What Happens When Republicans Simply Refuse to Certify Democratic Wins?


   [1]washingtonmonthly.com - David Atkins, Bill Scher, Emily Crockett,
   Chris Matthews, Sally Satel, Garrett EppsMay 16, 2021

What Happens When Republicans Simply Refuse to Certify Democratic Wins?


   [2]washingtonmonthly.com - David Atkins, Bill Scher, Emily Crockett,
   Chris Matthews, Sally Satel, Garrett Epps

  [136b1850f4916e77cbee1.jpg] [AP21047771810756-scaled.jpg]

  Violent rioters supporting President Donald Trump, storm the Capitol in
  Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)

  What will the institutions of liberal democracy do when Republican
  officials simply refuse to concede Democratic victories? The question
  isn’t as far-fetched as it may seem, and the reckoning may be coming
  far sooner than most expect.

  The entire left-leaning political world has spent the months after the
  2020 election obsessed over the fairness of elections, and conservative
  attempts to rig the vote through gerrymandering and voter suppression.
  This is for good reason, of course: Republicans know they lack the
  support to win majority support in a fair contest, but believe they
  have the right to rule nonetheless for reasons that ultimately boil
  down to white supremacy, religious dominionism and antiquated
  patriarchal beliefs. So Republicans have been[3] busy passing bills to
  restrict voting among young people and non-whites, while doing their
  best to ensure that exurban conservative whites continue to be
  dramatically and unfairly overrepresented in the House, Senate and
  Electoral College.

  But there’s another even more [4]sinister trend among conservative
  politicians that deserves greater attention: an unwillingness to
  concede any electoral victory by a Democrat as legitimate, and an
  eagerness to [5]punish any Republican elected official who concedes the
  will of the voters. The Big Lie that Trump really won the election is
  now [6]canon among a majority of Republican voters. Any Republicans who
  refuses to toe the line is branded a heretic, and elections officials
  who dared to certify Biden’s win are being censured or stripped of
  their power. Arizona Republicans have sponsored a [7]bogus “audit” of
  the election full of crackpot conspiracy theories, and Republican
  legislatures have been busy taking control of both running and
  certifying elections out of the hands of county official in
  Democratic-run cities and counties. The context of the January 6th
  insurrection at the Capitol was the attempt by Congressional
  Republicans to refuse to certify the Electoral College tally, in the
  hopes of sending the election back to gerrymandered Republican state
  legislatures, thus handing Trump a win as part of a anti-democratic
  coup. It was a physical coup attempt designed to intimidate Congress
  into enforcing a legislative coup. Republicans who refused to back the
  latter are facing steep primary challenges.

  It’s hard to overstate how dangerous this is, and what its consequences
  might entail in the very near future. As Greg Sargent [8]notes, the
  “GOP appears to be plunging headlong into a level of full-blown
  hostility to democracy that has deeply unsettling future
  ramifications.”

  Biden’s electoral college win was only certified because enough
  Republican secretaries of state and county election board officials did
  their duty to democracy and resisted pressure to thwart the will of the
  voters. Every lever of Republican power has since been wielded to
  punish them. Minor county board officials have been [9]receiving
  organized harassment and death threats. Georiga Secretary of State
  Raffensperger is not only facing a major primary challenge, he was also
  [10]stripped of his power to certify the election in the future. Every
  Republican not already committed to preserving their power by any means
  necessary has been put on notice that if they do not cooperate they
  will be physically threatened and politically replaced.

  So what happens in 2024 if President Biden or Vice President Harris win
  the Electoral College, but local Republicans on county boards with
  majority Democratic votes refuse to certify the election; when state
  legislatures who have seized control of certification refuse to certify
  their state tallies; when a potential Republican majority in the House
  of Representatives refuses to certify the Electoral College tally? What
  happens when they refuse to certify Democratic wins in purple state
  Senate races, throwing control of the Upper Chamber into limbo and
  chaos? What happens if Biden/Harris wins the popular vote by 8 million
  votes and 30 electoral college votes, only to see Republicans in states
  like Georgia and Wisconsin decide that their GOP legislatures will send
  electors for Trump or Tucker Carlson or Josh Hawley instead? What
  happens if Democrats legitimately add to their lead in the Senate, only
  to see Republicans refuse to certify those tallies as well, keeping GOP
  Senators in place for the next session?

