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Get Ready Now: Republicans Will Refuse to Certify a Harris Win
Some darkness in honor of JVL. It’s important stuff. —A.B. Stoddard
The last two weeks—the unveiling of the Harris-Walz ticket, and Kamala Harris’s surge in the polls—feels like some surreal dream state. Everything has changed. Have you noticed Harris has pushed Donald Trump right out of the comfy lead he’s held for an entire year? He’s noticed. From FiveThirtyEight to RealClearPolitics—pick your polling average—they all now show Harris out in front after only two and a half weeks.
Trump is no longer on track to win the election—which he has been for more than six straight months. Instead, the momentum, money, voter registration, volunteering, grassroots organizing, polling, and online engagement all favor the Democrats and it looks now like Trump could easily lose.
But that won’t happen, because Trump doesn’t lose. He beat Joe Biden in 2020—remember? So if he’s not the rightful victor on November 5, an entire army of Republicans is ready to block certification of the election at the local level.
No need to worry about mayhem on January 6, 2025 when Congress meets in joint session; the election deniers plan to stop a result right away if it looks like Harris is winning. Their goal: Refuse to certify anywhere—even a county that Trump won—and prevent certification in that state, which prevents certification of the presidential election.
A Harris victory could become a nightmare.
An investigation by Rolling Stone identified “in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania . . . at least 70 pro-Trump election conspiracists currently working as county election officials who have questioned the validity of elections or delayed or refused to certify results.” Of those 70, 22 of them already have “refused or delayed certification” in recent past elections. Nationwide, Republicans have refused to certify results at least 25 times since 2020, in eight states—the most in Georgia.
The article describes social media posts from the zealots who have infiltrated election administration as showing “unapologetic belief in Trump’s election lies, support for political violence, themes of Christian nationalism, and controversial race-based views.”
There are more than enough such individuals in these key posts to bring us to a constitutional crisis.
“I think we are going to see mass refusals to certify the election” in November, Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias told Rolling Stone. “Everything we are seeing about this election is that the other side is more organized, more ruthless, and more prepared.”
Sit with that.
Then there is this. Trump’s self-destructive attacks on Georgia’s popular governor made the headlines from his Atlanta rally last Saturday, but he also singled out for praise three little-known Georgians—Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares, and Janelle King—calling them “pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.”
Who are Johnston, Jeffares, and King? They are three of the five members of Georgia’s State Election Board. Three days after Trump’s speech, this past Tuesday, those three Republicans approved a new rule requiring a “reasonable inquiry” prior to election certification that—while vague and undefined—could be exploited to delay certification and threaten the statewide election certification deadline of November 22.
The law in Georgia, where Trump and fourteen others are charged with plotting to overturn the 2020 election result, requires county election boards to certify results “not later than 5:00 P.M. on the Monday following the date on which such election was held”—so this year, by the evening of November 11. The secretary of state is then to certify the statewide results “not later than 5:00 P.M. on the seventeenth day” after the election, so November 22.
Across the country, the November election results will have to be certified in more than 3,000 counties, and all state results must be final by the time electors meet in each state on December 17. Members of county election boards are not tasked with resolving election issues; certification is mandatory and “ministerial,” not discretionary. Disputes over ballot issues are separate from the certification process—investigated and adjudicated by district attorneys, state election boards, and in court.
Election experts say the new rule could disrupt the entire process across the state by allowing local partisans to reject results. And Georgia appears to be at the center of Trump’s plans. Casting doubt on Fulton County, which makes up the bulk of Democratic votes in the state, will help him claim he won the Peach State as the rest of the results come in red.
But even without an explicitly permitted “inquiry” like the new Georgia rule provides, Republicans in other swing states still plan on acting at the county level to slow or stop certification. Because questioning the outcome at the very start of the process will create delay. Any doubt and confusion, and perhaps even violence, makes it easier to miss essential deadlines and can threaten the chance that the rightful winner prevails.
