The decisive rejection by the US supreme court of an attempt by one state, Texas, to throw out election results in four other states might prevent the recurrence of such an effort in future presidential elections.
But the Texas lawsuit was not the only unprecedented attack to be leveled on US democracy during the November presidential election, and other such efforts could escalate in, or echo through, future elections for an unknown time to come.
Historians could mark 2020 as the moment when Republicans applied the same zeal they have used to attack democracy in advance of elections, through voter suppression and gerrymandering, to attacking democracy on the back end, by trying to deny and overturn the results.
Here is a list of five post-election attacks on democracy by Donald Trump and Republicans that were new in 2020 but might haunt elections for years to come.
Especially reckless and sustained election fraud charges
False accusations of election fraud are a fixture of US elections, but Trump has professionalized the enterprise, making more audacious and systemic claims of election fraud than ever before and coaxing more elected officials to go along with the lies than seemed possible before the Trump era.
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Republicans normalized Trump’s false charges by treating them as “legal challenges”. But by declining to acknowledge the election result, Republicans lent weight to the notion that something unusual was afoot apart from Trump’s effort to subvert the popular will, and they held open a months-long window for Trump’s lies to circulate, during which faith in US democracy was damaged.
Political pressure on local elections officials
Will the certification of election results in key counties ever again be taken for granted? And will the partisan poison that reached down to the local level in 2020 corrupt the conduct of future elections at that level?
This was the year for local officials from both parties to receive death threats as they worked to finish the vote counting and then certify the result. Many Republican officials, as in Philadelphia, Michigan and Georgia, reacted to the pressure with expressions of outrage and brave statements of principle. But other local Republican officials, as in Detroit, responded to the merest charm offensive from Trump by trying to retract their certification of the county results.
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In healthier times for the US democracy, no one paid much attention to the certification process because it was taken as an article of unexamined faith that the vote was the vote and the only role officials had was to stamp it. Now there is a plain chance that officials might take direction from the White House, the Republican National Committee or someone else instead of voters.
External legal challenges to the certification of state election results
Lawsuits have developed around elections before, but never in US history has an election been followed by a legal battle of the scope mounted by the Trump campaign. Trump, the loser, sued in every state, with multiple lawsuits, where flipping the result could help him win.
The fact that Trump lost basically all the lawsuits might not discourage future presidential campaigns from building a national post-election legal strategy into their victory plan: if you can’t win at the ballot box, try the courts.
Internal political challenges to the certification of state election results
Goaded by Trump, legislators in Pennsylvania asked the supreme court to prevent certification by the state of its result. Republican Senate candidates in Georgia demanded that the Republican secretary of state withdraw from the certification there. The Republican party in Arizona demonstrated extremely shrill behavior, demanding that the election not be certified and even challenging Twitter followers to express their willingness to die to prevent certification.
On the whole, efforts by these state elected officials to respond to Trump’s sudden demand that they overthrow what everyone had previously recognized as a democratic process were half-hearted and ineffectual. But if state elected officials get serious about disrupting the certification process, they might come more prepared in future elections.
The president’s role
Should a president of the United States, after an election, be calling up county election officials in charge of certifying the results? Should a president invite lawmakers weighing an intervention in their state’s certification process for lunch? Should a president call out the mob on Twitter against a local election official or a state secretary of state who has resisted his schemes?
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Whatever damage US democracy has sustained in 2020, much of it traces back to the source, to a president who did not see anything wrong in 2019 with coercing a foreign leader to try to take out a political opponent, who made the fealty of state governors a condition of pandemic aid, and who now has twisted the arms of elected officials across the United States in an effort to subvert the will of American voters.
The role that Trump has played in attacking the integrity of the American system is the most outrageous and unprecedented of all the unholy perversions of democracy that 2020 has seen. Whether that role will be replicated or reprised in future White Houses, and in future elections, could make all the difference.
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