LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: For months, former President Donald Trump has said if he loses come Election Day, it's because of massive fraud. It's a statement based on no evidence, but it's been a repeated lie from his campaign, and it's been going on for years. Trump still hasn't accepted that he lost in 2020. And neither have millions of Americans, despite dozens of court cases that found no widespread voter fraud when Trump lost to President Biden. So if Trump declares victory before the votes are counted, in a close race like this one between him and Vice President Harris, what does that mean for the future of democracy in the United States? Barton Gellman has considered this and other questions about the 2024 election process in a recent piece for Time Magazine, and he joins me now. He's a senior adviser at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU. Good morning.
BARTON GELLMAN: Good morning.
FADEL: What are some of the reforms that have happened after the 2020 elections?
GELLMAN: Well, for example, in Georgia, where Donald Trump notoriously refused to accept that he lost the vote in 2020, they had, at that time, a mechanism for doing multiple recounts. But they were criticized, because the same machines that did the original count did the recount. So now Georgia has hired a second technical vendor to count the same votes that Dominion Voting System counts. So they'll have Dominion do the first count, but after that, a second vendor will recount the votes as an auditing mechanism. So that actually adds another important step toward validation.
FADEL: Trump won't have the powers he had as an incumbent in 2020. Can you break down what that means in practical terms?
GELLMAN: In 2020, it was possible for advisers to come to him, as they did, and say he should send federal troops or federal law enforcement officers to seize all the voting machines and run a recount. He didn't do that, but he considered it. He had a Justice Department working for him. When he's not president, he doesn't have powers like that.
FADEL: Can democracy defend itself against an attempt to overthrow a president-elect?
GELLMAN: I think it can. Look at the differences between now and 2020. First of all, recall that the fake electors who tried to substitute themselves for the correct Biden electors in 2020 have now been indicted in multiple states. The lawyers who made fabricated false arguments about fraud in 2020 - some of them have been indicted, as well, and some of them have been disbarred. There also have been strong repercussions for lying consistently about the results. Fox News has had to pay three-quarters of $1 billion in defamation charges, or penalties, in court for talking about false reports that Dominion Voting Systems were flipping votes that were supposed to be for Trump and flipping them into Biden votes.
Congress has reformed the Electoral Count Act, which was this sort of century-and-a-half-old law that governed how the electoral votes were counted. And now it is much more clear who's in charge of defining who the correct electors are. That's the governor of each state. And keep in mind that in the seven battleground states that will decide this election, five of the governors are Democrats, and the two Republicans in Georgia and Nevada are not associated with election denial. And in fact, Brian Kemp in Georgia strongly resisted Trump's efforts to flip the election in 2020.
FADEL: But you point out that the biggest challenge is getting Americans to trust the system. How do you get people to buy in when there is so much doubt that has been sown?
GELLMAN: I think that election officials around the country have decided that the only answer to this is for them to be completely transparent and open. And so several of them said to me, if you doubt the election's integrity, come watch. Volunteer to be a poll watcher or a poll worker. Ask any question you want. I think that the only way we're going to regain confidence in our system is for all major political leaders to validate the election results - as every single presidential candidate has done in history, save for one. And as long as we have one political party endorsing that view, then we are going to have a large fraction of Americans who don't trust the elections, and that is the most damaging thing I can imagine for our civic society.
FADEL: Barton Gellman is a senior adviser at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU. Thank you so much for taking the time.
GELLMAN: Thank you very much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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