Donald Trump's allies have readied swing states across the U.S. to challenge his potential defeat in the upcoming presidential election by means recently described as a "5 alarm fire for democracy" in Georgia, experts warned Monday.
Republicans for years have been quietly readying election workers to not certify 2024 presidential election results should Trump lose to the Democratic nominee, the Guardian reported Monday.
“You can force certification through legal mechanisms, [but] those events tend to be like rocket fuel for conspiracy theories and misinformation and undermining confidence in the election," Ben Berwick, a lawyer at the non-profit Protect Democracy, told the Guardian. "There’s damage done even where certification is eventually forced."
Voting rights experts told the Guardian that Trump, allies such as firebrand Cleta Mitchell and MAGA politicians at the Republican National Committee have learned subtly in the years following the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, 2021.
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Christina Bobb, an election denier facing criminal charges for her effort to return Trump to the White House in 2020, is leading an election litigation team preparing to challenge results as the RNC recruits tens of thousands to "observe" polls on Nov. 5, the Guardian reports.
“I think we saw efforts by Republicans in 2020 that were pretty ham-handed,” voting rights lawyer Marc Elias reportedly said. “I worry that there will be both legal and extralegal efforts by Republicans to keep ballots from being counted.”
Their efforts have been eased by the entryway of far-right conspiracy theory into the mainstream as election denialism became a pillar of conservative movement, the Guardian reports.
"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," Elias reportedly said.
“It has become now the standard position of the Republican party.”
In Georgia, Republicans have already managed to pass a "reasonable inquiry" rule that empowers voting officials to investigate results before certifying results.
This could provide Republicans the means to push certification beyond a vital Dec. 11 deadline that could put swing state results at risk, said Berwick.
“The point is to have enough of it stick to create enough uncertainty for that critical post-election period," Berwick said. “If we get past that deadline, it opens up a lot of questions, like tricky legal questions and room for shenanigans."
