What Were the Threats to the Integrity of the 2020 Presidential Elections in the United States?
Donald Trump or Joe Biden? All around the world, people were waiting to find out who was going to become the 46th president of the United States. The answer, after days of anticipation and anxiety, came at around noon Eastern Time in the United States on November 7. Joe Biden was projected the winner of the state of Pennsylvania and managed to pass the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the race. Biden became President-elect, while Kamala Harris became the first woman ever to be Vice President-elect. Their victory came with the most votes received by a presidential candidate in history. And yet, in the days prior and after November 4, there have been threats to the integrity of the elections after what happened in 2016.
Let’s take a look back at the 2016 presidential race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. While Clinton won the popular vote, Trump was victorious in the Electoral College, even though exit-polls were confident in the victory of the Democratic candidate in the weeks prior to the elections.
So how did Mr. Trump turnaround the results? According to Abigail Abrams of TIME Magazine, it has been proven that Russia played a role as it helped the Republican candidate in a few ways. The first one was that agents with Russian military intelligence, known as GRU, hacked the Clinton campaign, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the Democratic National Committee and stole thousands of emails and documents, as reported by Abrams.
Abrams also noted that the agents then created Guccifer 2.0, a fake online group, and shared their findings with Wikileaks. The leaked emails diminished Clinton’s positions as she was in the news for the wrong reasons. The leak demonstrated that she didn’t do enough to protect the online privacy and security of her communication.Furthermore, the spread of fake news and propaganda on social media like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter promoted Trump and discredited Clinton, as proclaimed by Abrams.
The integrity of the 2020 race for the White House was threatened by different circumstances, as noted by Laura Curlin and Bergen Smith of MapLight, which is a nonpartisan nonprofit that seeks to achieve a government that works for the people. The first and most obvious thing is the COVID-19 pandemic. The United States , as reported by Clea Skopeliti of The Guardian, is one of the countries that has been the most affected by the virus, as it has the most cases and deaths worldwide.
President Donald Trump played a serious role in this development by undermining the threat of the virus and refusing to wear a mask in public places, as reported by Al Jazeera’s William Roberts. That could have discouraged people from voting in person as they may be afraid of visiting places, which are crowded and where it is easier to contract the virus, as proclaimed by Curlin and Smith.
The second reason why there was a threat to the integrity of the elections was that this year had the most mail-in and early ballots in history because of the COVID-19 pandemic, as reported by Jen Kirby and Rani Molla of Vox, a general interest news site. Kirby and Molla proclaimed that Joe Biden urged his supporters to vote-by-mail in order to stop the spread of the virus. The journalists from Vox reported that almost 100 million Americans voted early in 2020 which is more than a double increase when comparing it to 2016, when approximately 47 million people voted early. Roughly 64 million, or nearly two-thirds of those 100 million, voted by mail as noted by Kirby and Molla.
There are some problems with mail-in votes. As reported by the two journalists from Vox, votes by mail are rejected more often than ballots cast at a voting section as humans make mistakes. Sometimes they may use the wrong pen color or even forget to sign at all. Other times the votes get rejected because the signature in the voter registration file is different from the one on the actual ballot. And then there is the case that mail-in ballots may just not arrive on time to be counted.
As it became clear that there would be historic numbers of mail and early ballots, states developed different laws. Kirby and Molla reported that some states counted mail-in and early votes first and early results showed a picture that was not accurate. Such states were Florida and North Carolina where it looked like they were leaning towards the Democrats in the beginning of the night, which led to a “blue mirage,” as reported by Kirby and Molla. However, as results from Election Day started coming in, President Trump eventually regained the lead in these specific states.
On the exact opposite side were the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, where voting by mail and early votes were counted only after Election Day, as noted by Kirby and Molla. Here, the “red mirage” occurred and President Trump declared himself the winner, even though many votes were not counted yet. The counting of the ballots took a few days during which everyone was in the dark. The President, however, wanted the votes to stop being counted in the states where Biden was catching up to him, while in the places where he was losing, President Trump wanted the counting to continue.
In the weeks prior to the elections, President Trump claimed that mail-in votes will lead to massive fraud, even if there has not been any evidence to support his claims, as proclaimed by Curlin and Smith of MapLight. He continued with this tone after Biden was declared as the winner in a series of tweets on Twitter, with some of them being removed from the platform as they consist of false claims.
While there will be legal challenges in the states where Donald Trump lost, there has been no evidence that the integrity of the elections has been compromised like in 2016. Social media took measures to stop propaganda and the spread of fake news. There has been no evidence of fraud and US election officials have even come out and said that this year’s vote was the “most secure in American history.” Joe Biden will become President when he is inaugurated on January 20 and the United States will open a new page in its history.
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Ilina Stoyanova is a Junior at the American University in Bulgaria. She is majoring in Journalism and Mass Communication and Political Science.
