Chronic. Twenty years ago, on November 8, 2000, the United States woke up without an elected president. The total count of the votes cast the day before for the election of Bill Clinton’s successor to the White House comes up against the result of the ballot in the state of Florida, where the Democratic candidate Al Gore is contesting the few hundred votes of advance of Republican George W. Bush. The uncertainty will last a month, punctuated by endless recounts and surreal debates over the validity of the holes punched by ancient machines in the ballots of three counties in Florida.
It is ultimately the Supreme Court that decides. On December 12, she put an end to the new counts in Florida and designated George W. Bush the winner of the presidential election: he thus had the support of 271 major voters, against 266 for Al Gore. The latter bowed, although having won the popular vote at the national level, with 500,000 votes in advance. The whole world, or almost, welcomes this proof of the maturity of American democracy and the good functioning of its institutions.
Will it be the same in the sequence that will follow November 3? Nothing is less sure. The civility of the Bush-Gore confrontation and the civility that separated them take us back light years from the universe of alternative truths and rat race in which Donald Trump plunged us. It was also the president himself who began to cause trouble in July, at a time when a poll gave his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, 8 points ahead: 2020 will be “The most erroneous and fraudulent election in history”, he predicted. When asked on Fox News if he would accept the result in case he loses the election, Donald Trump declined to answer in the affirmative. “I’ll have to see, he said. I’m not just going to say yes. And I’m not going to say no either. I’ll have to see. ” Ah yes, “And first of all I will not lose – since these polls are false”.
Avoid polling stations
Seven weeks before the election, the gap between the two candidates has narrowed in voting intentions, and no one ventures to make predictions – especially since in 2016 Hillary Clinton had been beaten all by counting 3 million more votes than Donald Trump. But the doubt sown in the minds of the president and the persistence of the pandemic, which will, in all probability, encourage a large number of voters to vote by mail to avoid the polling stations, now feed the most serious scenarios. on the conduct of the November 3 election.
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