Politics
Column: The presidential race won't be over on election night. Here's what can go wrong after that
The presidential election is still too close to call, but here are three predictions you can take to the bank:
First, we won’t know who won on election night. Three potentially decisive states — Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — are notoriously slow at counting. A winner may not emerge before the end of the week.
Second, no matter who wins, Donald Trump will charge that the vote was rigged. He made that claim in 2020, when he lost decisively to Joe Biden. He claimed (again without evidence) that he was robbed of popular votes in 2016, even though he won the election. He has already charged that Democrats will cheat this year. “It’s the only way they’re going to win,” he claimed.
Third, if Trump loses, he will challenge the outcome in the courts, just as he did in 2020. “It’s not over on election day; it’s over on inauguration day,” Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita said earlier this year. So get ready for long and bitter legal battles that could end up in the Supreme Court with its Trump-friendly majority.
We’ve been here before. Four years ago, Trump tried to undo Biden’s election with a barrage of legal challenges that failed. He asked Republican state legislators to overturn results and demanded that then-Vice President Mike Pence block the count of electoral votes. All refused. A mob of angry, deluded Trump supporters tried to stop the process by invading the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; that failed, too.
The guardrails of democracy held — and legal scholars say those guardrails are a little stronger now.
“I’m very confident that the candidate who wins on Nov. 5 will be inaugurated on Jan. 20,” said Justin Levitt, who teaches election law at Loyola Law School in L.A. But a lot can happen between those two dates, he warned.
“There can be litigation. There can be delays. There will be a lot of misinformation, some of it spread on purpose,” he said. “There are real opportunities for unrest, maybe even violence.”
Here are four scenarios in which a close election could run into trouble:
Asking the courts to decide
“There is always the risk of another Bush v Gore,” Rick Hasen of UCLA Law School wrote recently, referring to the 2000 Supreme Court decision that decided that year’s presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. “If the election comes down to a few thousand votes or less in a state that is crucial for an electoral college victory, then we’ll expect both sides to litigate as hard as they can.”
In Pennsylvania, for example, Republicans filed a lawsuit complaining the state’s rules for accepting absentee ballots that arrive with small errors, like a missing date on the envelope, are too lenient. The state Supreme Court left it up to the state’s 67 counties to decide how to handle the ballots.
If those ballots could swing the election, the Trump campaign could argue that it’s unfair for counties to adopt different rules. A similar issue prompted the high court to act in Bush vs. Gore.
Republicans have already filed more than 100 lawsuits challenging election rules in several states to improve their chances after election day.
Refusing to certify results
What if local officials refuse to certify election results they don’t like?
Most legal scholars say courts are almost certain to knock down those attempts — but they could still lead to delays, legal battles and potential unrest.
The once-obscure issue of certification achieved more notoriety after Georgia’s Republican-led election board issued new rules requiring county officials to investigate potential irregularities before they certify results.
Certification has traditionally been an administrative action in which election boards merely confirm that the compiled results match up with what precincts have reported. Investigating allegations of irregularity or fraud is up to law enforcement agencies, not election boards.
In several counties around the country, pro-Trump election officials have briefly refused to certify election results, but courts have uniformly ruled against them. Two Georgia courts have already ruled that the state election board’s new rules are invalid.
“Certification is not likely to produce a [constitutional] crisis,” said Edward Foley, a leading election law expert at Ohio State University. “The courts are going to handle it as they already do.”
The danger of violence
But all those challenges raise the prospect of violence.
On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump told his followers: “If you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have a country anymore.”
This year, he has revived that warning, telling supporters that the stakes of the election are existential — literally. Last month, in Wisconsin, he told a rally that if he doesn’t win, migrants “will walk into your kitchen. They will cut your throat.”
“You won’t have a country anymore,” he said, again.
Violence is always possible, even likely. Trump has already been the target of two assassination attempts. But law enforcement agencies have spent four years preparing to protect polling places, tabulation centers, election officials and judges.
Detroit’s tabulation center, which Trump claimed (without evidence) was a hotbed of fraud, has been outfitted with bulletproof glass. Maricopa County, Ariz., where election officials have been attacked by pro-Trump zealots, is stationing snipers on the roof. The U.S. Capitol Police have worked to ensure that Jan. 6 cannot recur.
