December 30, 2021 11:22 AM UTC

Republican Election Challenges Likely to Continue in 2022

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• by: Colorado Pols

[mantra-pullquote align=”right” textalign=”left” width=”50%”]“Never in the country’s modern history has a a major party sought to turn the administration of elections into an explicitly partisan act.”

— The Associated Press (12/30/21)[/mantra-pullquote]

As Nick Riccardi writes in a sobering story for The Associated Press, challenges to the 2020 election could be just a preview of a “slow-motion insurrection” coming in 2022:

In battleground states and beyond, Republicans are taking hold of the once-overlooked machinery of elections. While the effort is incomplete and uneven, outside experts on democracy and Democrats are sounding alarms, warning that the United States is witnessing a “slow-motion insurrection” with a better chance of success than Trump’s failed power grab last year.

They point to a mounting list of evidence: Several candidates who deny Trump’s loss are running for offices that could have a key role in the election of the next president in 2024. In Michigan, the Republican Party is restocking members of obscure local boards that could block approval of an election. In Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the GOP-controlled legislatures are backing open-ended “reviews” of the 2020 election, modeled on a deeply flawed look-back in Arizona. The efforts are poised to fuel disinformation and anger about the 2020 results for years to come…

…The result, experts say, is that another baseless challenge to an election has become more likely, not less.

“It’s not clear that the Republican Party is willing to accept defeat anymore,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and co-author of the book “How Democracies Die.” “The party itself has become an anti-democratic force.” [Pols emphasis]

Riccardi notes that Republicans are advancing state-level efforts, from Georgia to Pennsylvania to Michigan, to remake the process of running elections in 2022. The biggest problem, notes Riccardi, could be that Americans just aren’t willing to accept the lengths to which some Republicans have gone to disrupt our election system:

It’s difficult for voters to believe the system could be vulnerable, said Daniel Squadron of The States Project, a Democratic group that tries to win state legislatures.

“The most motivated voters in America today are those who think the 2020 election was stolen,” he said. “Acknowledging this is afoot requires such a leap from any core American value system that any of us have lived through.”

The first step in any problem-solving quest is acknowledging that a problem does indeed exist. As much as Democrats can hope, not every Republican effort to find nonexistent voter fraud will be led by blundering idiots such as Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters.