Trump plots overturning 2024 election as Dems prepare legal 'army' to stop him: analysis
Donald Trump's Republican supporters are already hatching a plan to overturn the 2024 election if President Joe Biden wins, but the current administration has an "army" of lawyers working to block the plan, according to a new report.
A presidential election loss would see Republican allies resort to even more extreme measures than they did in 2020 as Trump now also faces four criminal court cases that could land him in prison, according to the Bulwark's A.B. Stoddard.
"In anticipation of every nightmarish contingency, squadrons of lawyers are already drawing up the necessary legal filings to avert what they expect will be an all-out assault on the election," Stoddard writes.
"The Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee have been working on an upgraded version of plans they made before November 2020."
Trump's hand is further weakened by his inability to tap the power of the federal government to delegitimize the election's results, which means "his best path to stealing an election is through the states," according to Stoddard.
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Stoddard cites a new book by Lawrence Lessig and Matthew Seligman titled "How to Steal a Presidential Election" in the report.
The authors point to a 2020 Supreme Court decision that declared state legislatures have the power to direct electors how to cast their votes -- a ruling Republicans could use in their favor.
“There are plenty of mechanisms to ensure that the election selects the right slate of electors—recounts, contest proceedings and so on,” the authors write. “But there are no protections against a state legislature simply ordering whichever electors are appointed to vote for the candidate that the legislature, and not the people of the state, choose.”
Speaking to the Bulwark, Lessig said if Republicans looking to throw the election “wanted to do it in the safest way possible...they would do it immediately after the election, because the time frame for the Court to intervene would be so short, it’s not clear the Court would have time to intervene.”
One option mentioned by Lessig and Seligman to stop such a scenario would be for Congress to pass a law declaring that any change state legislatures make to its election results after the popular vote comes in would render the electoral votes not “regularly given.”
Another option would be for states to affirm that electors are required to carry out the will of the voters.
"Or a legislature could pass a new law before the election granting itself authority to direct electors to vote for the legislature’s choice regardless of the popular vote—so there would be time for the Supreme Court to strike down that bill (assuming it would)," Stoddard writes.