Anxiety peaking as Americans head to the polls

Anxiety is gripping the United States as the 2020 campaign barrels down the home stretch.It is the first time a presidential election has been held in the throes of a deadly pandemic that has affected every corner of the country. This year, the pandemic has sparked an unmatched shift to early voting, by mail or otherwise, and rising expectations that days or weeks might pass before the outcome is known.

While the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law's Chief Counsel Jon Greenbaum is acknowledging the anxiety, he says "unprecedented voter participation in this election," is one reason to celebrate.An estimated 80 million voters have sent mail in ballots or lined up at socially distanced intervals at early voting stations to to have their say.

But legal scholars say there is no doubt that President Donald Trump has repeatedly suggested that the election is beset by fraud — the first time a major candidate, let alone a sitting president, has sought to undermine faith in the electoral process."He's particularly volatile and he's particularly uninterested in terms of the legal bounds," said Loyola University Law Professor Justin Levitt. "The election is not up to him, but he conveys the sense that anything can happen. In fact, that's not really true."

Georgetown Law Professor Joshua Geltzer told The Associated Press, "even amidst the pandemic, even admist foreign cyber enabled threats, I think Donald Trump has been a serious threat to the integrity of these elections and ultimately to how their legitimacy is viewed by large sectors of the American public. "

While Americans have become accustomed to learning who would be their next president on election night, it would be far from unprecedented if they don't. Until 1937, presidents were inaugurated in March, partly because it took so long to report and count the vote. And of course, the 2000 election was not resolved until Dec. 12, when the U.S. Supreme Court made George W. Bush the winner by ruling that Florida must stop counting votes.

Paradoxically, Greenbaum, believes American voters are benefitting from the coronavirus pandemic striking in the spring. "Most places that are holding elections have had to hold an election already under the pandemic and so they're much better prepared than they were in in March, April, May and June."

Another pandemic-inspired departure from the norm: While Trump has campaigned furiously, jetting from town to town, until recently his Democratic rival Joe Biden stayed in or near his home in Delaware, sparing himself and his followers the risk of contracting COVID-19.

The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law is ready to take legal action before and on Election Day if needed. They are prepared to work with election officials and law enforcement or go to court, "to get people who are are disrupting the vote out of the polls and away from the polls," Greenbaum said.

The 2020 election season has also spawned a record number of lawsuits - 320 and counting across the country.Loyola's Levitt expects lawsuits to be filed over the election result, but he cautions, "a lawsuit without provable facts of a statutory or constitutional violation is just a tweet with a filing fee."He believes that most of the legal cases that could be filed after the election have already been argued in court.

(Image Credit: AP) 

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