Legal expert warns about election deniers who 'wormed their way' into powerful positions

Election conspiracy theorists are still very much a threat to the democratic process, constitutional lawyer Michael Waldman warned MSNBC's Joy Reid on Friday.

In many states, outright pushing stolen election narratives has become unfashionable, with even Kari Lake acting evasive when confronted about her claims of election fraud in 2022. But that doesn't mean the deniers are by any means gone, Waldman said, when Reid asked about the possibility that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) could try to steal the election for God.

"You wrote about this before. You have talked through this scenario," said Reid. "I think when folks saw that article in Newsweek, they thought that would never happen. Could that happen?"

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"Well, we have learned we need to be imaginative about what could be done, because things we never thought were possible happened in 2020 and before," said Waldman. "And so we need to look at all these ways that in our country; unlike other democracies, there's no umpire who says, oh, yeah, this person won, that person won, neutral and respected. It turns out to be this very slapdash system going back many years where you can manipulate things."

Fortunately, he continued, "There's good news. Even Mike Johnson, even this election denier who no one heard of who is now the speaker, is constrained by this law passed at the end of the last Congress, the Electoral Count Reform Act. It is harder for him to try to throw the election in that way than it would have been a few years ago. That's the good news."

"The bad news is we have to be really vigilant, for example, the attacks on these things have actually moved to the states," he added. "We now have election deniers who sort of wormed their way into jobs running elections in local areas. Now, there's courts and there's laws and constitutions in the states that have stopped that kind of stuff up until now. But we need to be on our game. Anybody who cares about democracy, between now and when the next president puts their hand on that Bible."

Watch the video below or at the link here.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cUJolwYSS4&feature=youtu.be expand=1 site_id=20266338] Michael Waldman says election deniers "wormed their way" into powerwww.youtube.com