After Election Protection, Is A General Strike the Way to Beat a Trump Coup?

 

-by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman

Donald Trump has made it clear he will not peacefully relinquish power after the coming election, no matter what the outcome.

To get him out of the White House, it may take the ultimate non-violent action: a nationwide general strike.

Trump says he’ll brand any legitimate vote count that shows him losing to be “fraudulent” and proclaim himself emperor for life.

He’ll push to fill RBG’s Supreme Court seat before the election to give himself a solid majority there should he lose it in the popular vote.

Until it reaches that point, those opposing his permanent dictatorship face an apocalyptic trifecta, a three-part test of the human ability to save our democracy, and our place on this planet:

1- Protecting the Actual Election:

The daily battle for election protection has long since escalated to ceaseless hand-to-hand trench warfare against Trump’s infamous assault on the democratic process.

It’s highly unlikely Trump will command a legitimate majority of the American electorate. But if he subverts enough of the electoral process to win a majority of the votes cast and counted, or of the Electoral College, American democracy and the human ability to survive on this planet may be finished.

Mainstream polls generally show Biden ahead, even in the swing states that Hillary lost. In a legitimate election, those would give him an Electoral College majority.

But the New York Times has also published the only graph that really matters: if the polls are “as wrong as they were in 2016,” Trump wins 278-260.

That margin could come from Trump’s escalation of his 2016 attack on every conceivable aspect of the electoral process. It ranges from stripping the registration rolls, to destroying the US Postal Service to trashing paper ballots, to demanding (in Florida) ex-felons pay fees before they can vote, to every other Dirty Trick imaginable, from blowing up drop boxes, to terrorizing in-person voters, to hacking digital imaging machines, to torching election centers and whatever else Roger Stone and his Nixonian thugs can conjure.

As we report at grassrootsep.org and discuss every Monday at our 90-minute zoom calls, the grassroots work of fighting back for a free and fair election is a desperate 24/7 race for survival, with just five weeks to prevail.

But we are handicapped by the lack of response from the Democratic Party. In 2000, Greg Palast and Bev Harris reported on how the Bush GOP led by W’s CIA brother Jeb (then Governor of Florida) stripped more than 90,000 citizens of color from the Florida voter rolls and flipped the electronic vote count in key counties. Al Gore stopped Jesse Jackson from staging protest demonstrations, failed to sue for a comprehensive state-wide recount, failed to protect south Florida vote counters, stopped the Congressional Black Caucus from challenging the illegitimate Florida Electoral College delegation and much more (he also failed to carry his home state of Tennessee, which would have won him the election).

The Gore Democrats have since done nothing significant to rid us of the Electoral College (which seated Trump in 2016) instead spending the next two decades trashing Ralph Nader. In 2004 we reported from Columbus on a hundred (literally) different ways the Bush-Rove GOP stole the decisive Ohio vote count from John Kerry. We briefed his staff on the dire detail. In response, with 250,000 votes still uncounted, Kerry shafted us all by instantly conceding.

Since then we’ve been endlessly attacked by Democrat and “progressive” writers who could not be bothered to come to Columbus or dig past faux interviews with corrupt hacks.

In 2016, Green Party candidate Jill Stein slogged into decisive Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, unearthing a rat’s nest of manipulation and theft. Hillary ignored it all, joined Gore and Kerry in a quick concession, then attacked Stein in her ghastly memoir.

In 2018, absurdly rigged outcomes in Florida were sealed by another aborted vote count. With no serious objection from the Democrats, they seated a US Senator and a Governor now stripping the right to vote from more than a million ex-felons who may owe small fees. Those negated votes could easily put Trump back in the White House.

So too in Georgia, where Stacy Abrams was denied the governorship by a corrupt, vote-burning KKK Secretary of State who again could hand yet another decisive state—- with two US Senate races—- to the Trump Cult.

Now, in 2020 , we face the ultimate desperation. While the Democrats again ignore the massive untapped “youth vote” (millennials & GenZ) hard-working election protectionists must fight Trump’s Dirty Tricks. With early voting and vote by mail, the most critical juncture is poll workers decide whether to allow a ballot to be counted.

Trump says he’ll spend $20,000,000 to hire 50,000 “volunteers” to assault the polls. Many may strong-arm poll workers to trash countless ballots from suspected voters of color who omit a middle initial or a dotted i. Without fair-minded stalwarts to withstand that assault, the election could be decided simply by how many ballots Trump’s minions can trash before they’re counted.

Election protectionists must also guarantee that voters stripped from the rolls are reinstated, that vote-by-mail ballots actually go out, that drop boxes are deployed and then protected, that early voters get paper ballots and aren’t harassed by armed terrorists at the polls, that digital images aren’t hacked or pitched, that they’re counted quickly and accurately, and more.

2020 could well turn on poll workers, poll monitors and site protectionists.

Most precincts require them to be local residents, but will allow them to be under 18, potentially marking a major generational transition in who conducts our elections.

All who marched for George Floyd and police reform now must become poll workers. Those election boards are begging them to come in. The days are long, but the pay can be good, potentially marking a monumental generational transition from an historically elderly crew of poll workers to one spearheaded by a new generation.

But once all the above is said and done, the future will likely depend on whether Biden and the Democrats will stand and fight against a stolen outcome.

Or, beyond that, whether there’s a larger, more deeply committed “small-d” grassroots movement willing to fight for democracy and survival where the Democratic Party is not.

2- Protecting the Polls Against Trump Terror Assault

As Greg Palast has shown, Trump has a “12th Amendment option” to throw the election.

Assuming he’s about to lose the popular and Electoral College vote, Trump can simply resort to organized violence, official and otherwise. He can send military hit squads and fascist pouring into the key voting stations.

Non-violent activists must be there to confront them.

Trump hates vote by mail and early voting largely because (among other things) their diffuse nature makes it harder to terrorize the actual electorate in person at the polls. Trump’s Ku Klux Klan father was all about preventing people of color and other untermenschen from voting.

But the polling stations are still there, along with the ballots. Trump’s minions could make November 3 a new Kristallnacht, with armed troops and militias blowing up drop boxes, trashing stored ballots, destroying imaging machines, torching election centers and warehouses, trashing the legitimate vote count.

That would include assaulting poll workers, jamming the ballot approval process, sabotaging the timely reports needed to seat the Electoral College delegations set to choose the next president.

Should Trump succeed—- as so many US-sponsored mobsters have done in Third World countries—- he could (as per the 12th Amendment) throw the election into the US House of Representatives, or back to Republican-dominated state legislatures.

A reshaped Supreme Court, with a 6-3 fighting majority, could seal the coup.

3- The Ultimate Resistance: A General Strike

THEN what happens? Will the public resist? Does this nation have a non-violent core strong to stop such a coup d’etat?

The ability and willingness of an aroused, uncompromising, multi-racial public to shut the country down in the face of such a coup may be the only way to make an electorally defeated mobster give up power.

As Trump telegraphs his full Mussolini, much of the labor force in key industries must be ready to literally “shut it down” while occupying the means of production and distribution.

