‘Slow-motion insurrection’ as Republicans eye power grab
We’re not just trying to change the election with Trump. We’re trying to dig into the next election and change irregularities. GOP Senator Alberta Darling
In the weeks leading up to the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, a handful of Americans — wellknown politicians, obscure local bureaucrats — stood up to block thenPresident Donald Trump’s unprecedented attempt to overturn a free and fair vote of the American people.
In the year since, Trump-aligned Republicans have worked to clear the path for next time.
In battleground states and beyond, Republicans are taking hold of the once-overlooked machinery of elections.
While the effort is incomplete and uneven, outside experts on democracy and Democrats are sounding alarms, warning that the United States is witnessing a “slow-motion insurrection” with a better chance of success than Trump’s failed power grab in 2020.
They point to a mounting list of evidence: Several candidates who deny Trump’s loss are running for offices that could have a key role in the election of the next president in 2024. In Michigan, the Republican Party is restocking members of obscure local boards that could block approval of an election.
In Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the GOP-controlled legislatures are backing open-ended “reviews” of the 2020 election, modelled on a deeply flawed look-back in Arizona. The efforts are poised to fuel disinformation and anger about the 2020 results for years to come.
All this comes as the Republican Party has become more aligned behind Trump, who has made denial of the 2020 results a litmus test for his support.
Sixteen GOP governors have signed laws making it more difficult to vote. An Associated Press-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research poll showed that two-thirds of Republicans do not believe Democrat Joe Biden was legitimately elected as president.
The result, experts say, is that another baseless challenge to an election has become more likely, not less.
“It’s not clear that the Republican Party is not willing to accept defeat anymore,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and coauthor of the book How Democracies Die.
“The party itself has become an anti-democratic force.”
American democracy has been flawed and manipulated by both parties since its inception.
Millions of Americans — black people, women, Native Americans and others — have been excluded from the process.
Both Republicans and Democrats have written laws rigging the rules in their favour.
This time, experts argue, is different: Never in the country’s modern history has a major party sought to turn the administration of elections into a partisan act.
Republicans who sound alarms are struggling to be heard by their own party and are often dismissed as party apostates.
Others have cast the election denialism as little more than a distraction.
But some local officials, the people closest to the process and its fragility, are pleading for change.
At a recent news conference in Wisconsin, Kathleen Bernier, a GOP state senator and former elections clerk, denounced her party’s efforts to seize control of the election process.
“These made-up things that people do to jazz up the base is just despicable and I don’t believe any elected legislator should play that game,” said Bernier.
Bernier’s view is not shared by the majority of the Republicans who control the state Legislature in Wisconsin, one of a handful of states that Biden carried but Trump wrongly claims he won.
Early in 2021, Wisconsin Republicans ordered their Legislative Audit Bureau to review the 2020 election. That review found no significant fraud.
In November, an investigation by the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty came to the same conclusion.
Still, many Republicans are convinced something went wrong. They point to how the non-partisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, which the GOP-led Legislature and then-Republican governor created eight years ago to run the state’s elections, changed guidance for local elections officers to make voting easier during the pandemic.
That’s led to a struggle for control of elections between the state Legislature and the commission.
“We feel we need to get this straight for people to believe we have integrity,” said GOP Senator Alberta Darling, who represents the conservative suburbs north of Milwaukee. “We’re not just trying to change the election with Trump. We’re trying to dig into the next election and change irregularities.”
Republicans are also remaking the way elections are run in other states. In Georgia, an election bill signed last year by the GOP governor gave the Republican-controlled General Assembly new powers over the state board of elections, which controls its local counterparts.
Meanwhile, Trump supporters are signing up for local election jobs in droves.
In Michigan, the GOP has focused on the state’s county boards of canvassers. The little-known committees’ power was briefly in the spotlight in November of 2020, when Trump urged the two Republican members of the board overseeing Wayne County, home to Democratic-bastion Detroit, to vote to block certification of the election.
After one of the Republican members defied Trump, local Republicans replaced her with Robert Boyd, who told the Detroit Free Press that he would not have certified Biden’s win in 2020.
A similar swap — replacing a traditional Republican with one who parroted Trump’s election lies — occurred in Macomb County, the state’s third most populous county.
The Detroit News in October reported that Republicans had replaced their members on boards of canvassers in eight of Michigan’s 11 most populous counties
Michigan officials say that if boards of canvassers don’t certify an election they can be sued and compelled to do so. Still, that process could cause chaos and be used as a rallying cry behind election disputes.
“They’re laying the groundwork for a slow-motion insurrection,” said Mark Brewer, an election lawyer and former chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party.
The state’s top election official, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, warned: “The movement to cast doubt on the 2020 election has now turned their eyes . . . to changing the people who were in positions of authority and protected 2020.”
Trump has been clear about his intentions: He is seeking to oust statewide officials who stood in his way and replace them with allies.
In Arizona, state Rep. Mark Finchem’s bid to be secretary of state has unnerved many Republicans, given that he hosted a day-long hearing in November 2020 that featured Trump adviser Rudolph Giuliani.
Former news anchor Kari Lake, who repeats Trump’s election falsehoods, is running to succeed Republican Governor Doug Ducey, who stood up to Trump’s election-year pressure and is barred from another term.
In Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Democratic governors have been a major impediment to the GOP’s effort to overhaul elections. Most significantly, they have vetoed new rules that Democrats argue are aimed at making it harder for people of colour to vote.
Governors have a significant role in US elections: They certify the winners in their states, clearing way for the appointment of Electoral College members. That raises fears Trumpfriendly governors could try to certify him — if he were to run in 2024 and be the GOP nominee — as the winner of their state’s electoral votes regardless of the vote count.
But Democrats have had little success in laying out the stakes in these races. It’s difficult for voters to believe the system could be vulnerable, said Daniel Squadron of The States Project, a Democratic group that tries to win state legislatures.
“The most motivated voters in America today are those who think the 2020 election was stolen,” he said.
“Acknowledging this is afoot requires such a leap from any core American value system that any of us have lived through.”