From the New York Times: I'm likeable, I can borrow this. This election was rigged, everybody knows it. In the week's following November 3rd, as the election hung in the balance in a few key states, this colossal expansion of male and voting opened the flood gates of fraud. President Trump and his supporters tried to persuade local officials and courts to overturn the results. and in doing so exposed the most fragile aspects of our election system and democracy if we don't root out the fraud the tremendous and horrible fraud that took place in our two thousand and twentieth election we don't have a country anymore ultimately those efforts failed culminating in January sex we had an election that was stolen from us there was a landslide election and everyone knows it.
especially the other side, but you have to go now. But in the year since Republicans have appeared to systematically go after the laws and officials that stood in Trump's way, raising questions about whether the election system is weaker today and whether it could sustain another attack today. In part three of our
At the legacy of January 6, my colleague Alex Burns on the state of American democracy. It's Friday, January 7. To those who rigged the vote in our capital today, you did not win. Violence never wins. Freedom wins, and this is still the people's house as we reconvene in this chamber. The world will again witness the resilience and strength of our democracy, for even in the wake of unprecedented violence and vandalism at this capital, the elected representatives of the people of the United States have assembled again. Let's get back to work. Let's go back to January 7th, one year ago today. That's the day after January 6th, right? January 7th, after the siege, Congress gathers late into the night on the 6th and early into the morning hours of the 7th, and they finally did what they had been prevented from doing at the normal time. In the appointed way, which is to be officially served by the results of the 2020 election, the announcement of the state of the vote by the president of the Senate shall be deemed a sufficient declaration of the person's elected president and vice president of the United States. This leaves no doubt that Joe Biden is going to be sworn in as president in two weeks. The Chair declares the joint session dissolved.
But in that moment, I think many people in the country were shaken by what had felt like a very close call for democracy. Yes, in January, six is the terrifying culmination of that very close call. But the whole process of transferring power in this country is built on the expectation that everybody is basically going to go along with the process peacefully. and with some degree of race and at every stage really between november third, the election, and january six, the formal certification date that did not happen on the Trump' side, you saw a sitting president of the united states and his political allies, sometimes at his explicit instructions, sometimes taking matters into their own hands, with his rhetoric as inspiration, testing the limits of the system all the way along. right it was a pretty sprawling you might even call it scattershot effort particularly in the battle ground states the swing states where the votes were very close where the outcome was going to have been determinedMichael remember talking at the time to democrats who were on the other side of this battle people who were trying to figure out what Trump was up to and they were profoundly disturbed by the things that he and his allies were doing but they were also puzzled because it sure seemed like
There wasn't any particular strategy to it. It was, I think, scatter shot is the right word for it. Remember, Georgia? Okay, thank you much. Kello, bread and Ryan and everybody we appreciate the time in the call so we inspent a lot of time on this, and we could just go over some of the numbers. I think it's pretty clear that we we won very substantially. Georgia President Trump famously called the secretary of state of Brad Rafonsburgger the official overseas Elections in the state so well I want to do is this. I just want to find eleven thousand seven hundred and eighty votes, which is one more than we have. And during a recount, I spent an hour or more pressuring him to put find eleven thousand ballots that would make up the difference between Trump and Biden. That's not really a strategic request. Is the request that state official waves a wand and changes the outcome, but it's an extraordinary dangerous thing for a president to do. I don't know, look, bread. I got to get going. I have to find 12,000 votes, and I have them times a lot. Therefore, I won the state. That's before we go to the next step, which is in the process right now. President Trump is trying a new approach. His fight to overturn the election under personal political pressure in Michigan. You had a sitting president calling members of the local canvassing board in Wayne County, which is the county ward Detroit is located in. He personally hosted several of Michigan's Republican state lawmakers, including the Senate majority leader and the speaker of the Michigan House, at the White House, asking them not to certify Biden's victory there. Now, the president's biggest battleground is the court room. States that will decide the presidential race and then you have this avalanche of lawsuits in pretty much every remotely competitive state that joebiden carried his lawyers are desperately clinging to lies and in cindiia claims while offering no proof i know of crimes i can smellthem is enoughto overturn any election it's disgraceful what happened you had the president's lawyers and lawyers implicitly affiliated with his campaign filing litigation places like Pennsylvania, with these breezes and requests that the courts throw out tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of a male and ballot enough that could, at least in theory, should a series of judges make some really radical decisions and changes the outcome of the election in those places. Many of the campaigns' lawsuits across the country were rejected for a lack of evidence; they did not go anywhere, but I think a lot of people in the immediate aftermath of January Six felt that if any one of those pieces had got out a little bit differently if you had had a handful of less responsible federal judges or a handful of rogue officials at the state level that perhaps things could have been much much much more dangerous for democracy right and suddenly it felt like what's all exposed that we all learned is that our election systems come down to a lot of individuals upholding state and local
Election laws are essentially out of respect for the process, and more than that, they have a legal obligation to uphold those state and local election laws. So if Donald Trump's efforts in 2020 to subvert those obligations felt like the first kind of profound threat to the democratic system, what we've seen in the year since has been a campaign led by Trump and his supporters to essentially strengthen it.