A national non-violent resistance must be ready to peacefully disrupt business as usual, and to sustain that silence until Trump leaves.

There’s plenty of history behind a new American general strike.

The first, of sorts, came in Virginia, 1685. An upstart landowner named Nathaniel Bacon wanted Governor William Berkeley to conquer more indigenous land. Bacon drew together an army of black and white indentured servants that overthrew Jamestown, burned it to the ground and forced Berkeley to flee.

Both Bacon and Berkeley soon died, as did the Rebellion. But southern landowners quickly separated the races by inventing chattel slavery, history’s harshest form of human servitude. Turning a class system into a caste regime, they put into the category of “subhuman” and gave whites a “gift” of superiority. No matter how badly exploited a white worker might be, they were still legally superior to blacks. This “invention” of slavery was the “original sin” of racial separation that divides us to this day.

Centuries later, the black scholar W.E.B. DuBois dubbed the never-ending mass defection of black slaves and poor whites from the plantation south a “general strike” and urged it as a highly effective tactic.

In 1835 a three-week general strike in Philadelphia won the working class some brotherly love in the form of higher pay and a shorter work day.

In 1877 railway workers birthed the modern labor movement with the Great Railway Strike. Coming in response to a 10% pay cut by the Pennsylvania Railroads greedy CEO Tom Scott, angry workers spontaneously shut the national system, burning many rail yards to the ground.

In 1894 the great Eugene V. Debs led his young American Railway Union again shut the national system in support of workers at the Pullman factory in southern Illinois. The strike was broken with federal troops who killed at least 35 workers, and soon turned Debs into a Socialist.

In 1919, some 65,000 workers shut Seattle. The generally conservative American Federation of Labor joined with the radical Industrial Workers of the World to handle essential services like garbage collection and medical care.

In 1936-7, auto workers seized physical control of the General Motors production system in Flint. With 2,000 unionists on strike, the nascent United Auto Workers won a union contract soon duplicated in much of the rest of the industry. Strikes in Minneapolis, Toledo and throughout the US defined the decade.

Amidst the 1946 post-war crash, with some two million Americans unemployed, general strikes erupted in Rochester, Pittsburgh and Oakland, California. Workers supporting female retail clerks held Oakland for about five days.

In the wake of those strikes, a right-wing Congress passed the brutally anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act over Harry Truman’s veto. Democratic administrations have since failed to repeal that and other anti-worker laws, vastly weakening the American union movement.

As in France, 1968, European and Asian general strikes have brought down governments. The Soviet grip on Eastern Europe was broken in 1989 by massive non-violent outpourings, as was the Soviet Union itself in 1991. Slobodan Milosovic’s fascist Serbia was also toppled largely by mass non-violent demonstrations.

America’s movements for peace, civil rights and social justice ihave mobilized millions. The recent marches for George Floyd may collectively have been the largest in world history.

They may have moved the American mind on racism and other critical issues. But we’ve yet to face toppling a fascist thug intent on becoming Dictator for Life.

Mass marches alone cannot force Trump to step down. His joy at deploying troops and militia for mass killings is not in doubt. Countless millions could march for days with no tangible impact on Trump’s lethal mindset.

There’s no precedent for an American non-violent movement shutting down the country or toppling a dictator.

Woodrow Wilson did assume dictatorial power amidst World War I (which most Americans opposed) the infamous Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 (which was mostly his fault) and his 1918-20 Red Scare (which he used to illegally crush the Socialist Party).

Amidst it all, Wilson (an avowed White Supremacist) caught the flu and had a stroke, leaving his wife Edith to (badly) run the country for a year.

Meanwhile some 675,000 Americans died in an entirely avoidable Pandemic, along another 100,000+ on the killing fields of Europe, and 70 more in a futile assault on the Russian Revolution. The strikes of 1919 impacted the nation, but not sufficiently to rid us of Wilson.

Should Trump lose the election, he will proclaim it fraudulent and use force to keep power, and perhaps do even more damage than Woodrow.

There would be no effective non-violent response other than shutting the country down.

Let’s protect this election to make sure it doesn’t come to that.

If it does, let’s be prepared for a general strike far bigger and more effective than all that have come before.

An Action Guide For Saving The 2020 Election Protection Trifecta

-by Harvey Wasserman,
Grassroots Emergency Election Protection Coalition

The one thing certain about the 2020 election is Donald Trump’s desperate try to destroy it.

Here’s a practical, hands-on, county-by-county guide for saving it.

It will not be enough this year merely to register and vote. Nowhere near.

Those hoping for a fair outcome in the fall must NOW join election boards, become poll workers and poll watchers, and more. Wherever possible, all citizens committed to American democracy must be present for every aspect of the 2020 election process, including the post-election ballot counting and recounting.

This Guide is meant to lay out 2020’s vital details as simply as possible so YOU can ACT to make things right:

This fall’s outcome turns on the Election Protection Trifecta:

1- Voter registration rolls
2- Vote by mail
3- Tabulation/recount of the ballots

All are under serious attack.

Losing just one can undermine all else.

THE SIX, TWELVE OR EIGHTEEN SWING STATES

The “EP Trifecta” of registration rolls, vote by mail, and ballot counting will play out differently in a series of state (plus DC) and county contests.

The Electoral College will likely decide the presidency based on Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, and Arizona, followed by Ohio, New Hampshire, Georgia, New Mexico, Nevada, and Iowa, and then Maine, Texas, Kansas, Montana, Kentucky, and South Carolina. Many of the above have key US Senate races.

Less than 40 counties could determine the presidency. Less than 50 gerrymandered state legislative races could call the Congress.

The trifecta of protecting registration rolls, mailing ballots back and forth, and how they’re received and counted will decide the human future.

Only an informed, dedicated, grassroots groundswell can protect this election.

Less than three months remain to make that happen.

PRESSURE POINTS

Among the key challenges demanding grassroots election protection:

• Stop stripping the voter rolls
• Restore those wrongly removed
• Register new voters
• Proofread paper ballots before they’re printed
• Make sure they’re printed on time
• Make sure enough are printed for all registered voters
• Win reasonable official deadlines for ballot returns
• Get the ballots sent out early enough to return on time
• Provide secure neighborhood ballot drop boxes
• Provide safe places for any citizen to vote in person
• Support early voting
• Protect submitted ballots from arbitrary, partisan disqualification
• Get provisional ballots rightly counted
• Protect digital images
• Use the digital images to quickly provide the initial tally
• Preserve paper ballots for recounting
• Make sure deadlines for counting and recounting are met
• Protect the vote counts

ACTION PLAN / EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

Anti-democracy forces have pledged $20 million to deploy 50,000 “volunteers” to the polls.

At least as many Election Protectionists must embed with state/county election boards, as soon as possible, for as long as necessary...
The millions who’ve marched for civil rights and police reform must now join local election operations through November 3 and beyond to guarantee a sustainable outcome.
After protecting the voter rolls, implementing Vote by Mail, and monitoring the vote count, we can deal with gerrymandering.
Groups listed at www.grassrootsep.org need your help to protect the election in key states and counties that will determine our future.

