MSNBC's Rachel Maddow sat down with Democratic lawyer Marc Elias on Monday to discuss Donald Trump's past efforts at election subversion and how his supporters are preparing to again undermine the vote in November.
"Republicans pioneered this in Michigan in 2020," Maddow said, speaking about Trump's pressuring of GOP officials to not sign a certification of the 2020 presidential election. "Now Republicans have kept trying this thing in every election since," she added, citing a recent report from Democracy Docket, Elias' voting rights advocacy group, that officials in at least 10 counties have now refused to certify accurate election results. Republicans in Pennsylvania and Arizona also attempted to block the certification of the general election results outright.
"They're laying the foundation to do it again, in the next national election," Maddow claimed, noting how Trump at a Georgia rally last weekend "randomly" shouted out the names of three members of the Georgia state board of elections. "Those three officials have all refused to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election," Maddow clarified. "They are now trying to push through new rules that would make it easier for county-level officials to refuse to certify election results."
"This seems to be part of a unified strategy," she alleged. "Encourage Republican elections officials at every level to refuse to certify the elections — doesn't matter what the results are, doesn't matter where, doesn't matter if it's a country the Democrats won or a county that Republicans won. Refusing the certify the election at the local level just sticks a wrench in the works. If you make it impossible to certify a county, then you effectively make it impossible to certify a state. And then ultimately, that puts the whole tallying of the presidential election result into question."
Maddow then quoted Elias' report, which argued that "it's worse this election than previous ones because this year, the GOP is far more organized. They might have tried to subvert the results in a handful of places in 2020 and 2022, but this year, they will try to subvert them all, setting the stage now for what's to come in November."
Elias himself then joined the conversation, with Maddow kicking off the interview segment of her show by asking the attorney if she'd painted an accurate picture of what's at stake for the nation's democracy in November.
"I think you captured it entirely correctly," Elias said. "The fact is, when we talk about who won an election, we're really talking about two things: We're talking about the unofficial results that people get on election night ... but then we are really talking about the certified results."
The attorney continued by likening the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection to the "culmination of a certification dispute," before explicating the domino effect theory of the GOP's efforts to hinder the democratic electoral process.
"When Republicans couldn't achieve what they wanted to at the county level, they went to the state level," Elias said. "When they couldn't do that, they launched a fake elector scheme, which was just another way of undermining accurate certification of elections. When they couldn't do that, they launched a series of frivolous lawsuits and finally, they attempted to block what on January 6? The certification of the election. So this has been on their radar screen for some time, and it will be on their radar screen for sure in 2024."
Maddow followed by asking Elias what he has gleaned insofar as to how these subversive processes work, and how "these concocted controversies can be resolved when they [Republicans] do this stuff at the county level?"
"I had never seen it before 2020," Elias said frankly. "The idea of tinkering with the certification at the local level was just out of bounds. That is part of the pageantry of democracy — it is what makes us great as a country ... but as Donald Trump proved, the loyalty to his crimes and misdeeds is stronger than peoples' instinct for self-preservation."
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