TRUMP'S EFFORTS EVOLVING TO A MOVEMENT AGAINST DEMOCRACY

 

…The American voting booth should not become as worthless at Donald Trump would like.

 

Some GOP candidates would prefer that elections could be challenged by their state legislatures

Not a single 2020 former candidate in Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia or Nevada, that were interviewed, was willing to say Biden had won the 2020 election.  In addition, many people have accepted the results of a recent Republican-backed audit in Arizona that, despite amateur mistakes and a number of falsehoods, actually wound up finding more votes for Biden.  Instead, many also said that any candidate should be allowed to request election reviews as many times as they want. In other words, the election results could continuously be called into question with no end in sight

The ultimate win for these candidates would be to put in place those secretaries of state, who oversee how elections are conducted in most states and who also sign off on the results.  More than any other category of elected official, secretaries of state could be instrumental in overturning the popular vote in their state.  This would be an unprecedented move in American history. It would also take those actions that throw election results into question.

Ahead of the 2022 elections, there are a number of viable Republican candidates in states that could decide the next presidential election who question whether Trump actually lost in 2020. And they are proposing big changes to how elections are run.

The Fix [The Financial Information eXchange (FIX)]  talked to some of these candidates or their campaigns in Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia and Nevada about what they would do to change elections in the United States if they were in charge. At the top of their list, it includes: Allowing nearly endless audits of election results.

“We need a real audit,” said Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.) in a statement. With Trump’s blessing, he is challenging Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger after Raffensperger refused Trump’s efforts to call the Georgia election for him. Georgia has undergone three separate audits, all of which confirmed that Biden won the state without any evidence of widespread fraud. Hice said he would go even further and appoint a special counsel to investigate the 2020 election, echoing something Trump toyed with doing at the federal level.

Biden also won Wisconsin, but Jay Schroeder, a Republican secretary of state candidate there, doesn’t believe it.  “We need to investigate to see if he won,” he said in an interview. “This is what I can’t understand: If someone wants to have an audit, and you think there is nothing there, why wouldn’t you let them do it?”

When pressed repeatedly, Schroeder eventually did say that a candidate’s ability to audit their loss should end 22 months after the election, which is the current law in his state of Wisconsin.

These pushes for audits come as bipartisan election experts warn that continuous reviews of election results don’t provide voters confidence.  What they do, is they erode it. There’s nothing wrong with a review of an election after the fact, to figure out ways to make it run smoother, said Trey Grayson, a former Republican secretary of state in Kentucky. But you want to catch any wrong results before they’re certified. “One of the worst things you can do is certify the winner and then discover something when it is too late to do anything about it,” he said.

“There’s nothing that compares with the hanging of an election,” said Wendy Weiser, who directs the Democracy Program with the Brennan Center, in an interview last year about this.

Trump’s attempts to overturn his election loss has centered on pressuring state lawmakers to help him. He fell short in part because legislatures set policies for how elections are run, but it’s not up to them to count votes and certify them. A number of GOP secretary of state candidates want to change that.

In Arizona, candidate Shawnna Bolick, a current Republican state lawmaker, introduced a bill that would create an “elections oversight” committee in the Republican-led legislature with the power to reject who the secretary of state certifies.

Bolick’s primary challenger, Mark Finchem, is a leading driver of a conspiracy theory that the election was stolen in Arizona’s second-largest county, Pima County. He is a GOP state House lawmaker and he introduced a bill to let Republican lawmakers get hold of voter data there. “I expect to see criminal prosecution out of it,” he said.  But of course, said without citing any evidence.

In Nevada, Republican candidate, Jim Marchant, said he would support changes to allow state legislatures to override the secretary of state’s certification of who won an election. “There should be oversight,” he said. This same Mr. Marchant unsuccessfully sued in 2020 to overturn his own loss in a congressional race.

Georgia’s Hice indicated in his statement that he supports something similar in his state.

In Wisconsin, a bipartisan election commissions oversees results, but The secretary of state Schroeder is campaigning to put that power back into the hands of the partisan secretary of state by asking the Republican legislature to approve that role.

This would give the state legislatures more power over certifying election results and would be a drastically different way to run them, “a new questionable era in election administration,” said Wendy Underhill, an elections expert with the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures.

State legislatures house some of the most partisan politicians in America.  While a secretary of state campaigns on running elections for voters of every persuasion, state lawmakers are held to no such expectation.  And most U.S States today have Republican run legislatures.

“It’s a great way to undermine confidence in elections,” Grayson, a former secretary of state in Kentucky, said.

“There are all sorts of reasons you need to have a check on state legislatures. Their unchecked power can get extreme,” Weiser with the Brennan Center said.

This is all happening as Trump is working on beefing up state legislatures with his loyalists, ahead of his possible 2024 presidential run.

In Wisconsin, a state lawmaker just introduced a resolution to overturn Trump’s loss there.  Trump has urged other Republicans to sign onto it. “Only one state senator needs to co-sponsor the resolution for it to be put to a vote in each chamber,” Trump said in a statement. “Which American Patriot from the State Senate will step forward?”  Trump is also endorsing candidates for the Michigan state legislature who have questioned his election loss.

Trump’s false election-fraud claims were underpinned by citing the changes to how people voted in 2020.  Because of the pandemic, voting by mail became widespread, as did expanded early voting and drop boxes for ballots. Trump and his allies used the uncertainty that comes with this somewhat new method of voting to question the results.

A number of Republican secretary of state candidates have said they would restrict voting by mail and they refuse to allow any changes to voting should another coronavirus variant or natural disaster or any other unforeseen circumstance make it difficult for people to go to the polls the way they normally do.

In Arizona, Republican state lawmaker Bolick, through her spokeswoman, said she would ensure “that rules are not changed at the last minute that may be in conflict with state law.”

But Grayson, Kentucky’s secretary of state, who successfully got legislation approved in Kentucky by allowing him to postpone an election in the case of a terrorist attack, said such flexibility is key. “When stuff happens … you need to be able to react. That’s not partisan,” he said. “That’s just good government.”

Once a kind of sleepy job, because of Trump’s false statements, election officials came under enormous pressure in 2020.  We asked candidates how they would handle a situation in which the president of the United States asks them to override the results they had just certified. A number indicated that they’d be open to hearing from the president.

“I would do everything in my power to ensure both sides feel confident about the election results,” Georgia’s Hice said in a statement.

Others insisted that there wouldn’t be any such pressure. Arizona candidate Bolick, through her spokeswoman, said she doesn’t believe Trump tried to overturn an election. “There was a peaceful transfer of power,” she insisted.  But we all know that Trump has never conceded the election and he still falsely says it was stolen.

Jim Marchant, in Nevada, insisted that he would stand up to the pressure.  That is despite the fact that people close to Trump urged him to run and are supporting his campaign. “I will do my job. I am going to do my job as a secretary of state to make sure that we have 100% fair and transparent elections, and it doesn’t matter what he says,” he said.

Kentucky’s Grayson said that while election officials take calls from campaigns all the time, these officials need to be realistic about the sway a president will have over them. “When the president of the United States calls you in your own party, asks you to do something, you’re a human being,” he said. “That’s tough call.”

The elections in the U.S. and our democracy are in the toughest position we’ve ever been in since the nation was formed.  Too many Americans have been falsely tainted by the former president and his followers.  All you need to do is look at all of those people that attacked the capitol on January 6^th.

The real Americans that still value our democracy need to stand up for this great nation.

If not, our nation is in serious trouble.

Copyright G. Ater 2021