Cogito Ergo Non Serviam

Trump Refuses to Accept Election Result Ahead of Time

Although many of his supporters (and some detractors) claim that Donald Trump performed well in last night's final presidential debate, the headline is that he has declined to accept the result of the election unless he wins. His backers have walked a fine line saying he meant if it were close, he would feel free to challenge the result. Perhaps, that's what he meant, or perhaps, he meant if he loses it will be proof the system is rigged and that he is under no obligation to accept the loss. What cannot be disputed is just how hard it would be to steal a presidential election.

There is a saying in politics to the effect that one cannot steal an election if it isn't close. If one candidate secures 60% of the vote, the amount of shenanigans that the other side can get away with is insufficient to overturn the result. At 50.1% to 49.9%, the situation is vastly different. If a million votes have to be moved, the result is likely to stand. If 10 have to move, well . . . .

In the United States, the president is not elected by a nationwide popular vote. Instead, the founders decided to use a system of state-level elections to select electors who then cast their votes for president. Each state is allowed to set its own rules, and there is nothing that says the state legislature can't choose them and ignore or not hold a popular vote. When people look at Florida in 2000 with its hanging chads, Naderite votes and the rest, they forget that there was legislation ready to award all the electors from the state to Mr. Bush, thus settling the election that way.

Barring that sort of thing, electors are chosen in winner-take-all state-level votes (save in Nebraska and Maine where some are awarded by Congressional district -- and at most one electoral vote goes against the candidate who wins the state). This tends to result in an exaggeration of support for the candidate with the most popular votes. In 2000, Barack Obama beat John McCain 52.9% of the popular vote to 45.7%. In the electoral college, the result was 365 to 173, a must larger spread of 67.8% to 32.2%. So the idea that the electoral college result will be close is questionable. Although it was in 2000, for most of the elections since the end of the Civil War, it has not been.

If one state's result can make a difference (as in 2000), then it is possible that voting irregularities and miscounts can affect the outcome. However, neither party is interested in letting the other side get away with that, and the media would love to break a story about the theft of an election. Florida in 2000 may have been awarded to the guy who came in second in the popular vote in that state, but it certainly wasn't stolen. What happened was a muddled count where the Supreme Court eventually stepped in to tell the state to stop counting.

If it requires more than one state to flip, the difficulty in affecting the outcome is magnified many fold. Even more people must be involved in the conspiracy, and any conspiracy is likely to collapse because people can't keep their mouths shut.

There is an unfortunate truth that does feed into the conspiracy theory, and that is that when counting millions of votes, it is possible to get the count wrong by a few or even a few hundred. One would like to believe that every vote is counted accurately, but the system involves humans, and they make mistakes. For that matter, banks cannot vouch for the accuracy of the balance in all the accounts they have. The point is that a miscount of a few thousand votes would not often affect the outcome of a presidential election in most instances because the margin of victory (enhanced by the electoral college) is much larger than the margin of error.

This journal doesn't believe this election is going to be close. Mrs. Clinton is ahead in the national polls by 7%, which would be short of a landslide, but it would not count as a squeaker either. Moreover, given the likely distribution of that vote, her electoral college floor is likely to be 300 and Mr. Trump's ceiling around 235. It won't be close enough to steal. Mr. Trump can rest easy. He will not have this election stolen from him. He will lose it badly all on his own.

© Copyright 2016 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.



Kensington Review Home