Investigative reporter Barton Gellman describes a nightmare scenario that would sow chaos and destroy our democracy.

What if Trump refuses to concede? He has repeatedly said that mail-in ballots are fraudulent. He’s already predicted that, unless he wins, the election will be “rigged.”

Yesterday, he was asked directly if he would accept the results of the election, and he refused to say that he would.

Gellman writes:

In this election year of plague and recession and catastrophized politics, the mechanisms of decision are at meaningful risk of breaking down. Close students of election law and procedure are warning that conditions are ripe for a constitutional crisis that would leave the nation without an authoritative result. We have no fail-safe against that calamity. Thus the blinking red lights.

“We could well see a protracted postelection struggle in the courts and the streets if the results are close,” says Richard L. Hasen…

After you’ve spent loads of time reading,summarising and synthesising the literatures for your research, it’s hardly surprising that you might wonderwhether all of this work can be turned into something publishable. I certainly encounter many doctoral researchers who want to do just this. I was a bit surprised to see thatwhile there is a lot of material around about how to do different kinds of literature reviews – for example this,this and this – there is actually very little around about how to write a publishable paper afterwards – a paper based solely on ‘the literatures’.

Surely writing The Tome is not all I can do with all thatreading? I do need to clarify here what I mean by literatures. I don’t mean literature as in fiction/non fiction/poetry and plays but rather, the books and papers that are written by researchers about them. I don’t mean archival materials…

The purpose of the literature review shapes the way that noting is done.

And the purpose is to situate your study in the field – that is, to establish a space for the work you are going to do – and to find concepts and approaches that are helpful, that you can build on. It is also important to understand key debates and differences in the field so that you can position yourself in relation to them. The literature review thus typically discusses a field of knowledge production and key concepts and lines of argument within it.

The literature review is not finished in the first year of doctoral study, and the ways in which texts are used to develop a research proposal in year one may not be the same as their use in the final thesis text when the findings and argument are known. But whether it’s early…

Writing about literatures doesn’t mean writing a summary of what you have read. You dont want a paragraph by paragraph laundry list of the texts you’ve been reading organised into a rough kind of order. Of course you write summaries as a means of making sense of your readings, but it’s not where you stop.

In writing about what other people have written you are: 

• evaluating and interpreting, pulling out major points and
• connecting these interpretations to your topic.

So what you are writing then is not a report, but an argument. You are saying how you work sits in the field and how the field informs your work. This is arguing a case. Your case. Your argument is based in what you think the literatures mean and how you have understood them. You must then not only establish where your research fits in relation to the topic, what you…