What to Expect on Election Day and in the Transition Period

Part #5 of a series on the 2020 U.S. election crisis

In the previous articles, I discussed Trump’s financial interests in maintaining the presidency, the foreign help he’s getting in the election, and his attempt to delay or suppress the Biden vote while encouraging his supporters to vote early and often. In this article, I review what Americans can expect as Election Day (November 3, 2020) approaches, how a victor might be declared, and what the transition period — the three months between the election and the inauguration — might be like.

This series of articles was first published on October 2 and was updated on October 17.

Trump won’t transfer power

This is a good assumption. To recap: Biden is likely to win, and Trump has repeatedly said he does not plan to transfer power.

On June 16, he retweeted someone else’s analysis without adding any comment of his own: “‘Trump isn’t going to accept the 2020 election results,’ shout the people who still haven’t accepted the 2016 election results.” This is apparently a reference to people who are unhappy about Trump’s Electoral College win over Hillary Clinton in 2016, and this is an entirely different sense of the word “accept.” When a sitting president does not “accept” the election results, it means he does not relinquish power, and that is a totally different proposition of which Trump is certainly aware.