THE GRASSROOTS STATE AND COUNTY ACTIVIST CORE

DC, the states, and the territories all vote differently, as do the 3141 counties within them. A single local board could flip an entire US presidential election.

A Koch-financed 2010 “Redmap Coup” embedded far-right legislatures in most of this year’s key swing states.

Nearly all have decimated election protection, promoting sabotaged, stolen vote counts. The key right-wing “pincer strategy” is to limit voting places while decimating vote by mail, vastly reducing turnout.

The COVID pandemic has reduced the 116,990 polling places in 2018 to a tiny fraction in 2020. Franklin County (Columbus) Ohio’s 2020 primaries had a single, shabby voting center in an abandoned, hard-to-find Kohl’s. Voters in Wisconsin and Georgia were exposed to COVID and armed Trump terrorists, who will certainly return November 3.

In response, the NBA Atlanta Hawks have volunteered their 21,000-seat arena. Voters can take a number, sit socially distanced, and see their turn on the scoreboard. Most stadia offer central, secure locations, with ample parking, restrooms, and food services.

In every state and county, true election protection demands an informed, committed coalition of grassroots activists, experts, and attorneys embedded in the local election boards, rooted in multi-racial/cross-generational coalitions. Among others, Joel Segal has helped organize just such a coalition in North Carolina, serving as a template for what needs to happen nationwide (contact: joel.r.segal@gmail.com).

Voters and vote counters alike have been physically assaulted throughout US history. Clearly 2020 will be no exception.

At the choke points of certifying incoming ballots and then facilitating the recounts, and at two dozen other key junctures along the way, this grassroots EP force could decide the American future.

2020’s primary vortex-- its EP “trifecta”-- goes like this:

PILLAR ONE: THE VOTER REGISTRATION ROLLS

The first “leg” of the election protection trifecta is to register new voters, protect those now on the rolls, and restore those who’ve been purged.

The federal Election Assistance Commission and the Brennan Center say some 17 million Americans have been stripped from the 2020 voter rolls.

Legitimate reasons for stripping can include death, change of residence, convictions for treason, etc. But John Roberts’s US Supreme Court has allowed local and state election boards to strip voter rolls based on race, class, ageist, ID, and other partisan pretexts.

Millions who assume they’re securely registered may not be. Everyone must check registration lists online or call the election board.

Among other groups, Andrea Miller’s People Demanding Action works to restore voters to the rolls and to add new ones.

PILLAR TWO: VOTE BY MAIL

In 2020 we expect the percentage of absentee or VBM ballots in many states to jump from 5% to as much as 80%.

At its best, VBM can represent a historic transition from hackable electronic machines to universal paper ballots. It’s long been the core system in Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Utah, and Hawaii.

But it’s now under serious attack. States like Texas, Georgia, and Ohio are making ballots hard to get. The assault on the US Postal Service throws their delivery into doubt. In states using VBM for the first time to this extent, logistical vulnerabilities are significant.

How effectively the grassroots EP movement protects VBM could define 2020’s outcome:
1. Printing and Publishing

Paper ballots must first be designed, printed, and published. Simple typos and deliberate manipulations can destroy elections.

“Butterfly ballots” in Florida 2000 induced elderly voters to mistakenly choose Pat Buchanan. Absentee ballots in Ohio 2004 omitted John Kerry.

EP activists must proofread all draft ballots BEFORE they go to the printer, guarantee enough are printed for all registered voters, and make sure they get back to the election boards on time.

Ink specifications must be verified so ballots will be readable in electronic imaging machines.

2. The ballots must be carefully protected during initial delivery.

Once back at the election boards, the printed ballots must be protected before they go out to the voters.

Enough paper ballots must also be available at the polling stations to supply all registered voters who need one.

3. Who gets a ballot, when and how?

State and county election boards should simply send ballots to all registered voters, as early as possible.

Early in-person voting must also be made easy in all states and counties. “Souls to the Polls” begins now.

The earlier ballots are available, the less likely there will be problems on November 3. Voters who get them early should be encouraged to walk (rather than mail) them into election boards as early as possible.

But some partisan legislators, secretaries of state, governors, etc. have contrived to first send a voters postcard... then (maybe) an application... then (maybe) a ballot. All must meet firm deadlines.

Such flimsy, complex, time-consuming procedures add (deliberately) to the risk of documents being lost in the mail, ignored at home, trashed at the election board, etc.

Election protectors in all states and counties need a thorough knowledge of what’s going on with these procedures and how voters can be protected.

4. The military, diplomats, and other overseas Americans

The US military votes by mail, or electronically, often with reports that some officers may illegally intimidate soldiers into voting a certain way.

Deadlines and counting procedures can be problematic.

Jennifer Roberts, former mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, and a former diplomat, says others voting from afar include overseas workers with the US Commercial Service, USDA, USIA, AID, and more; corporate executives and contractors working overseas with international companies; students studying abroad; teachers. Hundreds of thousands of ballots can be involved.

Unless protected, these votes can be lost, stolen, or manipulated.

5. Will return applications & ballots be pre-stamped, put in drop boxes, mass harvested, or what?

Election protectionists must work to guarantee that pre-paid return envelopes go out with VBM ballots, as required by law.

They should also encourage voters to walk their ballots into the election boards or put them in neighborhood drop boxes (which some election boards don’t want to provide). But care is needed: some election boards may require that walked-in VBM ballots be delivered before November 3.

“Ballot-harvesting” (i.e. the mass gathering of paper ballots) has already been linked to criminal fraud in North Carolina and elsewhere.

“Ballot parties” in elder/nursing homes conducted by partisan activists, where witnessing and/or notarizing can be accomplished, are a gray area.

6. Will there be a US Postal Service?

Louis And Donald Fix The Post Office by Nancy Ohanian

A sabotaged USPS will pose huge challenges to a fair 2020 election. This hallowed, unionized institution demands protection. The White House is already gutting the USPS, making clear its intent to subvert the fall balloting. Making Vote by Mail work in the face of official subversion will be among the greatest challenges ever faced by this nation.

Key in 2020 is getting ballot applications and then ballots out from the election boards to the voters and then back within a legal time frame. Deadlines vary, as do postmark requirements.

Ohio now requires that returning ballots be postmarked a week before November 3. In Wisconsin’s fall primary, many returning ballots were not postmarked at all; some counties accepted them, some did not.

So EP activists advocate all citizens vote in person as early as possible. Many are getting ballot applications from election boards and distributing them as widely as possible. Where allowed, some are printing them independently.

We encourage citizens to take ballots they receive in the mail and as quickly as possible fill them out and walk them into the election board (make sure you bring your envelope). We want neighborhood drop boxes and voting in arenas as well.

Above all, we want the functioning, protected and respected US Postal Service the nation deserves.

7. Early voting and where?

In 2020, election protection demands as many voting stations and drop boxes as possible, with as much early voting as can be made available.

