Election deniers are ready for next week. Are we?

IF YOU BELIEVE DONALD TRUMP, his campaign, his allies and most pollsthe candidate who staged a coup and incited an insurrection will win back the presidency next week.

This is very likely.

But just in case he doesn’t, the Trump world has relied heavily on the narrative that he is invincible and that Kamala Harris is too stupid to have a chance, a message delivered Sunday night during his rally at Madison Square Garden was repeated.

There’s a reason for that. If the polls are wrong and the vice president outperforms and wins, Trump wants his followers to believe the election was stolen from him againas he and his allies plan to go further than last time to prevent his defeat.

The disruption is already underway. Monday someone illuminated a ballot box on fire and ballots destroyed in a swing district hosting a competitive House race in Vancouver, Washington. It was the third incident in the region in recent weeks.

There could be more to come before Trump declares victory on election night – a declaration he will make regardless of the outcome, just as he did last time. And it won’t take that much effort to cause massive disruption on Election Day. Intimidation at polling stations to intimidate and discourage voters – it’s cheap. Bomb threats on precincts in heavily Democratic areas like Fulton County, Georgia – just a phone call away. And what are these 200,000 poll workers and poll watchers that the Republican National Committee has recruited to protect “election integrity” up to? Polling stations can easily be closed if they become a place of chaos and unrest.

Then, once the voting is over, there will be another MAGA contingency: if it looks like Harris will win, there will be Republicans in swing states. ready to refuse to certify their provincial results. This could happen even in counties where Trump won handily: the goal is to create delay and doubt about the outcome. While the courts will likely eventually force the candidates to certify the results, a missed deadline by the county or state could be enough to prevent the certification of a Harris victory. If states fail to finalize their results when they are supposed to, the Electoral College vote on December 17 could be disrupted, resulting in delays that would cast further doubt on the election’s legitimacy and would give rise to a real possibility that the elections The elections will be decided by Congress.

And like I said, there are Republicans who are ready to do their part to help make this happen on every battlefield.

In six swing states, “nearly 70 pro-Trump election conspirators are currently serving as county election officials who have questioned the validity of elections or delayed or denied results,” according to Justin Glawe’s reporting for Rolling stone in July. Moreover, Republicans have refused to certify the results at least twenty-five times in eight states since 2020—most often in Georgia, where it has happened seven times.

A long one New York Times report on the election denial movement, election officials willing to obstruct the results in their counties described this: “For them, it was not a partisan gamble to go so far as to block the certification; it was a patriotic duty. Although it might technically be illegal, it complied with a higher law.” Someone who believes that – and acts on it – could prevent a Harris victory, he explains Times reporter Jim Rutenberg. “A determined administrator could attempt to essentially run out the clock, setting off a chain reaction of legal maneuvers that would culminate” in the elections decided in the House of Representatives and the Senate – “each of which could happen on January 6, 2025 are controlled by Republicans.”

Marc Elias, one of the Harris campaign’s lead lawyers, wrote in August that “Republicans are building an election subversion war machine.”

And Democrats are prepared. The Harris campaign has done just that more than 400 lawyers currently finalizing draft pleadings and memos in anticipation of any legal contingency. They are part of a much larger network that the party has spent much of the past year setting up; it includes 10,000 attorneys across the country prepared to address issues and protect the vote at the district level. They expect they will have to respond to lawsuits seeking to halt Election Day voting, reject mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, and stop the counting of provisional ballots, Elias told the WashingtonPost. Republicans are already involved in more than 130 lawsuits in 26 states.

Once the county results are certified, either immediately or after a lawsuit, state certification will likely go more smoothly. Georgia Republican Governor Brian Kemp did not steal the election for Trump in 2020, and he probably won’t do so this time either. Arizona, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Michigan have Democratic governors. Only Nevada has a GOP governor.

At that point, Trump will take action to push Republican Party lawmakers to create fraudulent lists of “alternative” voters. His party controls both chambers in North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin. Pennsylvania is divided; Republicans control the Senate. Although states have certified electors based on popular votes, Republicans in state legislatures could argue that the results cannot be trusted and submit new results, claiming that they are being granted the power to choose electors under the U.S. constitution.

That shifts the burden of contesting the results to Congress, where there would be ample opportunity for chaos.

Columnist David French, also a lawyer, wrote Thursday in the New York Times that Trump’s path is actually much more difficult than it was four years ago and that the alternative voters would not pass muster in court. With reference to last year’s ruling in Moore to Harper‘, he wrote: ‘An inter-ideological majority of six to three rejected the core of the doctrine of independent state legislatures. It ruled that federal elections were still subject to state judicial review and state constitutional law; State legislatures should not go rogue and flout existing state laws or ignore state court rulings.”

But we can’t know how far Republicans will be willing to go.

There will be unbearable party-wide pressure on any Republican who tries to hold the line and protect the outcome, not to mention the death threats that would come their way from the more extremes among Trump’s angry supporters.

While Democrats could win back The majority in the House of Representatives this year could prevent a new majority from being sworn in on January 3 before the January 6 certification. If that is indeed the case and Mike Johnson is re-elected chairman on January 3, could he confirm a Harris victory three days later?

In an exhaustive report titled ‘The very real scenario in which Trump loses and still takes power’ Politics described it as follows:

If Republicans, through speaker maneuvering, prevent either candidate from gaining a majority in the Electoral College, it would trigger so-called contingent elections in the House of Representatives, with each state delegation getting one vote. Republicans control 26 state delegations to Democrats’ 22, with two states evenly divided. The Republican Party would prefer to maintain that advantage, and Republicans would almost certainly choose to elect Trump president.

That could be Trump’s ultimate goal. On Sunday, Trump himself made it during his rally at Madison Square Garden sound as he and Johnson discussed how the speaker will ensure a Trump victory in the House of Representatives: “And I think we’ll do very well in the House with our little secret, right? Our little secret has a big impact. He and I have a secret. We will tell you what it is when the race is over.”

Republicans have worked hard to prepare for this, investing heavily in the Big Lie, radicalizing their voters, hiring lawyers, recruiting “election integrity” volunteers and ratcheting up the rhetoric. Anything short of a Trump victory will set this all in motion, and the Republicans will put this country through something unprecedented, dangerous, and damaging.

This is no small secret.