Election Law Blog‘s Rick Hasen is losing sleep. Not just over Donald Trump’s and his party’s “stolen election” narrative, but over nationwide Republican efforts to help the 2024 Republican presidential candidate steal the next (if voters who still can vote won’t hand it to him).
“You could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal,” says Hasen.
CNN:
Richard Hasen, an election law expert at University of California Irvine School of Law, said he once thought that it would require “some kernel of truth” for people to believe the falsehood that the 2020 election had been rigged.
“It turns out that no matter how much proof there is that the election was done fairly, people are going to continue to believe the ‘Big Lie’ because it’s being constantly repeated by Trump and his allies,” said Hasen, who co-directs the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center at UC Irvine.
“One would think in a real world, that even this fake audit, that was stacked in favor of helping Trump, that a finding in favor of Biden would have deflated the enthusiasm. And maybe it has among some,” he added. “But facts don’t matter when you’re incessantly lying about election integrity.”
The extremist right has moved on from working the refs to working its base, more vigorously than before. If nothing else, they are disciplined about it.
Hasen, who recently wrote a paper warning of the risks of election subversion in 2024, said it’s “incredibly dangerous” that people who continue to promote the “Big Lie” are running to oversee future elections.”
No. 1, it will further undermine people’s confidence in the process,” Hasen said. “And No. 2, someone who believes or purports to believe that the last election was stolen is more likely to act in a way to not conduct a fair election as a kind of payback for the supposed rigging the last time.”
People will not believe a thing can happen until it happens. Northerners scoffed at the idea that Southern states would secede, historians explain. Then Confederates fired on Fort Sumter. Many of us never thought the country so unbalanced that it would elect Donald Trump in 2016. Then it did. We failed to take Trump’s “Stop the Steal” as anything more than “a ridiculous stunt.” writes Jamelle Bouie. Then came the Jan. 6th assault on the Capitol.
Ten months later, Bouie writes, “Stop the Steal” has become “something like party orthodoxy, ideological fuel for a national effort to seize control of election administration and to purge those officials who secured the vote over Donald Trump’s demand to subvert it.”
Bouie continues:
Despite the danger at hand, there doesn’t appear to be much urgency among congressional Democrats — or the remaining pro-democracy Republicans — to do anything. The Democratic majority in the House of Representatives has passed a new voting rights act aimed at the wave of restrictive new election laws from Republican state legislatures, and Democrats in the Senate have introduced a bill that would establish “protections to insulate nonpartisan state and local officials who administer federal elections from undue partisan interference or control.” But as long as the Senate filibuster is in place — and as long as key Democrats want to keep it in place — there is almost no chance that the Senate will end debate on the bill and bring it to the floor for a simple majority vote.
It’s almost as if, to the people with the power to act, the prospect of a Trumpified Republican Party with the will to subvert the next presidential election and the power to do it is one of those events that just seems a little too out there. And far from provoking action, the sheer magnitude of what it would mean has induced a kind of passivity, a hope that we can solve the crisis without bringing real power to bear.
“The law is only as powerful as people’s willingness to abide by it,” Hasan told Politico:
“I feel like a climate scientist warning about the Earth going up another degree and a half,” Hasen told POLITICO Magazine in an interview this week. “The rhetoric is so overheated that I think it provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier ‘stolen’ election. People are going to be more willing to cheat if they think they’ve been cheated out of their just desserts.”
After everything that has happened since Trump decended the golden escalator, Democrats continue to behave as if it can’t happen here. New voting rights legislation has stalled as they focus on the infrastructure and Build Back Better reconciliation bills.
Hasan again sounded the alarm Monday evening on “All In with Chris Hayes,” saying,
Law — making legal changes — it’s so important. It’s my number one priority to push this over the next few years. But legal change alone is not going to protect American democracy. We’re going to have to be ready for mass, peaceful protest. We’re going to be ready to organize civil society, the kinds of things I never expected we’d have to talk about in the United States.
Hasan is right. After Trump’s 2016 election, women were so outraged that millions took to the streets nationwide and around the world, as many as half a million or more in Washington, D.C. It might take that and more after the Electoral College meets in 2024.
We assumed the legal battlements would hold in 2020, only to find months after the Jan. 6th attack how close Trump’s allies came to a successful coup. Faithful Americans might want to be better prepared in 2024.