Trump's grip on GOP sparks fears about democratic process

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Seven months after Election Day, former President Donald Trump's supporters are still auditing ballots in Arizona's largest county and may revive legislation that would make it easier for judges in Texas to overturn election results.

In Georgia, meanwhile, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a bill allowing it to appoint a board that can replace election officials. Trump loyalists who falsely insist he won the 2020 election are running for top election offices in several swing states. And after a pro-Trump mob staged a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol to halt the certification of Democrat Joe Biden's election victory, Republicans banded together to block an independent investigation of the riot, shielding Trump from additional scrutiny of one of the darkest days of his administration.

To democracy advocates, Democrats and others, the persistence of the GOP's election denial shows how the Republican Party is increasingly open to bucking democratic norms, particularly the bipartisan respect traditionally afforded to election results even after a bitter campaign. That's raising the prospect that if the GOP gains power in next year's midterms, the party may take the extraordinary step of refusing to certify future elections.

"We have to face the facts that Republicans - obviously with exceptions - have become an authoritarian party," said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and co-author of the book "How Democracies Die." "It's impossible to sustain a democracy in a two-party system when one of the parties is not willing to play by the rules of the game."

Levitsky and others warn there are several weak points in the U.S. system where a political party could simply refuse to allow its opponent to formally win a presidential election.

I'm more concerned about this now than I was on Jan. 7," said Edward Foley, a law professor at The Ohio State University who studies election disputes. "It seems that, over the months, the lesson has not been 'never again,' but how to be more effective next time."

This strikes me as being overblown," said Trey Grayson, a former Kentucky secretary of state and a Republican who has been sharply critical of Trump's election fraud claims.

Grayson said a comparable worry is that voting procedures have become a partisan issue like taxes and abortion, fomenting suspicion of election results. "Both sides are really amping up their rhetoric to amp up their bases," Grayson said, acknowledging that "there's clearly a lot more bad stuff going on on my side now."

Nonetheless, democratically elected officials were able to withstand that "bad stuff" in 2020, despite Trump's pressures. "When it came time for Republicans to do something in the 2020 election, most of those in power did the right thing," said Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California-Irvine.

Still, Hasen said he doesn't want to sugarcoat things. "There are a lot of warning signs," he said. "It is a very dangerous moment for democracy."

Levitsky said the United States' complex electoral system stands out among international democracies by vesting oversight of elections in local, partisan officials. "We rely a lot on local officials, and if one party decides not to behave, we are in for a world of trouble," he said.

Still, that system has worked for more than 200 years. "There are a lot of safeguards," Grayson said. "Now, we can blow through those safeguards and, if it comes down to one state like in 2000, you don't have all 50 safeguards."

What the right does is provide scape-goats to keep attention away from the real problem.