Fight to certify!
Dear Leading Ladies,
Don’t get us wrong. We are as excited and encouraged as anybody about the new energy and joy in the presidential race. But let’s be clear. Winning the popular vote, and even the electoral vote, are not the only challenges. There may still be threats to the election process as one candidate attempts to upend the ballot count in crucial states and then cause an insurrection that could make January 6, 2021, look like a playground tiff.
As Rachel Maddow said on Friday, August 9, during an interview with veteran democratic elections lawyer Marc Elias of Democracy Docket, in many areas there will undoubtedly be a refusal to certify election results. Already, Trump supporters are “implementing a strategy of embedding themselves in the administrative side of the election so they can subvert the certification of the outcome if it is not in Trump’s favor,” according to Elias. The fear among many is that this challenge to the election process is potentially more dangerous than in 2020 because the people involved now are better organized.
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“They might have tried to subvert the results in a handful of places in 2020 and 2022, but this year, they will try to subvert them all, setting the stage now for what’s to come in November,” Elias wrote recently in an article on Democracy Docket. With fewer than 100 days until the election, Republicans are building an election subversion war machine.”
It begins with a refusal to certify at the county level and then moves to the state, with the presumption that if it hasn’t been certificated at the lower level, there will be no justification to certify at the higher level. January 6, 2021, was, in fact, the frightening culmination of the certification dispute. In 2022, we saw the refusal to certify in Cochise County in Arizona and several counties in Pennsylvania.
“Over the course of the last year,” according to Elias, “Republicans have become bolder in their plans to subvert the election results in 2024. They now speak more openly about the need to control the certification process. They litigate more aggressively to be able to subvert election results. They enact new laws and rules explicitly for this purpose.”
On Monday, Maddow wrote in the New York Times, the Georgia State Election Board approved a rule that “gives election officials in each of the state’s 159 counties the option to delay or refuse certification in order to make a ‘reasonable inquiry’ into the results.” There is no explanation of what a reasonable inquiry is.
Maddow suggests that in a possible scenario, the November elections in the battleground states could come down to one state, perhaps Georgia. Then a “reasonable inquiry” could be made that, under new federal law, could last until December 12. If there were, hypothetically, a refusal to certify the results by then, and no party had the requisite number of electoral votes to claim the presidency, the decision would go to the House of Representatives. Yes, that could happen.
Make no mistake. The efforts to subvert legitimate voting results is not a haphazard endeavor. According to Docket, “They have a constellation of well-funded legal groups supplanting these efforts with unlimited money and grassroots volunteers. They are sending their lawyers into courthouses around the country to lay the groundwork for their anti-democratic plans.”
What can we do? At the higher level, lawyers can take cases to court. And they are. Average voters still have some power, however, according to Elias and Maddow. We can talk about the threat to election certification among our friends, families, and colleagues so that it becomes more widely known. We can post information on social media, attend local canvas boards, learn more about our local election boards, and volunteer to work at the polls. Elias maintains that every citizen has a role to play in making this issue known and out in the open. Only then can officials be held accountable and can democracy prevail through our elections.
So, yes, we are excited about the new energy on the political scene. The new optimism among young voters, women, people of color. We are beginning to feel confident that more people from more walks of life are going to come out to vote. Now, we just have to make sure that their votes will be counted.
All the best,
Therese (she/her/hers)
Judy (she/her/hers)
Didi (she/her/hers)
Leading Ladies Executive Team