What would happen if there were a meltdown in the 2020 election? Is the United States government prepared to handle this? And even if it were prepared, would the outcome be anything less than disastrous and more divisive? If the state of the union speech, and the subsequent crowing after his formal acquittal are any way to judge, I think we can expect a long-road ahead.
Richard Hasen, a law professor at UC Irvine, proposes that we may be in more trouble than we can imagine if the election is even a little close. In the past, Doug has talked about his fear of Trump never relinquishing power voluntarily. Professor Hasen notes this, plus a list of other issues we could face in 2020, as rival states could try to effect the outcome, and generally attempt to introduce distrust and fear into our democracy.
One of his suggestions, one I had not considered myself, is of an act-of-war, where Russia, Iran North Korea, or even China, could hack into our power grid system in a battleground, or swing, state like Pennsylvania, Florida, or Wisconsin. He imagines what would happen if the power grid was down during election day in one of these states and the voting machines network failed. He theorizes that even if there were a back up, pen-and-paper, system in place, the time to aggregate the votes could take weeks. And worse, that a candidate could use this to his or her advantage by either calling for a stop on the count, forcing a re-election, or even canceling it.
While an act of aggression like the one I described would be egregious, one can see that even an irresponsible, or benign action like what happened on Tuesday in Iowa, where the democratic primary had no results for hours due to issues with the voting app, would be cause-enough for alarm.
The facto of the matter is that a foreign government would not need to invest too much to cause chaos.
