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Republican leaders loyal to Trump are vying to control election administrations in key states in ways that could drastically distort the outcome of the presidential race in 2024. With the former president hinting strongly that he may stand again, his followers are busily manoeuvring themselves into critical positions of control across the US – from which they could launch a far more sophisticated attempt at an electoral coup than Trump’s effort to hang on to power in 2020. [...]
The idea of the stolen election continues to spread like an airborne contagion.
A poll released this week by the Public Religion Research Institute found that two-thirds of Republicans still believe the myth that Trump won. More chilling still, almost a third of Republicans agree with the contention that American patriots may have to resort to violence “in order to save our country”.
[...]
Trump has endorsed a number of Republican candidates for key state election positions who share a common feature: they all avidly embrace the myth of the stolen election and the lie that Biden is an impostor in the White House.
The candidates are being aggressively promoted for secretary of state positions – the top official that oversees elections in US states. Should any one of them succeed, they would hold enormous sway over the running of the 2024 president
To get into these positions of power, the candidates are challenging incumbent election officials who were seminal in thwarting Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 election result. This is most evident in the critical state of Georgia. Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, resisted the sitting president’s demand, made during a phone call, that he “find 11,780 votes” for Trump – one more vote than Biden’s margin of victory.
Raffensperger is now facing a tough fight against Jody Hice, a US Congress member boosted by Trump’s backing. Hice was among the 147 Republicans in Congress who voted on 6 January (hours after the insurrection) to overturn election results, falsely claiming widespread irregularities.
In Arizona, another critical swing state, many Trump allies are running for secretary of state, including Shawna Bolick.
She was the architect of a bill introduced to the Arizona state legislature that would have given lawmakers the ability to overturn the will of voters and impose their own choice for president. Under Bolick’s bill, legislators would be able to overrule the official count and put forward an alternate slate of electors in the name of the loser by dint of a simple majority vote, no explanation needed.
Had that provision been in place in 2020 it would have allowed the legislature’s 47 Republicans to override 1.7 million Arizonans who had voted for Biden and send their own alternate slate of Trump electors to Congress instead.
Bolick’s bill did not pass. But it gave a clear indication of Trump acolytes’ thinking as they inject themselves into the election process.
Competing against Bolick to be the next secretary of state of Arizona is Mark Finchem, who Trump has also endorsed. Finchem was at the Stop the Steal rally in Washington on 6 January that turned into the Capitol insurrection.
Finchem, a former police officer, has links to the far-right extremist group the Oath Keepers, which federal prosecutors allege was involved in planning the violence. On 6 January he posted a photograph of the ransacked Capitol building with the comment: “What happens when the People feel they have been ignored, and Congress refuses to acknowledge rampant fraud.”
If Finchem were to become secretary of state he would have a central role over certifying – or not – the results in Arizona.
In Michigan, another battleground state which Biden won by 154,000 votes in 2020, Trump has endorsed Kristina Karamo for secretary of state. A self-styled “whistleblower” and Fox News favourite, Karamo filed lawsuits in 2020 seeking to block Biden’s certification on spurious grounds of mass fraud.
The list goes on. Reuters analysed the records of 15 Republican candidates running for secretary of state in five battleground states, finding that 10 of them are avid “stop the stealers”.
The pattern of Trump loyalists agitating to take control of elections can be seen even at the hyper-local level. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House senior adviser, has used his War Room podcast megaphone to call on supporters to take over the reins of election administration “precinct by precinct”.
Boards of canvassers, normally unsung panels of local administrators operating at county level, are also being targeted. In Michigan, Republican stop the stealers are moving to oust seasoned election officials from the boards in many of the state’s largest counties, with possible ramifications for how future election results are certified.
Leading authorities on US elections watch these rapidly shifting tectonic plates with mounting alarm...“It took the courage of Republican elected officials who refused to do Trump’s bidding and overturn the election result to save us from a political and constitutional crisis. With those people removed from office, it’s harder to have confidence that the next presidential election is going to be run fairly.”
