"No Doubt" Trump and His Allies Will Attempt to Overturn a Harris Win. Here's How Democrats Are Preparing

A GOP attempt to overturn the election result is expected to be more sophisticated this time round. Democrats say their defense is too.

Trump raises his fist as he leaves the stage during a campaign event on Aug. 3, 2024, in Atlanta, Georgia. Photo by Elijah Nouvelage for The Washington Post via Getty Images

The rapid rise of Vice President Kamala Harris has calmed her party’s greatest fear about 2024. She could attract enough votes to beat Donald Trump.

But that, in turn, has elevated another fear lurking in the shadows long before President Joe Biden abandoned his quest for re-election this summer. If Harris attracts enough votes to win, can she get them accurately counted and certified?

For most of modern US history, that question would have never been asked. But the behavior of Trump and Republican allies after the 2020 election, culminating in the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection, has made it a clear and present danger ever since.

Democracy advocates express cautious optimism that they can fend off the threat as they did four years ago. But once more, they’ll have to prove it.

“There is no doubt,” says Jess Marsden, a lawyer with the non-partisan group Protect Democracy, “that Republican Party activists are going to use the court system to try to bring about President Trump’s return to power.”

Memories of last time remain fresh. After losing the popular vote by 7 million ballots to Biden and the Electoral College 306-232, Trump tried to subvert the results with false allegations of voter fraud in individual battleground states. 

After courts turned him away, Trump tried to block the tabulation of the electoral votes that Biden had legitimately won. Most House Republicans and eight Senate Republicans joined his objections even after the violence on Jan. 6.

Only after Vice President Mike Pence withstood fierce pressure from Trump – and despite threats from a violent mob that had earlier erected a gallows outside the Capitol – did the constitutional process of affirming Biden’s victory reach its appropriate conclusion.

From that day onward, lawyers for the Democratic Party and pro-democracy organizations have planned for 2024. They expect a more sophisticated and strategic Republican challenge than Trump’s ramshackle 2020 effort.

“We are much better able to withstand the threat than we were four years ago because we’re prepared,” says Wendy Weiser, who directs the Democracy Program at New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice. “But the risk level is also higher.”

How Dems Are Preparing

Part of the preparation has been political.

In 2022, the overwhelming majority of election-denying Republicans lost their races for critical statewide offices in battleground states, including Kari Lake and Doug Mastriano for the governorships of Arizona and Pennsylvania, respectively.

A second element involves safeguarding the voting and tabulation processes themselves. Non-profit groups and law enforcement organizations have worked to address fears of intimidating surveillance or actual violence aimed at both. When armed, masked individuals tried to intimidate voters at Arizona ballot drop boxes in 2022, a federal judge dramatically curtailed their activities; and the mid-term elections concluded peacefully.

A third is legal preparation to ward off attempts to block post-election certification of vote counts. Of particular concern are some officials at the county level, which has proven more vulnerable to penetration by conspiracists.

Rolling Stone magazine has documented nearly 70 election deniers holding county-level election posts in battleground-state counties in the run-up to November. Marc Elias, a prominent Democratic lawyer now working with Harris’ campaign, has warned of “mass refusals to certify the election.”

Those efforts won’t easily succeed. State officials have the power to override recalcitrant local authorities, Marsden tells me, and various state officials in battlegrounds have sent “reassuring signals” that they will do so. Five of the seven most hotly-contested states have Democratic governors; in a sixth, Georgia, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger proved their mettle in 2020 by resisting heat from Trump and winning re-election thereafter (though the MAGA-controlled State Election Board passed rules that Democrats say could allow for county officials to refuse to certify the election results).

“We’ve been getting ready for this risk around certification since 2020,” says Marsden. “This is a challenge to democracy that we can meet.”

No Guarantees

Still, in a year when a conservative super-majority on the US Supreme Court has held Trump immune from criminal prosecution for some of his behavior, nothing is guaranteed. Marsden’s nightmare scenario involves the election turning on a court decision concerning a small number of ballots in a single state, as with Florida in the 2000 election.

Yet two critical elements of the fiasco that culminated on Jan. 6, 2021, no longer apply.

Then, Trump’s refusal to appropriately use his bully pulpit and presidential powers incited the violence and allowed it to escalate.

Now, Democrats control the executive branch and, with it, the megaphone and authority to supplement local and state law enforcement if necessary.

Then, the final link in the election certification chain rested with Trump’s embattled vice president in a Senate controlled by fellow Republicans.

Now, Democrats control the Senate, and the ministerial task of counting electoral votes will fall to Vice President Kamala Harris.

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