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Comment by helsinkiandrew | Hacker News Reader

The article doesn't go into detail about what technically it means if a sitting president doesn't accept the result (apart from the "Secret Service escorting Mr Trump from the White House on inauguration day").

Apart from the court cases, and presumably a fair bit of protest and civil unrest, can anyone say (without getting into a for/against Trump debate) what will happen legally if come inauguration day he doesn't accept the ballot?

The huge gap between voting and inauguration day has always seems a bit odd to me as a non American. In the UK the losing Prime Minister/Government is replaced the morning after the election.

Why is the assumption that the Secret Service would escort the President from the White House? The Secret Service is squarely under the control of the executive branch (formerly the Department of the Treasury, now the Department of Homeland Security). I wouldn’t expect them to be the actual last-chance arbiters of a Presidential election.

They aren't the last chance arbiters, they're just implementing the constitutionally defined rules. They would escort the Ex-president from the White House, when the new president was sworn in.

If I was in his shoes I would try to get original jurisdiction in the Supreme Court, which I staffed, and cross my fingers for a ruling in my favor if we can get the thinnest constitutional or procedural argument.

Of course I would kick myself for not appointing extremely party people as Supreme Court judges throughout my first term, but there is still a chance the ones I did appoint will rule on party lines, for the argument presented by the party.

That would squash all subsequent constitutional challenges across the republic, leaving the people with a need to gain 75% consensus amongst all of the state's legislatures for a constitutional amendment to overrule a supreme court ruling. Since that won't happen, a path of less resistance would be followed in either scenario:

Congress could still impeach and remove if the Senate consensus changed. So people on the right are really voting for Nancy Pelosi due to her place in the line of succession, if Democrats take the Senate.

Oh right, the people. Eh, I guess a few cities will flare up with nightly battles for month and we'll just keep avoiding the term civil war, and it'll be pretty boring in the vast vast majority of the landmass.

There's a huge amount of risk hedging in the markets around election day. Maybe even historic levels.

I think most people, Republican and Democrat, are worried about what happens if Trump doesn't leave.

What might actually convince him to leave peacefully is the prospect of a market crash. The uncertainty of US leadership would surely tank the market and Trump is a billionaire

We already heard all of this rhetoric in 2016. "It's not rigged, you're just losing", "why am I not 50 points ahead", "at least I will go down as a president", etc. In the end, the only side that had any issues accepting the election results were the Democrats.

It’s not particularly shocking that the nominal winner of an election would not contest the nominal results of that election. To expect a party to do that out of principle would be ludicrously naive.

You are 100% correct.

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