In Key States, Election Officials Prepare to Challenge Results If Trump Loses

As voters across the United States head to the polls, we speak with New York Times writer Jim Rutenberg about how Donald Trump may try to preemptively declare victory and challenge election results. The former president has ramped up claims Democrats are “a bunch of cheats” and preemptively cast doubt on a win by Vice President Kamala Harris, following a similar playbook as 2020 when he baselessly claimed the election was stolen. Rutenberg spoke to pro-Trump election officials in battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania who say they are ready to refuse to certify local election results as part of a wide-ranging effort to throw the system into disarray. Rutenberg says after the failed insurrection of January 6, 2021, many in Trump’s orbit had a clear goal for 2024: “We have to go local.” He also discusses the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 that makes it harder to stop the final certification of results.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

On this Election Day, we look now at how Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump may try to prematurely claim victory just as he did the early morning hours after Election Day 2020. At a recent campaign event in Arizona, Trump was interviewed by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and anticipated declaring victory while he pushed a narrative of widespread fraud by Democrats.

DONALD TRUMP: We’re doing very well. I think we’re leading by a lot. And if we can keep them — if we can keep that cheating down, because they’re a bunch of cheats, if we can keep that cheating down, we’re going to have a tremendous victory. I think — I think it’ll be — I think it’ll go down as one of the greatest victories of all time. So, we’re going to have some — we’re going to have an exciting time. We’re going to have an exciting time.

AMY GOODMAN: In key swing states, officials are bracing for conspiracy theories and violence, especially in cities Trump accused of electoral fraud in 2020 which have sizable Black populations, like Philadelphia, Atlanta and Detroit, where Trump supporters tried to stop the count. This is Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey.

JANICE WINFREY: In the building where we do the actual work, here on the boulevard, we’ve replaced all of our first floor windows with bulletproof windows. We have updated our security camera system. We have updated the number of security plainclothes, as well as uniformed. And we’re just making sure that we’re all safe. … My concerns are not with the administration and the process. I’m very confident in that process. But I am concerned and hopeful that our country will accept whatever the outcome of this election is in a peaceful and a unified manner.

AMY GOODMAN: If and when Trump tries to prematurely declare victory, he won’t do it alone. He has allies in battleground states. The cover of this week’s New York Times Magazine reads in large font, “A Republican movement driven by disinformation has taken over election boards across the country. As voters go to the polls, a certification crisis looms that could threaten American democracy.” That quote is from a major investigation by our first guest, Jim Rutenberg. We turn right now to Jim Rutenberg, who, before he was at the Times, was at the New York Daily News and a colleague of Juan González.

Jim, welcome to Democracy Now! Why don’t you lay out what you found? What should we know about the looming election certification crisis?

JIM RUTENBERG: Well, thanks for having me. A big shoutout to Juan. Thank you for mentioning our alma mater, the Daily News. Excuse me.

So, I’ve been spending the past few months traveling around some swing states looking at this movement that grew up around January 6. I think for a lot of people, January 6 was an inflection point for this, to put it mildly, wild, allegedly illegal scheme to overturn election results, which, obviously, our system is built to not allow. What happened, though, despite all the prosecutions that have gone forward in states and at the federal level, was that a movement started from the ground up, with some high-up help, that attacked the sort of process. It went at the process of certification, which we all watch January 6 when Congress certifies the vote. That’s the end of the process. The beginning of that process is at this hyper local level at your county clerk’s office, your local election board — it’s different in every state — where these very local commissioners will certify the vote, that simply take the results and affirm them, to the extent that they can, and pass them along, even if there are problems, because problems like fraud and irregularities, those are handled in the courts. But what’s happened over the past few years is an amazing number, an unprecedented number, of local commissioners have moved to block certification at that level, at smaller election kind of level. But now this could affect the presidential, and people are very concerned about this throughout the sort of civil rights legal community.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jim, you write in that article that tens of millions of dollars flooded into election integrity groups over the past few years, and a new strategy was developed to purge the party of those Republicans who resisted Trump’s 2020 scheme. Could you give some examples of how that happened and where?

JIM RUTENBERG: Yeah. Well, it’s quite interesting, because you have this movement — literally, you had people like Patrick Byrne, who was the Overstock.com founder, put a lot of money into these groups. Your listeners probably have heard of this Conservative Partnership Institute, which became the very well endowed, financially endowed, organization of sort of the Trump world outside of the White House, post-White House. They aligned with a lawyer named Cleta Mitchell, who was on the famous phone call in Georgia where Trump asked the Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find votes,” quote-unquote. So, that’s the money — and other organizations have also traced this. Tens of millions of dollars flood in.

But at the same time, people like Steve Bannon and people like Ms. Mitchell talked about “Here’s what we have to do. We have to go local. We have to get into the voting system,” as Cleta Mitchell would say, “to take it back.” Right? She would allege that the voting system had been taken over by outside groups from the left, and we need to take it back. So, you saw these commission — people showing up at meetings and really pressing these commissioners, who are already at that level, about supposed fraud in the 2020 stolen election. And then, as I traced it — but other people have, as well — you see them move into positions of influence. In Washoe County, Nevada, there was already one person who voted against the certification in 2020, very rare at that time, was joined by a second member, Mike Clark, who starts voting against certifications. They start pressuring a third Republican to try to vote with them. That’s at the very local level.

But again, Juan, you hit on this idea: They had to move out people they described as RINOs, who actually are very conservative Republicans, but if they weren’t willing to go along with this idea of a stolen election, they wanted them out. And as you saw them succeed in that throughout the country, you see these, quote-unquote, “American firsters,” as they call them, moving into place and executing a plan based on these theories that have been debunked again and again.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And talk about Arizona, another key battleground state that you examined, and where the Arizona state Senate Republicans conducted a forensic audit. Could you talk about that and the impact that that has had on the voters of Arizona?

