26 NEWSWEEK.COM AUGUST 14, 2020
amaal bowman, a progressive, scored an
upset victory over longtime incumbent
Eliot Engel in New York’s 16th Congres-
sional District. The primary took place on
June 23rd, but the contest wasn’t officially decided
until more than three weeks later—and then only
because Engel finally conceded.
The problem wasn’t that the vote was close: Bow-
man held a 25-point lead in the early returns. It
wasn’t because of a recount: there wasn’t one. The
trouble was in simply counting the votes. More
than 400,000 New York City voters mailed in their
ballots—five times more than did so in the general
election of 2008—burying election officials in
paperwork. Engel finally conceded on July 17; had
he chosen to challenge the mail-in ballots, you’d be
reading this story without knowing the results.
If only this were just a New York issue.
The general election on November 3 may not
end quite so cleanly. President Trump, whose poll
numbers have been in decline for weeks over his
messy response to the coronavirus pandemic,
seems unconstrained, at least rhetorically, by
the American political tradition of the peaceful
transfer of power. On Sunday, he tweeted a call for
"immediate litigation" over mail-in voting in Nevada,
after Republicans there accused the Democrats of
attempting "to steal our election." On July 30, he
floated the idea on Twitter of postponing the elec-
tion. He has said, with no basis in evidence, that he
will consider mail-in votes to be fraudulent, setting
up a post-election case for rejecting the results. He
told Fox’s Chris Wallace, when asked if he would
respect the election results, “I have to see.”
President Obama has warned of the threats that
2020 poses to American norms. He told attendees at
a fundraising event with actor George Clooney on
July 28 that he worries most about voter suppression
and the danger of Trump questioning the election’s
legitimacy. In his eulogy for Rep. John Lewis, he
criticized lawmakers who have “unleashed a flood
of laws designed specifically to make voting hard,”
calling it “an attack on our democratic freedoms.”
Trump may be weak politically but the office of
the president commands enormous power. As com-
mander in chief, Trump is already using armed fed-
eral agents against American citizens in cities run by
mayors and governors of the opposition party, over
their objections. His tweets and comments erode
public trust in the upcoming election.
Past elections, no matter how divisive, have ended
with both sides honoring the process. The bitter
2000 election deadlock between George W. Bush
and Al Gore did not end with the Supreme Court’s
ruling over Florida ballots; it ended when Al Gore,PAPERWORK
The Democratic primary
in New York City got so
many mail-in ballots that
election ofɿcials couldn t
process the count for
weeks. The problem
will go nationwide in
November. Clockwise
from left: Jamaal Bowman
won his district after
a delayed decision a
polling station in Brooklyn
handles walk-ins
ballots are sorted in a
Utah polling station.ţ THERE’S SUBS
FROMLEFT
^ J
EENAH^
MOONʔ*ETTY;^ AN*ELA^ WEISSʔ
AFPʔ
*ETTY;^*EOR*EFREYʔ*ETTY