In the end, election law scholars say violence need not derail the outcome.
“I do worry about it,” said Levitt. “We live in a climate where some people consider threats of violence an acceptable tactic. … But it’s not going to affect the outcome of the election any more than it did on January 6.”
Congress gets the final say — again
Under the Constitution, Congress formally counts the electoral votes on Jan. 6. That normally ceremonial process almost went off the rails in 2021, when Trump urged Republicans to block legitimately elected Biden electors from swing states. Two-thirds of House Republicans supported the scheme, but Democrats and moderate Republicans quashed it.
That scenario is less likely to recur, thanks to a law Congress passed in 2022, making it harder to challenge electoral votes and clarifying that the vice president has no power to direct the outcome.
Still, if one-fifth of the members of each chamber object to a state’s electoral votes, both houses must vote to accept or reject them. If both chambers have GOP majorities, the outcome could come down to a handful of moderate Republicans like Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
There’s also a wild card in the list of potential nightmares: What happens if the electoral vote is a tie, 269 to 269?
In that case, the House of Representatives would choose the next president under a rule that would favor Republicans. Instead of a normal vote by individual members of the House, each state’s House delegation would get one vote — meaning California and North Dakota would get equal weight. In the current House, 26 states have mostly Republican House members; only 22, including California’s, are dominated by Democrats. (Two states are evenly divided.)
A tie hasn’t happened since 1800, when Thomas Jefferson tied with Aaron Burr. (Jefferson won the runoff.) Polymarket, a prediction market, puts the odds of a tie this year at 4%.
Misinformation will remain a danger
This is not a “both sides” issue. Only one party has told its followers that if it loses, the only possible reason will be that the election was stolen.
It doesn’t seem to matter whether the challenges are plausible. In 2020, they weren’t, as evidenced by Trump’s long string of losses in the courts. But polls this month have found that most GOP voters believe election fraud is likely to occur this year even though no significant instances have been proven in decades.
Claiming that every election is rigged is not only part of Trump’s political message; it has become part of his business model.
Last time, he raised more than $250 million after election day with his claims. Only $13 million of those donations funded legal efforts to reverse the result. The rest went into Trump’s political coffers, giving him an early start toward his next campaign.
And the misinformation Trump has cultivated won’t go away after inauguration day. He has made bitter post-election battles a durable feature of American politics.
“It is profoundly unhealthy for democracy,” said Levitt. “It is a long-term cancer in the system.”
Read more McManus columns on the election:
U.S. military forces stopped and boarded a second sanctioned tanker carrying oil from Iran in the Indian Ocean, the Pentagon said on Thursday, ramping up pressure on Tehran as the Trump administration seeks to resume negotiations to end the war.
A naval boarding team roped down from hovering helicopters and fanned out on the vessel, the M/T Majestic X, according to a Pentagon statement that included a 17-second video of the operation.
The military said the boarding was part of a “global maritime enforcement to disrupt illicit networks and interdict vessels providing material support to Iran, wherever they operate.”
Earlier this week, Navy SEALS boarded another ship in the Indian Ocean, the M/T Tifani, after the Pentagon said it was carrying oil from Iran.
Navy destroyers are also shadowing several other Iranian vessels, including the Dorena and Sevin, which had left from the Iranian port of Chabahar before the U.S.-imposed blockade began on April 13, a U.S. military official said. The Navy is directing those ships to return to an Iranian port, the official said.
With the M/T Tifani and M/T Majestic X now at least temporarily in the custody of the military, a U.S. military official said it was up to the White House to decide what to do with the sanctioned vessels and their cargo. The administration previously seized several tankers carrying illicit oil from Venezuela after a U.S. commando raid there in January that seized Nicolás Maduro, the country’s president.
“International waters cannot be used as a shield by sanctioned actors,” the Pentagon said in its statement on Thursday, adding that the department would “continue to deny illicit actors and their vessels freedom of maneuver in the maritime domain.”
Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hinted last week that the U.S. military would likely commence boarding operations like the ones this week. He said that U.S. military commanders elsewhere in the world, and especially in the Indo-Pacific region, would “actively pursue any Iranian-flagged vessel or any vessel attempting to provide material support to Iran.”
The U.S. Navy has turned back at least 31 ships trying to enter or exit Iranian ports since an American blockade outside the contested Strait of Hormuz began about a week ago, U.S. Central Command said late Wednesday.
Last Sunday, a Navy destroyer disabled and seized the Touska, an Iranian cargo ship, after it tried to evade the blockade. It was the first time a vessel was reported to have tried to evade the U.S.-imposed blockade on any ship entering or exiting Iranian ports since it took effect last week.
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White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt explained why President Donald Trump does not consider Iran’s seizure of two ships in the Strait of Hormuz a violation of the ceasefire agreement.
Leavitt made the statement during an interview with Fox News’ Martha McCallum on Wednesday just hours after Iran captured the Greek and Mediterranean-flagged vessels.
“Does the seizure of two ships — as we said, they were Greek and Mediterranean-owned ships with cargo on them, and the reports are that Iran basically seized them and then moved them into Iranian waters. We don’t know what’s going to happen to these crews. We’re not sure where all of this is going. Does the president view that as a violation of the ceasefire?” McCallum asked.
“No, because these were not U.S. ships. These were not Israeli ships. These were two international vessels,” Leavitt responded.
US FORCES ATTEMPTING TO BOARD SANCTIONED RUSSIAN-FLAGGED OIL TANKER IN NORTH ATLANTIC, SOURCES SAY
Karoline Leavitt, White House press secretary, conducts a press briefing. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“And for the American media, who are sort of blowing this out of proportion to discredit the president’s facts that he has completely obliterated Iran’s conventional Navy, these two ships were taken by speedy gunboats. Iran has gone from having the most lethal Navy in the Middle East to now acting like a bunch of pirates. They don’t have control over the strait,” she continued.
“This is piracy that we are seeing on display. And the naval blockade that the United States has imposed continues to be incredibly effective. And, to be clear, the blockade is on ships going to and from Iranian ports. And the point of this is the economic leverage that we maintain over Iran now. While there’s a ceasefire with respect to the military and kinetic strikes, Operation Economic Fury continues, and the crux of that is this naval blockade,” she added.
The Iranian made ‘Seraj’ a high-speed missile-launching assault boat on display in Tehran on August 23, 2010, as Iran kicked off mass production of two high-speed missile-launching assault boats the ‘Seraj’ (Lamp) and ‘Zolfaqar’ (named after Shiite Imam Ali’s sword) speedboats which will be manufactured at the marine industries complex of the ministry of defense. (YALDA MOAIERY/AFP via Getty Images)
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps said the vessels, identified as the MSC Francesca and the Epaminondas, were operating without proper authorization and had tampered with navigation systems, accusations that could not be independently verified. The ships had earlier reported coming under fire near the strait, underscoring the increasingly volatile conditions in one of the world’s most critical shipping lanes.
US ‘LOCKED AND LOADED’ TO DESTROY IRAN’S ‘CROWN JEWEL’ ‘IF WE WANT,’ TRUMP WARNS
The Guard attacked a third ship, identified as the Euphoria, which had become “stranded” on the Iranian coast, Iranian media reported. It did not seize that vessel.
Ships and tankers in the Strait of Hormuz off the coast of Musandam, Oman, April 18, 2026. (Reuters)
Both the U.S. and Iranian sides have targeted commercial and cargo vessels as part of a broader pressure campaign tied to stalled negotiations. U.S. forces have also moved to seize at least one Iranian-linked vessel in the region, with each side accusing the other of violating the terms of a fragile ceasefire.
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The Strait of Hormuz is a vital artery for global oil shipments, with roughly 20% of the world’s supply passing through it. Traffic has slowed dramatically as ships reroute or avoid the area amid gunfire, seizures and conflicting directives from both militaries.
Fox News’ Morgan Phillips contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger met privately with President Trump and administration officials Wednesday to press for federal support and yet-unpaid wildfire recovery funding as the region continues to rebuild from the 2025 fires.