Election deniers also hope that sowing chaos might prompt GOP legislatures to intervene—in Georgia, Arizona, or Wisconsin for example—a dangerous scenario I wrote about in April.
With all that has transpired since November 3, 2020, why are we here again?
Four years later we must ask this question. Our entire country has been held hostage by Trump’s mental and emotional deficits. He doesn’t “lose.” He is unwell and cannot publicly acknowledge defeat. Democracy was vulnerable before Trump, but its fragility could be fatal because of him.
The Big Lie, born from his pathological insecurity, led to a failed coup and a deadly insurrection. We had hoped those two things would undo or, at least, diminish the power of the Big Lie. Yet it has only grown more potent and widespread. It is an article of faith in the GOP base, with polls estimating that roughly two-thirds of Republicans are bought in.
These voters know there was no “evidence” that passed legal muster in court in more than 60 separate cases.
They know multiple recounts and audits in swing states certified Biden the winner.
They know Trump’s own Department of Justice concluded the same and that his own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency called the election “the most secure in American history.”
But they cling to his lies, and to conspiracy, because Trump’s cult provides a sense of belonging more nourishing than truth, and more compelling than facts.
Most GOP elected representatives and leaders do not believe the Big Lie—after all, they never questioned their own victories or losses in 2020. But they are cowards, so to stay in power they have perpetuated Trump’s mass delusion through their silence or their bandwagoning—which Liz Cheney details in her enraging book Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning. Those named in her account of the aftermath of the 2020 election know what is coming this November if Trump loses, from House Speaker Mike Johnson on down.
So Trump knows there are millions among us who believe him when he says Democrats can only win if they cheat and who believe dark forces are at work to thwart him again. And Trump needs to be president again. He wants to get his criminal cases thrown out, and to stay out of jail.
There is nothing he won’t try.
Courts have already intervened to stop efforts like this. At least ten counties refused certification in the primaries in 2022, followed by two counties—in Arizona and Pennsylvania—refusing to certify general election results that year. They lost in court and the results were certified. Participants in fake elector schemes have been prosecuted.
In retrospect, those efforts look like initial probes—like a bank robber casing the joint, figuring out where the guards stand and the cameras are while planning the real heist. Elias wrote last week that “Republicans are building an election subversion war machine.” It sure doesn’t appear that the law is going to deter them from launching an unprecedented attack on our elections.
And the ways that the potential scale of the assault will test the legal system is, in and of itself, daunting. The Brennan Center for Justice wrote, “little academic attention has been paid to the mechanics of state certification processes, leaving many in the legal community bewildered by the recent string of attacks.”
The Washington Post reported in June that “in some states, election administrators have already identified voters in each county who could serve as plaintiffs in emergency lawsuits to force county boards to certify results. In others, state administrators are sending detailed instructions to county officials laying out the limits of their power to block certification.”
It’s crucial that these plans are widely publicized. And they can be. Just like Project 2025, which was virtually unheard of and is now in the forefront of the political debate. Putting a media spotlight on this issue will force Republican officials to address what they are well aware of and are refusing to call out.
Yesterday CBS News reported Biden said in his first interview since leaving the presidential race he is “not confident at all” there will be a peaceful transfer of power if Trump loses. Harris isn’t likely to talk about this in her campaign, so it’s critical that other high-profile surrogates do. President Obama, President Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and others must educate voters about the plot underway to force more public pressure and accountability on the process.
Every Republican must be asked about local certification of elections, electors honoring the popular vote of their state, preventing political violence—all of it. Repeatedly.
As Elias told an interviewer, there are things we can do, as citizens willing to invest some time, to take action.
This isn’t a threat from abroad. This year—and likely for years to come—we will all have to continue to fight against what our fellow Americans are doing to subvert elections. Because without free elections—and facts and truth—we cannot be a free country.
We are forewarned.
