Votes count

Belarusan President Lukashenko is facing the consequences of his effort to fake re-election with a claimed 80% of the vote. The country’s citizens know this result is fraudulent and are unwilling to accept it. His competitor, who more than likely won, has fled to Lithuania with her two children. Her husband remains in prison in Belarus, hostage to Lukashenko. Belarusans have no alternative but to take to the streets, where the security forces are beating and detaining them for further brutal mistreatment while in custody.

President Putin has backed Lukashenko, even though the Belarusan president has at times been less than a loyal ally to Moscow. A weakened and dependent Lukashenko is precisely what Moscow needs to impose its will. The EU and US have issued muffled protests of the treatment of protesters. Brussels has also called the elections “unfree and unfair,” but neither has unequivocally denounced the election outcome. The EU is hampered by its need for consensus among 27 member states, some of whose leaders have sympathy with Lukashenko. The US presumably doesn’t want to offend Russian President Putin.

President Trump is preparing for his own election fraud. He won’t be able to pull off the kind of ballot-box stuffing and fake tabulations that Lukashenko indulged in. American national elections are run by the states and local authorities. It wouldn’t do much good for Trump’s allies to fake election results in many “red” states because all that really matters is who wins: that state’s electoral votes (with few exceptions) go entirely to the winning candidate, who won’t be in doubt in truly red states. He wouldn’t be able to pull off fake results in “blue” states. And many “battleground” states are run by Democrats.

So what Trump is trying to do is to suppress voting, knowing that his supporters are on the whole more enthusiastic than his rival’s voters, many of whom are more anti-Trump than they are pro-Biden. Trump has said he opposes special funding for the US Postal Service (USPS) in order to make it harder for mail-in votes to arrive on time. His recently appointed head of USPS is trying to slow mail delivery, including by removing sorting machines from many post offices.

I doubt this effort to suppress voting will succeed. Americans like their post office and postal workers are part of the communities they deliver ballots to and from. I expect the workers, whether they favor Democrats or Republicans, to make every effort to deliver the ballots on time.

But that will not entirely defeat Donald Trump’s purposes. He knows full well that many, perhaps most, Americans will prefer to vote by mail during a pandemic. He knows the postal workers will do their best to deliver the ballots. What he is trying to do is not only slow the mail but lay the basis for rejecting the election results. Mail-in ballots, he claims, are subject to fraud. They require far more time and effort to count, so there will be a delay in announcing results. He will use that delay as well as his campaign to cast doubt on their validity, claiming that results are being falsified.

I don’t expect this gambit to work better for Trump than Lukashenko’s worked in Belarus. But it could lead to big street protests in the days during which the election outcome is uncertain. Trump has made clear in Portland in recent months what he intends to do about those: he will unleash poorly trained Federal agents to provoke violence, which will give him the excuse to deploy more. We’ll see counter-protests as well, with further violence the inevitable consequence.

So it is vital that Americans who want to see the end of Trump do everything they can to vote early if by mail and in person if not, even despite the virus in battleground states.

Trump of course has other tricks to foil Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. He is suggesting she is not eligible to be Vice President or President because her parents were not citizens, even though she was born in Oakland, California. This is discredited and racist drivel, but so too is Trump’s claim that mail-in ballots are subject to fraud. In the end, what counts are votes.