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True political courage — the principled stand, the elevation of country over party pressure, the willingness to sacrifice a career to protect the common good — has become painfully rare in a polarized world. It deserves to be celebrated and nurtured whenever it appears, especially in defense of fundamental American institutions like our election system. The sad truth, too, is the country will probably need a lot more of it in the coming months.
In state after state, Republicans have systematically made it harder for citizens to vote and harder for the election workers who count those votes to do so. They are challenging thousands of voter registrations in Democratic areas, forcing administrators to manually restore perfectly legitimate voters to the rolls. They are aggressively threatening election officials who defended the 2020 election against manipulation. They are trying to invalidate mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, even if they meet the legal requirements of a postmark before the deadline. They are making it more difficult to certify election results and are trying to change how states apportion their electors, in hopes of making it easier for Donald Trump to win or help him overturn an election loss.
Though many of these moves happened behind closed doors, this campaign is hardly secret. And last month, Mr. Trump directly threatened to prosecute and imprison election officials around the country who disagree with his lies.
Against this kind of systematic assault on the institutions and processes that undergird American democracy, the single most important backstops are the public servants, elected and volunteer, who continue to do their jobs.
Consider Mike McDonnell, a Republican state senator from Nebraska, who showed how it’s done when he announced last month that he would not bow to an intense, last-minute pressure campaign by his party’s national leaders, including Mr. Trump, to help slip an additional electoral vote into Mr. Trump’s column.
Currently, Nebraska awards most of its electors by congressional district, and while most of the state is safely conservative, polling shows Vice President Kamala Harris poised to win the elector from the Second Congressional District, which includes the state’s biggest city, Omaha. In the razor-thin margins of the 2024 election, this could be the vote that determines the outcome. That was the intent of Republican lawmakers in Nebraska, who waited until it was too late for Democrats in Maine, which has a similar system, to change the state’s rules to prevent one congressional district from choosing a Republican elector.
“Elections should be an opportunity for all voters to be heard, no matter who they are, where they live or what party they support,” said Mr. McDonnell, who joined the Republicans this year after he was drummed out of the Democratic Party for his positions on abortion access and gender-affirming care.
The country will need more than a few Mike McDonnells to get through the next several months, especially if Ms. Harris wins and Mr. Trump follows through on his threat to again challenge the legitimate result, sowing lies, chaos and, as in 2021, violence. It isn’t easy to hold the line against a growing antidemocratic movement that refuses to accept the outcomes of elections it doesn’t win.
Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, did that in the aftermath of the 2020 election, when he stood firm against immense pressure from Mr. Trump to “find” just enough votes to help him overtake Joe Biden and win the state’s crucial 16 electors. Following Mr. Trump’s lead, both of Georgia’s Republican senators at the time demanded that Mr. Raffensperger resign for failing “the people of Georgia.” He stayed in office and ordered a hand count of the votes, which confirmed Mr. Biden’s victory but made him a target of Mr. Trump’s ire.
For all the political threats (and death threats) he received, Mr. Raffensperger still has his job, but others who have put themselves on the line have paid the price. Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County recorder who in 2020 provoked the outrage of Arizona Republicans by defending, rightly, the state’s voting system against claims of a stolen election, lost his primary this summer. In December 2020, two election workers in Georgia, Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, were falsely accused of ballot tampering by Mr. Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani, leading to a barrage of death threats and intimidation that drove them out of their homes and into hiding. It’s not hard to understand why so many poll workers are refusing to return to the job.
The threats continue to rain down. Last week Matthew Barrett, a Colorado judge, sentenced a county clerk to nine years in prison for tampering with voting machines in 2020 in an attempt to help Mr. Trump. Like clockwork, the judge began receiving threats in reaction to the sentencing.
In the face of genuine risk to their safety, Americans across the country — from judges to poll workers and election officials — have done their jobs with honesty and decency and have generally been supported by voters for doing so. In 2022 at least four election deniers supported by Mr. Trump who were running to be secretaries of state lost their races. The battles go on in a dozen states this year, with some MAGA candidates for secretary of state or election administrator vowing to eliminate mail-in ballots and early voting.
It’s important for voters to reject these conspiracy theorists in November, but the greatest responsibility lies with those who hold the greatest power. That means top Republicans, some of whom have put their careers on the line to protect the country against Mr. Trump and the MAGA movement and who have since spoken out in support of the rule of law and the Constitution: Rusty Bowers, a former speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, who refused to go along with the Trump team’s groundless claims of election fraud. Mike Pence, who, in the face of threats to his life by Jan. 6 rioters, did his constitutionally mandated job and has now declined to endorse his former boss. Liz Cheney, who was a top-ranking House Republican until she helped lead the investigation of the Jan. 6 riot. And Mitt Romney, a Utah senator, who voted to convict Mr. Trump after his second impeachment, for inciting insurrection.
Defying Mr. Trump’s and MAGA’s efforts to undermine the result of free and fair elections often came at a great cost to these people, to their relationships and, at times, to their own and their families’ physical safety. For this, they deserve our praise and our gratitude.
Yet far too few of these heroes will still be in office as the 2024 elections take place. Others will need to step up. Over the coming weeks and months, poll workers, state officials and Republican members of Congress may be well pressured to cast doubt on or work to undermine election results that don’t go Mr. Trump’s way. If the recent past is any guide, they may be called on to block prospective voters from the polls, to question ballots from Democratic precincts, to refuse to certify valid election results and even to engage in election fraud by posing as presidential electors.
The danger to the future of American democracy is profound and will not go away on its own. The rule of law survives only thanks to the actions of regular, honest people choosing to uphold it, in large and small ways, every day.
Source photograph by 3drenderings, via Getty Images.
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