Early in-person voting shrinks dependence on the USPS and uncertainty about whether ballots will actually arrive on time to be counted. It also helps avoid overcrowding and long lines on November 3.

Team Trump opposes neighborhood voting centers, drop boxes, and vote by mail, aiming to pinch voter turnout. (Voter ID requirements are also used to prevent non-millionaires of youth and color from voting.)

Ohio’s 2020 primary featured a single election center for each of the state’s 88 counties. In Franklin County (Columbus; pop. 1.3 million) it was in an abandoned Kohl’s department store in a remote, hard-to-find corner of Columbus. There were no drop boxes. Long lines (mostly in cars) built up through election day with voters trying to drop off their ballot or to obtain one. (Rural counties in Ohio had no such problems). On August 12, Ohio’s secretary of state ruled each Ohio county, no matter how big, would have just one ballot dropbox (he’s being sued).

Numerous safe, accessible election centers with ample parking must begin to operate well before November 3. Downtown sports arenas could be ideal.

8. Chain of custody

Tens of millions of paper VBM ballots will arrive at election boards, voting centers, and drop boxes this fall. There are always those who’d steal, destroy, corrupt them.

So they can’t be thrown around. Drop boxes demand cameras. Voting centers demand 24/7 security. Official results cannot be entrusted to laptops or thumb drives. Tally tapes must be posted in public as quickly as possible. Digital images must be preserved.

All votes cast, mailed, dropped must be protected, preserved, and properly prepared for precise, reliable counting and re-counting.

Above all, we don’t want them trashed, burned, pitched in rivers, or confiscated by armed troops deployed by the White House, all of which may take an EP army to prevent.

9. Voting centers, perhaps in sports arenas

Even with VBM, we still need well-advertised and convenient voting centers, with big parking lots for drive-by drop-offs to deal with special needs, registration issues, not having received a ballot, etc.

Well before election day, at universally known voting centers, citizens should be able to pick up and/or drop off ballots, register, consult with poll workers to straighten out registration issues, etc.

Centers should be open and staffed with long hours of access to avoid long lines and to provide timely, accurate, friendly service.

If Trump does mobilize thousands of armed thugs, election protection activists must be at the voting centers to embrace them.

In response, the NBA Atlanta Hawks have volunteered their 21,000-seat arena. Voters can take a number, sit socially distanced, and see their turn on the scoreboard. Most stadia offer central, secure locations, with ample parking, restrooms, and food services.

10. The Surrender Rule

With the attack on the Postal Service comes the need for voters to walk their ballots into voting centers and “surrender” them. To avoid long lines and mass confusion, it’s better to do that as early as possible.

Rules vary. But voters should always bring their envelopes as well as ballots. It can be possible to vote without them. But that could mean getting a provisional ballot, which may not be counted.

Before leaving, voters must confirm with poll workers that everything is properly filled out.

11. Election protection at the voting centers

Trump has promised $20 million for 50,000 paid, armed “volunteers” to threaten intimidation and violence at the voting centers. Nonviolent election protection activists – lots of them – will be needed to neutralize the assault.

Violent organized attacks, especially along racial lines, have been part of the American electoral reality since at least the end of the Civil War. Everyone who marched for George Floyd and police reform should now march to the polls to protect the vote.

12. Will Vote by Mail Mean Universal Paper Ballots?

Yes, VBM should mean a major transition to paper ballots, representing a huge leap away from the hackable electronic machines that have been used to steal so many of our elections in the past two decades.

True election protection also requires that all voting centers provide paper ballots to citizens who’ve not received them in the mail.

Appropriate electronic machines should be available for those with special needs.

But a hand-markable paper ballot must be available to all who want one, as the bulwark of this and all future elections.

Especially during this pandemic, electronic touch-screens can spread infection, and are even less acceptable than ever.

If the 2020 transition to paper ballots is successful, it can mark a major leap forward in all US elections to come. But getting there will require every ounce of our EP effort and energy.

13. Deadlines

Deadlines for ballot mail-out, postmarking, receipt, counting, recounting, and final reporting of the official tally must be clear and transparent to the public, the media, lawmakers, the courts... and the world.

In Florida 2000 and 2018, tens of thousands of votes were simply trashed because arbitrary counting and recounting deadlines weren’t met. Upheld by the Supreme and other courts, such deadlines have had decisive impacts on races for the presidency, governorships, US Senate seats, and more.

EP activists embedded at the precincts must work to make sure all deadlines are appropriate, reasonable, and completely public.

14. The Ballot Acceptance Choke Point

2020’s most critical and least discussed pressure point may be the moment of decision on whether to accept or reject mailed-in ballots.

Procedures will vary widely between states, counties, and precincts. In all or nearly all cases, a poll worker will examine the incoming ballots one-by-one.

They will accept or reject based on a wide range of inconsistent criteria, ranging from signature verification to the tiniest omission of the least significant details. Such would include the omission of middle names or initials, a misstated address, the lack of a date, putting information above or below an arbitrary line, missing a box, etc.

In many precincts “independent observers” are allowed to sit next to poll workers and lobby (or strong-arm) for the acceptance or rejection of individual ballots. In 2016, many of these critical decisions were turned by right-wing enforcers seated at the sorting table.

In 2020, grassroots election protectionists must be embedded at the critical juncture of this decision-making process. In a massive VBM deployment, literally millions of ballots will arrive with small glitches, errors, inconsistencies that are entirely irrelevant to the validity of the voter’s intent. Here EP activists must be personally present to make sure nonpartisan balance is at the core of the acceptance/rejection process.

In many places, the law allows election boards to telephone voters and let them return to correct obvious inadvertent errors. EP activists everywhere must guarantee that this happens as often as appropriate.

They must also work to avoid unnecessary, contrived delays that could clog the system and push vote-counting beyond critical deadlines.

15. Voter ID, signature verification, witness and notarization requirements

In reality, decisions made on who can and can’t vote turn in many states on details meant to eliminate voters by race, class, age, likely party leanings, etc. These include arbitrary photo ID requirements that in some states are being imposed even on mail-in ballots.

Texas accepts a gun or hunting license, but not a student ID. Some states require that a mailed-in ballot include a document signed by one or two witnesses, plus notarization. The COVID and other restrictions can make it impossible for elders and others to do that. Some nursing home employees are banned from serving as witnesses.

Registering the homeless, and thousands of the Indigenous who have only post office boxes, represents a huge challenge with no easy answer beyond hard EP work at the real grassroots.

Ultimately, there’s no easy or consistent way around these often arbitrary and always confusing barriers to voting except at the nitty-gritty precinct level, with on-the-spot activists standing their ground.

16. Internet Registration and Voting, Vote by Phone, the Digital Divide

Some states now accept ballot applications via the internet.

This unjustly favors the urban educated. But it’s reliable, and it avoids the delays and dangers that come with registering by mail or in person. EP activists can use laptops or digital phones to register citizens who don’t have their own internet access.

Such is NOT the case with submitting and counting actual ballots, or transmitting outcomes from precincts to voting centers. Any actual voting or vote counting entrusted to the internet at any point in the process is hackable, vulnerable, and unacceptable.

