Normally, the task of state electors is perfunctory, their work in December going unnoticed by the average citizen, who tends to tune out between Election Day and the inauguration in January. But Trump’s relentless effort to overturn his loss have thrust these anonymous functionaries into the spotlight and made them targets of the harassment that other election officials—from Democrats like Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to Republicans like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger—have faced for carrying out their duties against Trump’s wishes.
In swing states, electors are receiving police escorts to the locations where they’ll be casting ballots. In Arizona and Pennsylvania, that location has been kept secret, even from the electors themselves, until Monday, as a safeguard against threats. And in Michigan, where electors will cast their ballots at the State Capitol, “credible threats of violence” have shut down state legislative offices. “This is some scary stuff, man,” Khary Penebaker, a Democratic elector from Wisconsin, told the New York Times. “This is not what America is supposed to be like.”
I’m going to guess that none of these threats are being covered in the right-wing news, including Fox.
After the Supreme Court once again declined to hear one of the frivolous lawsuits filed on his behalf, Trump supporters took to the streets in Washington, D.C., vandalizing Black churches, instigating street fights, and even threatening violence against the president-elect. “Joe Biden will be removed,” the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones said at one point, “one way or another.” As the nation’s simmering political tensions started to boil (four people were stabbed in D.C. Saturday as the Proud Boys turned the demonstration into a riot; a right-wing protester allegedly shot a counter-protester at a separate demonstration in Washington state), Trump kept turning up the heat. On Sunday, he threatened that electors would be charged with a “severely punishable crime” if they made the results official, and at one point suggested that he will sandbag his own party in the Georgia runoff race next month if Governor Brian Kemp doesn’t give him his way.
The Proud Boys vandalized several historic Black churches over the weekend. If left-wing protesters had damaged church property, none of us would hear the end of it for months. But if right-wingers destroy church property, that’s okay. That’s because righties presume religion belongs to them, just like “patriotism” and “freedom” belongs to them, and the flag belongs to them. Violence, though, belongs to lefties. Or else it seems violence only counts as violence when lefties do it.
Trump and his allies, though, remain undeterred. The president said after his most recent Supreme Court humiliation that “we have just begun to fight.” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, one of 126 Republicans who formally endorsed the lawsuit seeking to disenfranchise millions of Americans, suggested in a Fox News interview Sunday that he still wouldn’t recognize Biden’s win after the Electoral College vote. And Trump adviser Stephen Miller told Fox & Friends Monday that an “alternate slate of electors from the contested states” would be voting at the same time as the actual electors, and would send those bogus results to Congress to help fuel the next stage of the challenge there. This is all corrosive to democracy, as even a majority in a recent Fox News poll recognized. But if the temperature continues to rise, so too will the risk of things boiling over into something even more dangerous.
Overturning the election in Congress requires several steps, including a majority vote of both houses, which ain’t gonna happen.
See also Assessing the threat from America’s far right at The Economist.