Election Deniers Are Ready for Next Week. Are We?
Expect armies of hostile poll watchers, and election officials who refuse to certify. It’s even possible Congress will end up picking the winner.
IF YOU BELIEVE DONALD TRUMP, his campaign, his allies, and most of the polling trends, the candidate who attempted a coup and incited an insurrection is going to win the presidency back next week.
This is very likely.
But in case he doesn’t, Trump world has leaned hard into the narrative that he is invincible and Kamala Harris is too stupid to have a chance, a message repeated throughout his Madison Square Garden rally Sunday night.
There’s a reason for that. If the polls are wrong and the vice president outperforms them and wins, Trump needs his followers to believe the election was stolen from him again, because he and his allies plan to go further than last time to prevent his defeat.
The disruption is already underway. On Monday, someone lit a ballot box on fire and destroyed ballots in a swing district where a competitive House race is taking place in Vancouver, Washington. It was the third such incident in the area in recent weeks.
More of this could follow even before Trump declares victory on election night—a declaration he’ll make no matter what the results are, just like he did last time. And it won’t require that much effort to cause mass disruption on Election Day. Harassment at polling stations to intimidate and dissuade voters—it comes cheap. Bomb threats at precincts in heavily Democratic areas like Fulton County, Georgia—just a phone call will do it. And just what are these 200,000 poll workers and poll watchers the Republican National Committee recruited to protect “election integrity” planning to do? Polling stations could easily be shut down if they become sites of mayhem and unrest.
Then, as soon as voting is over, a further MAGA contingency: Should it look like Harris is winning, there are Republicans on the ground in swing states ready to refuse to certify their county results. This could happen even in counties Trump won handily: The goal is to create delay and doubt about the outcome. While the courts are likely to ultimately force canvassers to certify results, a missed county or state deadline could be enough to prevent certification of a Harris victory. If states fail to finalize their results when they are required to do so, voting by the Electoral College on December 17 could be disrupted, resulting in delays that would create further doubt about the legitimacy of the election and give rise to a real possibility that the election will be decided by Congress.
And as I mentioned, there are Republicans primed to do their part to help bring this about in every battleground.
Across six swing states, “nearly 70 pro-Trump election conspiracists currently working as county election officials who have questioned the validity of elections or delayed or refused to certify results,” according to Justin Glawe’s reporting for Rolling Stone in July. Further, Republicans have refused to certify results at least twenty-five times since 2020 in eight states—most frequently in Georgia, where it has happened seven times.
A lengthy New York Times report on the election denial movement described election officials willing to obstruct results in their counties this way: “For them, going so far as to block certification wasn’t a partisan gambit; it was a patriotic duty. Though it might technically be illegal, it obeyed a higher law.” A person who believes that—and acts on the belief—could prevent a Harris victory, explains Times reporter Jim Rutenberg. “A determined administrator could try to in effect run out the clock, creating a chain reaction of legal maneuvers that would culminate” in the election being decided in the House and the Senate—“each of which could by Jan. 6 [2025] be controlled by Republicans.”
Marc Elias, one of the lead lawyers for the Harris campaign’s team, wrote in August that “Republicans are building an election subversion war machine.”
And Democrats are prepared. The Harris campaign has more than 400 lawyers currently polishing off draft pleadings and memos in anticipation of every legal contingency. They are part of a much larger network the party has spent much of the past year setting up; it includes 10,000 lawyers across the country who are prepared to address issues and to protect the vote at the precinct level. They anticipate having to respond to lawsuits that attempt to stop voting on Election Day, reject mail ballots that arrive after Election Day, and halt the counting of provisional ballots, Elias told the Washington Post. Republicans have already engaged in more than 130 lawsuits in 26 states.
Once county results are certified, whether immediately or following litigation, state certification is likely to go more smoothly. Georgia’s GOP governor Brian Kemp didn’t steal the election for Trump in 2020, and he isn’t likely to do it this time, either. Arizona, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Michigan have democratic governors. Only Nevada has a GOP governor.
At that point, Trump will move to push GOP state legislators to create fraudulent slates of “alternate” electors. His party controls both chambers in North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin. Pennsylvania is divided; Republicans control the State Senate. Though states have certified electors according to popular vote, Republicans in state legislatures could claim the results can’t be trusted and submit new ones, asserting they are afforded their power to choose electors under the U.S. Constitution.
That moves the burden to contest the results to Congress, where there would be plenty of opportunity for chaos.
Columnist David French, who is also a lawyer, wrote Thursday in the New York Times that Trump’s path is actually much more difficult than it was four years ago and that alternate electors would not pass court muster. Citing last year’s ruling in Moore v. Harper, he wrote, “A cross-ideological 6-to-3 majority rejected the core of the independent state legislature doctrine. It held that federal elections were still subject to state judicial review and state constitutional law; state legislatures could not become rogue actors and run roughshod over existing state laws or ignore state court rulings.”
But we can’t know how far Republicans will be willing to go.
There will be unbearable party-wide pressure brought to bear on any Republican trying to hold the line and protect the result, to say nothing of the death threats that would come their way from the more extreme among Trump’s enraged supporters.
While Democrats could win back the House majority this year, close races in recounts could prevent a new majority from being sworn in on January 3 before the January 6 certification. If that is indeed the case and Mike Johnson is re-elected speaker on January 3, would he certify a Harris victory three days later?
In an exhaustive report titled “The Very Real Scenario Where Trump Loses and Takes Power Anyway,” Politico described it this way:
If Republicans, through the speaker’s maneuvering, prevent either candidate from garnering an Electoral College majority, it would trigger what’s known as a contingent election in the House, with each state delegation getting a single vote. Republicans control 26 state delegations to Democrats’ 22, with two states evenly split. The GOP is favored to maintain that advantage, and Republicans would almost certainly choose to elect Trump president.
That could be Trump’s ultimate goal. On Sunday at his Madison Square Garden rally, Trump himself made it sound like he and Johnson have discussed how the speaker will ensure a Trump victory in the House: “And I think with our little secret, we’re going to do really well with the House, right? Our little secret is having a big impact. He and I have a secret. We’ll tell you what it is when the race is over.”
Republicans have worked hard to prepare for this, investing heavily in the Big Lie, radicalizing their voters, hiring lawyers, recruiting “election integrity” volunteers, and ratcheting up the rhetoric. Anything short of a Trump victory will set all of this in motion, and Republicans will take this country through something unprecedented, dangerous, and damaging.
This is not a little secret.