On Tuesday, the watchdogs at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington – CREW– released a new report highlighting state election officials who have refused to certify elections since 2020 and the MAGA plan to steal this year’s election. The report also describes what responsible state officials and courts can do to stop it.
The threat, to be sure, is significantly less than it was after the 2020 election, thanks in large part to record voter turnout that year and in subsequent elections where a substantial number of deniers in key races were defeated. Additionally, the salutary bipartisan reform of the Electoral Count Act took away the more pernicious avenues to corrupting the election results, and we are more aware of what bad actors might try to do. But the threat still lurks if the election is in any way close.
The efforts to enforce the law outlined by CREW will be crucial. Even more important is the role that we – the voters – can play. A large electoral margin of victory for the rule of law ticket – Kamala Harris and Tim Walz – would be rocket fuel for law-bound state officials, including courts, to neutralize Trump cultists’ refusals to certify state wins by that ticket – and to deter any judge who might put party over country if enabled.
While crowd size matters to Donald Trump, it’s the size of his defeat in November that we control. We cannot afford a speck of complacency that momentary enthusiasm can engender. Battleground state margins are sure to be narrow.
If we redouble our efforts to vote and get out the vote, not only can we move the margins in those battleground states to simply thin from razor thin, but we can potentially build a landslide national vote for the reproductive-freedom-and-pro-democracy-candidates. Doing so would add to the obstacles facing the MAGA opportunists.
Of course, we need to be especially active in countering voter suppression and intimidation; fortunately, there are many groups mobilized to protect legitimate voters and their ability to cast their ballots.
But the danger is also great after those ballots have been cast. As made clear Monday in The Guardian's analysis of today’s Republican infiltration of local election offices, this is not 2020 – but in some ways it’s worse. Compromised local election officials, and even some state election boards, were not in place then as they are now.
Georgia is a notorious case in point. The special danger there arises from a five-member state election board which the Republican legislature has packed with a MAGA majority. Its sole Democratic member, Sara Tindall Ghazal, told the Guardian on Tuesday that the board is “being driven by far-rightwing narratives” intended to “create chaos” in November.
Also reported – MAGA member Rick Jeffares has proposed himself to a former Trump administration official as the southeast region’s Environmental Protection Agency director if Trump wins. Nothing like self-interest corrupting election integrity.
In August, the Georgia state board enacted a rule requiring local election boards to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” into voting issues before certifying the election. That vague rule is a green light to stall certification while fishing for any excuse to vote against it. Certification delayed is certification denied if multiplied across battleground states.
And the rule could complicate responsible Georgia law enforcement’s efforts to order local boards to perform their nondiscretionary duty to certify any Harris-Walz victory. The board’s rules allowing local officials to perform an “inquiry” could be used by local MAGA election officials as an excuse to ignore the deadline set for certification, the first Monday after the election. It is fixed in order to ensure a timely Congressional certification of all states’ votes by the following January 6.
As for local election-denying officials in county offices in Georgia, CREW’s report identified eight of them in five Georgia counties. All eight have participated in “test runs,” refusing to certify a local election in the recent past. None succeeded because no majority of their boards agreed. But in three counties, including Fulton County where Atlanta is located, the non-certifiers needed to flip only one vote. The new Election Board rule could facilitate a majority delaying certification.
The news in Georgia is not all bad. Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger remains the state official responsible for certifying the overall state results. He was re-elected in 2022 after his heroic refusal in January 2020 to bend to Donald Trump’s pressure to “find 11,780 votes,” one more than needed to overturn Georgia’s electoral win by President Joe Biden. In addition, Republican Governor Brian Kemp is the state official who formally “ascertains” and sends Congress the certified results. He, too, stood up to Trump in 2020.
On August 3, the former president, who cannot let go of such grievances, continued to insult Kemp at a rally in Atlanta. Trump can’t help cutting off his anti-democratic plan’s nose to spite its face.
As for the other states whose election-denying officials CREW identified – Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New Mexico, and North Carolina – all but North Carolina have responsible oversight: secretaries of state and attorneys general committed to affirming their state’s electoral counts. Attorneys general are the ones who most readily bring lawsuits to mandate that local officials perform their duty to certify local election results.
Speaking of mandates, you don’t need to be a pundit to know the power of a clear electoral mandate delivered to a presidential candidate. An overwhelming Kamala Harris victory at the polls in November would fortify right-minded state attorneys general, secretaries of state, governors, and even courts, to dispense quickly with election denialists' refusal to certify local results.
And that goes for the national vote count as well. Elected officials and most judges do not blind themselves to the will of the people. Voters in non-battleground states like New York, California, Oregon, Washington, Maryland, and even in red states like Kansas or Nebraska, can be of enormous help to building a tally that helps neutralize Trumpian chaos in November.
Voters in non-battleground states have been conditioned to think that their votes don’t matter in presidential elections. Of course, as always, they are crucial in November in electing members of the House and Senate and state officials who can protect democracy going forward. In addition, these votes this time matter for avoiding the disorder Trump desperately seeks if he loses. More than ever, every vote counts.
