US election: What next?

Monday 9th November 2020

President Donald J. Trump was planning to paint the town red. His plan having gone pear-shaped, the Democrats are doing that. Joe Biden has emerged the winner in the US presidential race. He had won 279 electoral votes and Trump 214, at the time of going to press. President Trump’s allegations of electoral frauds, undue delays in vote counting and other such issues have taken the gloss off the Democratic win to some extent.

This is not the first time there have been allegations of fraud and intimidation anent a US presidential election. Such incidents were widespread in some parts of the US including Louisiana and South Carolina, during the closely contested 1876 presidential election, and both Democrats and Republicans were responsible for them, according to historians.

Interestingly, Trump, whom Russia is accused of having made the President, has been brought down by what he calls the China virus, among other things. The Democrats were hoping for a walk in the park, on 03 November, but Trump put up a good fight; if not for the pandemic, which has plunged the US into chaos, Trump would perhaps have been able to secure a second term. The Republicans have performed impressively in the Senate and House races, which went alongside the presidential election.

The American polity is riven with deep divisions. The biggest challenge before President elect Biden will be to make the American democracy great again, and reunite the United States. He addressed the nation very eloquently and undertook to do so. However, the proof of the pudding is said to be in the eating. He will have to preside over one of the worst crises in the history of the US as well as the world. The US topped 125,000 daily COVID-19 infections on Friday, and this portends serious trouble for the new administration to be formed. Trump chose to keep the country open despite the rapid increase in infections, and his modus operandi has not worked. He fought shy of closing the country as he did not want the economy to suffer. Lockdowns will entail huge economic, political and social costs. How does Biden propose to get on top of the situation?

The Democrats have defeated the nationalistic forces that rallied behind Trump. But whether they will succeed in managing their electoral gains hinges on Biden’s ability to deliver. Will he and Kamala Harris be able to live up to the Americans’ expectations? We are reminded of the 2015 regime change in this country. It was also considered a setback for nationalism and saw the coming together of a docile President and a self-assertive second-in-command. What happened thereafter is now history.

Meanwhile, the process of electing the US president is not yet over. What is known as the general election has been completed, for all practical purposes, although the final result has not yet been announced. The people have voted for 538 electors in favour of Biden and Trump, and the exact number of electoral votes each of them has secured will be known soon. Thereafter, it is up to the electors to vote for either Biden or Trump when they meet as the Electoral College, on 14 Dec. 2020. Their votes are sent to the Congress for the final tally, which is scheduled to be announced on 06 January 2021.

The Founding Fathers expected electors to be ‘men capable of analyzing’ presidential candidates, but the members of the Electoral College are today bound by their party allegiances more than anything else. The electors are thus party loyalists, but not all of them are legally bound to vote for the candidates they have publicly declared their allegiance to. There been instances of ‘faithless’ electors voting for candidates other than those they were pledged to. Following the conclusion of the 1948, 1960 and 1968 presidential elections, when the Electoral College met, third parties received electoral votes, much to the disappointment of the voting public and the main candidates. After the presidential elections in 1976, 2004 and 2016, faithless votes changed the final tallies but had no impact on the outcomes of those races.

In 2016, Republican Candidate Trump lost two electoral votes (out of 306 elected) and his Democratic contender Hillary Clinton five (out of 232 elected), owing to faithless candidates. Some States have legislated for the cancellation of faithless votes, and the electors who cast them are penalised in five States, but those from other places face no such legal barriers.

Faithless electors have not changed the outcome of a US presidential election so far. They are not a problem in an Electoral College blowout situation, but the fact remains that they have the potential either to change the apparent winner or to send a presidential election to the Congress. The US polity is polarised as never before. Even armed Trump supports were sighted near some counting centres. President Trump, having declared himself the winner falsely, is ready to do whatever it takes to retain power, and anything is, therefore, possible. Trump has not conceded defeat, and a representative of his legal team has said that much could happen between the election and the inauguration of the President due on 06 January 2021.

It may be recalled that in 1877, the Congress had to appoint an ad hoc electoral commission to sort out a dispute when both Democratic and Republican candidates who contested the 1876 presidential election—Samuel J. Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes, respectively—claimed victory with South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana being in doubt. The election results were revised, and the Congress, following a stormy session, announced, on 02 March 1877, that Hayes, who had almost conceded defeat a few months before, had been elected the President.