I’m glad a single catch-all ‘election nightmare scenarios’ thread has been started. The topic has cropped up in several separate threads, and it will be handy to have a single place to address concerns. I will share some material I’ve already written in other threads.
OK, to start off … cross-posted from the “Trump: In 4 years we’ll have it fixed” thread:
[From] the Stanford Law & Policy Review (Stanford University): Certification and Non-Discretion: A Guide to Protecting the 2024 Election (PDF, 48 pages, free to access).
From the article’s abstract:
While efforts to impede [election] certification are not new, never before have they been deployed on such a large and coordinated scale. For this reason, little academic attention has been paid to the mechanics of state certification frameworks. This Article fills that gap to demonstrate why, and how, state certification frameworks can combat the ongoing threats against them. It begins by providing a detailed overview of how election certification works and how recent attacks on the process have targeted and disrupted certification using false claims of widespread election fraud. It then delves into the rich but often overlooked history of certification as a non-discretionary duty to demonstrate that those attacks flouted hundreds of years of well-established American legal history; recognizing that discretion created opportunities for crises and election fraud, early courts and legislatures purposefully shaped certification into a mandatory, non-discretionary duty. The Article concludes with a roadmap for election officials, candidates, and advocates to resolve future attacks on the certification process in eight key battleground states likely to play significant roles in the 2024 election cycle.
One of the authors of the Stanford article, Lauren Miller Karalunas, wrote a brief synopsis [of the Stanford Law piece above - b] for the Brennan Center for Justice defiantly titled Election Denial Can’t Overcome Election Certification Protections.
…
Cross-posted from the “Trump Pressured Georgia Official to ‘Find’ Enough Votes” thread:
The local-level rat-fuckery [viz the “election nightmare scenarios” of the OP’s title - b] is not going unopposed. That’s the whole point of Democracy Docket and Marc Elias’s advance efforts. Most of the potential bad actors are already exposed (Rolling Stone article , Rachel Maddow , etc.) and the remedial filings, lawsuits, and countersuits to overcome the bad-faith officials are already drafted.
There’s an idea floating out there that a some number of local officials somewhere can summarily “refuse to certify” and suddenly that whole state’s election edifice comes crashing down. And that it will happen in every single swing state, and that will be it – the election is then thrown to the House! Thrown to the Supreme Court! That’s just not how it’s going to go down
Same thread, seventeen posts up:
Media coverage of election-denying officials have greatly exaggerated how much impact individual refusals to certify can really have. Significant procedural delays in election certification can’t be effected by single and small-group actors. Remedies already exist and the mousetraps are already sprung (see @Aspenglow ’s post above). No one’s being caught off-guard this time around.
Lastly, @Aspenglow happened to drop this very helpful link into the thread: