US Election 2024 Certification Warnings

Republicans are planning now to refuse certification of the 2024 election results.

Again?!

As we saw in 2020, Republicans no longer seem to care much about winning elections, but rather more like taking elections.

Trump has even said this, quite explicitly. For example, at a campaign event in Asheboro, North Carolina, he said he thinks he has the votes all locked up and only needs to accuse Democrats of (imaginary) cheating ^[1]:

Our primary focus is not to get out the vote, it is to make sure they don’t cheat… Because we have all the votes we need.

Basically, he cannot conceive of a world in which he does not win, so he need not actually compete. He merely need ascribe his problems to cheating by others, as seems to be his custom in all things.

He’s setting us up for accusations of cheating in the fall, followed by the riots and insurrections of his followers about which he was so enthused last time.

The Reality: Republican Attempts at Cheating, Again

The truth, of course, is that the cheating is essentially all on the Republican side. Whether it was fake slates of electors intended to deceive Congress, pointless but endless lawsuits, or the actual riots, insurrections, assaults, and deaths on January 6 2021, the intent is the same: ignore the votes, force the process to his will so he can take power.

The US election system is a complex Rube Goldberg machine with many interacting parts. It’s essentially a way for people to act out, almost in pantomime, the ritual steps in an 18th century workflow as specified by our laws. Today much of it would be replaced by a spreadsheet (one that was very, very carefully and transparently audited).

It’s also breathtakingly decentralized: there is almost no Federal counting, as that is done not even by states, but by counties. In theory, this is security against mischief in one place; in reality, it provides opportunities for mischief in many places. (A joke from one of my former employers: “Our systems don’t have a single point of failure. We have multiple points of failure!”)

Each of those has different laws and customs. Each of them might have either appointed or elected officials. While they are supposed to be non-partisan, Republicans since Reagan have been anything but that.

As we previously noted in 2020 here on this Crummy Little Blog That Nobody Reads, there are multiple stages at which a coordinated Republican effort to overthrow the election could very well work. Unfortunately, other people have also noticed this.

The inspiration for today’s post is this article ^[2] and the accompanying 9min 22sec video ^[3] from Democracy Docket. (Which, by the way, I highly recommend.)

Their main focus is the certification process: after we determine who is eligible to vote, and the voting itself happens, and the counting happens, comes certification.

• This is traditionally seen as a ceremonial activity, in which a local official polls the vote-counters, tallies up the results, writes them on a fancy document, which is then signed and possibly has a pretty seal affixed. Basically, they assert the tabulations are complete and correct, under legal penalties for lying that are something like perjury in a court.
• That document is sent up the chain of command to the state, which does something similar as a second level of certification.
  • Based on that, electors to the Electoral College are chosen, and sworn. Eventually, they officially do their thing and cast Electoral College ballots.
• Finally, the Electoral College ballots are counted in Congress, with the Vice President certifying each state’s Electoral College ballots and the total.

Marc Elias of Democracy Docket describes the election certifiers at all levels as like the “scoreboard operators” of an athletic game, not members of the competing teams. Of course, if you can corrupt the scoreboard operators – including Congress! – you can subvert the process. If the process is tree-structured and depends on upward dataflow, a few subversions at the bottom can bork the whole thing, like falling dominoes.

There are legal remedies, of course. Writs of mandamus, suing counties, and so on. Democracy Docket is on the case in that regard. But once elections happen, clocks start ticking, and there are a lot of US counties which comprise a huge attack surface for those seeking to subvert the election. The Georgia state election board has already passed rules making it easier for county-level officials to obstruct the entire national election.

How bad is it? Suppose the number of counties attempting to obstruct the election were binomially distributed. Then we need to know $N$, the number of relevant counties, and $p$, the probability that a given county will attempt to obstruct.

• According to Wikipedia ^[4], there are 3,143 US counties plus 100 county-like subdivisions in territories, for a total of 3,243.
  • Let’s suppose about half of those have local election boards that are Republican. (I suspect the true number is a bit higher, but let’s cut ourselves a break and assume it’s even.)
  • Then $N = 1621$.
• Now, most Republicans still actively functioning in office have to be Trump fans, or they’d have been removed. Most of those are extreme MAGAs.
  • However, let’s be charitable and assume that only about 10% of them would actually attempt to block a Democratic win.
  • Then $p = 0.10$.

The number of counties $k$ attempting overthrow would be a binomially distributed random variable:

A bit of fiddling about in R tells us the median and the 95% confidence limits on the likely number of these law-defying counties:

> qbinom(c(0.025, 0.500, 0.975), 1621, 0.1)
[1] 139 162 186

So we’d expect about 162 counties to attempt this in the median, with 95% confidence between 139 and 186. That’s… a lot of leaks in the bottom of the boat to have to patch under time pressure and in the face of resistance in court!

But why would anyone want to do that?

• If the Electoral College is tied, or just crippled to the point of not functioning, then the election is “thrown into the House” to decide.
• Each delegation, i.e., each state, gets 1 vote.

So all those low-population, rural, red states get 1 vote. California, with its huge population, gets 1 vote. The big, low-population red states would install Trump and simply ignore the votes of most of the US citizens.

That’s what they want.

NB: This looks perhaps more pessimistic than need be.

• The reality of political polarization is that most states are already locked in. The election will be decided by a about 10 battleground states.
• In fact, only $O$(10,000) “undecided” voters in those states will determine the outcome.
• However, that makes the pressure on county election officials there even more intense. As the Democracy Docket article notes, about 70 election officials in battleground states have already declared their belief in conspiracy theories about 2020 and their intent to obstruct any result they do not like.

The sorta good news, I suppose, is that 70 leaks in the boat is a smaller number of leaks to plug in real time this November. Ok, maybe just “less bad” news, but I’ll take it. We can start watching them now, which is what Elias’s law firm is presumably doing.

The Weekend Conclusion

The Democratic National Convention this week has raised my hopes that the Democrats are becoming the party they always should have been. Nonetheless, the fascists currently in charge of the Republican party seem to have very ugly plans for election overthrow.

Republicans are probably going to lose the election, but they will almost certainly try to overthrow democracy.

Again.

(Ceterum censeo, Trump incarcerandam esse.)

Notes & References

1: V Hillyard & R Shabad, “Trump says his focus is ensuring Democrats ‘don’t cheat,’ not voter turnout — echoing efforts to undermine election”, NBC News, 2024-Aug-21. ↩

2: M Cohen, “What Happens When Election Officials Refuse to Certify Results?”, Democracy Docket, 2024-Aug-01. ↩

3: S Feldman, “What Happens If Election Officials Refuse to Certify Results?”, Democracy Docket on_YouTube_, 2024-Aug-22.↩

4: Wikipedia Editors, “List of United States counties and county equivalents”, Wikipedia, retrieved 2024-Aug-22. ↩