The president of the United States has no power to unilaterally delay the 2020 election, and he wasn’t claiming such authority. To suggest otherwise, as many in the mainstream media have done, is absolutely absurd.

Besides, if such fears are really motivated primarily by a desire to ensure a fair and timely election, they’re looking in the wrong place—the president is warning against universal mail-in ballots precisely because he wants to avoid a repeat of the Bush v. Gore fiasco we went through 20 years ago, when the outcome of the presidential election hung in limbo before the Supreme Court finally put a stop to the endless recounts.

President Trump’s tweet merely called attention to the fact that it might actually be more expeditious to delay the election than to hold it entirely by mail. He even ended it with question marks—hardly a hallmark of authoritarianism. The effort to portray the president as a would-be despot seems like a desperate ploy to distract from his legitimate warning that universal mail-in voting would make 2020 “the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history.”

Under current rules, 24 states allow voters to request mail-in ballots in the last week before the election. Even under ideal conditions, these absentee ballots filter in for days and weeks after Election Day. Inevitably, some are lost in the mail. Also, some are filled out in ways that raise suspicions. In a normal election, this winds up not mattering, because the outcome is already decided by the time the stragglers reach local election commissions to be counted.

These sorts of issues could turn from a nuisance into a catastrophic problem, however, if 100 million or more Americans are all trying to vote by mail. The problem is compounded when ballots are sent out to all registered voters—especially in states such as California, which allows political activists to venture out into communities to “harvest” ballots by collecting them from voters and delivering them to election officials themselves, creating rampant opportunity for fraud.

In Atlanta, Georgia, an unsolicited voter registration application was mailed out to Cody Tims. This came as something of a surprise to the rest of the Tims family, who knew two things about Cody that the State of Georgia might have overlooked: first, that Cody has been dead for over a decade; and second, that Cody was never eligible to vote even when he was alive, because Cody Tims was a cat.

Imagine waking up on November 4 with millions of votes outstanding, either uncounted or unaccounted for, and the outcome of the election hanging in the balance. Imagine legal teams for both campaigns spending the months between Election Day and Inauguration Day frantically fighting over every single ballot’s postmark, with control of the White House going to the party that manages to invalidate more of the other side’s votes.

Unlike far-fetched “#resistance” fears of an imaginary dictatorial Donald Trump unilaterally postponing the election, this is a very real scenario that could easily unfold if we permit universal mail-in voting to become a reality. Indeed, it would make the Bush v. Gore fiasco of 2000 seem like a calm and orderly transition of power by comparison.

The truth is, the people who are so intent on making everyone vote from home are not doing so out of any legitimate concern for public health. Time and again, it has been demonstrated that traditional American elections need not put anyone at heightened risk of contracting COVID-19. Rather, the motive has always been transparently partisan. Democrats believe that—on balance—they will fare better in a universal mail-in vote than they would under the rules that have governed every other American election.

President Trump’s suggestion that Congress and the states might find it necessary to take more time to get mail-in voting right is not a threat to our republic. Changing the rules at the last moment, on the other hand, would create widespread uncertainty and undermine the public’s confidence in the validity of the outcome.

Charlie Kirk is the founder and executive director of Turning Point USA, an advocacy group for young conservatives.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.