Donald Trump’s crusade against mail-in voting continued on Thursday when he floated the idea of delaying the 2020 US election until in-person voting was feasible.
“With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???” Mr. Trump tweeted.
The president’s concerns with mail-in voting have been debunked by elections experts. But could he actually move the election?
Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic challenger to Mr. Trump, issued an unsettling warning to his supporters in April about the subject.
“Mark my words, I think [Trump] is gonna try to kick back the election somehow, come up with some rationale why it can’t be held,” he said during the event. “That’s the only way he thinks he can possibly win.”
The charge would raise skeptical eyebrows under normal conditions. But in the coronavirus-embattled world we now inhabit, in which billion-dollar sports leagues cancel seasons and states postpone – or even cancel – their primaries, is it really that absurd to think Mr. Trump could delay the 2020 election?
Well, yes.
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Mr. Trump doesn’t have the power to move or otherwise postpone the election. That power – to determine the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections” – is granted to the Congress by way of the US Constitution.
The US Constitution mandates that every state votes on the same day and that the states determine a number of electors who ultimately elect the president. US Code builds on that, establishing that those electors “shall be appointed, in each State, on the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November, in every fourth year succeeding every election of a President and Vice President.”
Read more: The Independent