Chris Krebs led the federal cybersecurity agency Cisa in charge of protecting the integrity of the 2020 election until he was fired by Trump. He fears that the conspiracy theory of the stolen election has spread so rapidly that it is now beyond control.
“There’s a part of me that thinks perhaps we’re too far gone,” he said. “The stop the steal movement has metastasized into a broad base that is more powerful than any individual, even Trump.”
Democracy experts have focused their energies in recent years on the resurgence of voter suppression, the form of anti-democratic politics that arose out of the Jim Crow era of the 20th century. Those techniques have been on ample display this past year. The Brennan Center recorded that in the first six months of this year alone at least 30 new laws were enacted in 18 states making it harder for Americans to vote.
But now voter suppression has been joined by a new, and possibly even more sinister, antidemocratic threat: election subversion. The trusted outcome of a presidential election, which every four years Americans took for granted as the bedrock of their democratic way of life, appears at risk of being willfully distorted or even overturned.
“The largest concern I have right now is the potential for election subversion,” Hasen said. “That’s something I never expected to worry about in the United States.”
The nonpartisan group Protect Democracy and its partner organisation States United Democracy Center have recorded 216 bills introduced this year in 41 states that politicize, criminalize or interfere with election administration. Many of the bills seek to increase the power of Republican-controlled state legislatures over the election process, stripping powers from impartial election officials and handing them to radically partisan lawmakers.
The largest concentration of bills fall in exactly those states that were most closely contested in 2020 and where the outcome of the 2024 presidential election is likely to be decided – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and the increasingly competitive state of Texas.
“We know that some of these bills have been part of a coordinated effort,” Jessica Marsden, a lawyer with Protect Democracy, said. “We see similar measures pop up in a number of different states, so there is significant evidence that there is at least the beginnings of some sort of plan.”
So far 24 of the bills have been passed into law. They include a new voting law in Georgia that came into effect in August which the New York Times described as “a breathtaking assertion of partisan power in elections”.
[...] Fulton county was seminal in handing victory to Biden. It also gave the edge to Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, in senatorial races that swung control of the US Senate to the Democratic party.
“Late at night during the passing of the voter bill in Georgia, Republicans snuck in a provision that could have the most devastating impact,” Waldman said. “It changes the rules of who gets to count the votes, taking away the power of the secretary of state and taking over county election processes on very flimsy grounds.”
For the past year Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, has been at the centre of the storm unleashed by Trump’s big lie. Attacks on Hobbs and her staff began straight after the November 2020 election and have continued unabated ever since.....Hobbs was one of those to feel their wrath. “We have been the target of a barrage of constant attacks. There have been threats, harassment and vitriol, not just against our election staff but to every department where people can find a phone extension to call,” she said.
Days after the presidential election, armed stop the stealers gathered outside Hobbs’ home. In May she and her family were assigned a security detail after she received three separate death threats in a single day and was chased outside her office by a man working for the conspiracy theory website Gateway Pundit.
“Security is certainly not something I expected as part of this job,” she said. Asked why she thought she was such a hate figure for Trump supporters, she said: “These folks think I’m going to be arrested, that I belong in Gitmo and deserve to be tried for treason – and they are reminding me of this every single day, without any evidence.”
Threats of violence are not the only challenge Hobbs has faced. In June, Republican lawmakers in the state legislature stripped her of powers to defend election laws in court, handing the critical function to the state attorney general, a Republican.
The move was later blocked by a judge on constitutional grounds. But Republican lawmakers have successfully weakened her role by barring her access to legal counsel, which severely curtails her ability to carry out her duties as the protector of Arizona democracy.
“They’ve tied my hands, and that’s been par for the course in terms of partisan retaliation throughout my term in office,” Hobbs said.
The Brennan Center reported in the summer that one in three election officials in the US felt unsafe in their jobs. One in six had received threats. [...] And it doesn’t end there. Were the Republicans to regain control of the House of Representatives in 2024, Kevin McCarthy, the minority Republican leader, would have considerable sway as Speaker over how the outcome of the presidential election would be certified.