“This afternoon we met with President Trump and Administration officials to advocate for families who lost everything,” Bass and Barger said in a statement. “We had a very positive discussion about FEMA and other rebuilding funds as well as the support of the President to continue joining us in pressuring the insurance companies to pay what they owe — and for the big banks to step up to ease the financial pressure on L.A. families.”
Barger said the two leaders had a “high-level discussion” with the president in the Oval Office, sharing stories about what fire survivors are experiencing day to day. She added that “we left details behind with the President,” but did not specify whether Trump made any funding or policy promises during the meeting.
“First and foremost, today’s meeting was to thank the President for his initial support of infusing federal resources to expedite debris removal, as well as his recent tweet about insurance companies, which have already proven fruitful,” she said in a statement provided to The Times.
Bass was similarly reserved about the discussions, telling reporters that “we will follow up with the details,” but signaled progress is being made on federal support.
“I think what’s important is that we certainly got the president’s support in terms of, you know, what is needed, and then the appropriate people were in the room for us to follow up. And that was Russ Vought, who is the head of the Office of Management and budget,” Bass told KNX on Wednesday.
The meeting comes on the heels of a yearlong standoff between California leaders and the Trump administration over wildfire recovery funding, disaster response and whether the federal government should have a say in local rebuilding permitting.
California leaders, led by Gov. Gavin Newsom, have accused the Trump administration of withholding billions in critical wildfire aid, prompting a lawsuit over stalled recovery funds. Officials allege political bias in the delay of billions of dollars from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Newsom visited Washington in December. When he made his rounds on Capitol Hill, he met with five lawmakers, including three who serve on the Senate and House appropriations committees, to renew calls for $33.9 billion in federal aid for Los Angeles County fire recovery.
But the governor said he was denied a meeting with FEMA and would not say whether he had attempted to meet with Trump to discuss the issue.
Bass, meanwhile, appears to have found a path to the president on a subject that has been paramount for her community.
The fruitful meeting comes after Trump lobbed insults at the mayor at a news conference earlier this year, where he called her “incompetent” for how she handled last year’s wildfire recovery efforts. He alleged that under Bass’ leadership, the city’s delay in issuing local building permits will take years when it should have taken “two or three days.”
California officials, including Newsom, have urged the Trump administration to send Congress a formal request for the $33.9 billion in recovery aid needed to rebuild homes, schools, utilities and other critical infrastructure destroyed or damaged when the fires tore through neighborhoods more than 15 months ago.
What Bass and Barger’s meeting with the president ultimately produces remains to be seen.
The billions in recovery aid have not yet materialized, but the meeting could potentially give those discussions new momentum.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment about the meeting.
Earlier this month, Trump criticized insurance provider State Farm on Truth Social for its handling of the devastating Los Angeles County wildfires. He accused the insurance giant of abandoning its policyholders when tragedy struck.
“It was brought to my attention that the Insurance Companies, in particular, State Farm, have been absolutely horrible to people that have been paying them large Premiums for years, only to find that when tragedy struck, these horrendous Companies were not there to help!” Trump wrote.
But the rebuke didn’t come out of the blue. It stemmed from a controversial February visit to Los Angeles by Trump administration officials.
Trump tapped Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin in an effort to strip California state and local governments of their authority to permit the rebuilding of homes destroyed in the Eaton and Palisades fires.
Within the week, Zeldin was in Los Angeles, bashing Newsom and Los Angeles officials at a roundtable with fire victims and reporters, saying that residents were suffering from “bureaucratic, red tape delays and incompetency” and that leadership was “denying them … the ability to rebuild their lives”.
During the trip, officials heard direct complaints from local leaders and fire victims about insurers being slow, restrictive and insufficient with their claim payouts.
After these meetings, Trump directed Zeldin to investigate the insurers’ responses. State Farm, facing roughly $7 billion in fire-related claims, is also under formal investigation by California’s insurance commissioner over its handling of the crisis.
Despite tensions with the administration, Bass and Barger appeared confident that progress was being made on the insurance and funding issues.
“Our job is to fight for our communities,” their joint statement concluded. “When it comes to this recovery, our federal partners are essential, and we are grateful for the support of the President.”
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