Nearly a year after a pro-Trump mob tried to prevent a peaceful transfer of presidential power, a new report warns that Republican efforts to use election law to prevent any Democrat from winning the presidency are well underway.
According to an updated report issued Thursday by three pro-democracy and good government watchdog groups — States United Democracy Centre, Protect Democracy, and Law Forward — state legislators in 41 states have introduced bills to allow partisan hijacking and overturning of elections regardless of the will of voters, with 32 such bills having been enacted into law by the governments of 17 states.
“We’re seeing an effort to hijack elections in this country, and ultimately, to take power away from the American people. If we don’t want politicians deciding our elections, we all need to start paying attention,” States United CEO Joanna Lydgate said in a statement. ““The anti-democracy playbook is simple: change the rules, change the players, so they can change the outcome”.
Ms Lydgate added that the “coordinated efforts” taking place in legislatures across the US are rooted in the same lies told by former president Donald Trump and his allies in the run-up to the 6 January attack on the Capitol.
The report organises the anti-democratic efforts of GOP state legislators into four separate categories: “Legislative seizure of control over election results,” “legislative seizure of election responsibilities,” “legislative meddling in election minutiae,” and “legislative imposition of criminal or other penalties for election decisions”.
Of the four, it describes bills which fall into the first category as “the most worrying” because they would “create the serious prospect of an election crisis by giving state legislatures the opportunity to overturn election results they don’t like”.
State legislators in three states — Arizona, Missouri, and Nevada — have introduced these sorts of measures, which would “create opportunities for the legislatures in those states to hijack the process for certifying election results and choose a winner that does not correspond with the popular vote”.
In the days and weeks prior to the 6 January insurrection, prominent Republicans — including Mr Trump — pushed for legislatures to do exactly what these types of bills are designed to enable under a fringe constitutional theory known as the independent state legislature doctrine.
Proponents of this theory posit that state legislatures have the power to unilaterally reject the will of voters and appoint electors for the candidate of their choosing. Some have even suggested that election laws such as the federal Electoral Count Act — which require a state governor to certify electoral college results — are unconstitutional.
According to the report, such bills “would have significantly added to the turmoil that surrounded the election” and “raised the alarming prospect that the outcome of the presidential election could have been decided contrary to the will of the voters” if they’d been in place in 2020.
It also found that such pieces of legislation are “a transparent response” to the failure of state legislators in swing states to heed Mr Trump’s call to overturn the results of last year’s election by sending Republican electors to be counted.
Jess Marsden, counsel at Protect Democracy, said there has been a “active disinformation campaigns seeking to undermine trust in our elections and spread conspiracy theories” in the year since the 2020 election, as well as “attacks on the officials and civil servants who run our elections, and changes to state laws that will make it easier for politicians — who don’t like the results of elections — to overturn the will of the voters”.
“This troubling nationwide trend of state legislatures proposing legislation that intentionally interferes with the ability of state and local election officials to do their jobs is only gaining momentum and leading us down an anti-democratic path toward an election crisis,” she added.