If a state legislature were to send an alternate slate of electors to Congress in an attempt to overturn the will of voters then McCarthy would be a pivotal player. His word would carry weight in determining whether to allow those alternate electors, potentially turning the result of the election on its head.
McCarthy was one of the 147 Republican rebels who on 6 January – hours after the storming of the Capitol – objected to the certification of Biden.
“Here’s one of my big concerns,” Hasen said. “The House of Representatives headed by Kevin McCarthy accepts alternate slates of electors and overcomes the will of the people, making the loser the winner.”
Such a move would undoubtedly trigger a constitutional crisis, which in turn would inevitably end up before the US supreme court. Here, too, there are reasons to be apprehensive.
In the runup to the 2020 election, four of the nine justices expressed some degree of support for the theory that state legislatures have the power to put forward their own alternate electors should they decide the official count somehow had failed. Trump nominated three new conservative justices during his time in the White House, tipping the balance on the court sharply to the right and increasing the likelihood that the conservative majority looks favourably on this highly questionable legal ruse.
“There could be five or six justices who could go along with it, given the right case,” Hasen said.
With 2024 on the horizon, democracy experts have identified several ways in which disaster could be averted. Rick Hasen wants new federal guardrails put in place to prevent state legislatures from interfering in elections for purely partisan reasons. Chris Krebs wants a more robust system of post-election audits to act as a legitimate counterpoint to the sham audits promulgated by Trump.
All the authorities on American democracy who spoke to the Guardian were united about the urgency of the moment. New protections need to be put in place, right now, or else the nation will enter the 2024 presidential election cycle with its democratic structures already bloodied and vulnerable to further attack.
Waldman looks to Washington for signs that the peril has been recognised, and that appropriate action is in train. He sees neither.
“The leadership of the federal government doesn’t appear to be treating this as the emergency it is. This is one of the great clashes in American political history. Where is the alarm?”
Republican leaders loyal to Trump are vying to control election administrations in key states in ways that could drastically distort the outcome of the presidential race in 2024. With the former president hinting strongly that he may stand again, his followers are busily manoeuvring themselves into critical positions of control across the US – from which they could launch a far more sophisticated attempt at an electoral coup than Trump’s effort to hang on to power in 2020. [...]
The idea of the stolen election continues to spread like an airborne contagion.
A poll released this week by the Public Religion Research Institute found that two-thirds of Republicans still believe the myth that Trump won. More chilling still, almost a third of Republicans agree with the contention that American patriots may have to resort to violence “in order to save our country”.
[...]
Trump has endorsed a number of Republican candidates for key state election positions who share a common feature: they all avidly embrace the myth of the stolen election and the lie that Biden is an impostor in the White House.
The candidates are being aggressively promoted for secretary of state positions – the top official that oversees elections in US states. Should any one of them succeed, they would hold enormous sway over the running of the 2024 president
To get into these positions of power, the candidates are challenging incumbent election officials who were seminal in thwarting Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 election result. This is most evident in the critical state of Georgia. Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, resisted the sitting president’s demand, made during a phone call, that he “find 11,780 votes” for Trump – one more vote than Biden’s margin of victory.
Raffensperger is now facing a tough fight against Jody Hice, a US Congress member boosted by Trump’s backing. Hice was among the 147 Republicans in Congress who voted on 6 January (hours after the insurrection) to overturn election results, falsely claiming widespread irregularities.
In Arizona, another critical swing state, many Trump allies are running for secretary of state, including Shawna Bolick.
She was the architect of a bill introduced to the Arizona state legislature that would have given lawmakers the ability to overturn the will of voters and impose their own choice for president. Under Bolick’s bill, legislators would be able to overrule the official count and put forward an alternate slate of electors in the name of the loser by dint of a simple majority vote, no explanation needed.
Had that provision been in place in 2020 it would have allowed the legislature’s 47 Republicans to override 1.7 million Arizonans who had voted for Biden and send their own alternate slate of Trump electors to Congress instead.
Bolick’s bill did not pass. But it gave a clear indication of Trump acolytes’ thinking as they inject themselves into the election process.
Competing against Bolick to be the next secretary of state of Arizona is Mark Finchem, who Trump has also endorsed. Finchem was at the Stop the Steal rally in Washington on 6 January that turned into the Capitol insurrection.
Finchem, a former police officer, has links to the far-right extremist group the Oath Keepers, which federal prosecutors allege was involved in planning the violence. On 6 January he posted a photograph of the ransacked Capitol building with the comment: “What happens when the People feel they have been ignored, and Congress refuses to acknowledge rampant fraud.”
If Finchem were to become secretary of state he would have a central role over certifying – or not – the results in Arizona.
In Michigan, another battleground state which Biden won by 154,000 votes in 2020, Trump has endorsed Kristina Karamo for secretary of state. A self-styled “whistleblower” and Fox News favourite, Karamo filed lawsuits in 2020 seeking to block Biden’s certification on spurious grounds of mass fraud.
The list goes on. Reuters analysed the records of 15 Republican candidates running for secretary of state in five battleground states, finding that 10 of them are avid “stop the stealers”.
The pattern of Trump loyalists agitating to take control of elections can be seen even at the hyper-local level. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House senior adviser, has used his War Room podcast megaphone to call on supporters to take over the reins of election administration “precinct by precinct”.
Boards of canvassers, normally unsung panels of local administrators operating at county level, are also being targeted. In Michigan, Republican stop the stealers are moving to oust seasoned election officials from the boards in many of the state’s largest counties, with possible ramifications for how future election results are certified.
Leading authorities on US elections watch these rapidly shifting tectonic plates with mounting alarm...“It took the courage of Republican elected officials who refused to do Trump’s bidding and overturn the election result to save us from a political and constitutional crisis. With those people removed from office, it’s harder to have confidence that the next presidential election is going to be run fairly.”
Chris Krebs led the federal cybersecurity agency Cisa in charge of protecting the integrity of the 2020 election until he was fired by Trump. He fears that the conspiracy theory of the stolen election has spread so rapidly that it is now beyond control.
“There’s a part of me that thinks perhaps we’re too far gone,” he said. “The stop the steal movement has metastasized into a broad base that is more powerful than any individual, even Trump.”
Democracy experts have focused their energies in recent years on the resurgence of voter suppression, the form of anti-democratic politics that arose out of the Jim Crow era of the 20th century. Those techniques have been on ample display this past year. The Brennan Center recorded that in the first six months of this year alone at least 30 new laws were enacted in 18 states making it harder for Americans to vote.
But now voter suppression has been joined by a new, and possibly even more sinister, antidemocratic threat: election subversion. The trusted outcome of a presidential election, which every four years Americans took for granted as the bedrock of their democratic way of life, appears at risk of being willfully distorted or even overturned.
“The largest concern I have right now is the potential for election subversion,” Hasen said. “That’s something I never expected to worry about in the United States.”
The nonpartisan group Protect Democracy and its partner organisation States United Democracy Center have recorded 216 bills introduced this year in 41 states that politicize, criminalize or interfere with election administration. Many of the bills seek to increase the power of Republican-controlled state legislatures over the election process, stripping powers from impartial election officials and handing them to radically partisan lawmakers.
The largest concentration of bills fall in exactly those states that were most closely contested in 2020 and where the outcome of the 2024 presidential election is likely to be decided – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and the increasingly competitive state of Texas.
“We know that some of these bills have been part of a coordinated effort,” Jessica Marsden, a lawyer with Protect Democracy, said. “We see similar measures pop up in a number of different states, so there is significant evidence that there is at least the beginnings of some sort of plan.”
So far 24 of the bills have been passed into law. They include a new voting law in Georgia that came into effect in August which the New York Times described as “a breathtaking assertion of partisan power in elections”.
