The Club PUBlication 09/02/2024

Dems wary of plans to subvert vote
By AMY GARDNER and YVONNE WINGETT SANCHEZ
The Washington Post

CHICAGO 
As invigorated Democrats celebrated Vice President Kamala Harris's nomination, some of them were doing so with a wary eye on new developments in what they fear could be efforts by former President Donald Trump's allies to create doubt about the election and muddy the result should it not go his way.

​In Atlanta, the Georgia State Election Board on Monday approved a rule that critics said would empower county election officials to withhold certification of results without justification, potentially thwarting a popular result.

The board's Trump-supporting majority also signaled plans to adopt nearly a dozen additional rules in coming weeks despite warnings from state and local officials that the lateness of the calendar all but guaranteed confusion and mistakes.

Also this past week, election officials in at least three battleground states received nearly identical letters from the American Conservative Union explaining its plan to monitor ballot drop boxes and scrutinize those using them to vote.

The letters prompted concerns from election officials about the possibility of voter intimidation.

"The whole thing is an absurd sham to cover up direct efforts to intimidate voters by a bunch of CPAC-recruited vigilantes," said Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes. The effort's purpose, he added, is "to intimidate voters — and we absolutely will not be cooperating with them."

In Wisconsin, meanwhile, the Texas-based group "True the Vote", which peddled false claims of widespread ballot fraud after the 2020 election, is teaming with sympathetic sheriffs to monitor polling locations and drop boxes. True the Vote's founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, said in a text that the program is "mainly focused" in Wisconsin "but we do have a scalable program."

With Democrats' renewed optimism has come concern among some that the newly competitive race will invite election interference. Trump has said that the only way Democrats can win is by cheating, and he has not committed to accepting the results if he loses.

Democratic election officials and nonpartisan democracy advocates gathered in Chicago last week to assess the threat — and to explain what they are doing to address it.

Their greatest worry, several said at an event hosted by the Brennan Center for Justice, is the possibility of civil unrest.

Even if efforts to subvert election results fail, they said, an army of angry Trump supporters could resort to violence just as they did at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

"Those who are trying to destroy our election system don't believe in the fairness of the game," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said.

" They don't believe in letting the people decide."
Those pushing for tighter election rules and more surveillance of voting say the steps they are advocating will increase public confidence in the November results.

"My interest is in the cleanest, most transparent accountability rules under the existing laws that I can get before voting starts," said Ken Cuccinelli, former Homeland Security deputy secretary under Trump and a former Virginia attorney general who now leads the Election Transparency Initiative and is supporting many of the new rules being adopted in Georgia.

"I want to see good rules in place before the voting starts, and I want to see them followed. And that didn't necessarily happen everywhere in 2020."

Trump's efforts to overturn the results in 2020 centered on the six most competitive battleground states that year, where Biden's razor-thin victories fueled conspiracy theories about forged ballots, intentional miscounts and other false claims of fraud.
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Democrats and voting rights advocates said they are paying particularly close attention to efforts to empower local election officials not to certify results, which could impede the process of declaring a winner and create an opportunity for violence or disorder by stoking unsubstantiated worries that fraud tainted the election.