How about Attorney General William P. Barr, a week before the election, announcing a criminal investigation into the Democratic presidential nominee,
Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Or, after Mr. Biden wins a narrow Electoral College victory, Mr.
Trump refuses to accept the results, won’t leave the White House and declines
to allow the Biden transition team customary access to agencies before the Jan.
20 inauguration.
Far-fetched conspiracy theories? Not to a group of
worst-case scenario planners — mostly Democrats, but some anti-Trump
Republicans as well — who have been gaming out various doomsday options for the
2020 presidential election. Outraged by Mr. Trump and fearful that he might try
to disrupt the campaign before, during and after Election Day, they are engaged
in a process that began in the realm of science fiction but has nudged closer
to reality as Mr. Trump and his administration abandon longstanding political
norms.
The anxiety has intensified in recent weeks as the president
continues to attack the integrity of mail voting and insinuate that the
election system is rigged, while his Republican allies ramp up efforts to control who can vote and
how. Just last week, Mr. Trump threatened to withhold funding from states that defy his wishes on expanding
mail voting, while also amplifying unfounded claims of voter fraud in
battleground states.
“In the eight to 10 months I’ve been yapping at people about
this stuff, the reactions have gone from, ‘Don’t be silly, that won’t happen,’
to an increasing sense of, ‘You know, that could happen,’” said Rosa Brooks, a
Georgetown University law professor. Earlier this year, Ms. Brooks convened an
informal group of Democrats and never-Trump Republicans to brainstorm about
ways the Trump administration could disrupt the election and to think about how
to prevent it.
But the anxiety is hardly limited to outside groups.
Marc Elias, a Washington lawyer who leads the Democratic
National Committee’s legal efforts to fight voter suppression efforts, said not
a day goes by when he doesn’t field a question from senior Democratic officials
about whether Mr. Trump could postpone or cancel the election. Prodded by
allies to explain why not, Mr. Elias wrote a column on the subject in late March for his
website — and it drew more traffic than anything he’d ever published.
But changing the date of the election is not what worries
Mr. Elias. The bigger threat in his mind, he said, is the possibility that the
Trump administration could act in October to make it harder for people to vote
in urban centers in battleground states — possibilities, he said, that include
declaring a state of emergency, deploying the National Guard or forbidding
gatherings of more than 10 people.
Such events could serve to depress or discourage turnout in
pockets of the country that reliably vote for Democrats.
“That to me is that frame
from which all doomsday scenarios then go,” he said.
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