PILLAR THREE: COUNTING AND RECOUNTING THE BALLOTS

In addition to the challenges of safely storing them, early VBM ballots that arrive before November 3 could tempt locals officials to do early counting, and then to leak results (real or concocted).

This can’t happen. Ballots that come in early must remain secured and unopened until 7 p.m. local time on November 3. There’s no legitimate reason to open or count them beforehand.

Electronic ballot imaging machines are in place at 80% or more of our US precincts. The paper ballots that are mailed in to-- or filled out at-- the election centers can, starting at 7 p.m. November 3, be inserted into these machines.

The machines in turn produce an electronic ballot image. The paper ballots go into clear plastic bins on the backside, preserved for recounting.

These ballot imaging machines can deliver an accurate tally of even very large numbers of votes within a few minutes.

But some election officials insist on erasing the electronic images, which is illegal under federal law. A Florida lawsuit (which should not be necessary) now aims to stop this.

Even if the ballot images are computer-read for a fast initial vote count, recounts using the preserved paper ballots are inevitable. And reporting deadlines that must be met to validate the (re)counts vary widely.

In south Florida, 2000, when a “Brooks Brothers mob” assaulted poll workers, the US Supreme Court made G.W. Bush president.

In Ohio 2004, a federally mandated recount failed when official records from 56 of Ohio’s 88 counties “disappeared.” US Senate and governor’s races in Florida 2018 were decided when dense Southern counties couldn’t meet critical deadlines, effectively trashing thousands of legitimate votes.

In 2020, all key swing states will likely be forced into recounts. EP activists must be present to guarantee they’re done securely, reliably, and quickly enough to meet legal deadlines.

The real test will come in the precincts, as deadlines loom and those tabulating the ballots may be assaulted by hired thugs. If election protectionists aren’t there to guarantee all ballots are admitted and counted fairly, 2020 could be decided by armed terrorists.

ACT NOW!!! BECOME AN ELECTION PROTECTIONIST

What can I do to save 2020?

Contact your state coordinator (see listings here).

• Pick a critical county/precinct.
• Hook up with an EP organization already in place.
• Learn everything about how your chosen county will conduct its election.
• Apply to get on the election board.
• Learn everything you can about who’s already on it.
• Apply to be a poll worker.
• Learn how to become a ballot acceptance worker/observer.
• Inspect the voter rolls.
• Find those who’ve been wrongly stripped & get them re-registered.
• Register new voters (maybe using your cell phone or laptop).
• Spread ballot applications far & wide.
• Encourage early mail-outs of ballot applications.
• Watch how the actual ballots are drafted.
• Follow the trail of how they’re printed.
• Make sure enough are printed for all potential voters.
• Encourage their rapid return from the printer.
• atch to see that the ballots go out as early as possible.
• Watch to see the ballots go to everyone who is due one.
• Make sure envelopes have return postage on them.
• Be available to help those who are confused or restricted in voting.
• Protect the acceptance of rightfully submitted ballots.
• Encourage early voting.
• Get sports arenas accepted as voting centers.
• Encourage neighborhood drop boxes.
• Prepare to non-violently confront anti-vote terrorists.
• Monitor the chains of custody.
• Prepare to protect ballots from troops deployed by the White House.
• Protect digital scanners from being hacked.
• Help feed ballots into the digital scanners.
• Make sure digital ballot images are preserved.
• Work to guarantee recounts meet legal deadlines.

Listings of allied organizations, state coordinators, critical documents, Trifecta articles, and more appear at www.grassrootsep.org.

Join our weekly (usually Monday) Zoom meetings as linked here

Next Zoom gathering is Monday, August 24, at 5 p.m. Eastern Time.

Write to me at solartopia@gmail.com

No More Stolen Elections!!!!

How Existential A Threat To Democracy Is Trump And What Do We Do About It?

I don't trust the voting machines... never did, never will. They're too easily hackable. And I've thought that Trump's hysteria over vote-by-mail was because he had it all down exactly how the election would be stolen via machine tampering. With the appointment of future federal penitentiary inhabitant Louis DeJoy as postmaster general, Trump may have handled the vote-by-mail threat to his November plans.

In an OpEd for The Hill, Al Hunt wrote that "The charge by Trump and his attorney general that mail voting risks massive fraud is a canard. Spencer Cox, the conservative Republican lieutenant governor of Utah, who oversees voting in one of five states that exclusively votes by mail, says it's a 'tremendous success' with little fraud. The stated reason for going after the Postal Service is red ink which totaled $8.8 billion last year. A little bit of context on Donald Trump worrying about deficits: As a businessman, he bragged about being 'the King of Debt,' and on his watch, the federal deficit has almost doubled to close to $1 trillion, before the pandemic.

The new postmaster general is a Trump loyalist. He has given $2 million to Republicans and Trump campaigns since 2016, the latest being a $210,000 contribution to the Trump Victory Fund in February. He was going to be finance chair of the Republicans’ Charlotte convention before it was curtailed; his wife has been nominated to be U.S. ambassador to Canada.

DeJoy told the Postal Board of Governors Friday that he's not making any changes that will impede voting by mail and declared: although he has a "a good relationship" with the president, any assertion he'd make decisions at the direction of Trump "is wholly off-base."

In response to an email from me, he wouldn't say whether he spoke with Trump about the job prior to his appointment or has communicated with him since taking over.

He has not assuaged Democrats.

Congressman Gerry Connolly (D-VA), chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Government Operations, told me: "Trump has appointed a donor and political crony to undermine the postal service for partisan gain."

In the first month and half under DeJoy, instructions have gone out to the more than 600,000 postal workers to curb any overtime and cut back services.

There's a more pressing need for overtime during this health crisis. Most postal workers are out every day, exposed to the virus. Three months ago-- the latest data-- some 2,400 postal employees had tested positive for the virus; 17,000 had been quarantined, and scores died. Those numbers undoubtedly have risen since then.

DeJoy is playing with political fire.

In a recent Hart Research-North Star Opinion Research national survey, 94 percent of Americans say the Postal Service is important to them, and there's widespread backing of federal support. A large number of the 31,000 post offices are in rural America, areas that are generally more dependent on mail delivery and that are represented by Republicans.

This morning I woke up to this ominous tweet by by friend Frank Schaeffer:

Jamelle Bouie's NY Times column, published at the same time, came to a similar conclusion: To keep a crooked authoritarian threat to democracy from claiming victory on Nov. 3, Americans patriots who can vote in person may well have to. This is gettin' serious, friends.

There’s no mystery about what President Trump intends to do if he holds a lead on election night in November. He’s practically broadcasting it.

First, he’ll claim victory. Then, having spent most of the year denouncing vote-by-mail as corrupt, fraudulent and prone to abuse, he’ll demand that authorities stop counting mail-in and absentee ballots. He’ll have teams of lawyers challenging counts and ballots across the country.

