If you needed just one fact to show that in the world’s largest democracy one of the two major parties is perversely committed to suppressing and even undermining the vote, you couldn’t do better than this: the senior counsel for the ‘Republican National Committee elections’ integrity team” – Orwellian doublespeak comes to life – is a criminal defendant in Arizona’s case against 18 Republicans who tried to overturn the state’s 2020 vote for Joe Biden.
But unfortunately, there are so many more facts like this, raising fears about post-election chaos of the kind that Donald Trump and his party unleashed four years ago.
As one Republican involved in the pre-Trump presidential election put it to me, when it comes to support for our electoral system, “Trump has taken the party to a bad place.”
What is dangerous for democracy is that the Republicans’ belief in systemic fraud by the Democrats has now become an article of faith. See how elected officials in 2024 are still dodging reporters’ questions about who won in 2020 for fear of angering Trump and worshipful party voters. “All they want to do is cheat,” Trump said said of Democrats at a recent rally in Wisconsin. Ominously, two-thirds of Republicans say they would trust Trump to accept the results next month, far more than they would trust a government-certified outcome, an August report shows poll from the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
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Since 2020, Red States have implemented voting restrictions under the guise of “election integrity,” even though fraud is common. anything but non-existent. They have imposed new identification requirements and limited mail-in ballots, drop boxes, and virtually every measure aimed at expanding participation and providing convenience to distressed Americans—and especially to minorities, students, big-city voters, and generally all groups that identify as Democratic. Mailboxes have been a target of Republicans, especially in Wisconsin, where U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde asked at a campaign event: “Who is watching to see how many illegal ballots are being stuffed?”
Al millions of voters have voted early, just as state and national Republican groups are pursuing dozens of lawsuits nationally, they are challenging local and state election rules and practices, including how early ballots are counted. They want to throw out some technicalities like not dating an envelope, which have nothing to do with the integrity of the ballots, and toss out anything that arrives after Election Day even if it is postmarked before it.
Read more: Where can you vote in person or by mail for the 2024 elections?
Republicans are fighting to limit the number of mail-in ballots, even as the party urges its own supporters to vote that way. That is consistent with Trump’s false claims that these types of ballots do exist “corrupt.” Why? Simply because most mail-in votes come from Democrats. In the battleground Pennsylvania, for example, these are the Democrats requests more than twice as many mail-in ballots as Republican voters.
Many of the lawsuits and other challenges to local election boards and state legislatures will not succeed, election experts agree, just as the dozens of lawsuits filed after Trump’s 2020 defeat have failed all the way to the Supreme Court. Monday the judges rejected a petition from Republican secretaries of state, members of Congress and Pennsylvania state legislators opposing a modest executive order from Biden as unconstitutional; its provisions include time off for federal employees who want to volunteer as much-needed nonpartisan poll workers.
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But some challenges will prevail. Meanwhile, the legal battles have election lawyers playing Whac-A-Mole, leaving voters and local officials baffled as to what exactly the rules are. What’s different from 2020, and worrying, is that Trump’s grassroots allies have since had years to heed his wingman Steve Bannon’s 2021 call to take control of the election boards, where the votes are cast first are counted and certified: “We are going to take this back… neighborhood by neighborhood.”
The head of such a board in Michigan’s Macomb County is a Republican who implored Trump to fight to stay in power in 2020. A Republican in a North Carolina county executive has claimed without evidence that Democrats are illegally trading votes. And Republican officials in some Pennsylvania counties have resisted certifying the results in previous elections. These are among the findings of a Reuters review of swing-state election administrators.
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Such election skeptics are unlikely to decide next month’s outcome, but they could screw things up by refusing to certify votes for Kamala Harris in the short term and further undermining confidence in voting in the long term.
Pennsylvania and Georgia, two of the hardest-fought prizes for Trump and Harris, are the states that election experts are most concerned about. MAGA loyalists have a presence in Georgia at the state and county level. They control the state administration and have authorized county officials to withhold voting explanations from any “reasonable inquiry” they might summon; ordered that ballots be counted by hand, a time-consuming and error-prone practice; and pushed to appoint vote monitors for Democratic-leaning Fulton County, home to Atlanta and a large number of black residents. Democrats and voting groups Are sue.
But here’s the good news: This time, Trump is not the president, who is able to abuse his power to, for example, order the Justice Department to intervene or the Pentagon to intervene. confiscate voting machines. And JD Vance will not be the vice president presiding when Congress certifies the results on January 6.
Let’s keep it that way for the next four years.
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
