Across America, Republican Trump-supporting election deniers are making plans to subvert the outcome of the 2024 presidential election should their candidate lose. In 19 states, an election denier currently holds at least one statewide office with election oversight power. Central to the scheme is laying the groundwork to delay certification of ballot counts based on any vague allegation of voter fraud, thereby causing chaos at the county and state level with the ultimate goal of empowering the Republican majority House of Representatives to select the nation’s next president.
In September, the Republican majority on the Georgia State Election Board passed a set of last-minute rules that required county election workers to hand-count the number of ballots cast in each precinct and which critics said could threaten to delay the reporting of the results. But on Oct. 15, Fulton County Judge Robert McBurney ruled that county election boards are required to certify their election results by Nov. 12.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Justin Glawe, an independent journalist and frequent contributor to Rolling Stone magazine, who writes the newsletter American Doom. Here he discusses the Trump and Republican party plan to undermine the 2024 election if they lose, which includes delaying certification of county and state winners and falsely claiming that massive voter fraud by undocumented immigrants should invalidate the election outcome if Vice President Harris wins on Nov. 5.
JUSTIN GLAWE: This comes down to one word and that word is “certification.” We’re talking about certification of the actual votes being counted at the precincts that you and I and everyone else will be voting at. And that process begins in Georgia and in many other places at the local level and at county commissions and county election boards.
And then from there it goes up to secretaries of state. And the final step for the statewide certification is governors signing what are called certificates of ascertainment. Those certificates lay out how Electoral College votes were allocated, which in all but two states means whoever won the popular vote in that state receives all of the Electoral College votes.
And what we’ve seen since 2020 is a lot of local officials who have refused to certify results based off of their belief in unfounded claims of widespread election fraud. And obviously, those beliefs are coming because these are, you know, Republicans and right-wing people and Trump supporters who believe his lies about the 2020 election. And so, you know, that’s obviously a danger that these local officials could sort of hold up the certification of statewide tallies.
However, in my opinion, these will essentially be protest votes, because in most places, these election denial officials who support Trump, they don’t have the numbers on each one of these boards to actually vote against certification. There’s additional legal measures that can be enacted to force them to certify. The biggest danger that we face in terms of having a free and fair election in November, again, comes down to Jan. 6. And that level of certification, congressional certification is still rife with potential problems and potential means by which the Republicans could essentially throw out, a win by Vice President Kamala Harris and reject certification of those votes and go down several different paths to basically incorrectly and perhaps illegally certify Donald Trump as president.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you for that, Justin. On another topic here. As you wrote in the article titled, “They Will Lie and Blame Immigrants for Losing” that really talks about the plans being readied by the Trump campaign to contest the election if they lose, charging that undocumented immigrants are illegally voting, committing massive fraud, stealing the election from Donald Trump for a second time.
There’s no evidence of any of this significant numbers of immigrants voting and this appears to be a pretext to throw the election result into chaos and use the Constitution’s 12th Amendment to have the Republican-controlled House determine the winner of the 2024 election. Maybe you can expand on that.
JUSTIN GLAWE: This goes back to that regularly given thing. There’s another phrase involved with congressional certification called “lawfully certified,” and I am by no means an election law expert, but my reading and some other folks who are experts in this field are concerned about the sort of broad nature of the ability of Congress to object to both, you know, certificates of ascertainment from states. And, you know, I think that the Electoral College Reform Act, my understanding is that it kind of closed some of those loopholes.
But the bottom line is what I wrote about today is essentially these lawsuits which allege that there are more than a million, probably upwards of many millions of ineligible voters registered to vote in all of these states, all of these lawsuits filed by Republicans.
Essentially, what that does is it opens up a window for Congress or Trump or Mike Johnson or whoever, to argue that the election was beset with widespread fraud because, “Oh, there were all these people who were ineligible voters based on our investigation and our research — and by “our,” I’m saying election deniers and right-wing groups — and therefore the election was fraudulent.
And oh, by the way, among these ineligible voters could be unknown scores of undocumented immigrants who are voting for Kamala Harris — for a variety of sort of conspiratorial reasons that the American right believes that immigrants would be more inclined to vote for a Democrat than a Republican. So it opens up this entire window into which conspiracy theories and political narratives and arguments about a stolen election can be played, and then those can potentially be used in more of a legal way during certification to say, well, this whole thing was rigged.
So we’re not taking votes from Georgia, we’re not taking votes from Pennsylvania because we didn’t get the voter rolls cleaned and therefore we’re not certified. So that is one of the potential scenarios that I’m envisioning.
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