Two ‘wargame’ teams have a grim take. They agree that undermining confidence in our elections would have terrible long-term consequences.
Two ‘war game’ teams agree that undermining confidence in our elections would have terrible long-term consequences.
L ooking at the national polls, some conclude that the 2020 presidential election is over.
But candidates — historically usually Republicans — have been known to make up a lot of ground in the final weeks or outperform their final polls. See Gerald Ford in 1976, George H. W. Bush in 1992, and Bob Dole in 1996, though all ended up losing.
Karlyn Bowman, who does polling analysis for the America Enterprise Institute, says she’s paying more attention to the polls in the key swing states than the national numbers. In Sunday’s CBS polls, Biden has a three-point edge in Arizona and a five-point edge in Wisconsin. The latest Las Vegas Review-Journal poll in Nevada shows Biden with only a two-point lead.
So there’s a chance the race could still be close in the Electoral College. That could mean that various scenarios are possible in which a winner isn’t clearly known for a while. If this were to happen, we could see a blizzard of lawsuits, attempts to circumvent norms that go far beyond what we saw with Bush v. Gore in 2000, and civil unrest.
Back in July, a group assembled by Rosa Brooks, a former official in the Obama administration, ran a war-games-style exercise about the election outcome.
A group of 67 former government officials, consultants, journalists, and academics formed her Transition Integrity Project.
They gathered to role-play four Election Day scenarios: a big Biden win, a narrow Biden win, a Trump win in the Electoral College but a loss in the popular vote, and ambiguous results with neither candidate conceding. War games are common in national-security studies, and in polarizing times it seems appropriate to apply them to politics.
The results of the exercises were fascinating, albeit many were highly speculative and even bizarre. A key flaw was that few if any of the players actually supported President Trump — the Republicans included Never Trumpers such as former RNC chairman Michael Steele and columnists Bill Kristol and David Frum.
The project received some media attention, but its weak spots spurred the formation of another post-election simulation (“a contest after the contest”) by two free-market think tanks: the Claremont Institute and the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF).
The two groups assembled a team of 35 experts in constitutional law, foreign affairs, law enforcement, media, and election rules to produce a roadmap to the likely outcome of various election scenarios. They called it “The 79-Day Report,” named after the period of time between Election Day and Inauguration Day. The seven-day exercise was umpired by TPPF’s Chuck DeVore, a retired military officer and former California state legislator who has presided over hundreds of war games.
The team spent most of its time on a scenario in which the election results in several states were delayed. Intense court battles resulted in a struggle that lasted right up to the January 6 joint session of Congress where the Electoral College ballots are unsealed. Under some variations, the contest continued in the House and Senate right up to Inauguration Day.
The key takeaways from the 79 Days effort include:
— Regardless of the outcome, the winner isn’t likely to be known on Election Night. In six swing states (Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), no mail-in ballots may be counted before Election Day.
— The large number of mail-in ballots may prove hard to validate because systems have not been prepared to process the ballots and count them, while tremendous pressure will be brought to bear to bypass safeguards against fraud and produce results.
— When employed, the legal system will be up to the task of adjudicating disputes over election results.
— There is a significant chance for unrest, stoked by media outlets in which many Americans have lost trust, by domestic opponents to America’s constitutional system, and by foreign powers, mainly China and Russia. Further, major media and Big Tech (Facebook, Twitter, Google) may actively shape and suppress news.
There are two areas of uncertainty at the late stage of a contested election: Each house determines the final election results of its membership. This means that the Democratic majority in the U.S. House might decide not to seat duly elected Republican members so as to prevent the Republicans from holding a 26-seat majority in the state delegations used to determine the president if no candidate has a majority in the Electoral College. The Senate might see contests that are so close that some seats could be vacant if that body is called on to choose the vice president.
Should the results be undetermined through Jan. 20, Inauguration Day, the Succession Act would suggest that the speaker of the House would become acting president until one is determined and, if the House cannot decide, then elevating the vice president, even if selected out of the Senate.
Some elements of “The 79-Day Report” dovetailed with those of the Transition Integrity Project. The TIP group found that the courts provided only slow, weak, and unreliable remedies in the election contests. David Frum, reporting on the TIP simulations he’d participated in, warned in The Atlantic of what might happen if the vote goes against Trump.
His team tried to convince his supporters that they had been robbed — and that they were therefore entitled to take extreme, even violent, actions. In our exercises, however, the game-winning strategy was to goad the other side into violence. This was particularly true for Team Trump, whose supporters already fear violence from anarchists and Antifa.
But the TIP report also discussed machinations by Team Biden:
During TIP’s exercises, Team Biden almost always called for and relied on mass protests. . . . Participants in the exercise noted that racial justice activists and others will likely act independently of the Biden campaign. . . . If anything, the scale of recent demonstrations has increased the stakes for the Democratic Party to build strong ties with grassroots organizations and be responsive to the movement’s demands.
John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager, proved to be a most effective player in the TIP simulation. Playing the role of the Biden campaign manager in a scenario in which Trump leads Biden in the Electoral College, he alleged massive “voter suppression.” He then got the Democratic governors of Trump-won states such as Wisconsin and Michigan to send a competing slate of pro-Biden electors to the Electoral College. In the meantime, California, Oregon, and Washington threatened to secede from the union if Trump took office. The Democratic House unilaterally named Biden president.
“The 79 Days Report” team was more concerned with four post-election possible outcomes:
Widespread urban unrest; state and federal litigation; brazen media and social media narrative shaping; and foreign interference and adventurism. . . . State and local public safety authorities should be prepared for destructive urban unrest as well as communications difficulty due to interference with or overload of systems.
They urged that legal arguments for both sides need to be anticipated and prepared now, during the relative calm of the pre-election environment.
Participants in “The 79 Days Report” included KT McFarland, President Trump’s former deputy director of the National Security Council, and Gladden Pappin, an assistant professor at the University of Dallas.
It fell to Pappin to play the role of Twitter’s leadership during the simulation. The controversy over Twitter’s blocking distribution of the New York Post stories on Hunter and Joe Biden occurred after the simulation. “I had to pinch himself to see what was reality and what had just previously happened in the simulation,” Pappin said. In his role-playing as Twitter’s leadership, Pappin policed assertions about voter fraud, embargoed “questionable” tweets, and redirected election searches to “trusted sources” approved by Twitter.
The lesson of both simulations — the one by the Transition Integrity Project and “The 79 Days Report” — are the same. We are in danger of generating massive mistrust in the integrity of our elections, and that could greatly intensify our polarization and anger from here on out.