Vox: How election deniers could sway the 2024 election
Vox: How election deniers could sway the 2024 election
Republican officials in key states stood in the way of former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.
But this year, according to recent Washington Post reporting, 54 of 87 GOP candidates running for positions with power over the way elections are certified in presidential battlegrounds have falsely claimed that the 2020 election was fraudulent, and say they would have done things differently. The next time a presidential candidate seeks out help overturning an election, they could find willing accomplices in these candidates.
Though there are candidates who have peddled Trump’s election lies in every projected 2024 battleground, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Arizona present three scenarios for how bad actors — as secretaries of state or state attorneys general, in governors’ mansions or in state legislatures — could abuse their power over certifying elections to subvert a result they personally disagree with. …
Trump allies are targeting the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which administers elections and has the authority to investigate and prosecute violations of election laws. It was established in 2015 by the Republican-controlled state legislature and was intended to function similarly to the Federal Elections Commission, with three Republican and three Democratic appointees.
The commission has significant discretion over how elections are conducted, and plays a role in certifying election results. In 2020, after Republicans sought recounts in the large, heavily Democratic counties of Milwaukee and Dane based on false claims of fraud, the commission voted 5-1 to certify President Joe Biden’s victory.
State Republicans have since called for the dissolution of the commission, whose policies, they falsely argue, led to fraudulent votes that cost Trump reelection.
“The problem for Republicans is that the Wisconsin Elections Commission was pretty scrupulous. It did not tilt elections towards Republicans like they thought it would,” said Jay Heck, executive director of the democracy group Common Cause Wisconsin.
State Rep. Amy Loudenbeck, the Republican nominee for Wisconsin secretary of state, is one of those Republicans seeking to dismantle the commission and to re-empower the secretary of state’s office to preside over the state’s elections for the first time since the 1970s. (Before the commission, there was the Government Accountability Board, which also ran elections.)
If a Republican secretary of state presided over elections, they could tighten up rules around voting, from identification requirements to who could cast an absentee ballot and where they could drop it off — policies that, individually, might not cause a huge drop-off in voting, but together, amount to “death by a thousand cuts,” Heck said. And, if the secretary of state did assume the commission’s current power to certify the election results, they could try to disrupt that process as well.