Assault on American democracy has gained pace since US Capitol attack
On 6 January 2021, it seemed like the stitching holding America’s democracy together might finally collapse. As armed supporters of a defeated president laid siege to the Capitol, the US Congress did something extraordinary – it suspended the official procedure to certify the winner of a presidential election.
The attack was eventually put down and Congress returned to officially certify Joe Biden’s victory. “They tried to disrupt our democracy. They failed,” Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, said when the Senate came back into session.
But the effort to disrupt and undermine American democracy didn’t end on 6 January. In fact, it has speeded up over the 12 months since then.
Working in state legislatures across the US, Republicans have launched a methodical effort to undermine the post-election processing of votes and the people who count them. One year after the effort to steal the 2020 election for Donald Trump failed, Republicans have put in place machinery to ensure future attempts could be successful. The potential for a stolen election in the US is higher than ever.
In recent years there has been growing alarm over the way the Republican party has eagerly embraced voter suppression – efforts to change election rules to make it harder to vote. But what’s happening now, experts say, is new – an effort to take control of the administration of elections and vote counting itself.
“What we’re seeing is an unprecedented, multi-pronged assault on the foundations of our democracy,” said Wendy Weiser, who directs the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “We’re really seeing an all-out effort to undermine election administration in America.”
Republicans have built this attack around three pillars. First, they have encouraged and fomented doubt about the results of the 2020 election. Second, they have passed new laws that inject more partisanship into election administration. And third, they have sought to take over key election offices from which they could exert enormous unilateral power over vote-counting and post-election certification.
Republicans have taken the idea of a stolen election from the fringes of political discourse and made it party orthodoxy. Senior Republicans have castigated fellow members who have contested claims the election was illegitimate. At the state level, Republicans have continued to spread false accusations about the 2020 vote and embraced unusual and partisan reviews of the 2020 election that have used shoddy methodology to question the results.
In Arizona, Republicans hired Cyber Ninjas, a firm with no election experience to lead a widely panned review of the election results in the state’s largest county. The final report affirmed Biden’s win, but also suggested there were irregularities. The claims were immediately explained and debunked. In Wisconsin, Republican legislators authorized their own post-election inquiry, led by a former state supreme court justice who has hired partisan staffers, threatened to jail mayors of some of the state’s biggest cities and said he doesn’t know how elections work.
In 2020, Trump allies pushed state lawmakers in Georgia and Arizona to reject the popular vote in their state and choose their own electors. That effort was unsuccessful. But the focus on undermining the 2020 results now appears to be laying the groundwork to allow lawmakers to successfully do this in 2024 and beyond, said Jessica Marsden, a lawyer at Protect Democracy who is tracking election subversion efforts.
“In both Arizona and Georgia, you had the governors not willing to go along with that game, they would have been doing that quite explicitly to throw out the vote of their own constituents,” Marsden said. “What the disinformation campaign does is try to lower the political cost of throwing out election results by creating a lot of uncertainty about what the true results were.”
The effort appears to be working – 71% of Republicans believe Biden’s victory was not legitimate, according to a recent UMass Amherst poll.
There was also a surge of bills last year that sought to interfere with election administration in 2021. As of mid-December last year, 262 election interference bills had been introduced in 41 states, according to the States United Democracy Center. Thirty-two of those bills have become law in 17 states.
Among them is a new law in Georgia that gives state lawmakers the authority to review local election boards and replace them if the state election board determines they are underperforming. Separate from that law, Georgia Republicans have also quietly acted to remove Democrats from their positions on county election boards. A new Arkansas law allows state officials to investigate irregularities and remove local election officials from their posts if needed.
In Wisconsin, Ron Johnson, a Republican US senator, has suggested that the Republican-controlled legislature should unilaterally assert control of federal elections, eliminating the sixmember bipartisan commission that runs elections in the state. Republicans in the state legislature have also called for criminal punishment for members of the commission as well as its nonpartisan administrator.
“What’s going in Wisconsin is sort of the canary in the coalmine of what is spreading across the United States,” said Ann Jacobs, a Democrat who chairs the six-person panel that oversees elections in Wisconsin. “There is a faction of the Republican party that is openly embracing the idea that people’s votes should not count.”
Beyond laws, Republicans who believe the election was stolen have also launched an aggressive effort to win elections for secretary of state, the top election official in many places. They are targeting offices in Michigan, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin, all key swing states where secretaries played a key role in ensuring a fair vote count in 2020.
In Michigan, Republicans have also tapped election deniers to serve on local canvassing boards, responsible for local election certification, in several counties, a role from which they could cause significant damage in future elections.
That effort comes as a flood of election officials have left their jobs in the last year facing a flood of harassment and other threats, opening up opportunities for inexperienced and partisan workers to fill the void. It has raised fears over what might happen in 2024’s presidential election, especially if Trump runs again.
Democrats are still seeking a way to block this kind of subversion.
The Freedom to Vote Act, one of two sweeping voting rights bills stalled in Congress, would prohibit the removal of election officials without cause and strengthens protections for election workers. It also requires the use of paper ballots, creating a paper trail to verify after an election, and sets minimum election standards around election rules. But even though Democrats have pledged they will find a way to pass the bill, they have yet to find a way around the filibuster to do so.
While Democrats try to find a way forward, Weiser, the Brennan Center expert, noted the Republicans campaign already appeared to be succeeding.
“We have vote suppression measures in place. We have qualified, professional election administrators across the country having left their positions,” she said. “We have candidates for election office at the gubernatorial level saying that they would refuse to certify election results if it didn’t turn out a certain way.
“We already have significant damage to our electoral system that’s already in place. That we’re already going to be living with.”