He also seems to be counting on having the advantage of mail slowdowns, engineered by the recently installed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Fewer pickups and deliveries could mean more late-arriving ballots and a better shot at dismissing votes before they’re even opened, especially if the campaign has successfully sued to block states from extending deadlines. We might even see a Brooks Brothers riot or two, where well-heeled Republican operatives stage angry and voluble protests against ballot counts and recounts.

If Trump is leading on election night, in other words, there’s a good chance he’ll try to disrupt and delegitimize the counting process. That way, if Joe Biden pulls ahead in the days (or weeks) after voting ends-- if we experience a “blue shift” like the one in 2018, in which the Democratic majority in the House grew as votes came in-- the president will have given himself grounds to reject the outcome as “fake news.”

The only way to prevent this scenario, or at least, rob it of the oxygen it needs to burn, is to deliver an election night lead to Biden. This means voting in person. No, not everyone will be able to do that. But if you plan to vote against Trump and can take appropriate precautions, then some kind of hand delivery-- going to the polls or bringing your mail-in ballot to a “drop box”-- will be the best way to protect your vote from the president’s concerted attempt to undermine the election for his benefit.

...There are reforms that could keep the president from taking this tack. To account for postal delays, states can pledge to count ballots postmarked on or before Nov. 3, so that they’re included in the total even if they arrive late. To speed up the process, states could permit election officials to verify and count mail-in ballots even before Election Day. They could also decline to release results until all polls close and all votes are in. News organizations, similarly, could set expectations for viewers and bring as much transparency as possible to vote counts and other forms of election analysis.

Nonetheless, there is a chance that the president takes this path regardless of state officials and the media. And there’s every reason to think that some portion of the Republican Party will back him. The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee are already challenging mail-in voting laws and suing to keep states like Nevada and Pennsylvania from enlarging their scope. It is easy to imagine a replay of Florida 2000, except on a national scale.

The best defense for the president’s political opponents is, if possible, to vote in person. For some, this will mean going to the polls in November, in the middle of flu season, when the spread of Covid-19 may worsen. In most states, however, there are multiple ways to cast or hand in a ballot. Every state offers some form of early or absentee voting, and 33 states-- including swing states like Arizona and Wisconsin-- allow absentee voting without an excuse. Trump supports absentee voting-- it’s how his older supporters in Florida vote-- and his opponents should take advantage of the fact that those systems won’t be under the same kind of attack. Many vote-by-mail states also offer drop boxes so that voters can deliver ballots directly to the registrar. And if you must mail in your ballot, the best practice would be to post it as early as possible, to account for potential delays.

Earlier this year, a group of more than 100 people-- Republicans, Democrats, senior political operatives and members of the media-- gathered to role play the November election, using predetermined rules and procedures. “In each scenario other than a Biden landslide,” writes Nils Gilman of the Berggruen Institute, who helped organize the exercise, “we ended up with a constitutional crisis that lasted until the inauguration, featuring violence in the streets and a severely disrupted administrative transition.”

There you have it. To head off the worst outcomes, Trump must go down in a decisive defeat. He’s on that path already. The task for his opponents is to sustain that momentum and work to make his defeat as obvious as possible, as early as possible. The pandemic makes that a risk, but it’s a risk many of us may have to take.

Christine Pellegrino is favored to replace a worthless Republican Trumpist on Long Island. This morning she mentioned to me that "Trump's popularity or lack there-of is absolutely going to drive people to the polls, or their mailboxes, to vote. But I'm not taking my foot off the gas. At the end of the day, voters care about common sense issues: good jobs, good schools, and healthcare. Talking to voters about the change Albany can create for all of us is empowering for the disaffected. The voters want a real representative. They’re tired of lazy, lifetime politicians and they’re demanding more than they just show up for photos. Down ballot candidates like me need to make sure that people mobilized by the 'Trump factor' fill out their entire ballots."

My old friend, Jerry Leichtling, came up with a brilliant idea-- that's what brilliant people like Jerry do... come up with brilliant ideas. Take look at this proposal he just sent me:

Inasmuch as E-Commerce companies have benefitted tremendously from the Covid-19 Pandemic, these same companies should be willing to do the people of the United States a massive public service. Given the Trump-ordered slowdown of the United States Postal Service there is no reason why federally-bonded companies like Amazon, Fedex and UPS should not, as a patriotic public service, pick up all voters' ballots and deliver them to Local Boards of Elections. These companies, and hundreds more, already do massive business with the Postal Service. They have literally millions of employees and are NOT slowing down. Please write to the CEO’s of Amazon-- Jeff Bezos (Jeff@Amazon.com); Fedex-- Fred Smith (Fredric.Smith@Fedex.Com) and UPS, Carol Tome (CTome@UPS.com) with the heading or hashtag Special Delivery Democracy. and send copies to your elected representatives as well. Let’s see if we can derail Trump’s express train to tyranny.

Counting Sheep by Nancy Ohanian

Desperately Needed: Election Protection-- Otherwise Expect "Street-Level Violence And Political Impasse" In November

Never Waste A Serious Crisis by Nancy Ohanian

Over the weekend, the Washington Post ran a story about the extreme dysfunction NYC has experienced in trying to run an election. There is still no determination who will represent NY-12, a district that includes Yorkville, the Upper East Side, Midtown (including Trump Tower), Gramercy Park, Turtle Bay, Tudor City, Union Square, Roosevelt Island, Kips Bay, the East Village and the Lower East Side in Manhattan; Astoria, Long Island City and Sunnyside in Queens; and Greenpoint and northern Williamsburg in Brooklyn. Wall Street hack and establishment liberal Carolyn Maloney represents the district now but on election night (June 23) the results were too close to call. With tens of thousands of mail-in ballots, they still are.

• Carolyn Maloney- 16,473 (41.6%)
• Suraj Patel- 15,825 (39.9%)
• Laura Ashcraft- 5,268 (13.3%)
• Peter Harrison- 1,933 (4.9%)

"Just 648 in-person votes are separating them," wrote Jada Yuan, "with 65,000 mail-in ballots still being counted. And an entire district of 718,000 people across three boroughs have no idea who their next representative will be-- a full month after Election Day... At the center of this mess is a massive influx of mail-in ballots-- 403,000 returned ballots in the city this cycle vs. 23,000 that were returned and determined valid during the 2016 primary-- and a system wholly unprepared to process them. It’s not just delayed results that are at issue: In the 12th district and in the primaries across the country, tens of thousands of mail-in ballots were invalidated for technicalities like a missing signature or a missing postmark on the envelope."

All across the state, other close primaries were also plagued by the same problems. "None of this," continued Yuan, "bodes well for November’s federal election in which President Trump has refused to say whether he will accept the results. Turnout is expected to skyrocket because of the presidential race. Another covid-19 spike in the fall could lead to more mail-in ballots from people who fear crowded polling places. Add in slowed mail delivery because of the pandemic, while Trump constantly threatens to dismantle the U.S. Postal Service. Meanwhile, Trump and his Republican allies have repeatedly attacked the integrity of mail-in voting, making unfounded claims that the method is susceptible to widespread fraud."

