In the US elections cannot be canceled even when Martial Law is declared. That does not mean a certain someone will not try to simply ignore the Constitution given his track record of simply ignoring the Constitution
The US President in 1944 was someone who wanted to have elections. In 2026 this is not the case anymore. How much of a difference it makes, nobody knows.
Elections won't be canceled. They're too important for the perception of legitimacy. Virtually every country on Earth now has elections. Russia, China, even North Korea has elections.
The modern playbook isn't to abolish elections, it's a combination of blocking opposition candidates, suppressing votes, intimidating voters, and lying about the results. That's what to watch for.
It's fairly easy to abuse a state of exception to cancel elections. Ukraine has done it, and it's been, along with banning opposition parties and attempting to imprison critics (Arestovych, etc.), a critical step in their government consolidating power.
It’s absurd to claim that Ukraine (I’ll assume you actually mean “Ukrainian leadership”) is somehow “abusing” a constitutionally mandated state of emergency.
>I’ll assume you actually mean “Ukrainian leadership”
What else could I possibly have meant, genius?
But yes of course they've taken advantage of it. Russia yeeting them out of its own territories and then invading The Ukraine is the best thing Zelensky could have asked for.
Ukraine's constitution doesn't allow elections when martial law is in effect. The US constitution has no such clause, nor anything else that would allow for delaying or canceling elections.
That's not to say it can't be done, but there's a huge difference in difficulty between doing what the country's constitution says, and doing the opposite. Especially in a country where elections are run by sovereign governments not under the control of the central government.
My point is about difficulty, not how “fine” it is. It’s really easy not to hold elections when your constitution says you can’t. It’s a lot harder when your constitution says you must, and also gives you no power over the governments who actually hold those elections. But obviously you’d rather grind your axe against Ukraine than actually discuss what you said before.
What are the states going to do with their local election results when the officials in Washington ignore them due to some manufactured state of emergency?
He already tried to get specific states' election outcomes discarded from the count on Jan 6, 2021.
Could you be more specific on who the officials in DC would be that could ignore the election results? The Clerk of the House, I assume? They have a fairly limited role, and it would probably be a short-lived disruption. The members-elect themselves seem to have all of the power, if my civics knowledge is correct.
I've never seen more enthusiasm about US politics than from Europeans (like pavlov there in Finland) and Australians. It makes meaningful discussion very difficult, online.
I lived in the US for years (including Jan 6 2021) and I’ve seen how this playbook was executed in Russia.
From my POV, Americans are hopelessly naive about their institutions holding up when it’s been demonstrated so many times that the guardrails are gone. It’s one of the reasons I left the country - I feel safer living next to Russia than in America.
I think that is a valid point, though I would like to see some meat in these proclamations of doom.
There are more guns than people in the US, and in nobody's wildest dreams does ICE (or the entire federal government, for that matter, including the military) have enough personnel to subdue even 10% of the population rising up. And while I think it is somewhat valid to assume the military leans a bit conservative, in my experience it is more of a true conservatism and not MAGA. I was in the military, and the vast majority of soldiers would 100% refuse to suppress US citizens.
Everyone thinks the adults are not really in charge in the GOP right now, but I think that's absolutely not true. They are just okay with the chaos right now because it's not impeding business and keeps people distracted. If MAGA gets too spicy and causes real civil unrest, we're going to find out very quickly who actually runs the show. And it ain't Donald Trump.
He doesn't, it's literally enshrined in the constitution. If he decides to violate that, it's him violating the constitution yet again, not proof that he has a say.
It would also probably be the last straw for a lot of people who has been limping along on the belief in free elections.
More importantly, this isn’t a “who’s going to stop me?” sort of thing like having ICE violate people’s civil rights. The power isn’t there. ICE does what Trump says because the law puts them under his control and he metaphorically signs their paychecks. If Trump orders state governments to do something with elections, that carries no weight. There’s no legal obligation or tradition to comply, no paychecks involved, nothing that would compel them to do it unless they actually wanted to. He’d have to use force, and it would be a gargantuan effort that would spur great resistance.
