With a president who routinely wins “Best Sore Loser” and the future of the Post Office
hanging in the balance, it’s scary to think about all the ways election night could go
wrong. Almost as scary as the idea of never seeing those sexy chicken legs in shorts again.
I asked Allana Harkin to speak to leading experts to find out more.
- Shall we play a game? In the 1983 movie Wargames, a super-powerful
Speak & Spell simulates a global thermonuclear war. But recently there was a real and more
terrifying wargame: the 2020 election. The organizer: Georgetown law professor and pleasant-faced
nightmare smith, Rosa Brooks. She co-founded the bipartisan Transition Integrity Project,
which recently assembled a large group of experts to game out election scenarios.
- The goal of these exercises was to shock people a little bit into realizing that there
is no guarantee that everything is going to be fine.
It turns out nothing was fine.So tell me a little bit about the simulation that you held.
- We had about 70 people participate in our exercises, and these were serious people,
you know. There were Republicans, there were Democrats, they were former White House chiefs
of staff. And in pretty much every scenario we ran, we ended up with street-level violence,
constitutional impasse, and complete political and legal chaos.
Violence, chaos, and no clear winner from each realistic scenario. A close race on election
night, and Trump blocks mail-in ballots—chaos. Close Biden win but Trump claims fraud and
rejects the results—chaos. Big Biden win but Trump still won’t concede—chaos. Trump
loses popular vote but wins electoral college amidst foreign meddling—chaos.
- These games are not predictions. But do not kid yourself that nothing horrible could
happen. But, if Trump contests the results, won’t it be like, you know, Congress, something
something something, Nancy Pelosi something something something, ACLU, everything’s
fixed, poof?! - No.
You’d think the rules governing a contested election are simple. But they’re a mess
and open to debate. And totally useless when you're playing against a cheating sociopath.
It’s not like you’re saying the law doesn’t matter. It’s just that the law doesn’t
matter. - The law matters! But if the law is the only
thing you’re relying on, everything is going to be too little too late.
For example... - Let’s say that Trump is sending armed
federal agents to seize ballots that he claims are fraudulent.
Oh, god. - You can go to court, uh, and seek an injunction,
And if they’re really, really lucky, they get that eight hours later or twenty-four
hours later. You can do a whole lot of damage in eight or twenty-four hours.
But Joe Biden handled Corn Pop—couldn’t he fight back?
- Joe Biden could call a press conference, Donald Trump can call out the 82nd Airborne.
You look like you have a headache. I’m sorry. I’m breaking out in a full body sweat. Is
it hot in here? - Donald Trump is telling us and he is showing
us how he plans to steal this election, and it’s up to all of us to stop it.
Arisha Hatch’s organization is one of many working with Protect the Results to, well,
you know. - We’re at a really scary place in our country
and our democracy. So what scenarios scare you the most? Other
than, um, all of them? - Donald Trump claiming that he won an election
that we know he didn’t win. - Mail in ballots will lead to the greatest
fraud... - Using traditional media, using social media
to say that he won when not every single vote has been counted. If Trump decides that he’s
not going to concede the election, how will CNN handle it? How will MSNBC and Fox News
handle it? Uh, we’re pretty sure how Fox will handle
it. - What will Twitter and Facebook do if Trump
goes on their platforms and says that he’s president?
We have to count on Facebook? Is Facebook pretending they have a contingency plan?
- They’re meeting. They’re meeting. They’re meeting and discussing. But how reliable can
they be given the actions that they’ve taken in the last several months?
He can’t even make the right decision about his hair. I’m sorry, it's objectively horrific.
But still only half as bad as Facebook’s content policies.
What do we… what do we do? - People need to be prepared to get out in
the streets and they need to just be prepared to be really really patient and face really
really bad stuff for a really really long time.
In the good ol’ days, “bad stuff” was the Brooks Brothers riot that shut down the
Florida recount. In 2020, “bad stuff” means people like this—
Who believe s*** like this— - The only way we’re gonna lose the election
is if the election is rigged. Remember that. I talked about it with Lawrence Wilkerson,
Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff, who observed the exercises.
What do you think is gonna happen? - A sitting senator actually asked what would
happen if Trump lost and then called his base to the streets with their guns. And I would
hope that the military would act in accordance with its allegiance to the Constitution. 20-30
years ago I could’ve told you a little more definitively, but today I can’t.
Anyone else boiling hot? So how do we avoid the worst outcomes?
- Our best option is just to like really, really win.
Oh, God. We have to really, really win? That’s our plan? Like, really really really really.
- The only scenario that we did that didn’t end on the verge of constitutional collapse
was the big Biden win. Some of the GOP elected officials in our exercise started putting
pressure on Trump saying, you know, “the writing is on the wall.” And that could
happen. I think that that absolutely could happen.
Well, I mean, so far, they’re okay with kids in cages and Nazis, so, I don’t know…
- I actually don’t feel hopeless at all. It is absolutely not too late to change things.
You can volunteer to help count ballots, you can volunteer to help drive people to the
polls. You can volunteer to be poll monitors. So the I Voted sticker means nothing anymore.
- The I Voted sticker is going to need to add a few lines of text.