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.”

New York Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, said before former President Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden that doesn’t imagine Trump is a fascist.

According to Politico, on October 26, Adams told reporters gathered at a news conference at New York Police Headquarters that he thought comparisons to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler were exaggerated. Asked if, like Vice President Kamala Harris and former Trump chief of staff John Kelly, he believes the previous president is a fascist, Adams replied: “My answer is no, I know what Hitler did and I know what a crime what a fascist regime looks like. “

According to Kelly, saying that Trump meets the definition of a fascist is a disturbing event within the history of American politics.

“But over the nine years he has run for president or served, Mr. Trump has regularly invoked the language, history and themes of fascism without hesitation or apparent concern for what it would look like,” political reporter Peter Baker wrote.

He added that “no American commander-in-chief in the last few centuries has so aggressively sought to discredit the institutions of democracy at home while openly approving and envying dictators abroad.” Moreover, no president “has ever been publicly accused of fascism by his own hand-picked top adviser who spent day after day with him in the Oval Office.”

According to Politico, Adams’ reticence to criticize Trump is partly as a result of courting his support within the face of waning support resulting from a federal investigation into allegations of bribery and corruption.

A/Siena survey it currently shows Adams’ poll on the back each former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York Attorney General Leticia James amongst likely Democratic voters.

Additionally, Adams is more popular amongst Republican voters, who usually tend to say he did nothing incorrect. Democratic voters, including Black and Latino voters, once a strong bloc for Adams, have resented the mayor since his 2021 victory.

The only presumptive candidate within the mayoral race to comment on the poll was Jessica Ramos.

“New Yorkers lost faith in Eric Adams before the Southern District confirmed his corruption,” she told Politico. “It is telling that he refused to appear at the first forum in the Bronx to defend his record and share his vision. “He has polls that show that working New Yorkers who have relied on him are fed up.”

Vice President Kamala Harris’ appearance on Shannon Sharpe’s “Club Shay Shay” podcast was met with thousands of comments from Donald Trump supporters on YouTube.

Tens of thousands of viewers left comments expressing their shock, and others praised Sharpe’s team for not disabling comments filled with quite a few criticisms and insults towards the vice chairman.

“I’m really shocked that comments haven’t been disabled.” wrote one commentator.

“The comments did not disappoint. People are aware of Harris’ nonsense,” another person commented.

“I was scrolling for 20 minutes looking for a positive comment for Harris. Haven’t seen one yet. America is awake!” one other comment was read.

Others cited Katt Williams, who helped Sharpe’s podcast go mainstream with an interview he conducted earlier this 12 months that went viral with over eighty million views.

“All likes will be revealed in 2024 Katt Williams,” one other user wrote.

Comments supporting Harris were few and much between. The comments on the clips shared on X, formerly Twitter, were much the identical. Thousands of Trump supporters flooded the clips with negative comments.

It is unclear whether Sharpe’s team will resolve to stop commenting.

During Harris’ meeting with Sharp, she talked about immigration reform, health care, taxes and more.

However, as many commentators noted, Sharpe and Harris didn’t begin to delve into the Democratic nominee’s vision for the country until nearly 20 minutes into the interview. Most of this time was filled with an off-the-cuff discussion about Harris’ childhood, what she eats for breakfast on daily basis, and her music and fashion preferences.

“I really like that Shannon Sharpe got this chance, but I’m 10 minutes in and I actually wish it wasn’t Stephen A. Talk politics. I do not care what she eats for breakfast or what she would tell her 18-year-old self,” wrote one YouTube user.

The conversation finally modified course when Sharpe asked Harris concerning the economy, prompting Harris to begin assessing Trump’s economic policies and actions during his time in office.

Harris emphasized that while Trump’s name was on stimulus checks distributed to Americans in the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, several Black members of Congress, equivalent to Maxine Waters and Hakeem Jeffries, led the initiative on these payments. She also criticized Trump’s tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy and his efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Harris highlighted some of her economic proposals, equivalent to creating funds for a $25,000 down payment for first-time homeowners, increasing access to capital for small business owners, tightening Social Security regulations, tax cuts for working-class Americans and tax relief child taxes for brand new children. parents.

During her conversation with Sharp, she also addressed black men who plan to vote for Trump:

“Don’t think you’re in Donald Trump’s club. You’re not. He won’t think about you. Do you think he invited you to dinner? he asked Harris. “You think that when he goes away, when he’s with his buddies, his billionaire buddies, he’s thinking about what we need to do to deal with… the health disparities in black men around colon cancer, what we need to do, screening , what do we have to deal with prostate cancer, which black men are twice as likely to develop?”

She also went after Trump for his personal indictment against the Central Park Five, his racist birther stunt against former President Barack Obama, and the inflammatory and baseless lies he spread about Haitians eating human animals in Springfield, Ohio.

In the weeks leading up to Election Day on November 5, Harris appeared on several podcasts and network television shows.

The episode “Club Shay Shay” received over 300,000 views and over 13,000 comments inside three hours of being posted on YouTube.