Looking ahead to future elections, contesting them through shady means looks a lot like the next phase of the same threatening behavior we've been seeing - this looks like the beginning of a long-range plan to attack the 2020 election even more aggressively than Trump attacked the election in 2020, to make sure that it's tougher to vote next time, and that if the election goes the wrong way, there are more options to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power. We need election integrity and election reform immediately. Republicans should be the party of honest elections that can give everyone confidence in our country's future without honest elections. Who has confidence without honest elections? See how laws start to fly out of these state legislatures controlled by Republicans as a really last resort as in January you see it in swing states you see it in Solidly red states there is an unprecedented new wave of state election laws on the horizon and you can kind of break these laws into two categories: one is voting restrictions, often called voter suppression, Republican lawmakers and at least forty three states are considering more than two hundred and fifty proposed bills that would make it harder to vote, so stricter voter ID requirements, the bill with a ban counties from holding early voting. Sunday shorter time periods to cast early votes or absent in-person votes. Many of the measures target early voting, which exploded in popularity during two thousand and twenty and led to a historic turnout. Fewer voting sites. The bill also cracks down on mobile voting. There is an effort to impose even tougher restrictions, in the name of fighting election fraud. What's the second category of these laws? So the second category is about
Now who actually administers elections in these states? Category one is what the rules say voting who gets devoting to do in category two is who oversees the whole system and what you've seen in a number of states, including some critical swing states like Georgia, is an effort to codify partisanship essentially in the system to give Republican office holders or legislative bodies that are dominated by the GOP a stronger role in overseeing elections and in some cases ultimately adjudicating who wins or loses, as ABC News identified at least eight states including Arizona, Georgia, and Florida that have enacted ten laws so far this year, changing election laws by bolstering partisan entities' power over the process or shifting election-related responsibilities from secretaries of state to take Georgia as an example. an example: here you saw Republican state legislators change the role of the secretary of state. This new bill has made it so the secretary of state's office is less effective and it simply takes the control of elections significantly away from the Georgia secretary of state. They removed him as an officer from the state border elections. They created a new office, the chair of the state board of election, which is nominally nonpartisan but is appointed by the state legislature, which again is dominated by republicans. The state legislature in Georgia also gave itself the power to suspend county level election officials from their duties. The New York Times has this in a new report: quote, "Across Georgia, members of at least ten county election boards have been removed, had their position eliminated, or are likely to be kicked off board through local audiences or new laws passed five years ago, the state legislature at least five times removed people of color and most democrats from office. The law said these things, and we were giving republicans the power to remove democratic municipal officials. But in practice, that's really what that law is: an assertion of power by a state legislature that is completely dominated by the GOP, taking the prerogative to say, "You know, Fayette County to Allegheny County, these Democratic-leaning areas, if we don't like what's going on, we'll just remove the officials." want to suspend the people who are elected or chosen to run your elections we can do that with a relatively free hand out this all looks so overtly like a clear partisan effort to get a different election result next time that I'm left looking for any other rationale that some state lawmakers could possibly give for what they're doing you have some Republican officials in the states who are genuine true believers who that the election was stolen in two thousand and twenty and believe that they need to overhaul the system from top to bottom in order to stop that from happening again, but most of what you're seeing from mainstream republicans in the states is that they're pointing to their constituents, meaning donald trump's base, and saying the voters back home believe that the two thousand and twenty election was stolen and they need to do something to reassure those people that they're taking action, so you get this kind of circular Logic with changes being made to election procedure and election administration in order to reassure voters who Donald Trump has persuaded to be concerned about a problem that doesn't exist right so that's how Trump's big lie seeds its own ecosystem of laws and legislation that look to many like they're creating less fair elections they're being done on the premise that officials are working to make elections
