Even though the momentum of the 2024 race for the White House has shifted from failed former president Donald Trump to Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats in recent weeks, the November 5 election is expected to be incredibly close, perhaps coming down to a few thousand votes in several key battleground states.
If Harris does manage to prevail in November, that doesn’t guarantee she will be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow warns in a terrifying op/ed for the New York Times.
“Election boards across the country now include Republican officials who have not only propounded Mr. Trump’s lies about the last presidential election being ‘stolen,’ they have tested how far they can go in denying the certification of the vote,” Maddow writes. “Republicans tried this ploy more than two dozen times in at least eight states since 2020.”
How would this look if Republicans decided to try and contest the 2024 results? With “legal challenges” and “certification refusals” by MAGA Republicans, especially in states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, all of which went for President Joe Biden in 2020 by narrow margins, Maddow explains.
“The point of these certification refusals may not be to falsify or flip a result, but simply to prevent the emergence of one. If one or more states fail to produce official results, blocking any candidate from reaching 270 electoral votes, the 12th Amendment prescribes Gerald L.K. Smith’s dream scenario: a vote in the newly elected House of Representatives to determine the presidency.”
Once the election was before the House of Representatives, here’s what would take place, Maddow continues: “Each state delegation would get one vote; today, Republicans control 26 state delegations; Democrats control 22; and two are evenly divided…. No one should be surprised when certification refusals happen or when they are then exploited to try to maximize chaos and upset.”
“After all, the Republican nominee this year is no Richard Nixon.”
With the House controlled by Republicans, it would be easy for the GOP to pull off the ultimate legal coup: Choosing the next president despite the will of the voters who cast their ballots for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, likely with the full blessings of the right-leaning Supreme Court, which has shown it has no problem stacking the deck for Republicans and giving the next president absolute immunity from prosecution.
The solution to this nightmare is for those of us who care about the United States to vote in massive numbers that cannot possibly be denied or overturned. Then we can begin to heal and repair the country that Republicans seem hell-bent on trying to burn to the ground.
