How Republicans Could Help Trump Steal the Election from Harris
Donald Trump and his allies in Congress and election offices throughout the country have a variety of tools to dismantle the will of voters and install Trump as president — Tuesday’s election results be damned.
Much of the nation was shocked when attempts to overturn the 2020 election culminated in a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. And while that specific scenario is unlikely to play out again this Jan. 6, the nation and world could be stunned once more at the lengths to which Republicans may go to undo a potential win by Vice President Kamala Harris.
Congress tried to close some loopholes that Trump and House and Senate Republicans tried to exploit four years ago, but danger still remains. Pro-Trump Republicans still have several paths to overturn the election, should Vice President Kamala Harris prevail at the polls.
Meanwhile, a diverse and bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, election law experts, retired judges, and former federal officials have been war-gaming scenarios — both in conjunction with the Harris campaign and independently — to prepare for a Republican-led constitutional coup that could come to a climax again in the halls of Congress four years after the insurrection.
This informal coalition is focusing on four scenarios: widespread certification refusals by county election officials, disruptions to voting and canvassing by right-wing activists, disruptions or interference at or by state legislatures to the work of the Electoral College, and refusals by Republican members of Congress to certify a Harris win.
“There are all of these areas where we’ve seen pressure points, and they see how far they can go,” a Harris campaign advisor tells Rolling Stone. “Our processes have held up at every turn. Certification is undefeated as far as elections go.”
The advisor adds that the Harris campaign is looking at “everything from votes being put into machines to hand on the Bible” on Inauguration Day.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a constitutional scholar himself, declined to discuss specific Democratic plans to combat a potential coup effort from Republicans.
“I’m going to have to answer you in an elusive way,” he tells Rolling Stone. “I’m reticent to talk about the different scenarios I’m trying to think through because the last thing I want to do is give them any ideas.”
The path to overturning the election begins at the local level, where county election officials who support Trump’s lies about election fraud can refuse to certify results, as they’ve done more than a dozen times in eight states since 2020. Pro-Trump protesters could also hold up voting itself or the counting of votes, as they tried to do in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Arizona’s Maricopa County in 2020.
If counties refuse to certify results, or protests or attacks prevent results from being certified, it could cause governors to miss a key deadline — Dec. 11 — for their own task of certifying statewide results. This would open up myriad scenarios for congressional Republicans to try to steal the election for Trump on Jan. 6, 2025.
Governors and state legislatures could also try to rig the election for Trump by approving fake slates of electors for the Electoral College, as some states did in 2020, or by introducing rules that dictate how their state’s electors must vote, as a right-wing congressman recently suggested. Protesters could also disrupt slates of electors and prevent them from voting for Harris, should she win the popular vote in a given state.
Finally, Congress will again gather on Jan. 6 to certify Electoral College votes, opening up a legal minefield of scenarios that Republicans might exploit to overturn a win by Harris, according to Raskin. These efforts would likely involve hyping baseless allegations of fraud to claim that the election results are illegitimate.
Short of a landslide win by Trump, experts and elected officials across the political spectrum anticipate that next week’s election results will be contested. Sources close to Trump have said he’ll claim victory — regardless of actual results — as soon as election night, as Rolling Stone previously reported.
Court battles over GOP efforts to purge voter rolls in swing states, the handling of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania, whether Georgia’s MAGA election officials can arbitrarily refuse to certify election results, and more will only add to the chaos between Election Day and Jan. 6, when Congress will again meet to officially designate the next president.
“The way I see it is that Trump and his followers are not running a classic political campaign where they’re engaged in canvassing, phone-banking, get-out-the-vote efforts of voter mobilization. They are rather preparing to attack the electoral results and the electoral process,” Raskin says. “So, on the Democratic side, we have to go out and win the election first, and then, we have to defend the election.”
TRUMP AND REPUBLICANS have repeatedly refused to say they’ll concede to Harris if she wins the election. He has said Democrats “cheat like hell” and is already baselessly complaining about election fraud.