More fair is the argument that these legislators make, and it's an argument that is geared towards the hard-core Trump supporters who decide elections back home for them. In reality, of course, yes, many of these laws would give a future president Trump or a Trump-like figure a stronger hand in these states and a different set of levers to use if they wanted to obstruct the normal, nonpartisan administration. of an election and you know micel'sworth notic here that there were some really far out proposals in the states just extraordinarily extreme that did not pass but there're still notable and reflective of something that's going on in their republican party at the state level in arizona you had a state legislator propos a bill that would say at the end of the day however the election goes however the voters cast their ballots it's ultimately the state legislature that will decide who The electors from that state, which is a really dramatic proposal to override the power of the bi-legislature over the political process, if our Republican state legislature were to decide something is rotten in the way the election took place in this state, so we're just going to give the electors to the other guy again, that did not pass, but the underlying motivation there seems to something going on that's pretty unsettling for the state of democracy, so those are the legal changes that supporters and allies As a former president, Trump has achieved over the past year what kind of pressures has Trump himself brought to bear in this effort to essentially finish the job in the future? Finish the job is exactly the right language to use for what former president Trump has been up to. His main activity in state-level electoral politics has been endorsing people for state-wide office and even state legislative seats who were
The Republican former senator David Perdue announced today that he is running for governor of Georgia. He recently got an endorsement from President Trump, as you can see him endorsing in gubernatorial elections in a place like Georgia. He's called for the defeat of the sitting Republican governor Brian Kemp, because Kemp did not go along with efforts to strike the election.
And you know you have a big election integrity problem in Georgia, and he's even supported candidates for secretary of state in multiple states - Michigan, Arizona, and Georgia. They ignored monumental evidence of rampant fraud we've all seen in the videos, with tables being pulled out from under the observers, and people being kicked out. Remember, this is not a typical arena for a former president to get deeply involved in the role. of the state's top election administrator, it's a pretty low profile job under ordinary circumstances. But what you've seen from President Trump here is an effort to take retribution against people who do not do his bidding, and to put people in those jobs who next time might very well go along with his big lie about bankers controlling the election systems in their states, including a candidate in Michigan who peddles conspiracies and lies in the days and weeks before The November third presidential election secretary said Brad Afferenen's burgers that he could find no signs of widespread voter fraud. Meanwhile, Georgia congressman John is called the same election faulty and fraudulent, and now he says he wants to oversee the state's future elections. In Mark Fisch, also of Republican state lawmakers, is now running for the secretary of state of Arizona. And, well, at a Trump rally on Saturday he called for the election results here to be stayed certified, even though numerous audits and reviews have lacked any evidence of voter fraud. and Michael, there's a broader universe of people who are responding to Trump's call than just those people who he has personally backed. You have the former president effectively the leader of the Republican party out there, they are beating the drum that the election was stolen, and there are millions and millions and millions of Republicans and conservatives who agree with them and who have embraced that view of the world, and some of them are running for office themselves. So even beneath the level of governor. and secretaries of state when you get down to low profile state legislative seats obscure county level election boards you have people filing for the ballot who believe sincerely that the last election was stolen and something ought to be done about our colleague Charlie Hlands reported on one of these people a pastor substitute teacher from Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania who was at the stop the steel rally in Washington on January six before the attack. A capital who was just elected to his local election board back home and it's impossible at this point to predict or to precisely quantify how many people with that profile or that world view, that view of American democracy, might find themselves swept into office in two thousand and twenty two if it turns out to be a strong election year for republicans right so these are people who are true believers, not down the shoulder by Donald Trump and just want to ensure that another election is not quote stolen again that's right and if you are inclined to be a dot connector in the political world and you see all these chess pieces from the Trump world coming into place the laws, the endorsements, that candidates, that are emerging, it starts to look like a very fast moving threat to democracy, certainly
Looks like a developing set of circumstances that have the potential to put far more stress on the system in the next election than even what we saw after 2000, well back.
