Meanwhile, the National Task Force On Election Crises and The National Council on Election Integrity formed to sound the alarm. All include cross-partisan practitioners of various disciplines, national security, law, academia and electoral politics among them, ranging from President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, President George W Bush’s Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Admiral Michael Rogers, who served military and national security roles under Trump and President Barack Obama.
Meredith McGehee, executive director of the democracy reform organisation Issue One, is involved in both of those groups and said the members have been calling governors, attorneys general and military officials. It is not that she necessarily thinks we are headed for a cataclysmic event, she said, but the conditions do exist. There has been a decline in trust in institutions, armed violence and street protests have been ubiquitous, and Trump continues to be a wild card.
But she has seen some heartening signs too. For instance, there has been a lot of media coverage about the potential that the country will not know who wins on Election Day. That seems to be sinking in with the public, too, with a recent poll finding two-thirds of voters do not expect to know who will win on the night of the election.
“If you want to game out all the terrible things that could go wrong, there’s lots of them, and they can be very scary,” she said. “The best way to ensure that there’s not a cataclysm is to prepare.”
