The timeline for certifying the vote is important because, under federal law, states must have an official election result by 11 December, six days before the electoral college meets. Delaying certification efforts at the local level could put states at risk of missing that deadline.
[...]
A new law, the Electoral Count Reform Act, should provide a significant new layer of protection against election subversion. The bipartisan bill passed Congress at the end of 2022.
The law makes it so that Trump and his allies cannot repeat what they did in 2020 and submit false slates of electors from key swing states. Significantly, it says that the slate of electors submitted by a state’s executive is the legitimate slate and raises the threshold in both houses of Congress to object to the electoral result.
While the law controls what Congress must do once it receives certificates from electors, it doesn’t have much to say about what must happen in the lead-up to the electoral college vote. That could leave a lot of wriggle room for Trump and allies to try to slow down certification and go to court to try to force states to miss their certification deadline.
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In early August, the Republican-controlled state election board in Georgia adopted a new rule [...] requires local election board members to conduct an undefined “reasonable inquiry” into any discrepancies before they can certify the election. There are concerns that officials could use that discretion to hold up certification of the election.
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Trump has repeatedly refused to commit to accepting the election results, declining multiple times to do so during a 27 June debate. He has suggested that Christians would “never have to vote again” if he wins. The anti-democratic sentiment has been echoed by other prominent conservatives, including Mike Howell, the director of the oversight project at the Heritage Foundation, who said earlier this year there was a “0% chance of a free and fair election”.
“I’m formally accusing the Biden administration of creating the conditions that most reasonable policymakers and officials cannot in good conscience certify an election,” he said at a Heritage Foundation event this summer.
The Guardian
What conditions would those be?
The effort poses a challenge that again would test the strength of the US’s voting system and its democratic institutions. It could probably stretch from little-known county election officials to the Congress.
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[Cleta] Mitchell, a close Trump ally, has spent the last few years building up a network of activists focused on local boards of elections. And the Republican National Committee’s election litigation team is now being led by Christina Bobb, an election denier who is now facing criminal charges for her efforts to overturn the 2020 race. The RNC claims it is recruiting an army of 100,000 poll observers who could provide significant disruption during voting and counting.
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But more significantly, the idea that the 2020 election was stolen has moved from the fringes to being a pillar of the Republican party.
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This is no longer the province of people who thought that there were bamboo filaments in paper or mythical sea creatures involved in the election with Venezuelan dictators.
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A January poll from PRRI found that 66% of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen.
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Mitchell has played a key role in leading a coalition of groups that has pushed the false idea that there is a serious threat of non-citizens voting in US elections. Her coalition has supported federal legislation championed by the House speaker, Mike Johnson, and others to require proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Such a restriction would probably do little to prevent fraud, which is exceedingly rare. Instead, it would probably make it harder for millions of eligible voters to cast a ballot. Nearly one in 10 eligible voters – 21 million Americans – lack easy access to proof of citizenship documents, according to one study released earlier this year.
Even though Johnson’s congressional bill passed the House, it will probably go nowhere in the Senate. But it helps create an impression that something is amiss with American elections. To make matters worse, when Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, Republicans also immediately sought to suggest her candidacy was illegitimate, calling the effort a “coup”.
A constellation of groups – including the RNC, the Public Interest Legal Foundation and United Sovereign Americans – has also filed several lawsuits in various states to create the false impression that voter rolls are not properly being cleaned in several swing states. These lawsuits use misleading methodology and legal claims to suggest that there are a suspiciously large number of people registered in certain jurisdictions.
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Just as there was in 2020, there’s likely to be a period of uncertainty after election day when votes are still being counted in key swing states. Two of those, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, still do not allow election officials to begin to process mail-in ballots until election day.
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Accusations of fraud may find a receptive audience at county boards responsible for certifying elections. Until 2020, no one gave much thought to these positions, sometimes filled by elected officials and other times by little-known party loyalists. In 2020, Trump’s campaign made a strong effort to try to delay certification at the local and state level as part of his effort to overturn the election.
In Wayne county, home of Detroit, Trump personally called two Republican canvassers on the board responsible for certifying the vote there. The two officials briefly refused to certify, then reversed themselves and did. At the state level, Aaron Van Langevelde, a Republican on the state board of canvassers, faced pressure not to certify the vote, but decided to anyway.
In Wisconsin, Republicans nearly got the state supreme court to block certification of the state’s election. In Arizona, Trump called the then governor, Doug Ducey, as he was certifying the vote amid a pressure campaign to stop the certification of votes there.
Since 2020, there have been at least 20 instances in eight states of election officials refusing to certify election results.
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Sometimes election officials who refuse to certify have pointed to mistakes that happened during the election, even though they did not affect the outcome. In other cases, like Adams’s in Georgia, officials have refused to certify to protest about what they view as unfair laws.
While courts would probably force recalcitrant officials to certify the vote, significant damage could still be caused.
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Lawyers and other activists say they are ready, having spent the last four years studying and understanding the vulnerabilities that Trump and allies targeted in 2020. Any effort to block certification is likely to be swiftly challenged in courts, where Trump has already been unsuccessful dozens of times.
The new Electoral Count Reform Act should offer additional safeguards should there be an effort such as there was in 2020 to get Congress to stop its certification of the vote
Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss the threat altogether. The same pressure points that existed in 2020 exist in 2024, and in some places election deniers have been elevated to positions of power.
“We are going to see mass refusals to certify the elections” because the GOP is “counting on the fact that if they don’t certify in several small counties, you cannot certify these statewide results.”
Such refusals to certify local elections by rogue election officials are certainly going to cause a headache, but the important thing is that there are processes to ensure each election is properly certified.
[...]
As we saw in the 2020 election and the 2022 midterms, rogue election officials delaying, or outright refusing, to certify an election is something that happens now. It’s occurred in Arizona, Georgia, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and other states in recent years.
The short answer is: there’s mechanisms in place to ensure elections are certified. As Karalunas noted, some states have specific statutes that outline a process to follow if a local official won’t certify an election. “So in Michigan, for example, the state law allows state election officials to take over certification at the local level if a local official refuses to certify,” she explained.
In other states, the courts can step in, at the request of a voter, candidate, or another state official. The process, known as a writ of mandamus, involves a court to step in to legally compel a government official — in this case, an election official — to fulfill their duties, like certifying an election.
But what happens when an election official refuses to comply with a court order to certify an election? They could be removed from their position. In the 2022 midterm elections in North Carolina, two officials were removed for refusing to certify. In such cases, Karalunas emphasized, safeguards are in place. “So in the last election cycle they removed two officials that refused to certify the election,” she said. “And then there are some additional federal and state rules that allow another person to just come in and actually fulfill that legal process.”
Democracy Docket
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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