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This is an adapted excerpt from the Oct. 31 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
If Donald Trump loses next week, it seems likely that he will try to steal the election — it's something that no one on either end of the political spectrum seems to really deny.
The former president is already lying about voter fraud in Pennsylvania. And things are likely to get worse in the coming days.
With all of that in mind, though, I think it is important to remember that there are already new guardrails in place that did not exist in 2020, the last time Trump and his cronies tried to overturn the will of the American people.
It's important to remember that there are already new guardrails in place that did not exist in 2020.
To begin with, state officials are much better prepared to deal with Trump's potential meddling efforts this time around. As NBC News reports, “top officials in three swing states — Pennsylvania, Arizona and Wisconsin — said they are ready to take local government authorities to court if they refuse to certify the results.”
At the federal level, there's a new law called the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022. It passed Congress in a bipartisan vote and was signed into law by President Joe Biden two years ago. Its explicit purpose is to block attempts to steal presidential elections.
The law makes it much more difficult for members of Congress to put forward bogus challenges to the state election results, as they did in 2020, and it requires each state’s governor, or another official, to submit their electors. That should stop states from submitting false slates of electors, as Trump tried to do four years ago.
The ECRA also closes a loophole that makes it easier for state legislatures to throw out election results and it puts forward a process to expedite any legal challenges that do inevitably arise. That could prevent Trump’s lawyers from dragging out the process through protracted legal battles this time around.
Of course, that provision of the law also means the Supreme Court will see cases faster — and depending on how much you trust this 6-3 MAGA court, that may not be a good thing.
But, at the very least, it should stop Trump from delaying the results of the election and using the uncertainty to sow more chaos and division.
Perhaps most crucially, the law also explicitly bans the former president's key argument from Jan. 6, 2021. It says, in no uncertain terms, that the vice president does not have the authority to throw out slates of electors, as Trump pressured then-Vice President Mike Pence to do that day.
Of course, I don’t think anyone was particularly concerned about the current vice president, Kamala Harris, trying to overturn the results but it is nevertheless an important safeguard going forward.
There are people working every day to make sure Trump does not steal this election.
All of which is to say that, while there are guardrails in place, they may not all hold.
However, there are people working every day to make sure Trump does not steal this election, one of whom in particular has become an absolute obsession of the right: Marc Elias, a voting rights attorney who helped the Biden campaign defeat most of Trump’s bogus lawsuits in 2020. He's a man who strikes so much fear into the heart of Steve Bannon that the first thing Bannon did upon getting out of prison was attack him on his podcast.
Bannon said, "Every day after the evening of Nov. 5 is going to be Stalingrad" for Trump's legal team if they're facing off against Elias in court.
On Thursday, Elias joined "All In" to respond to Bannon's comments. "They hate me because I fight hard," he told me. "But they also hate me because we have the facts and the law on our side."