The former president and close allies in the party have been laying the groundwork, state by state, in the years since his 2020 election loss to corrupt electoral processes in ways they believe will benefit them. One example is Trump’s involvement in a fight over processing mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania. As Rolling Stone recently reported, Trump personally called GOP allies in the Keystone State to demand they block efforts from Democrats to allow mail-in ballots to be processed before Election Day. Sources say Trump intends to cite the slow count of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania as evidence that the election is being “rigged” or “stolen” from him.
Another is Georgia, which the Trump team has called their “laboratory” for tweaking the electoral system to their advantage. The Georgia State Election Board has been taken over by Trump loyalists, who passed a series of rules designed to slow the counting of votes and empower MAGA election officials to refuse to certify the results if they feel like it. (Certifying election results has long been a mandatory, ministerial task, not a discretionary one, election experts and Democrats say.)
While judges have blocked those rules, election denier groups have, in recent weeks, begun to pressure county election officials to refuse to certify results. Following the election, the State Election Board could amplify unfounded fraud claims. In recent weeks, even Republican Gov. Brian Kemp — long a target of Trump’s rage over his refusal to back his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results — has come into the fold to vocally support the former president.
The Trump campaign and Republican National Committee — both fueled by the Trump-era iterations of election denialism, voter crackdowns, and a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose philosophy for elections — have long prepared for chaotic scenarios in which the 2024 presidential contest ends up being so close in such a small number of states that Trump and the GOP would feel compelled to force a victory, whether he actually won or not.
Trump-aligned lawyers and officials refuse to admit — even off the record — that they are gearing up for potential situations in which Trump would want them to steal an election. Or, at least, “steal” isn’t the term of art they’d use. However, in Rolling Stone’s recent conversations with a wide array of attorneys, prominent MAGA activists, GOP lawmakers, and other political Trump confidants, it is crystal clear that they are exploring virtually all gameplans, and are willing to fight dirty, especially if the margins are historically tight and they sense an opportunity to seize power.
“Of course all legal options are on the table,” says a lawyer close to the former president who is advising Team Trump on possible post-election strategies.
Many of those options end in Congress, where House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who helped lead House Republicans’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, is perceived as a key ally in efforts to overturn the 2024 election — and that was before Trump mentioned a “little secret,” that only he and Johnson know, at his Madison Square Garden rally last week.
“I think with our little secret we’re going to do really well with the House, right?” Trump said. “Our little secret is having a big impact. He and I have a little secret — we’ll tell you what it is when the race is over.”
As Rolling Stone reported last year, a major reason Trump supported Johnson’s ascension to House speaker is that Johnson is “good on elections.” In recent weeks, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation, the former and perhaps future president has privately reiterated to other Republicans in his orbit that Johnson “did the right thing” during Trump’s last coup attempt, and that he can be trusted to have Trump’s back if Democrats try to — in Trump’s conspiracist vision — “cheat” again on Election Day 2024.
For his part, Johnson has demurred about plans to contest a Harris win. In a statement to The New York Times, Johnson didn’t elaborate on what his “little secret” with Trump might be.
“By definition, a secret is not to be shared — and I don’t intend to share this one,” Johnson said. On Friday, Johnson claimed the secret relates to “one of our tactics on get-out-the-vote.”
Asked by CNN on Friday whether he has spoken with Trump about not accepting the 2024 election results if Trump wins, Johnson said, “Of course not. I’ve taken an oath to uphold the Constitution. We are going to do our job.”
Pressed then whether he would accept the results if Harris wins, Johnson said, “Yes,” adding: “I’m going to qualify this — and this is going to make everybody freak out again — if it’s a free and fair election. I’m saying the exact same thing that Jamie Raskin is saying.”
AFTER POLLS CLOSE, it will be up to local election officials to certify results in their counties. Since 2020, rogue officials who support Trump’s election lies have refused to certify results at least 30 times in eight states, according to Rolling Stone and American Doom’s ongoing analysis of local election denial efforts. The Brennan Center lists 50 counties that pose a risk of certification refusal thanks to the role of election conspiracists in those locales.
