Both former Vice President Joe Biden and failed 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton spoke out in defense of a November election on Tuesday, warning President Donald Trump not to postpone the presidential contest — even though President Trump hasn’t expressed any desire to move the date.
Biden warned Trump not to move the election in an interview with the Today show, where he suggested the November presidential election is laid out in the Constitution, and pleaded with the president to allow vote-by-mail in the event social distancing measures are still in place at the end of 2020.
“I’d much prefer to have in-person voting. but it depends. It depends on the state of play, but we cannot, we cannot delay or postpone a constitutionally required November election,” Biden said.
Technically, Biden’s incorrect on at least one detail: Congress set the presidential election date on the first Tuesday that follows the first Monday in November by Federal statute. It can also be postponed, though it’s only happened once, and then, for only a handful of select Congressional districts in Georgia — and that was for a midterm election, not a presidential election.
Biden’s solution to the possibility of a continuing coronavirus crisis seems to be the same solution proposed by Congressional Democrats: a national vote-by-mail system that’s largely seen as problematic by Republicans, largely because there’s nearly no workable state oversight of balloting, verification, and election results. As Wisconsin is demonstrating Tuesday, it’s also difficult even for a state that regularly handles absentee ballots to adapt to a vote-by-mail system.
With more than 1.2 million absentee ballots likely to be cast in the Wisconsin primary, state election officials say it could be days or weeks before results are certified.
“We have to make our democracy, as well as dealing with the disease, function. We can do both. We should be thinking now ahead — have all the experts, both political parties and academia laying out what it would take to have voting by mail,” Biden told Today.
He’s backed by 2016’s Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, who assured her social media followers this week that President Donald Trump does not have the authority to move the presidential election, no matter how much he may want to.
“Let’s be clear,” Clinton tweeted. Trump does not have the power to cancel or postpone the November election.”
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The problem, of course, is that Trump hasn’t spoken on the issue. Congressional Republicans have repeatedly dismissed the Democrats’ plan for a national vote-by-mail program, but President Donald Trump, more concerned with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, has been silent on the issue of the presidential election except to lob an occasional barb at his prospective opponent, Biden.
So far, even the coronavirus task force has also been silent on the possibility of moving a presidential election and both parties are proceeding as if the election will take place in November.
Clinton’s linked article says much the same as above: that there’s only one way to postpone a presidential election and that is with the total cooperation of Congress, a body so aggressive, at the moment, that it’s almost impossible to believe it would support a change to Election Day.
Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton Panic Over President Trump Postponing The Presidential Election
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April 08, 2020
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