This is an adapted excerpt from the October 31 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
If Donald Trump loses next week, it seems likely that he will try to steal the election — something that no one on either end of the political spectrum really seems to deny.
The former president is already lying about voter fraud in Pennsylvania. And things are likely to get worse in the coming days.
With all that in mind, though, I think it’s important to remember that there are already new guardrails in place that didn’t exist in 2020, the last time Trump and his cronies tried to overturn the will of the American people.
For starters, government officials are much better prepared this time for Trump’s possible interference attempts. As NBC News reports, “top officials in three swing states — Pennsylvania, Arizona and Wisconsin — said they are prepared to take local government agencies to court if they refuse to certify the results.”
At the federal level, there is a new law called the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022. It was passed by Congress in a bipartisan vote and signed into law by President Joe Biden two years ago. Its explicit purpose is to block attempts to steal a presidential election.
The law makes it much harder for members of Congress to file bogus challenges to state election results, as they did in 2020, and requires each state’s governor, or other official, to present its electors. That should prevent states from submitting false voter rolls, as Trump tried to do four years ago.
The ECRA also closes a loophole that makes it easier for state lawmakers to ignore election results and proposes a process to expedite any legal issues that inevitably arise. That could prevent Trump’s lawyers from dragging the trial through lengthy legal battles this time.
Of course, this provision of law also means that the Supreme Court will hear cases more quickly – and depending on how much you trust this 6-3 MAGA court, that may not be a good thing.
But it should at least deter Trump from delaying the outcome of the election and using the uncertainty to sow more chaos and division.
Perhaps most crucially, the law also explicitly bans the former president’s main argument as of January 6, 2021. It says in no uncertain terms that the vice president does not have the authority to throw out electoral rolls, as Trump then pressured him to do. Vice President Mike Pence will take place that day.
Of course, I don’t think anyone was particularly concerned about the current Vice President, Kamala Harris, trying to overturn the results, but it is nevertheless an important safeguard for the future.
All of this is to say that while there are guardrails in place, they may not all hold up.
However, there are people working every day to ensure Trump doesn’t steal this election, one of whom in particular has become an absolute obsession of the right: Marc Elias, a voting rights lawyer who helped the Biden campaign defeat most of Trump’s bogus lawsuits in 2020. He’s a man who terrifies Steve Bannon so much that the first thing Bannon did when he got out of prison was attack him on his podcast.
Bannon said, “Every day after the evening of November 5, it will be Stalingrad” for Trump’s legal team as they face Elias in court.
On Thursday, Elias joined “All In” to respond to Bannon’s comments. “They hate me because I fight hard,” he told me. “But they also hate me because we have the facts and the law on our side.”
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