If counties fail to certify results — either because election officials vote against certification, or the canvassing process is interrupted by protests or attacks — it could cause governors to miss a deadline to submit statewide results to the Electoral College no later than Dec. 11. The deadline is mandated under the Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA), a bipartisan law passed in 2022 in the wake of Trump’s effort to overturn the election.
The statewide results come in the form of documents called “certificates of ascertainment,” which list the electors for each state. Those electors are designated by the Democratic and Republican parties, and in all but two states — Maine and Nebraska — the electors must vote for the candidate who wins the popular vote. Should governors fail — or refuse — to sign certificates of ascertainment confirming a Harris win, the documents can be signed by panels of three federal judges under a provision of the ECRA.
Some secretaries of state and attorneys general have threatened county officials who refuse to certify results with various penalties, including criminal charges, like those filed against an election official in Cochise County who refused to certify results in 2022 and has since pleaded guilty for the crime. State officials and election experts also say that writs of mandamus — a legal order demanding officials perform duties mandatory under state law — could be used to force county election officials to certify results.
Still, with dozens of election deniers serving as local election officials in the swing states, the danger of mass certification refusals remains.
“Both the pro and con of our election system is that it’s decentralized,” the Brennan Center’s Wendy Weiser tells Rolling Stone. “When we see attacks on certification they’re rather piecemeal. If it happened en masse, it would have to be remarkably coordinated.”
In the event governors miss the Dec. 11 deadline to file certificates of ascertainment, House Republicans could object to Electoral College votes — which is to say, states’ election results — on the basis that they were not “regularly given” or “lawfully certified,” as outlined in the Electoral Count Act of 1887, the ECRA’s predecessor.
Members of Congress can reject electoral votes “when they agree that such vote or votes have not been so regularly given by electors whose appointment has been [lawfully] certified,” the 1887 law states. The ECRA does not explicitly change the definition of “regularly given” and “lawfully certified,” but drafting language for the 2022 law did clarify that the objections cannot be made over claims of fraud — like those already being made by Trump and others. If members of Congress make “regularly given” or “lawfully certified” over election fraud claims, experts say those objections would be improper — as it was Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) filed a “regularly given” objection that kicked off congressional Republicans’ attempts to overturn the election in 2020.
But first, the Electoral College will meet on Dec. 17 to cast their vote for either Harris or Trump — whichever candidate, in every state but Maine and Nebraska, wins the popular vote.
Two right-wing figures have already suggested either disrupting or rigging the meeting of electors on Dec. 17 to favor Trump. Last week, Ivan Raiklin — a former Green Beret, current attorney, and self-appointed “Secretary of Retribution” for a second Trump term — suggested that Republican voters pressure members of Pennsylvania’s legislature to install electors who will vote, no matter what, for Trump.
Raiklin and Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), the new chair of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus, have separately suggested legislators in North Carolina should require electors to vote for Trump regardless of the popular vote. Legislatures in both states aren’t set to meet until after the Dec. 25 deadline for the Electoral College to file its votes to Congress.
Disruptions of electors performing their duty to award Electoral College votes to Kamala Harris, should she win in a given state, remain a concern, says Rex VanMiddlesworth, a former teaching fellow in constitutional law at Harvard University who has been consulting with state and local election officials through his work with the bipartisan group, Keep Our Republic. Electors must meet at state capitols to carry out this task.
“The one good thing about having made it through 2021, officials are very concerned, they are wargaming, they are doing table-top exercises, and there is much coordination between law enforcement and election officials to be prepared to respond to anything that anybody can dream up,” VanMiddlesworth said during a press briefing on congressional certification held in mid-October. He noted that in one of the states coordinating with Keep Our Republic, the governor can single-handedly designate any location to be the state capitol, allowing Electoral College members to meet virtually anywhere.
But “in some cases, it’s an open question” whether the state capitol can be officially re-designated to another location in the event of protests that interrupt meetings of presidential electors, VanMiddlesworth says. “We’d rather not get there, so we hope that they secure the state capitol(s).”
After the electors vote — ideally uninterrupted by protests or attacks — the electors must file their votes to Congress by Dec. 25. Congress then reconvenes on Jan. 3. And that’s when the real steal could happen, Democrats fear.
