By John F Di Leo -
In this, the strangest of all years, certain things are inexplicable. The DNC’s decision to coalesce around Joe Biden in the primaries, always odd, today seems like madness. But was it?
Consider where we are, at this particular moment in the season... in terms of the election process.
The rules for replacing a candidate on the ballot – late in the season - vary from state to state, and from office to office.
The official intent, of course, is to have each party select its candidates by either primary or caucus, and for those chosen candidates to then compete in the general election.
But what if a candidate drops out for health reasons or dies (or is convicted of a felony and jailed, or otherwise forced to drop) at some point between that selection and the general election?
In some states, the state's party committee meets to replace the candidate. In others, the state's party must organize a caucus or convention of some kind. In some, the slot is just blank on the ballot; the party forfeits the race.
The higher the office, the more important a rational resolution is, but, surprisingly perhaps, many states don’t have good, clear plans for such an eventuality.
To drive home the importance of the issue, consider the most maddening example of this problem: the 2000 U.S. Senate race in Missouri, in which Democrat Mel Carnahan faced Republican John Ashcroft. Three weeks before the election, Carnahan died in a plane crash, and the state had no legal process for this circumstance. Ballots were already printed – heck, many absentee ballots had already been voted – so the Democrats just said to leave it all alone, and any vote for the deceased Mel Carnahan would be counted anyway. If by some chance the dead guy won, the governor would appoint his widow to the office.
This was unprecedented, lawless, and frankly, insane. To assume that everyone who voted for the well-known Mel Carnahan – who had a long record of experience in government, having served as state treasurer, lieutenant governor and governor over most of the previous 20 years – would necessarily have also voted for his utterly inexperienced widow, who had never held elective office before, was unjustifiable. But they did it anyway, and got away with it; the late Mel Carnahan won in a squeaker, his widow was appointed, and she served a two year term in the United States Senate.
Since that time, some states have done a bit to clean up their process, but most think the risk of a candidate dying mere weeks before an election is such a rarity that it’s not worth bothering to prepare for. So here we are, twenty years later, in what could be quite a constitutional quandary.
What if Joe Biden undeniably had to be dropped from the ticket at this late date? What would happen?
Deadlines are key to the election process. We don’t just have a single, standardized election day anymore. There’s the day itself, then the week or weeks beforehand for “early voting”... then the month or two before that, to allow for absentee voting, since we have millions of Americans abroad, both in military service and in a variety of private sector foreign commitments, from college to vacation to retirement to business assignments. And then there’s the mail-in election concept, a “push” version of the absentee ballot that greatly compounds the risk of error, failure and fraud that are already present with traditional absentee voting.
To accommodate the absentee or mail-in voting process, states need to finalize the ballot several weeks before sending them out. The new craze for mail-in voting and weeks of early voting have pushed up that timeline even further.
With the election now less than 60 days away, but with absentee mail-in ballots already printed and largely sent out, we are ALREADY well past the deadline for the traditional swapping out of a candidate to be a smooth process.
If for some reason (you can imagine many), Joe Biden were to drop out today, the integrity of the election would be immediately compromised, no matter what they did or who the party chose to replace him on the ticket.
Some states could rush a change to their ballots, others could not. Some wouldn't have time, some wouldn't even have a legal provision to allow such a change. And millions of ballots are already out there, in various stages from outbound mail to being in the hands of voters to being in the process of being mailed back in for the count.
As a result, tons of ballots - more and more every day, but certainly a number in the millions, if not tens of millions - would be either useless or in legal question.
Let's say they replaced Joe Biden with, Oh, let's say, Bernie Sanders, since he came in second in the delegate count this spring.
Some states could change their ballots, others could not. Would mail-in or absentee ballots already cast for Biden be automatically counted for Sanders? Could they legally? Should they?
Remember, this presidential eleciton isn't strictly a choice between parties. Even very partisan people make different choices in different matchups. A person who might vote for Joe Biden over Donald Trump might also vote for Donald Trump over Bernie Sanders (in fact, that's what the DNC was absolutely certain of, last spring, as they steered their support toward Biden through the primary season).
So, it would be plainly wrong to just say "if you voted for the Democrat before, we'll count that vote for the new Democrat we swapped out for him..."
And what of the ballots that can't be changed, because it’s just too late? Some states could legally put a little sticker over the old name if new ballots can't be printed. But again, what about the millions of ballots already cast by then?
The process would cause tons of mailed ballots - both traditional absentee and these new "push style" mail in ballots - to be delayed, or put in question, to the point where the final decision - the eventual count itself - would be controversial.
And now, at last, we can broach a new theory, just beginning to surface in the minds of some of us out here in flyover country.
I think we've all been operating on the theory that the Democrats have been planning on Joe getting through the election, and if he wins, having him resign for health reasons after the inauguration, sometime in his first year in office.
We've all been assuming that they expected him to make it through the election okay, thinking his decline would be much slower than it has been.
We've all been assuming the Democrats have been blindsided by just how rapidly his mental capacities have degraded.
But... what if we're wrong?
What if the scheme was that they were fully aware of how fast he was declining, yes, all along, and they PLANNED to have him drop out in September or early October, after it was too late for a smooth election, specifically because they knew that they couldn't possibly win this year, no matter who they nominated, but this approach would enable them to claim that this election was illegitimate for ever afterward?
That is, if the Democrats knew full well a year out that they were going to lose - no matter what -why not set a plan in motion that enables them to claim it was stolen?
People might quickly forget the exact rate of Joe's decline, but they'd never forget the months of arguing about whether or not to count these ballots for the replacement or not, whether states were prejudiced in their application of their ballot rules, etc.
Maybe their whole plan all along was not a Hail Mary pass for an unlikely victory, but a scheme to delegitimize a certain defeat?
Well, there you have it. Just one more thing to think about as we wind down 2020, the oddest year in memory.
Copyright 2020 John F Di Leo
John F Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer, writer, and actor. His columns have been regularly found in Illinois Review since 2009.
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