Enter New York’s 12th as an extreme, but not isolated, case study. On Tuesday, the race even caught the eye of White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who cited “the absolute catastrophe for New York City” in her news briefing while answering a question on election security.

“It’s a dark omen for November,” said a Wall Street Journal op-ed about the race, warning against voter fraud.

“Let’s fix this dumpster fire before it burns down the country in November,” the New York Daily News, a liberal tabloid, wrote in its op-ed on the race, warning about voter disenfranchisement through ballots that are invalidated because of missing postmarks.

...But the invalidation rate is concerning to many who are watching the race. According to data from the Board of Elections first published by The Intercept, up to 1 in 5 mail-in ballots were declared invalid before even being opened, based on mistakes with their exterior envelopes. The majority of mistakes are due to missing or late postmarks, and missing signatures. Preliminary numbers from the Board of Elections show an invalidation rate of 19 percent in both Manhattan and Queens and 28 percent in Brooklyn, just in this district. That rate, if applied to all of Brooklyn, would equate to 34,000 ballots thrown out, in a borough with the city’s largest population of black residents.

...Election Day was on June 23. The Board of Elections, by law, waited a week for all the mail-in ballots to arrive, and then waited until July 8 to start the count because of the sheer volume of ballots to sort through and the July Fourth weekend. A week after that, still no absentee ballots had been counted in the 12th District.

...All the action in their contest is focused on the count, and it is something out of a dystopian thriller about office tedium. At the Manhattan canvassing spot, numbered folding tables are scattered throughout a cavernous space. Two BOE employees sit on one side of a plexiglass sneeze guard.

On the other side are the watchers. Each campaign gets one watcher at each table. The BOE employees open the envelopes and show the ballots through the sneeze guard so the watchers can contest a ballot’s validity and compile chicken-scratch tallies. The pace is equivalent to watching a sloth eat bark.

Back in his office, Patel is worrying over “the postmark issue.” It was all he could think about: The 13,000 invalid ballots across three boroughs in his race. Based on photocopies of envelopes his campaign received from the Board of Elections, he estimated half of those were not counted because of a missing postmark.

These are ballots that fell into a kind of black hole of election law. Ballots that arrived to the BOE before or on June 23, Election Day, with or without a postmark are valid. Ballots that arrived by the cutoff of June 30 with a postmark of June 23 or earlier are valid. Ballots that arrived before June 30 but have no postmark or a postmark of the 24th, which many had, likely due to what the BOE called “USPS error,” Patel said-- those are invalid, automatically.

“It’s a question of timeliness. We are constrained,” said Valerie Vazquez-Diaz, the BOE’s spokeswoman.

That third category of ballots are the one Patel is fighting to have counted. The lawsuit he filed calls on Gov. Cuomo to fix the issue with an executive order.

In his Tuesday news conference, Cuomo punted the issue to the state legislature.

What Patel argues is that the law isn’t taking into account how much the pandemic changed the election. In the midst of the state’s shutdown in April, Cuomo signed an executive order mandating that the BOE send an absentee ballot application to every New Yorker, who in the past could only obtain an absentee ballot for very narrow reasons, such as illness or disability.

The BOE, with limited staff allowed in its offices, sprung to action, setting up an online portal and a phone line for absentee ballot requests and preparing a mailing for the city’s 3million registered primary voters. That didn’t go out until mid-May.

Every ballot request needed to be approved by a bipartisan set of staffers, then entered into the voter rolls. Then a court dispute about the presidential primary delayed the finalization of the ballot, which the BOE didn’t begin sending out until three weeks before the election.

That’s where the U.S. Postal Service comes in. Mail-in ballots are in the hands of a federal agency on the brink of bankruptcy that had to sideline 17,000 workers on quarantine because of exposure to the virus. Louis DeJoy, a Trump donor recently appointed as postmaster general, has announced cost-cutting changes that will likely further slow mail delivery.

At every turn, the governor’s executive orders and the BOE’s deadlines were out of touch with the Postal Service’s abilities. The final date for voters to send in absentee applications was June 16, an impossible seven-day turnaround for the application to get to the BOE and a ballot to get to the voter in time to cast it.

But in New York, there was another issue. The governor’s executive order called for the ballots to have business-class postage-paid return envelopes. In a normal year, voters provide their own stamp, which is considered first-class mail and always postmarked. The USPS said it is also their policy to postmark all ballots. It is not standard, however, as voter advocacy groups have said, to postmark the type of business-class mail used in New York’s primary election. If you drop it off in a mailbox it is simply sent to its destination. It seems as though the postage class created confusion among some USPS employees.

The only way for a voter to guarantee a postmark would have been to stand in line at a post office and watch a teller do it, rather than drop it in a box, which defeats the public-health benefit of mail-in ballots.

Upon review of what happened in New York, USPS spokeswoman Martha Johnson said, “We are aware that some ballots may not have been postmarked and have taken actions to resolve the issue going forward.”

On Wednesday night, Cuomo and New York Attorney General Letitia James responded to the lawsuit Patel joined by saying that allowing un-postmarked ballots was “not in the public interest because it would upend the rules... after the election has already taken place.”

Patel quickly looked into a new legal strategy and has secured an expedited hearing that may happen as early as Thursday.

“This is not the fault of vote by mail,” he said. “I’ve always been an advocate of vote by mail. It increased participation to astronomical rates for a congressional primary. But man is New York unprepared to have the procedures in place to count these ballots in a timely fashion.”

Of course, he still wants to know the outcome.

“It might be that we open up those ballots and they all go to Maloney. It’s not my job to decide who gets to vote,” he said. “At least we’d know what the actual intention of New York-12 was.”

OK, want to imagine the worst-- that it isn't just a couple of Wall Street-friendly Democrats, one old and one young,  fighting over postmarks-- but Trump and Biden in November? Jess Bidgood, reporting for the Boston Globe wrote that "On the second Friday in June, a group of political operatives, former government and military officials, and academics quietly convened online for what became a disturbing exercise in the fragility of American democracy. The group, which included Democrats and Republicans, gathered to game out possible results of the November election, grappling with questions that seem less far-fetched by the day: What if President Trump refuses to concede a loss, as he publicly hinted recently he might do? How far could he go to preserve his power? And what if Democrats refuse to give in?"

“All of our scenarios ended in both street-level violence and political impasse,” said Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown law professor and former Defense Department official who co-organized the group known as the Transition Integrity Project. She described what they found in bleak terms: “The law is essentially... it’s almost helpless against a president who’s willing to ignore it.”

Using a role-playing game that is a fixture of military and national security planning, the group envisioned a dark 11 weeks between Election Day and Inauguration Day, one in which Trump and his Republican allies used every apparatus of government-- the Postal Service, state lawmakers, the Justice Department, federal agents, and the military-- to hold onto power, and Democrats took to the courts and the streets to try to stop it.