So I think all of this has left a very pressing question one year on: if we were to basically rerun the 2020 election, do it over again, where the votes are all the same but all of these changes that you have just described are now in place, would we get the same result? This has obviously been a subject of intense debate and speculation.
And concern, and I think if we ask ourselves that question in pretty black and white terms with these new rules, you’d run for president in 2020 and Joe Biden would still end up as the president. I think there are a lot of reasons to believe that the answer is yes. Just to zoom out here in modern American terms, this was not a super close election. You won the popular vote nationally by seven million votes. Obviously We choose our president through the electoral college, but that kind of thing still matters. He flipped five states that Donald Trump won in 2016 and won the electoral college with room to spare, so you're not looking at a situation where just by tinkering with the voter eligibility rules in one or two states, suddenly Joe Biden's advantage in this race totally evaporates. But when into a place like Georgia or a state like Arizona where you have really tight margins in the popular vote - eleven thousand votes in Georgia and then you impose these changes - devoting procedure and voting administration - and then you had the changes governing which officials would are judicate disputes over the resuts of an election. I don't know that you can say that in that one state we would have had the same outcome in 2020 under this new set of regulation. Interesting.
Again, just a reality check on the big big picture here: Joe Biden didn't need Georgia to win the election. He was right when he declared the winner of the presidential election before he was declared the winner in Georgia. So, in the broadest, most black and white sense of the question, would the results of the two thousand and twenty election have held up? I do think Joe Biden would have quite a strong chance to still be the president anyway.
But as you were alluding to, you said that's if we are looking at this as a black and white question of whether Joe Biden is still elected president, what would it mean to not look at this as a black and white question? My question is right: if your test for this is just whether the same guy ends up in the Oval Office, that's a relatively narrow way to look at the state of American democracy and the health of our electoral systems. Right? Because there are a lot of possibilities. The fall election is stolen by the guy who lost, which is still pretty distressing for the country. There are clearly many more opportunities now for bad actors in the political system to sow disorder and chaos and to obstruct the basic functions of election administration, in a way that there were not a year ago. A secretary of state doesn't have the power to go out and say, "I hereby decreate Donald Trump." and Joe Biden's one hundred and fifty thousand boat lead is meaningless but a secretary of state can do plenty to cast out and so suspicion and obstruct the normal process of thing and transmitting election results in a way that has the potential to be deeply ugly for the resolution of an election you saying the bar for a broken democracy shouldn't be whether or not the rightful winner wins or loses it needs
to be greater and more nuanced than that, if the test we set for ourselves is this ament dangerous enough to literally kill American democracy, that is setting a really high bar for considering this a serious problem. I think a scenario that's awfully scary right now, even without a longer range campaign to redraw election administration in the United States, is Is what if you had a future election where the results were actually not quite so convincing for one candidate and where the other candidate, Joe Biden, hadn't flipped five states with room to despair in the electoral college but had crossed the threshold for victory with the votes from one state's right think back to the two thousand election in Florida between George W. Bush and Al Gore. It was massive, decided by barely five hundred votes and with that the presidency if you were to have a scenario like that where the entire outcome of an American presidential race depended on one state and that state happened to be one of these states that has redrawn its election administration to make it way more partisan and to make it much easier for partisan actors to intervene in the literal process of casting and counting ballots that to meet is an awfully scary scenario even without Any further sort of nightmare scenarios developing in the legal side of all that good evening just moments ago I spoke with George W. Bush and congratulated him on becoming the forty-third president of the United States because remember two thousand out promised them that was a very contested election a lot of people were less very very angry about the outcome saw it as a cheat. There be no doubt while I strongly disagree with the courts. decision I accept it but the losing candidate, who except for the results and walked away, and tonight for the sake of our unity of the people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession. There is a higher duty than the one we owe to political party. This is America, and we put country before party. We will stand together behind our new President. Thank you, and good night. God bless America. And that was the end. The end. And now it's really hard to imagine losing a presidential candidate in a future election doing exactly what augorre did, and walking away from a defeat that close, that gracefully, because ultimately this more than anything else is what donald trump did after the 2020 election. He crossed a line that no other presidential candidate in our lifetime has crossed, and simply refused to accept the legitimacy. The victory of the winners is once you cross that line, a future candidate can see it and they'll no longer be the first one to do it. The norm has been shattered, and it doesn't even have to be a republican in the future. It could be either party's candidate who sees a one state result as illegitimate and therefore the whole election is cast into doubt. You have millions upon millions of voters who are prepared to believe that. to carry on believing it well to the administration of the next president, whoever that might be, so push back.
