The first presidential election since the January 6 attack will test Congress’s new defenses

WASHINGTON (AP) – It presidential electionsfirst from January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitolwill be a stress test of the new systems and guardrails Congress has put in place to make sure America’s long tradition of peaceful transfers of presidential power.

As a Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris race to the finish line, pro-democracy supporters and elected officials are preparing for an uncertain period after Election Day as legal challenges are filed, bad actors spread disinformation and voters wait for Congress to certify the results.

“One of the remarkable things about this election is that so much of the potential threat and so much of the attack on the electoral system is focused on the post-election period,” said Wendy Weiser, vice chairman for democracy at the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice.

After the Jan. 6 attack, Congress moved to strengthen the process and stop a repeat of the unprecedented period when Trump, joined by some GOP allies in Congress, refused to concede defeat to the president Joe Biden. Trump spent months pushing through dozens of failed legal cases before sending his supporters to the Capitol, where they disrupted the vote count with a bloody riot. He is standing in front of A federal indictment for a program that included lists of faux electors from states falsely claiming he had won.

While new Vote Counting Reform Act approved by Congress clarified post-election processes — to resolve legal issues more quickly and to emphasise that the vice chairman has no power to alter the end result of the Jan. 6 election — the new law is on no account set in stone.

Much depends upon the people involved, from winning and losing presidents to elected congressional leaders and voters across America who put their trust in a democratic system that has existed for greater than 200 years.

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Voters are concerned about post-election conflicts

AND poll conducted by the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed that American voters are approaching the election with deep anxiety about what may come next.

Dick Gephardt, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, currently serves on the board of the nonpartisan organization Keep our Republic, which provides civic education about the process in the presidential battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

“We are only concerned about one thing: Can Americans still have reasonable confidence in the elections, and can we achieve a coherent, peaceful transition of power in all offices, including the presidency?” Gephardt said at a briefing earlier this month.

“I think January 6, 2021 was really a wake-up call for all of us,” he said.

It’s not only the onslaught of legal challenges that Democratic groups are concerned about, as each Republicans and Democrats have already filed dozens of cases before Election Day. They say the sheer variety of cases could raise questions election result and cause disinformation, each at home and abroad, as happened in 2020 when Trump’s legal team advanced distant theories that turned out to be wildly inaccurate.

Trump is looking for to reclaim the White House, already setting the stage for challenges in an election he desires to be “too big to be rigged.” The Republican National Committee has made legal strategy a cornerstone of its activities Election Integrity Program.

Trump is supported by Republicans on Capitol Hill, including the Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnsonwhich adopted similar language, saying it could only accept the results if the elections were free and fair.

“We will have a peaceful transition of power,” Johnson, who led one in every of Trump’s 2020 legal challenges, said on CBS. “I believe President Trump will win and this will be handled.”

House Republicans’ specific line of attack was to suggest that non-citizens would vote illegally, despite the fact that it’s offense to accomplish that, and state and federal reviews have shown this to be the case extremelyrare. To reinforce his concerns, Johnson pointed to previous House races, including one in Iowa in 2020 that he won by six votes.

Republican Joseph Morelle of New York, the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, said Johnson was “saying the quiet part out loud,” signaling how Republicans could challenge the result.

This “disturbs me,” he said.

What happens between the election and the inauguration?

At the Brennan Center, they ran war game-like scenarios about what might occur after the election, while state election officials they’re facing a rebirth conspiracy theories and disinformation about voting.

The process features a series of deadlines between Election Day on November 5 and Inauguration Day on January 20, once routine steps which might be now necessary milestones that could be achieved – or missed.

States are required to certify their electors by December 11 upfront of the Electoral College meeting, which falls on December 17 this 12 months.

The new Congress meets on January 3 to elect the Speaker of the House and swear in lawmakers. Then on January 6, Congress meets in a joint session to approve the counting of votes from the states – a typically ceremonial session presided over by the vice chairman.

To strengthen the process in the wake of the January 6 attack, the Ballot Counting Reform Act made several changes intended to strengthen the process and ensure disputes are resolved by the time Congress meets. Legal questions over the results are expected to be resolved more quickly, under an accelerated timetable for judicial review, all the approach to the Supreme Court if needed. If the district refuses to issue the certificate their results, like some did in the 2022 midterm elections, the governor has greater authority to certify the state’s results.

As of Jan. 6, the law now requires 20% of the House and Senate to call on the state’s voters to force a vote to reject them, reasonably than a threshold of 1 member from each chamber.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., who co-sponsored the new law with Republican Sen. Susan Collins, D-May., said she had done “the best she could” to guard the process.

“You know people have the right, if they have a problem with the election, to go to court and be heard,” Lofgren said. The thing is, once it’s over, it’s over.”