The only way they’re going to beat us is by doing that kind of stuff.”
The Democratic secretary of state in Pennsylvania, Kathy Boockvar, said in a statement that she has confidence county elections officials will count ballots efficiently to make sure “the outcome of the election is known as quickly as possible.”
While state officials influence the election with the rules governing voting, they also can play a pivotal role in ballot-counting if the race is close, with rulings to break tie votes or other actions such as Harris took in 2000, said Daniel Tokaji, a former Ohio State University election law professor and now dean of the University of Wisconsin Law School. There’s also inherent tension between discharging their official duties and the incentive to help their party, he said.
“There’s just no getting around that conflict of interest,” Tokaji added. “Even well-intentioned officials trying to do the right thing, their actions can always be called into question.”
Asked whether Trump’s campaign is concerned about Democrats being in charge of overseeing post-election counting in some states, spokeswoman Thea McDonald focused instead on efforts to expand mail-in voting. “Rather than trying to predict the future, the news media ought to draw attention to Democrats’ nonstop attempts to throw our electoral system into chaos 60 days before a general election,” she said.
The Biden campaign declined to comment.
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/gen-gov-industries-med/2020/09/06/id/985623/