America’s tribalism is such these days that we struggle to even agree on the basic rules. Elections have always been hotly contested. As the saying goes, “Politics ain’t beanbag.” The process has long involved elements of nastiness and underhanded conduct.

Still, we used to be able to take some things for granted. We had a baseline of trust in election officials. We had confidence in the vote count. Losers accepted the outcome, most often with grace.

Those times were hardly innocent, but they seem positively upright and virtuous compared to the current upheaval.

The uptick in intense polarization predated President Donald Trump, notwithstanding the barrels of fuel he has thrown on the fire. Though any accounting has to assign him much of the blame for the attacks on our core electoral institutions.

Give Trump credit for this: He most often previews his moves. He spent much of 2020 casting doubt on the integrity of mail balloting and asserting that the election would be illegitimate if he did not win reelection. Sure enough, when voters chose Joe Biden by a margin of seven million votes and an electoral vote tally of 306 to 232, Trump and his troops flooded the zone with nonstop, unsubstantiated claims of a “stolen election.”

We recall all too vividly what that led to at our venerable Capitol building on a chilly day in early January.

Here we are nearly six years later and Trump, back in office, has still not given up the ghost. He continues at every opportunity to repeat his long-discredited claims of 2020 fraud.

Beyond litigating old grievances, he is actively questioning the validity and legitimacy of this fall’s midterm elections. Facing dismal approval ratings, he is laying the predicate for what could follow if voters turn away from him and his party. It feels very much like a poorly produced sequel.

Ever notice how “election fraud” is only ever alleged by losing candidates? I am eagerly awaiting the day when some declared winner stands up and declares, “These numbers can’t be right. I am not all that upstanding a person and there’s no way all these people voted for me.”

Colorado plays a key role in this drama as an early adopter of universal mail balloting. Our state is now regarded as a national model for efficient, low-hassle elections using real-time ballot tracking along with bank-grade signature verification and bipartisan oversight.

If there is a gold standard in this realm, Colorado is it.

With the Nov. 3 election on the near horizon, turmoil is the only constant. A Supreme Court ruling this past week on Trump’s executive order intended to restrict the number of voters receiving mail ballots was perhaps not as consequential as advertised.

The Court decided that a lower-court injunction against provisions of the executive order had been issued prematurely. Now that the Postal Service has finalized its proposed rules, new lawsuits surely will be filed and the issue will again be joined.

Underpinning the dispute between the White House and the attorneys general of many blue states is the central question of what role belongs to the president in the conduct of elections.

The Constitution grants state legislatures the power to regulate the time, place and manner of holding federal elections.  

However, that clause goes on to say that Congress may make or alter those regulations. This means that Congress would have been within its prescribed role to pass the so-called SAVE Act which Trump had been pushing on them. But Congress lacked the necessary votes, no matter the fierce presidential pressure.

Notably missing from this constitutional language is the assignment of any such authority over elections to the president or the executive branch.

Another factor complicating Trump’s agenda is what is known as the Purcell doctrine, which calls on courts to exercise restraint in changing rules too close to an election in order to limit disruption and confusion. With the election just two months away, we would seem well within that window.

All of this is significant but still rather small potatoes compared to two nightmare scenarios. In the first of those, given that Trump has involved the Department of Homeland Security in this process, uniformed, masked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents would descend on select polling places in a brazen attempt at voter intimidation.

The second such bad dream would transpire after the election. Each legislative chamber is the final arbiter of its own membership.

Imagine an election outcome in which Democrats gain more than ample seats to take control of the House but congressional Republicans, led by Speaker Mike Johnson taking his marching orders from the White House, refuse to seat newly elected Democrats from states which did not follow Trump’s mail-ballot edicts.

That would present a constitutional crisis with the very real prospect of public rebellion. It might seem far-fetched. But so did Jan. 6^th before it became all too real. And Mike Johnson shows no signs of being confused for Mike Pence when it comes to courage and backbone.

For all of the fact-free talk of a “stolen election” six years ago, it is the purveyors of that myth who might be trying to steal this current one.

Eric Sondermann is a Colorado-based independent political commentator. He writes regularly for ColoradoPolitics and the Gazette newspapers. Reach him at EWS@EricSondermann.com; follow him at @EricSondermann