It’s coming. They are broadcasting that it’s coming.
Three recent studies found that the U.S. is backsliding on its commitment to popular democracy. Ian Bassin, the co-founder and executive director of Protect Democracy, spoke with Dahlia Lithwick on Slate’s Amicus podcast about his group’s new report, Executive Override.
“So let’s understand what’s coming, and what’s already begun,” Bassin argues. “It’s essentially three things: deceive, disrupt, and deny.” Just what we saw Donald Trump do in response to his losing in 2020.
Bassin explains in detail why his “stolen election” election deception wasn’t enough in 2020 to overturn the election in his favor. Including the nation’s system for running elections distributed among over 3,000 counties and roughly 175,000 voting precincts. But Trump will make adjustments in 2026. Much of the prep work Trump did on convincing nearly a third of Americans that elections are rigged was undone when he won the 2024 election. So Trump has had to seize ballots in Georgia and in Arizona. That was just the warmup:
They’re going to get Nicolás Maduro to cop to some plea that Venezuela hacked the election. They’re going to create all these fictional conspiracy theories. They sent voting monitors from the DOJ to New Jersey and California in 2025. Harmeet Dhillon is going to come out with some report that she sees dead people. They’re going to come out with all this manufactured stuff to try to persuade people that something untoward is happening; that Iran is interfering; China’s interfering; the Cookie Monster is stealing ballots, right?
And that’s all to set up the “disrupt.” Once you can convince people that there’s something that really needs fixing here, you can get all these people you don’t necessarily directly control to try to change the rules and disrupt the system. So right now, the president is putting all this heat on the Senate to pass the SAVE Act. Which would mandate birth certificates and passports in order to register to vote, disenfranchising tens of millions of people, including, especially, married women who have changed their names and may not have gone back and gotten a new birth certificate with their new name on it. But the president hasn’t deceived enough people yet, and so the Senate is basically saying, “Yeah, nah.” So the president has to deceive more people. If he does, you’ll have more disruption. Ultimately, if the disruption doesn’t succeed, and the results are not to the president’s liking, you’ll have the “deny” phase, where they will simply try to deny the results. This is what happened in 2020.
Lithwick concludes:
We’ve seen this before. We saw it in 2020. We saw it in North Carolina in 2024. We have defeated it each time. That’s the fourth D: We’re going to defeat this. We’ve done it before. We’ll do it again.
Committing to voting will not be enough. Bassin’s group suggests a menu of actions those in different positions can take to prepare in advance.
But as we saw in 2024 in the North Carolina State Supreme Court race between Allison Riggs and Jefferson Griffin, preparing to mobilize against the post-election denial efforts will be vital. We know what’s coming. Engage now with your local election board and county Democratic Party.