The courts provide the likeliest mechanism by which election administration failures could be resolved, but litigation could also cause counties to miss statewide deadlines for certification - an unprecedented scenario that election administration experts say would trigger a crisis of democracy. “At the end of the day, whoever has the most votes, this state official shall declare them the winner…and at a certain point, it makes it much more difficult to talk about what checks and remedies exist.”
In Arizona, three of those candidates are in tight contests with Democrats for offices that play critical roles in the administration and oversight of elections.Īs governor, Lake would have the authority not only to sign off on the 2024 election, but also to approve any election-related laws passed by the increasingly rightwing state legislature.įollowing the 2020 certification, Finchem also introduced a bill in the Arizona House of Representatives that would have allowed the legislature to appoint its own presidential electors, a move blocked by the then Arizona Republican House Speaker Rusty Bowers.Īccording to Derek Tisler, counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice’s Democracy Program, there are few legal mechanisms by which officials involved in certification can be held to account. That is in part because, in midterm elections taking place next week, Trump has endorsed more than 100 Republican candidates across congressional and statewide races who believe that he, not Biden, won the 2020 election. While in 2020 the defences around election integrity held, and Biden’s legitimate victory was certified by state officials who resisted overwhelming pressure not to do so, in 2024 the system could be less secure. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in Arizona, where Joe Biden’s razor-thin victory over Trump prompted some of the most extreme election fraud conspiracies among the former president’s supporters. When Donald Trump and his supporters disputed the result of the 2020 presidential election, the complex architecture of election administration came under unprecedented scrutiny, as conspiracists jumped on every detail of the process in an attempt to cast doubt on its legitimacy.
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