Beware Trump’s Election Deniers Sitting on Election Boards!

For the past four years, former U.S. President Donald Trump has been building a cult of election deniers who believe his false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

They don’t care that no one has ever presented a shred of credible evidence to support Trump’s blatantly bogus claim.

Notwithstanding the lack of evidence, 69% of Republicans, including Republican-leaning independents, have said they believe Joe Biden is an illegitimate president, a direct result of Trump’s massive disinformation campaign.

Election deniers are preparing to try to elect Trump at all costs, no matter who the voters choose. An all hands-on-deck legal effort will be required to stop this from happening.

The election deniers’s movement has spent years getting ready for 2024 with the goal of ensuring that a Republican is elected president.

According to a recent study by the Center for Media and Democracy, there are 102 election deniers on election boards in eight battleground states. These election deniers, the study found, have majority power in 15 counties in battleground states, including seven in the critical state of Pennsylvania.

Now they are moving into action, preparing to throw up various roadblocks to help elect Trump.

One of their key lines of attack is to delay and obstruct the certification of the winner in their state. Under the Electoral Count Reform Act—enacted in the aftermath of Trump’s attempted 2020 election coup—the deadline for a state to certify its electors is December 11. Failure to meet that deadline could mean the electoral votes in that state would not be considered in the final tally.

If that happens in one or more states, it could mean that Trump wins the electoral vote majority or alternatively that the race is thrown to the House of Representatives where Republicans are expected to control a majority of state delegations and elect Trump.

(The Constitution provides that if a presidential race ends up in the House, each state delegation gets one vote.)

In 2020, Trump, in his infamous phone call, pressured and threatened Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find 11,780 votes that would give Trump the win in Georgia. Raffensperger, a Republican, rejected Trump’s pressure.

Georgia is once again center stage.

Georgia’s State Board of Elections is controlled today by election deniers and has been adopting new last-minute election rules with no plausible justification other than to tilt the state for Trump.

The Georgia Board recently adopted a rule requiring counties to hand count the ballots cast in the state to determine whether the number of paper ballots matches the voting machine count. While small rural counties may be able to comply with this burdensome last-minute requirement, large urban areas, which favor Democrats, don’t have the capacity to do this kind of paper ballot counting. Nor is it necessary.

The conservative Republican attorney general warned that the rule is likely unlawful. The rule is expected to be challenged in court.

This ballot-counting rule follows another rule by the Georgia Board that requires counties to make “reasonable inquiries” into the balloting before certifying the results, another rule subject to abuse by election deniers seeking to obstruct certification. This rule is being challenged in court.

Meanwhile, in Mississippi, a ridiculous challenge has been made in federal court to a rule—similar to one in place in 20 states—that allows a state to count mailed-in ballots received up to five days after Election Day if the ballot is postmarked by Election Day. This challenge, with national implications, was argued Tuesday before a conservative three-judge panel.

Election deniers are preparing to try to elect Trump at all costs, no matter who the voters choose. An all hands-on-deck legal effort will be required to stop this from happening.

Fortunately, that effort is underway.

That effort is being led by former U.S. Solicitors General Seth Waxman and Donald Verrilli Jr., two of the nation’s premier Supreme Court and appellate advocates. Also leading the effort are Dana Remus, a former White House counsel, with Covington and Burling; Bob Bauer, a former White House counsel; and John Devany, a Partner at Perkins Coie. They and a team of dozens of lawyers are representing Vice President Kamala Harris and the DNC.

Waxman and Verrilli, along with a third former U.S. solicitor general, the late Walter Dellinger, led the successful defense of the 2020 presidential election results, which included overwhelming victories against the dozens of baseless efforts by Trump and his supporters to try to overturn the Biden victory.

We can be confident that the supremely skilled and talented Waxman and Verrilli with their impressive history of major legal successes, and the team of dedicated colleagues, will protect our elections in the courts this election season.