How Dems are 'preparing' for MAGA's 'election subversion war machine'

With the United States' 2024 presidential election only a week away, poll after poll continues to show an incredibly close race.

Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris leads former President Donald Trump by 4 percent in a national ABC News/Ipsos poll of likely voters released on Sunday, October 27, while a national CBS News/YouGov poll released the same day found Harris ahead by 1 percent. And a national Emerson College poll that came out a day earlier found Harris and Trump in a dead heat.

Many pollsters consider the race a toss-up, and Democratic lawyers — including Democracy Docket publisher Marc Elias — have been warning that if Harris wins, Republicans are almost certain to fight the election results. Radio host Charlamagne tha God has even warned that been if Harris picks up more than 270 electoral votes, the "corrupt" U.S. Supreme Court will hand the election to Trump anyway.

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In an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on October 29, journalist A.B. Stoddard describes the ways in which Democrats are preparing for what Elias calls the GOP's "election subversion war machine."

"If you believe Donald Trump, his campaign, his allies, and most of the polling trends," Stoddard explains, "the candidate who attempted a coup and incited an insurrection is going to win the presidency back next week. This is very likely. But in case he doesn't, Trump World has leaned hard into the narrative that he is invincible and Kamala Harris is too stupid to have a chance — a message repeated throughout his Madison Square Garden rally Sunday night. There's a reason for that. If the polls are wrong and the vice president outperforms them and wins, Trump needs his followers to believe the election was stolen from him again, because he and his allies plan to go further than last time to prevent his defeat."

Stoddard warns that if Harris appears to be winning on Election Night, Republicans in swing states are "ready to refuse to certify their county results."

"The goal is to create delay and doubt about the outcome," Stoddard observes. "While the courts are likely to ultimately force canvassers to certify results, a missed county or state deadline could be enough to prevent certification of a Harris victory. If states fail to finalize their results when they are required to do so, voting by the Electoral College on December 17 could be disrupted, resulting in delays that would create further doubt about the legitimacy of the election and give rise to a real possibility that the election will be decided by Congress."

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Stoddard adds, however, that Democrats are "prepared" and that Harris' campaign "has more than 400 lawyers currently polishing off draft pleadings and memos in anticipation of every legal contingency."

"They are part of a much larger network the party has spent much of the past year setting up; it includes 10,000 lawyers across the country who are prepared to address issues and to protect the vote at the precinct level," Stoddard notes. "They anticipate having to respond to lawsuits that attempt to stop voting on Election Day, reject mail ballots that arrive after Election Day, and halt the counting of provisional ballots, Elias told the Washington Post. Republicans have already engaged in more than 130 lawsuits in 26 states."

Stoddard emphasizes that if Harris wins, MAGA Republicans will do everything they can to prevent her from being sworn in as president.

"Republicans have worked hard to prepare for this, investing heavily in the Big Lie, radicalizing their voters, hiring lawyers, recruiting 'election integrity' volunteers, and ratcheting up the rhetoric," Stoddard warns. "Anything short of a Trump victory will set all of this in motion, and Republicans will take this country through something unprecedented, dangerous, and damaging. This is not a little secret."

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A.B. Stoddard's full article for The Bulwark is available at this link.