JIM RUTENBERG: Yeah. And, you know, Juan, I went back to Arizona because — listeners might remember this. There was this very controversial and objectively badly done audit of the vote in 2020. It happened in 2021. The Arizona Senate moves on this idea that we need an outside group to audit our vote. They hire a company called the Cyber Ninjas out of Florida. The man who runs it has been associated with Trump world figures who were trying to overturn the 2020 results. They are mishandling ballots, allegedly. They’re not an experienced auditing firm. And people might remember that this was treated in mainstream circles as kind of a joke.

But really what that was was the beginning — the kind of getting back the band after January 6th. You saw the moneyed groups I was talking about flood in there. There’s even some money from a Trump super PAC that gets into that. And where the mainstream press says, “This thing was a mess. Let’s move on,” in Trump world, and to Trump himself, they seized on details that this group came up with to say, “We are now vindicated. We see the Arizona election was a mess and clearly stolen.” And so, for part of this world that lives in a different media bubble, the message is that this was somehow affirming the view. And that is really the beginning. In Arizona, in Maricopa County, that’s where the movement, the post-January 6 movement, begins to retool itself for this election cycle.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk, Jim, about Nevada.

JIM RUTENBERG: I went up to Washoe County, Nevada, because I think something that I was very interested in, and I went kind of deep into, was a Republican commissioner — I mentioned that this Washoe County board had two people who doubted election results, had voted against certification. There’s a third Republican on the board. It’s a five-member board. And she is not a denier. She’s a very traditional Republican, believe me, conservative Republican, by any old world standard. By “old world,” I mean just a couple years ago. And a lot of pressure comes on this third Republican. In their primary, their local primary in June, this group of deniers in that community are pressuring her to vote against her own certification when it comes time to certify her own race. And she’s in this meeting — July 9th, this happens — to certify — it’s actually a recount of her race. She has won. The community of largely pro-Trump election doubters really didn’t want her to win her election. They pressure her. And with some errant legal advice in the room, a lawyer with the local DA’s office says, “You can vote your conscience on certification.” And she feels trapped in this moment and decides she has to vote against her own certification. And I thought that was — so, that certification fails. It’s actually a local race. The certification fails.

And I thought it was very interesting because here was someone who didn’t want to vote against certification. Some mistaken advice from a lawyer causes her to vote against her own certification. And if this happens this fall, and there are 10,000 jurisdictions like this, now we get into a much bigger problem. We’re up against the Electoral College deadlines, congressional deadlines. And this is where, again, this large community of election administrators, moderate Republicans and civil rights lawyers are very worried about what happens.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jim, of course, the biggest battleground state that everyone is watching is Pennsylvania. Could you talk about the Supreme Court decision last Friday having to do with mail-in ballots there, and also what you’re expecting, what you’re looking for in this election now in terms of what happens at the county levels with vote counting and certification?

JIM RUTENBERG: Right. Well, I’ll say that the Supreme Court decision will affect ballots. It went against what Democrats would say the law was. So, some ballots are not going to be able to be counted that Democrats say that legally should be able to be counted.

But separate from that, the certification issue is a big deal in Pennsylvania. In fact, in 2022, several counties, in a standoff with the state, would not certify — or, wouldn’t certify the total vote, because when a local jurisdiction has to certify, they have to certify every vote they get. Again, if they see problems, they mark it, leave it for the courts, prosecutors. So, Pennsylvania is one of those states where we’ve seen a lot of issues around certification. And that, everybody — now, look, it’s predictive. Today is Election Day. We’ll see what happens. But Pennsylvania is one of the hot spots. And they missed their own state deadline in 2022 to get all their results in. It wasn’t a presidential. The Electoral College wasn’t involved. But they have missed a deadline because of some boards that were holding off on certification, at least the full certification. So, all eyes are really on Pennsylvania, as much as anywhere else, especially given the importance of the state.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, as we end, Jim Rutenberg, if you can talk a little more about the Electoral Count Reform Act passed two years ago?

JIM RUTENBERG: Thanks for bringing that up. That is what gives election lawyers and administrators great heart. Congress passed a new law to make it harder to do something like January 6. It set a new deadline for states to get the results in, the idea being that any kind of mucking around with certification will be fast-tracked by the courts. It raised the bar for people in Congress to object to results. So, it tried to tighten things up. It clarified the vice president’s role, even though really that didn’t need clarifying. If listeners will remember, there was pressure on Mike Pence to somehow reject these votes. It’s not legally something he could do, but that’s been clarified.

The issue is that the potential loophole — and again, this is a long shot, but it could be enough to inspire some people to try. There’s a new hard deadline that I talked about. It’s December 11 this year. And the law doesn’t make it very clear that if a state is involved in some big certification fight, or who knows what else, and misses that deadline, it’s not clear what happens. Now, the courts, people tell me, will sort that out. But if Congress is in full control of Republicans and Trump has lost, you could see that — and some people see that as pretext to say, “X state missed its deadline. We have to talk about the alleged fraud in that state,” which will be why it would have missed the deadline, as there will be allegations of fraud. And now do we get into a January 6 situation again?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Jim Rutenberg, we want to thank you for being with us, writer at large for The New York Times and New York Times Magazine. We’ll link to your recent articles, “The Army of Election Officials Ready to Reject the Vote” and “Trump, Preparing to Challenge the Results, Puts His 2020 Playbook Into Action,” as well as your New York Times Magazine piece.

Again, folks, tune in tonight on democracynow.org and your radio and television station for our four-hour election special, “War, Peace and the Presidency,” from 8 p.m. to midnight Eastern, also expanding tomorrow to two hours in the morning 8:00 to 10:00 in the morning.