[...] Fulton county was seminal in handing victory to Biden. It also gave the edge to Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, in senatorial races that swung control of the US Senate to the Democratic party.
“Late at night during the passing of the voter bill in Georgia, Republicans snuck in a provision that could have the most devastating impact,” Waldman said. “It changes the rules of who gets to count the votes, taking away the power of the secretary of state and taking over county election processes on very flimsy grounds.”
For the past year Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, has been at the centre of the storm unleashed by Trump’s big lie. Attacks on Hobbs and her staff began straight after the November 2020 election and have continued unabated ever since.....Hobbs was one of those to feel their wrath. “We have been the target of a barrage of constant attacks. There have been threats, harassment and vitriol, not just against our election staff but to every department where people can find a phone extension to call,” she said.
Days after the presidential election, armed stop the stealers gathered outside Hobbs’ home. In May she and her family were assigned a security detail after she received three separate death threats in a single day and was chased outside her office by a man working for the conspiracy theory website Gateway Pundit.
“Security is certainly not something I expected as part of this job,” she said. Asked why she thought she was such a hate figure for Trump supporters, she said: “These folks think I’m going to be arrested, that I belong in Gitmo and deserve to be tried for treason – and they are reminding me of this every single day, without any evidence.”
Threats of violence are not the only challenge Hobbs has faced. In June, Republican lawmakers in the state legislature stripped her of powers to defend election laws in court, handing the critical function to the state attorney general, a Republican.
The move was later blocked by a judge on constitutional grounds. But Republican lawmakers have successfully weakened her role by barring her access to legal counsel, which severely curtails her ability to carry out her duties as the protector of Arizona democracy.
“They’ve tied my hands, and that’s been par for the course in terms of partisan retaliation throughout my term in office,” Hobbs said.
The Brennan Center reported in the summer that one in three election officials in the US felt unsafe in their jobs. One in six had received threats. [...] And it doesn’t end there. Were the Republicans to regain control of the House of Representatives in 2024, Kevin McCarthy, the minority Republican leader, would have considerable sway as Speaker over how the outcome of the presidential election would be certified.
If a state legislature were to send an alternate slate of electors to Congress in an attempt to overturn the will of voters then McCarthy would be a pivotal player. His word would carry weight in determining whether to allow those alternate electors, potentially turning the result of the election on its head.
McCarthy was one of the 147 Republican rebels who on 6 January – hours after the storming of the Capitol – objected to the certification of Biden.
“Here’s one of my big concerns,” Hasen said. “The House of Representatives headed by Kevin McCarthy accepts alternate slates of electors and overcomes the will of the people, making the loser the winner.”
Such a move would undoubtedly trigger a constitutional crisis, which in turn would inevitably end up before the US supreme court. Here, too, there are reasons to be apprehensive.
In the runup to the 2020 election, four of the nine justices expressed some degree of support for the theory that state legislatures have the power to put forward their own alternate electors should they decide the official count somehow had failed. Trump nominated three new conservative justices during his time in the White House, tipping the balance on the court sharply to the right and increasing the likelihood that the conservative majority looks favourably on this highly questionable legal ruse.
“There could be five or six justices who could go along with it, given the right case,” Hasen said.
With 2024 on the horizon, democracy experts have identified several ways in which disaster could be averted. Rick Hasen wants new federal guardrails put in place to prevent state legislatures from interfering in elections for purely partisan reasons. Chris Krebs wants a more robust system of post-election audits to act as a legitimate counterpoint to the sham audits promulgated by Trump.
All the authorities on American democracy who spoke to the Guardian were united about the urgency of the moment. New protections need to be put in place, right now, or else the nation will enter the 2024 presidential election cycle with its democratic structures already bloodied and vulnerable to further attack.
Waldman looks to Washington for signs that the peril has been recognised, and that appropriate action is in train. He sees neither.
“The leadership of the federal government doesn’t appear to be treating this as the emergency it is. This is one of the great clashes in American political history. Where is the alarm?”
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