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Comment by TallGuyShort | Hacker News Reader

I would say 90% of my US-based Facebook friends fall into one of two groups at any one time: posting things about how "we're not a democracy, we're a republic", and posting things about how we should suspend things in the Bill of Rights because we've been needing to exercise "emergency powers" continuously for the last 20 years.

Let's ask ourselves: what do you think is the probability a year from now that the US presidential election later this year will be contested by a significant portion of the country, regardless of the outcome?

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Why look to the future? The last election has been openly opposed by a large percentage of the population AND agencies of the public service.

Not like the Obama terms where much different. Just a different group of people saying "My team didn't win so I'm going to have a tantrum".

I predict the next election cycle will just be more of the same, no matter who wins.

Would the election being contested by the losing candidate be more of the same to you? Because there's a massive difference between voters being upset their candidate lost, and the candidate not accepting the results.

Especially if that candidate is the acting president and refuses to go through the peaceful transfer of power.

And the fact it's even being discussed as a serious possibility that the current acting president would do that should raise so many alarm bells about how democratic the US really is ... it's not even funny.

> And the fact it's even being discussed as a serious possibility that the current acting president would do that should raise so many alarm bells about how democratic the US really is ... it's not even funny.

That was discussed with the same seriousness by the other side with Obama stepping down. Complete load of tosh.

If the electoral college fails to elect Trump as president when it meets at the end of the year, the secret service and/or army will remove Trump and Pence from the White House at noon on Jan 20th, revoking their security clearences. That will be done by force if necessary, and the winner of the EC will take the presidency.

If the EC fails to meet before Jan 20th for whatever reason (including elections being unable to be held etc), Then at noon on Jan 20th both Trump and Pence are removed and (baring a change in the makeup of the House), Nancy Pelosi will be sworn in as President.

The idea of a military coup in a country so enamoured by its constitution is fantastical.

Trump has refused to say that he would accept the results of the election, constantly saying he "will see".

This is absolutely not something Obama has done and claiming the situations are similar is blind and absurd.

Removing the president by force does not help the stated case by the way.

It's not removing the president by force. If Trump fails to win the electoral college vote by 12:01p on Jan 20th, the president will be Biden or Pelosi. If Trump then refuses to leave the white house he'll be treated as an intruder and arrested and/or shot. He has no individual power, and no loyalty to him, the loyalty is to the office of president, which is currently occupied by Trump, but unless he is declared

The peaceful transfer of power is about the operation of the government transferring - the head of the army, the secret service, the finance, etc.

You might get civil unrest if some Trump supporters refuse to accept it, but unlike other countries where ballots are counted, the US does not elect a president by popular vote, instead a joint session of congress counts registered votes from 538 electors across the country. The sitting president isn't even the room. There is no question.

In all your replies you are defending against a claim nobody is making.

Nobody said the president will just remain a president if he just says so. What I originally said is that the fact this (the acting president refusing to go through peaceful transfer of power) is a serious discussion is symptomatic of a serious issue, and I maintain that, and nothing you said contradicts it. You then replied with a weird tangent about Obama.

> He has no individual power, and no loyalty to him, the loyalty is to the office of president, which is currently occupied by Trump, but unless he is declared

You should note, the man has shown many times to be able to gather a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people with a few tweets, and phone calls.

Not at his inauguration, and not at his Oklahoma rally.

Look at how many heavily armed right wing fanatics show up whenever people remove a racist statue. It isn't so hard to imagine hundreds of them marching into the white house to "protect" the president after he loses the election.

It won't be a matter of a few secret service agents escorting Trump out. It will be a full on armed standoff in the white house with 40% of the country rooting for Trump.

Top that off with a raging pandemic, unprecedented economic devastation, homelessness, shutdown schools, and sophisticated digital propaganda campaigns designed to exacerbate every divisive issue and it is hard to see how US democracy survives.

> It isn't so hard to imagine hundreds of them marching into the white house to "protect" the president after he loses the election.

If the secret service can't cope with a few protesters what is the point of them?

> That was discussed with the same seriousness by the other side with Obama stepping down.

I'm just going to call that out as a straight-up distortion and falsehood. In it's effect, equivalent to a lie.

Show me reliable quotes of saying Obama he would "have to see" about the election results, as Trump has, and I'll be more charitable.