  The short answer is that the matter would go to the courts. The clear
  rule of law says that state legislatures [11]cannot overrule the will
  of the voters. But if the vote isn’t officially certified, there is no
  official will of the voters. There are laws stating that elections must
  be certified by certain dates, but there a dearth of precedent around
  what happens if they don’t. And given the Trump administration’s
  stacking of the lower courts and the wildly conservative imbalance on
  the Supreme Court, it’s not clear that the outcome would favor the
  preservation of democracy. Nor is it clear that the matter would be
  resolved in time to prevent civil conflict–or, in fact, that
  Republicans in the state or federal legislative branches would honor
  the Court’s authority should it side against them.

  A Republican Party hostile to democracy can use America’s creaky
  Constitutional system to create a series of unprecedented roadblocks to
  majority rule. Not just by suppressing the vote or drawing unfair
  districts, but by refusing to accept the vote itself. The result could
  throw the nation into political violence unseen since the days of Ku
  Klux Klan terrorism if not the Civil War itself.

  There are ways of addressing these problems. The role of certifying
  elections can be taken out of the hands of either local or state
  partisan officials and given to independent judicial boards, electoral
  courts and elections commissions as in many other developed
  democracies. The electoral college can be bypassed by the [12]National
  Popular Vote. We can strengthen laws around the requirement to certify
  elections per the tabulated results, and increase the transparency and
  security of those results by requiring paper trails and open source
  software on voting machines. We can end the gerrymandering that allows
  anti-democracy conservatives to control legislatures and House
  delegations in states where the majority of the population votes
  against them. We can stop the end-run tactics used to take elections
  administration out of the hands of local officials secretaries of state
  and put them under the thumb of partisan legislatures, and make it
  harder for legislatures to send separate slates of electors.

  But to do almost any of those things would require at a minimum ending
  the filibuster. If Republican attempts at voter suppression and
  gerrymandering are not enough to spur Senators Sinema and Manchin to
  take appropriate action, then perhaps the threat of ending democracy
  itself might. The Senate won’t be a very collegial place if the country
  is melting down in violence from an anti-majoritarian coup.

  And no, that’s not an exaggeration. Everything we’re seeing from the
  Republican Party is pointing directly to it in 2024.

  Source [13]washingtonmonthly.com
  Made by [14]@chotamreaderbot
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References

  1. https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/05/08/what-happens-when-republicans-simply-refuse-to-certify-democratic-wins/
  2. https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/05/08/what-happens-when-republicans-simply-refuse-to-certify-democratic-wins/
  3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/voting-restrictions-republicans-states/
  4. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/05/liz-cheney-ouster-gop-leadership-future-stolen-election/
  5. https://www.vox.com/22420764/liz-cheney-trump-republicans-democracy-2024
  6. https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/majority-republicans-still-believe-2020-election-was-stolen-donald-trump
  7. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/arizona-audit-2020-election-gop-maricopa-county/
  8. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/05/liz-cheney-ouster-gop-leadership-future-stolen-election/
  9. https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-election-threats/website-targeting-u-s-election-officials-draws-attention-of-intelligence-agencies-idUSKBN28K34F
 10. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22368044/georgia-sb202-voter-suppression-democracy-big-lie
 11. https://www.justsecurity.org/73274/no-state-legislatures-cannot-overrule-the-popular-vote/
 12. https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/
 13. https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/05/08/what-happens-when-republicans-simply-refuse-to-certify-democratic-wins/
 14. https://telegram.me/chotamreaderbot?start=from_telegraph

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