Will Mail-In Voting Drive American Democracy to the Edge of a Cliff?

Short of a clear victory by one candidate or another, the coming elections risk seriously denting the legitimacy of the next president.

With a little less than two months to go until the American presidential election, the question is not just who will win, but how. At the heart of this concern is of course mail-in voting. Obstinately attacked by President Trump as a tool of unprecedented electoral fraud, and defended tooth and nail by the Democrats who see it as a miracle solution to claim the right to vote in the era of COVID-19, mail-in voting has quickly become a new line of identity demarcation in the United States.

As is the case for wearing a mask, intending to vote by mail also corresponds to your political preferences. If you intend to take up that right, you are much more likely to support Joe Biden than Donald Trump.

And here lies the problem: Because it is anticipated that mail-in ballots will be much more Democrat than Republican, there is a fundamental interest for one party to encourage it, and for the other to discourage it. This reinforces the partisan dynamic of mail-in voting.

That leads to two potentially problematic, even dangerous, outcomes.

The first and the most obvious, already widely discussed, is that since in-person voting will be counted before mail-in ballots, Donald Trump could have a lead on the evening of Nov. 3 that would then crumble over the course of the following days. Seeing his lead melt little by little — a phenomenon already nicknamed “the blue shift” — the president could prematurely declare victory and describe Biden’s comeback as fraudulent.

The second, much less discussed or understood, would see Donald Trump hang onto his lead and be re-elected, especially because a large proportion of mail-in ballots received are declared invalid, whether because they arrive late, they’re not signed properly or because of any other irregularity.

For example, the presidential primaries this year, marked by a dizzying increase in mail-in voting, saw more than half a million ballot papers rejected—a rise of more than 70% compared to the general election in 2016—for which the turnout was around three times higher.

In some areas, the rate of mail-in ballots eventually rejected was jaw-dropping — as in the county of Kings in New York (which includes Brooklyn), where almost a quarter of votes were discounted during the primaries last June. We’re talking about 80,000 votes. To put that number into perspective, it’s more than the number of votes it took for Donald Trump to win in three states in 2016 — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan — which tipped the electoral college in his favor.

Imagine a situation in which Trump clings to the presidency after rejecting several hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots, when he has been publicly discrediting mail-in voting for months. Would the cries denouncing electoral fraud stop, or would those cries instead be made by the Democrats?

Democratically, neither of these outcomes would be particularly serious, in and of itself, if comparable proportions of Democrat and Republican voters plan to vote in person and by mail. The number of votes counted or rejected in one camp or another would not automatically be perceived as conferring an undue advantage de facto to one party or another.

But, any knife-edge result for one side or the other risks being received by the losing side as biased, or even completely unjust. Several states need to decide between now and November on legal proceedings as to whether paper ballots posted before Nov. 3 but received by the electoral authorities after Nov. 3 should be counted. How will the disadvantaged party see the electoral results if the outcome is close? How will they accept it?

Nothing at all suggests that the United States will tip over into authoritarianism or civil war. Even if he yells fraud until he runs out of breath in the case of defeat, Donald Trump will leave the White House next Jan. 20, and his constitutional powers will by then be reduced to nothing. Even if the Democratic opposition does the same if Trump is re-elected, the latter would not transformed into a monarch. He would simply leave the White House (a maximum of) four years later.

That is not to say that it is advisable to spend weeks or even months in electoral disagreements that would make the Florida fiasco in 2000 look like an anecdote — for only four subsequent years, during which the very legitimacy of the president would be rejected by tens of millions of Americans.

The United States is living through the worst health crisis in 60 years, the worst economic crisis in 90 years and the worst social crisis in 50 years, and it certainly doesn’t need to go through a completely unprecedented democratic crisis.

Whatever the result, let’s hope first and foremost for one thing: that it is unequivocal.