Otherwise I (mostly) agree with you. Bear in mind though that when Trump wanted to deploy paratroopers to cities during the first wave of protests and the riots associated with (but not really a part of) them after the murder of George Floyd, the only check and balance in our system left was our military leadership itself, which, to their credit, saw that such an order would be immoral, probably illegal, and un-American.

But literally all the other checks and balances meant to prevent a President from turning the military / law enforcement into their own personal squad of doofuses have been removed at this point.

Look at Barr and the FBI. Or the current behavior of DHS in Portland.

So I mostly agree with your prediction but certainly have my unsettled moments.

I mean the guy got the Army to have a Blackhawk helicopter go hover over and intimidate peaceful protestors like it was part of an occupying force.

Plus, let's not forget that the election could be a shitshow this year in terms of how long it takes to count the votes, voter access to polling places (because of neglect or deliberate disenfranchisement), etc.

So there could be a lot of gray areas and areas of concern unrelated to a "military coup."

> Show me reliable quotes of saying Obama he would "have to see" about the election results, as Trump has, and I'll be more charitable.

It's meaningless what Trump says or does. It's what Congress, Senate, Military and (in the short term) various federal agencies like the secret service. The Federal government obey legal orders from the President. Come 12:01pm on Jan 20th, barring a valid electoral college vote being declared in a joint session of congress in Trumps favour, Trump ceases to be president, and the Federal entities start following the lawful orders of either Biden or Pelosi (assuming Biden wins the EC or the EC doesn't happen but the democrats maintain control of the House)

Of course it's entirely possible for the election to be "stole" by keeping all non-trump voters away from the polling booths, that's a far woolier version of the word "stole" though.

What if votes are still being counted? What if so many votes are lost because of screwups that it's hard to know who won in certain counties? What if Trump lies, as he does, and says he won in places where he didn't?

Also I'd like to point out that the orders to create concentration camps for immigrants which Trump issued to ICE may very well have been illegal. Federal agencies receive orders all the time from various folks and sometimes those orders are later acknowledged as illegal.

It's tricky for an officer to know if an order is legal or not, hence the issues. What an chief of staff is sure of is that a legal order can only come from the president, and at 12:01p on Jan 20th the president will be whoever the joint session of congress says it is.

I think you're missing me point. Most likely you'll be correct.

But if all the votes aren't counted yet - like what happened with the Bush/Gore election - then the Supreme Court or whomever makes these decisions could legally extend the timeline (however it happened before). Trump remains President then until it's sorted out.

And it probably would get sorted out. But my point is that there is historical precedent for a gray area of when an election is over - I mean come on, the Supreme Court had to decide when the Bush / Gore election was over, and Gore could have contested that, if he had chosen to.

So it's obviously a possibility considering how messed-up our electoral process could be this year from a combination of covid-19, neglect, and deliberate neglect. And possibly foreign sabotage though I'd put that at the bottom of the list.

The 20th amendment literally says

> The terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January

It could not be plainer.

Supreme court can rule about the process of counting, when the joint session to verify the votes happens, when a given state has to appoint its electors etc, but can't possibly interpret this as anything other than the plain text it says.

Thanks for the info on that. :).

What if on January 20 there is disagreement about who the President is?

I actually don't know how that works.

When you have a situation where the winning candidate has fewer votes than the other candidate, that clearly leads to some saying it wasn't a fair representation of the feeling of the country.

I don't think many contested Bush in 2004, when he got a majority (not even just a plurarity) of votes. They might not have liked it, but it was a given.

Clearly in 2000 there were complaints, Gore got more votes, on top of that was the whole hanging chad fiasco.

In both 92 and 96, Clinton got the plurarity of votes, but didn't reach 50%. Most who voted, voted against him. Not as bad as not getting a majority of votes, but will lead to some resentment.

Now on top of that there's the whole "Hacking" the election, which is far more woolly, and isn't just because of Russia and Cambridge Analytica, it's also about how informed a population is, the ease of getting onto the voting register, the ease of casting a vote, etc.

Democracy is hard

All good points. I would add that democracy in the workplace, which affects most people's day to day lives far more than that of the government, has been decreasing for decades, with the decline of unions and skyrocketing of wealth inequality.

agreed though I think the appearance of workplace democracy affecting day to day more than governmental democracy is only historically (rather than inherently) true of post-war america. that standard could radically shift in the future and I'd also say that it's government policy or stagnancy that enables the context in which workplace democracy has declined.

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