You’ve probably heard about the nefarious plot in Georgia to challenge the election by now and I’m sure you’re familiar with Trump’s shenanigans in other states in 2020. This article in the Guardian takes a look at the current national effort led by Trump insider Cleta Mitchell. Read the whole thing, but I thought this was a worthy excerpt:
Since 2020, there have been at least 20 instances in eight states of election officials refusing to certify election results.
The first red flag came in 2022, when county commissioners in Otero county, New Mexico, refused to certify the results of a primary election, citing vague concerns about voting equipment. The secretary of state eventually went to court to force the commissioners to certify the election.
In July of this year, two Republicans on the county commission in Washoe county, Nevada – a key county in a battleground state – refused to certify its primary vote, setting off alarms. The commissioners who refused to certify eventually reversed themselves. Nevada’s secretary of state, Cisco Aguilar, has since asked the state supreme court to clarify that county commissioners have an obligation to certify votes.
Sometimes election officials who refuse to certify have pointed to mistakes that happened during the election, even though they did not affect the outcome. In other cases, like Adams’s in Georgia, officials have refused to certify to protest about what they view as unfair laws.
While courts would probably force recalcitrant officials to certify the vote, significant damage could still be caused.
“You can force certification through legal mechanisms, [but] those events tend to be like rocket fuel for conspiracy theories and misinformation and undermining confidence in the election. So there’s damage done even where certification is eventually forced,” said Berwick, the Protect Democracy lawyer.
The timeline for certifying the vote is important because, under federal law, states must have an official election result by 11 December, six days before the electoral college meets. Delaying certification efforts at the local level could put states at risk of missing that deadline.
“If we get past that deadline, it opens up a lot of questions, like tricky legal questions and room for shenanigans,” Berwick said.
The experts are counting on the state courts but who knows? And there has been some action at the federal level to [revent a re-run of 2020:
A new law, the Electoral Count Reform Act, should provide a significant new layer of protection against election subversion. The bipartisan bill passed Congress at the end of 2022.
The law makes it so that Trump and his allies cannot repeat what they did in 2020 and submit false slates of electors from key swing states. Significantly, it says that the slate of electors submitted by a state’s executive is the legitimate slate and raises the threshold in both houses of Congress to object to the electoral result.
While the law controls what Congress must do once it receives certificates from electors, it doesn’t have much to say about what must happen in the lead-up to the electoral college vote. That could leave a lot of wriggle room for Trump and allies to try to slow down certification and go to court to try to force states to miss their certification deadline.
And they will. You know they will.
Are we any better off than we were in 2020?
Lawyers and other activists say they are ready, having spent the last four years studying and understanding the vulnerabilities that Trump and allies targeted in 2020. Any effort to block certification is likely to be swiftly challenged in courts, where Trump has already been unsuccessful dozens of times.
The new Electoral Count Reform Act should offer additional safeguards should there be an effort such as there was in 2020 to get Congress to stop its certification of the vote
Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss the threat altogether. The same pressure points that existed in 2020 exist in 2024, and in some places election deniers have been elevated to positions of power.
“This has started earlier in the cycle and is louder and is more consistent,” said Morales-Doyle of the Brennan Center. “That is all just at a different level than it was before 2020.”
It is going to happen and he is going to come unglued as will some number of his followers. If I had to guess, most of them are probably pretty tired of all this and will actually feel some relief that it’s over. They’ll whine, of course, but I doubt he’ll get the crowd he got in 2020 (which he will certainly call for.)
But there will be a few who want to take some action and I would expect them to be very reckless. I hope everyone is prepared for that too.