If it sounds paranoid or outlandish-- a war room of seasoned politicos and constitutional experts playing a Washington version of Dungeons and Dragons in which the future of the republic hangs in the balance-- they get it. But, as they finalize a report on what they learned and begin briefing elected officials and others, they insist their warning is serious: A close election this fall is likely to be contested, and there are few guardrails to stop a constitutional crisis, particularly if Trump flexes the considerable tools at his disposal to give himself an advantage.

“He doesn’t have to win the election,” said Nils Gilman, a historian who leads research at a think tank called the Berggruen Institute and was an organizer of the exercise. “He just has to create a plausible narrative that he didn’t lose.”

The very existence of a group like this one, which was formed late last year, underscores the extent of the fear in Washington’s political circles-- and beyond-- that Trump will take the same hammer he has used to fracture the norms of executive governance over the past three years and upend the nation’s delicate tradition of orderly political transitions of power by refusing to concede if he loses.

“We have norms in our transition, rather than laws,” said Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict and Governance Program at the Carnegie Foundation, who was not part of the game. “This entire election season is something a democracy expert would worry about.”

It is a fear that has been stoked by the president himself, who has repeatedly warned, without offering evidence, of widespread fraud involving mail-in ballots-- which voters are likely to use at unprecedented levels because the pandemic has made in-person voting a potential health risk-- to cast doubt on the results of November’s election.

“I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election, I really do,” he told Fox News’ Chris Wallace last Sunday. When asked if he would accept the election results, he said: “I’ll have to see.”

Former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has taken to issuing foreboding warnings of his own. “This president is going to try to indirectly steal the election by arguing that mail-in ballots don’t work-- they’re not real, they’re not fair,” he said at a fund-raiser on Thursday night. He has also mused publicly about Trump having to be escorted, forcibly if need be, from the White House.

That happened in one of the four scenarios the Transition Integrity Project gamed out, according to summaries of the exercises provided to the Boston Globe. But constitutional experts-- and the game play-- was less focused on the possibility of a cinematic, militarized intervention on Inauguration Day, which is a possibility many still consider remote, than the room the Constitution appears to leave for a disastrous and difficult transition if the incumbent does not accept a loss.

“How well is our constitutional legal system designed to deal with an incumbent president who insists that he won an election but for the presence of fraud?” said Lawrence Douglas, a professor at Amherst College who has written a book on what would happen if Trump took such a stand. “And I think the rather unfortunate answer is our system is not well designed at all to deal with that problem,” said Douglas, who was not involved in the game.

Brooks got the seed of the idea for the Transition Integrity Project after a dinner where a federal judge and a corporate lawyer each told her they were convinced the military or the Secret Service would have to escort Trump out of office if he lost the election and would not concede. Brooks wasn’t so sure. She and Gilman decided to turn the Washington parlor game into an actual exercise; they held an early meeting in Washington, with about 25 people, in December.

“When we started talking about this we got a lot of reactions-- oh, you guys are so paranoid, don’t be ridiculous, this isn’t going to happen,” Brooks said.

Two things have happened since then: Trump has displayed increased willingness to challenge mail-in ballots, and his administration has deployed federal forces to quell protests in front of the White House and in Portland, Oregon, and has threatened to do so in other cities.

“That has really shaken people,” Brooks said. “What was really a fringe idea has now become an anxiety that’s pretty widely shared.”

Brooks, Gilman, and others recruited a slate of players including a former swing state governor, a former White House chief of staff, and a former head of the Department of Homeland Security. They invited both Democrats and Republicans who they knew had concerns about Trump’s comments on the election; nearly 80 people in all were involved. The Republicans were described by participants as “never Trump” or “not Trump Republicans.”

They played using the so-called Chatham House Rules-- in which participants can discuss what was said, but not who was there; some participants were willing to be named. They included Republicans Trey Grayson, the former Kentucky secretary of state, and conservative commentator Bill Kristol, as well as Democrats Leah Daughtry, who was CEO of the 2008 and 2016 Democratic National Convention Committees, former White House ethics czar Norm Eisen, and progressive Democratic strategist Adam Jentleson.

The game was elaborate. The participants took on the roles of the Trump campaign, the Biden campaign, relevant government officials, and the media-- generally, Democrats played Democrats and Republicans played Republicans-- and used a 10-sided die to determine whether a team succeeded in its attempted moves. The games are not meant to be predictive; rather, they are supposed to give people a sense of possible consequences in complex scenarios.

Each scenario involved a different election outcome: An unclear result on Election Day that looked increasingly like a Biden win as more ballots were counted; a clear Biden win in the popular vote and the Electoral College; an Electoral College win for Trump with Biden winning the popular vote by 5 percentage points; and a narrow Electoral College and popular vote victory for Biden.

In the scenarios, the team playing the Trump campaign often questioned the legitimacy of mail-in ballots, which often boosted Biden as they came in-- shutting down post offices, pursuing litigation, and using right-wing media to amplify narratives about a stolen election.

To some participants, the game was a stark reminder of the power of incumbency.

“The more demonstrations there were, the more demands for recounts, the more legal challenges there were, the more funerals for democracy were held, the more Trump came across as the candidate of stability,” said Edward Luce, the US editor of the Financial Times, who played the role of a mainstream media reporter during one of the simulations. “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”

In multiple scenarios, officials on both sides homed in on narrowly decided swing states with divided governments, such Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina, hoping to persuade officials there to essentially send two different results to Congress. If a state’s election is disputed, a legislature controlled by one party and governor of another each could send competing slates of electors backing their party’s candidate.

Both sides turned out massive street protests that Trump sought to control-- in one scenario he invoked the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to use military forces to quell unrest. The scenario that began with a narrow Biden win ended with Trump refusing to leave the White House, burning government documents, and having to be escorted out by the Secret Service. (The team playing Biden in that scenario, meanwhile, sought to patch things up with Republicans by appointing moderate Republican governors, including Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, to Cabinet positions.)

The scenario that produced the most contentious dynamics, however, was the one in which Trump won the Electoral College-- and thus, the election-- but Biden won the popular vote by 5 percentage points. Biden’s team retracted his Election Night concession, fueled by Democrats angry at losing yet another election despite capturing the popular vote, as happened in 2000 and 2016. In the mock election, Trump sought to divide Democrats-- at one point giving an interview to The Intercept, a left-leaning news outlet, saying Senator Bernie Sanders would have won if Democrats had nominated him. Meanwhile, Biden’s team sought to encourage large Western states to secede unless pro-Democracy reforms were made.

That scenario seemed highly far-fetched, but it envisioned a situation in which both sides may have incentives to contest the election.

“There is a narrative among activists in both parties that the loss must be illegitimate,” he said.

According to the Constitution, the presidency ends at noon on Jan. 20, at which point the newly inaugurated president becomes the commander in chief.

The games, ultimately, were designed to explore how difficult it could be to get there.

“The Constitution really has been a workable document in many respects because we have had people who more or less adhered to a code of conduct,” said retired Army Colonel Larry Wilkerson, a Republican and former chief of staff to Colin Powell who participated in games as an observer. “That seems to no longer to be the case. That changes everything.”