I why do you see a version where either side is capable of rejecting the outcome of the election, because so far, claims of electoral fraud and a refusal to accept the election results feel like the singular possession of the Republican Party right now? Look, let me be clear: there's only one party in this country that has shown a willingness to attack and obstruct the legitimate result of a presidential election but in a future election now that all these rules have been changed at the state level and now that the nature of election administration in some pretty important states has been made much more partisan, I don't think it's farfetched to imagine a scenario where a Republican wins the presidency based on a victory in one state like Georgia. Democrats in the state and around the country see the rules as rigged against them, perhaps with some reason, and they see the whole thing as simply not on the level. That's fascin[ating] because we have talked so much about the way in which Donald Trump has convinced and almost unfathomable number of Republican voters that the election system cannot be trusted and that elections can be stolen. You're saying, in this other way, he may also have done something
Similar to democratic voters, I think there's no question about that. I think, as long as Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party, and certainly in any scenario where he's the candidate of the Republican Party, the widespread assumption among Democratic Party leaders and many Democratic voters is going to be that if this guy can steal the election, than he is going to steal it. And they have some reason to worry about that. That's not just a totally invented possibility. But even in a post-Trump world, he doesn't run into trouble in 2020. Somebody else does if a Republican wins the presidency based on the votes of one state, and that state rewrote its election laws after 2020 in order to appease and strengthen Donald Trump. I think it's awfully hard to assume that Democratic voters around the country are going to just automatically assume that it's an election and fair is fair. The other guy won one So in that sense, perhaps the greatest immediate threat to democracy is really the erosion of voters' faith in democracy. I think that's right. And I think this is another place where it's useful to just take a step back from the specifics of election administration, and even the specifics of what happened on January 6, to know what happened last time and to know how scary it was for the country and how threatening it was. The peaceful transfer of power. If we're just asking ourselves, could the same thing happen next time but worse? That's probably underestimating the range of threats to democracy that are in front of us right now. Because, when you have a majority of one party believing solidly that the last election was stolen, and the other party, the winning party on the ruling party sees the kind of camp In the kind of anti-democratic crusade that Trump has been leading, you have laid the groundwork for a future presidential election or even elections for other offices where voters on either side are totally prepared to believe that the winning party has stolen this thing. And that doesn't necessarily need to take the shape of a sitting president bullying a secretary of state doesn't need to take the shape of a bunch of far-out lawsuits being filed and rejected from the courts and it doesn't need to look like an angry mob storming the capital building right when the climate of a democracy is one in which distrust of the system and lack of faith in the system is this pervasive that's a threat that transcends the specifics of election Machinery and administration and litigation viz thank you very much thanks Michael and here's the truth the former. pressure the United States of America has created spread a web of wisdom about the two thousand and twenty election he's done so because he values power overprinciple in a speech on thursday marking january six delivered from inside the US capital president biden sought to confront the growing lack of faith in American democracy by directly confronting DonaldTrump Rule in creating those doubts, the former president and his supporters have decided the only way for them to win is to suppress your vote by subverting our elections and denouncing both Trump's lies about the election and Trump's efforts to change election laws across the country. Biden said he would use the power of his office to defend American democracy against the former president and his Quarters I do not seek this fate brought this capital one year going day but I will not shrink from an either I will stand in this breach I will defend this nation not allow no one to place a dagger at the throat of democracy what they back here's what else you need to hundred day a ten standal between demonstrators and the government of kazakhstan has resulted in dozens of deaths and prompted kazicak stands leader to call in troops from russia The violent protests which were triggered by high energy prices quickly spread to kazakhstan's largest city. Where protesters burned city hall and briefly took over the airport, the result was more like skirmishes and shootouts across the city amid the clashes. The government said that at least eight police officers had also been killed.
This episode was produced by Rachel Quinter and Eric Croft. With help from Robert Chisman and Diana Win, it was edited by Lisa Token. It contains original music by Marion Lono and Dan Peal, and was engineered by Brad Fisher. Our their is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lander of One Hood. That's it for D. I'm Michael Barr. on Monday