We’ve all seen what Donald Trump does when he loses an election.
In 2020, when he lost to Joe Biden, he laid the groundwork early, suggesting postal votes were prone to fraud for months ahead of the vote.
On the night, when the ballots being counted began to look more blue than red, he stood up at the White House and declared victory anyway. He refused to concede even after every state and news outlet had confirmed the result. And for months he and his team pursued preposterous lawsuits in a vain bid to have the result overturned.
All of this culminated in January 6th 2021, when Trump encouraged his followers to march on the US Capitol Building in Washington DC to prevent the certification of states’ electoral votes. What followed was a bloody insurrection, an attempted coup d’etat in the world’s greatest democracy.
To see more of the stories you love from The Mirror and to find them easily in Google then make us your preferred source. Free and easy-to-do, just click on the link here to find more from The Mirror at the top of your feed.
There is no reason to suspect Tuesday’s midterm elections, which Republicans are expected to lose very badly, will prompt much of a different response from Trump.
And Republicans started trying to rig the result more than a year ago.
In swing states, lawmakers for the “Grand Old Party” (GOP) have been re-drawing electoral maps to make it easier for them to win, and eroding voting rights protections to make it harder for some people to vote.
But they’re going further than that.
US elections are handled on the state level – the federal government is hardly supposed to be involved in the process at all.
But this year, the Department of Justice (DoJ) has been demanding states give up their electoral rolls, so it can demand “noncitizens” be purged.
And by “noncitizens”, we mean people who the Department for Homeland Security thinks might be noncitizens.
But so far, every time the DoJ has demanded a state remove tens of thousands of names from the rolls, it’s turned out all but a handful were legitimate, legal voters.
The DoJ has been dealt a string of legal defeats in this bid to purge voters from the election – and it’s too late for them to stop people voting this time.
But it hasn’t stopped them trying. The DoJ is locked in a court battle in California because it wants the votes of people flagged in this “purge” to be put to one side, so that they can be removed from the tally later.
Then there’s troops at polling stations. Trump has said he regretted not using the National Guard to seize voting machines after 2020 – an election he lost – and there’s real concern they might be deployed this time. Trump has been super coy about whether he’s prepared to invoke the insurrection act so he can deploy troops relating to the election – to patrol at voting places or to seize ballot boxes or counting machines.
People are concerned that ICE agents could suddenly appear near polling stations on Tuesday, not to seize anything, but to intimidate people and reduce turnout in Democrat-leaning areas.
And while the US has joined Russia and Belarus in declining to invite international poll observers for this election, the DoJ will be sending its own poll watchers to look for – or, some fear to concoct – shenanigans.
But the most likely thing that’s going to happen is that Trump will try to deny the result. He’s been paving the way for this for months – calling the California primary “rigged” because his favourite Republicans lost, falsely claiming postal votes are vulnerable to fraud and accusing Democrats of cheating.
In Alaska, for example, the names on the ballot – and who put them there – have become a big story. An independent third party candidate Daniel S Sullivan Jr, is running with a very similar name to the Republican incumbent, Dan Sullivan.
It’s been alleged this ‘spoiler’ candidate was encouraged to run as part of a project hatched by a Democrat aligned group. And although Senate Candidate Mary Peltola has denied any involvement, Trump has demanded she be “removed from the ballot and prosecuted”.
So-called “Ballot stacking”, where rival campaigns encourage spoiler candidates to run, or support them financially or with advertising in the run-up to the vote, is not illegal and is widely practiced by both parties.
In fact, in the Ohio senate race in this same election, Trump’s political operation is supporting a socialist candidate to try and pull votes away from the Democrat candidate. And in Nevada, GOP-aligned groups are backing a candidate for Governor with the same last name as the Democrat candidate.
And it doesn’t stop there. Kanye West’s brief and noisy bid to run for President in 2020 was encouraged by Republicans in a bid to siphon votes away from Joe Biden.
Trump has called on the courts to block certification of the result if the Republican loses by a small margin. And you can bet your life there’ll be lawsuits like that in any state with a narrow victory for democrats – which could be a lot of states.
Here’s the thing to watch for on election night. Trump gets very upset about something called the “red mirage”.
That’s when early results look like republicans are winning as the ballots are counted, but then at some point in the night the numbers change and Democrats take the lead. Trump sees this is as an indication that fraud is taking place – that democrats are somehow dumping additional fraudulent votes into the count when it looks like they’re losing.
What it’s actually evidence of is that postal ballots skew democrat, are counted last and can take a long time – even days – to count fully.
Still, if he’s going to cry foul on the night, that’s how he’s going to do it.
