The GOP’s attack on election integrity has already begun

If you needed just one fact to show that in the world’s largest democracy, one of the two major parties is perversely aiming to suppress and even undermine the vote, you couldn’t do better: the senior adviser to the “Election” of the Republican National Committee Integrity Team” – Orwellian duplicity brought to life – is a criminal defendant in the Arizona case against 18 Republicans who tried to overturn the state’s vote for Joe Biden in 2020.

But unfortunately there are so many more such facts, and they raise concerns about the post-election chaos that Donald Trump and his party unleashed four years ago.

As one Republican involved in pre-Trump presidential campaigns put it to me when it came to supporting our electoral system, “Trump has put the party in bad shape.”

Republicans’ belief in systemic fraud by Democrats is dangerous to democracy and has now become an article of faith. Witness how elected officials in 2024 are still dodging reporters’ questions about the winner in 2020 for fear of angering Trump and alienating the party’s voters. “All they want to do is cheat,” Trump said said of Democrats at a recent rally in Wisconsin. Worryingly, two-thirds of Republicans say they would trust Trump to accept the results next month, far more than they would trust a government-certified result, an August study said Opinion poll by Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

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Since 2020, red states have enacted voting restrictions under the guise of “election integrity,” but fraud is the case anything but non-existent. They have introduced new ID requirements and restricted mail-in ballots, drop boxes and just about every measure aimed at increasing participation and providing convenience to stressed Americans — and especially minorities, students, big-city voters and generally all groups leaning Democratic. Drop boxes have been a target of Republicans, particularly in Wisconsin, where U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde is running asked at a campaign event: “Who is watching how many illegal ballots are stuffed in?”

Already Millions of voters have cast early ballots, just as state and national Republican groups are tracking Dozens of lawsuits nationwide challenge to local and state election rules and practices, including how these early mail-in ballots are counted. You want to throw away some formalities, such as: Such as missing a date on an envelope, which have nothing to do with the integrity of the ballots, and throwing away any that arrive after Election Day even though they were postmarked beforehand.

Read more: Where you can vote in person or by mailbox in the 2024 election

Republicans are fighting to restrict mail-in voting even as the party urges its own supporters to vote that way. This is consistent with Trump’s false claims that such a vote was the case “corrupt.” Why? Simply because most postal votes come from Democrats. In contested Pennsylvania, for example, it is the Democrats request more than twice as many mail-in ballots as Republican voters.

Many of the lawsuits and other challenges before local election boards and legislatures will not succeed, election experts agree, just as the numerous lawsuits filed after Trump’s loss in 2020 failed all the way to the Supreme Court. The judges on Monday rejected a petition from Republican secretaries of state, members of Congress and Pennsylvania state lawmakers opposing a modest Biden executive order as unconstitutional; Its provisions include time off for federal employees who want to volunteer as much-needed nonpartisan poll workers.

Read more: Opinion: Much of the world is afraid of another Trump presidency. Here’s why

But some challenges will remain. Meanwhile, the legal battles keep election lawyers playing ball and leaving voters and local governments perplexed about the exact rules. What’s different from 2020, and worrisome, is that Trump’s grassroots allies have had years since then to heed his wingman Steve Bannon’s 2021 call to take control of the electoral colleges where votes are first counted and certified: “We’re going to take this back…” District by district.

The chairman of one such panel in Michigan’s key Macomb County is a Republican who implored Trump to fight to stay in office in 2020. A Republican on a North Carolina county panel has made substantive allegations that Democrats are trading in illegal votes. And Republican officials in some Pennsylvania counties have opposed certifying the results of previous elections. These are, among other things, the findings of a Reuters review by swing state election administrators.

Read more: Calmes: When Trump talks about “bad genes” and “racehorse theory,” he’s telling us who he is

Such election skeptics are unlikely to decide the outcome next month, but they could botch the job by refusing to certify votes for Kamala Harris in the short term and further eroding confidence in the election in the long term.

Pennsylvania and Georgia, two of the most hotly contested titles for Trump and Harris, are the states that worry election experts the most. MAGA loyalists exist at the state and county levels in Georgia. They control the state legislature and have authorized county officials to withhold voting certificates for any “appropriate investigation” they may conjure up; ordered the manual counting of ballots, a time-consuming and error-prone practice; and insisted on appointing poll watchers for Democratic-leaning Fulton County, home to Atlanta and a large number of black residents. Democrats and voter groups Are sue.

But here’s the good news: This time, Trump is not the president who could abuse his power to, for example, order the Justice Department or the Pentagon to intervene Confiscate voting machines. And JD Vance will not be the vice president presiding when Congress certifies the results on January 6th.

It should stay that way for the next four years.

@jackiekcalmes

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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.