Exact Fallout of Presidential Election Predicted in 2019 War-Game Paper
January 3, 2020
Paper suggests use of 1887 act, congressional impasse leading to Pelosi as acting president
News Analysis
“It is Election Night 2020.This time it is all eyes on Pennsylvania, as whoever wins the Keystone State will win an Electoral College majority. Trump is ahead in the state by 20,000 votes…
…In the morning, new numbers show Trump’s lead starting to slip, and by noon, it is below 20,000. Impatient, Trump holds an impromptu press conference and announces:
I’ve won reelection.The results last night showed that I won Pennsylvania by over 20,000 votes. Those results were complete, with 100 percent of precincts reporting. As far as I’m concerned, those results are now final. I’m not going to let machine politicians in Philadelphia steal my reelection victory from me—or from my voters!
Trump insists, by tweet and microphone, “THIS THEFT WILL NOT STAND!!!” “WE ARE TAKING BACK OUR VICTORY.”
So begins the saga over the disputed result of the 2020 presidential election.”
Although familiar, the passage above isn’t taken from a recent article describing the Nov. 3, 2020, presidential election. Rather, it comes from a 55-page paper, published in the winter of 2019 by the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal, called, “Preparing for a Disputed Presidential Election: An Exercise in Election Risk Assessment and Management Election Risk Assessment and Management” by Edward B. Foley.
Foley, a professor who heads the election law program at Ohio University and also is a lawyer and a contributor to The Washington Post, originated the Blue Shift theory, which holds that Democratic candidates often gain votes as mail-in ballots get counted following the day of the actual election. Although Foley loosely identified mail-in ballots as a cause of the “Blue Shift”, he also played down their impact, concluding his thesis by noting “further insight on just what is causing the observable big blue shift must await more sophisticated statistical analysis.”
Foley’s paper, more of a Democrat war-game analysis, takes readers on a complicated electoral journey that may well prove to accurately foreshadow events through Jan. 20. In effect, Foley has provided a complicated—but thus far surprisingly accurate—electoral roadmap to be used by Democrats.
Indeed, Foley’s paper has already proved remarkably prescient (although he uses Elizabeth Warren instead of Biden), describing how election officials certify the vote by a thin margin for Trump’s opponent as the election tally continues to move away from him in the days following the election.
Foley predicted that provisional ballots would be “attacked as ineligible for counting, as would any absentee ballots not previously counted” because, in Foley’s words “when one is ahead and attempting to preserve a lead, the goal is to shut down the counting process as much as possible” and he also anticipated that “Heavily Democratic precincts would be closely scrutinized for any voting irregularities.”
He also pointed out the role that might be played by the courts, observing that Trump “would certainly be in a more favorable posture if a judicial decree blocked the counting of these extra votes” or even better, if a court ordered that the state’s governor “certify a popular vote victory for his Republican slate of electors.”
Foley also acknowledged “the historical legacy of improper practices conducted by big-city machine politicians.”
“Remember what happened in Florida in 2018, specifically in Broward County: There, the local election administrator acted improperly with respect to the handling of ballots, and that became a potential basis for challenging the entire result statewide. If something similar happened in Philadelphia, one can imagine that Republicans would invoke it as grounds for discarding the results of the canvass …”
Foley’s Concerns Over the Role of Vice President Mike Pence
Foley notes, however, that Trump doesn’t require a court victory in order to “press his case to Congress. As long as he gets the state legislature to appoint his presidential electors directly, and those electors submit their purported electoral votes to the President of the Senate—who happens to be his vice president, Mike Pence—he has a fighting chance.”….
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