ON JAN. 6, Vice President Harris, acting as President of the Senate, will open votes from the slates of Electoral College electors and ask Congress if they were “regularly given” and “lawfully certified,” just as former Vice President Mike Pence did on January 6, 2021.
“Mr. President, sadly but resolutely I object to the electoral votes of my beloved Commonwealth of Pennsylvania on the grounds of multiple constitutional infractions that they were not, under all of the known circumstances, regularly given,” Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) told Pence that day. Perry noted that his objection was also signed by Sen. Josh Hawley, making it official under the Electoral Count Act.
The ECRA changed that, and now one-fifth of both chambers must sign a “regularly given” objection to make it official.
The “phrase ‘regularly given’ is a term of art,” writes Derek Muller, an election law professor at the University of Notre Dame. In an essay titled “Electoral Votes Regularly Given” and published by the University of Georgia Law School in 2021, Muller writes that Hawley and other members of Congress “have incorrectly used the objection to challenge an assortment of pre-appointment controversies that concern the underlying election itself.”
Democrats and some Republicans, like Rep. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who led GOP efforts on the ECRA, tried to close the “regularly given” loophole when Congress passed the law in 2022. Drafting language for the bill stipulates that “regularly given” objections cannot be based on claims of election fraud that occur before the appointment of Electoral College electors, or “pre-appointment,” according to VanMiddlesworth.
Another phrase that could cause headaches for Democrats also comes from the ECRA’s predecessor: “lawfully certified.” Members of Congress can object to state results if they believe Electoral College votes weren’t “lawfully certified.” As with “regularly given” objections, “lawfully certified” objections are not supposed to be based on claims of voter fraud or voting-related disputes, experts say.
If 20 percent of Congress objects to a state’s Electoral College votes because they weren’t “lawfully certified,” those electoral votes will be subtracted from the total number to win, 270. That would change the total number of Electoral College votes needed to win, and change the states the candidates need to win as well.
In addition to legitimate “lawfully certified” objections, “sustained regularly given objections will result in a contingent election, which will be a disaster,” VanMiddlesworth says. Members of Congress who either don’t know — or don’t care — about the clarifying language of the ECRA may still present regularly given objections, according to VanMiddlesworth.
“If there’s one thing that keeps me awake at night, it’s ‘regularly given,’” VanMiddlesworth said in the October press briefing. “If enough of those are made we go to a contingent election.”
That’s one of the nightmare scenarios for Democrats. A contingent election — there hasn’t been one since 1837 — occurs if neither candidate has enough Electoral College votes to win. In such a scenario, it would be up to state delegations within the House to vote for President. Currently, Republicans hold a majority of those delegations at 26. Democrats hold 22 delegations, and four are tied. It’s exceedingly unlikely that Democrats capture a majority of state congressional delegations this year.
A contingent election would “be a very difficult situation for the country if we were to get there on the basis of electoral votes having been rejected,” Jonathan Winer, a former U.S. Special Envoy for Libya who also served as counsel for John Kerry in his time as senator, said in the October press briefing about congressional certification. “It’s not likely, but it is possible.”
The months leading up to Election Day have already been beset with the most legal fights in recent memory, says Ezra Rosenberg of the Lawyers Committee, which is battling Republicans in court in Virginia and elsewhere over attempts to purge hundreds of thousands of voters from rolls. “It’s never been like this before,” Rosenberg tells Rolling Stone.
Now, there is more chaos on the horizon. The period between Election Day and Jan. 6 is expected to bring some of the most contentious legal battles over any election in history, VanMiddlesworth and others say. In fact, the months ahead may determine whether the checks and balances put in place by the nation’s founders — not to mention their hopes for a country free from the tyranny of a president with no loyalty to democratic ideals — will stand under the test of Trump.
“Political scientists have told us what an authoritarian political party is,” Raskin tells Rolling Stone. “And one of the key hallmarks is that an authoritarian or fascist political party does not accept the results of democratic elections that don’t go their way.”
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