By Tim Dixon

So Donald Trump and the GOP have told us – inadvertently – about what will happen during the 2024 election. You can tell by the troop buildup, ie, an increase in GOP (read MAGA) influence in local electoral councils. These are the groups that ratify electoral results in every county in the US.

In Australia we have one Electoral Commission that oversees all elections in this country. While in the US, every one of the over 3 thousand counties has a council that is set up to ratify the result of voting in those counties. These councils are made up of partisan political constituents… there is a shit fight as to whether these councils are dominated by Democrat or Republican representatives, and these people are not paid, they are volunteers. They can come from any walk of life… so unlike the AEC, who may not employ you if you are partisan to any political party, the overseers of local electorates in the US are overseen by totally partisan electoral councils, and there is a huge fight to be a part of these councils.

Moderate Republicans have been ejected in the last few years in favour of MAGA representatives, and in red states, Democrats are hardly given a say.

The bottom line is that these local electoral counties have always ratified the results of their counties, it’s what by law they have to do, and it happened in 2020; these counties ratified their results and these feed into the overall state results that are then sent to the electoral college.

Donald Trump tried to steal the election by denying that the results of the electoral college were valid in 2020, but by then the horse had already bolted; Pence did the one great thing of his political career by ratifying the Electoral College votes, even though he and his colleagues had been under fire (literally) in the capital earlier that day to not do this.

In 2024, Trump and the GOP are far smarter; they have inundated certain electoral counties in decisive counties to favour MAGA, and I say MAGA on purpose – these are no longer Republican-held counties, even though they are in name. So even though it is the directive of these local counties to ratify the election results as they pan out, because MAGA have stacked these councils with their followers, it is possible, no, inevitable, that these councils will fail to ratify results that they disagree with, ie. Trump losses. This is unprecedented, and can mean that these council members can be arrested and face court. But what it will no doubt mean is Trump’s favourite way of operation; endless law suits, and it means that state results will not be sent to the electoral college by the December 11 deadline, which in turn means that unlike in 2020 when the results showed that Trump had lost the electoral college because the results were in, there may not be any state results known in the decisive states, because the local electoral councils have not ratified results…

We know that Trump and the GOP will do this. We have known for years that they have been stacking electoral councils, so why is it that we are so focused on Harris and Trump being locked together as far as polls are showing. It is moot… we may not know who has won or lost due to the currently illegal failure of counties to ratify results… especially if Trump looks like losing the decisive states.

Further reading: What to Know About the Looming Election Certification Crisis