Pildes, the NYU professor, said that while he was concerned about efforts to block certification at the local level,
he was confident that state courts could resolve any disputes by the time the electors meet.

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.

After Donald Trump nearly succeeded in overturning the 2020 election, is the US better prepared to stop a similar effort in 2024?

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.

“This has started earlier in the cycle and is louder and is more consistent,” said Morales-Doyle of the Brennan Center.

“That is all just at a different level than it was before 2020.”

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#Aguilar #timeline #misleading #evidence #affidavits #county #boards #refused #reversed #Brennan #Center #Protect #Democracy #Howell #HeritageFoundation #network #Bobb #poll #observers #Elias #Giuliani #Ellis #Powell

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/12/trump-overturn-result-presidential-election-vote?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Any effort to challenge the election results will probably start at the local level.

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.

“I’m definitely concerned that you’re gonna have a lot of efforts to disturb the process of counting those votes, if we go into the late evening, early hours of the next day and all of that,”
said Richard Pildes, a professor at New York University who specializes in election law.

The observers amassed by Cleta Mitchell and the RNC could have a significant role.

In 2020, chaotic confrontations at polling sites offered #misleading #evidence
that Trump and allies used in their effort to try to overturn the election.

Trump’s effort to challenge the election results in Arizona, for example, was undergirded by #affidavits from observers and poll watchers who falsely claimed they saw ballots being
rejected because of the type of pen voters were using.

In Georgia, Trump pointed to reports from observers in Atlanta falsely claiming they were
removed from the facility where mail-in ballots were counted.

In Michigan, Trump’s team used as evidence an “incident report” from an election observer who falsely said she heard workers giving instructions to
count a rejected ballot.

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.

(3/N)

This year, Americans are unlikely to use mail-in voting at the same levels they did during the pandemic,
and Republicans are now encouraging their supporters to take advantage of it.

But Trump and allies are using a new messaging tactic in its place:

that there are scores of non-citizens and other ineligible people on the voter rolls.

Cleta 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.

Among other issues, they compare up-to-date voter registration information and outdated data from the American Community Survey.

“They’re hanging the hooks to later hang their hat on,” said Sean Morales-Doyle,
the top voting rights expert at the #Brennan #Center.

“It’s all part of creating sort of a pretext to say,
‘Oh, we need to throw out this set of ballots’
or ‘We can’t really know who the real winner is,’”
said Ben Berwick, a lawyer at the non-profit "#Protect #Democracy"
who works on voting rights issues.

“I think much of it won’t stick, but I think the point is to have enough of it stick to create enough uncertainty for that critical post-election period

(2/N)