The Carter Center, founded by former President Jimmy Carter, typically sends election observers to countries like Sierra Leone, Venezuela and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This fall, the center plans to send nonpartisan observers to Michigan, Arizona and, of course, Georgia, the state where the center is based. Their monitoring in the world's oldest democracy reflects the damaging effects of former President Donald Trump's years of relentless election denialism.
Almost without notice, Trump supporters in several key states have been probing for weaknesses in the country's decentralized election administration system. For example, they appear to be trying to see whether county-level officials could block the certification of vote tallies if the election results don't go their way.
There are more than 3,000 counties in the United States. A delay in certification in one of these counties could cause a chain of problems. If a state fails to certify its results by the December 17 deadline for electoral votes, the votes will be counted by Congress on January 6, 2025. If no candidate receives 270 electoral votes, the House of Representatives may be forced to choose the president. Each state's delegation will cast one vote, which favors the Republican Party.
The Electoral Count Reform Act passed in 2022 addressed weaknesses exposed by Trump's attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It makes it harder for state legislatures to block certification and increases the bar for lawmakers to block the counting of electoral votes submitted by states. But while it was a meaningful and worthy bipartisan measure, it did not address all of the weaknesses.
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That’s why it’s concerning that since 2020, county-level officials in five battleground states have tried to block the certification of vote tallies. The Washington Post’s Amy Gardner, Patrick Murray, and Colby Itkowitz report that well-funded pro-Trump groups have backed those efforts, including a test case underway in Fulton County, Georgia, home to Atlanta and where the first presidential debate is scheduled for Thursday. A Pennsylvania court is also considering whether local boards of elections in three counties should include certain erroneous ballots in their certified tallies after local boards of elections withheld thousands of votes from the count two years ago. (Certification doesn’t prevent lawsuits or other challenges.)
Fortunately, so far, none of these efforts have been successful. Some states have imposed strict rules that limit the autonomy of county election boards for precisely this reason. Two rural Arizona board members have faced criminal charges for not certifying the results of the midterm elections. “Last month, in Michigan's Delta County, the elections board voted not to certify the results of a local election,” reports The Washington Post. “A similar attempt to not certify the results of May's election took place in Washoe County, Nevada, home to Reno…. Officials cited distrust of election machines and errors in ballots but did not provide evidence of widespread fraud. In all four states, certification proceeded after state intervention.”
These maneuvers come as Trump refuses to commit to abide by the 2024 results, echoing his 2016 and 2020 stances. In the first debate four years ago, Joe Biden expressed confidence that Trump would accept the results once all the votes were counted. “And that's it,” he said. Unfortunately, Biden was wrong. Exit polls from the Republican nomination race showed that a majority of Republicans believed the lie that the president did not win legitimately. Two-thirds of Iowa caucus-goers, for example, said so.
When Trump fired the Republican National Committee's chairman earlier this year, he called on the committee to make “election integrity” a top priority. The committee last week announced plans to deploy at least 100,000 poll watchers, staff and election officials for the November election. Training sessions are being held in battleground states. But in contrast to four years ago, the national Republican Party has embraced early voting and mail-in voting, which Trump previously called “corrupt,” even though he himself voted that way.
To be clear, many election officials and numerous lawyers from both parties are seriously preparing for the 2024 elections. Some state election officials are identifying voters in key jurisdictions who could be plaintiffs in emergency lawsuits to force county commissions to certify the election results if officials object. These efforts, combined with state-level safeguards and the track record of Trump supporters so far, offer hope that the nation's democratic fabric will hold. The election system was largely uncontroversial in the 2022 midterm elections. But of course, Trump was not on the ballot.
A handful of officials in one or two key battleground states could sow widespread doubt or even subvert the certification process, and motivated partisans appear to be looking for holes in the system to exploit. Americans should not be lured or manipulated into thinking 2020 was a one-off event. Instead, they should take the ongoing threats to their vote seriously and demand that their leaders stop discrediting our democracy.
