The Daily - Jan. 6, Part 3: The State of American Democracy

Episode Date: January 7, 2022

After the election on Nov. 3, 2020, President J. Donald Trump and his allies tested the limits of the U.S. election system, launching pressure and legal campaigns in competitive states to have votes overturned — all the while exposing the system’s precariousness.Although the efforts weren’t successful, they appear to have been only the beginning of a wider attack on American elections. In the final part of our Jan. 6 coverage, we explore the threats to democracy that may come to bear in the next election. Guest: Alexander Burns, a national political correspondent for The New York Times.Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: The fight over American democracy and the fragility of good faith: Times political journalists talk about the Republicans’ push to restrict voting and seize control over elections, and how Democrats are responding.Here are four takeaways from the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. This election was rigged. Everybody knows it. In the weeks following November 3rd, as the election hung in the balance in a few key states. This colossal expansion of mail-in voting opened the floodgates to massive fraud. President Trump and his supporters tried to persuade local officials and courts

to overturn the results, and in doing so, exposed the most fragile aspects of our election system and democracy. If we don't root out the fraud, the tremendous and horrible fraud that's taken place in our 2020 election, we don't have a country anymore.

Ultimately, those efforts failed, culminating in January 6th. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now. especially the other side. But you have to go home now. But in the years since, Republicans have appeared to systematically go after the laws and officials that stood in Trump's way,

raising questions about whether the election system is weaker today and whether it could sustain another attack. and whether it could sustain another attack. Today, in Part 3 of our look at the legacy of January 6th, my colleague Alex Burns on the state of American democracy. It's Friday, January 7th. Freedom wins, and this is still the people's house. And as we reconvene in this chamber, the world will again witness the resilience and strength of our democracy. For even in the wake of unprecedented violence and vandalism at this Capitol, the elected representatives of the people of the United States have assembled again.

Let's get back to work. Alex, let's go back to essentially one year ago today, the day after January 6th. Right. January 7th, after the siege, Congress gathers late on the night of the 6th into the early morning hours. And they finally did what they had been prevented from doing at the normal time and in the appointed way, which is to officially certify the results of the 2020 election. The announcement of the state of the vote by the president of the Senate shall be deemed a sufficient declaration of the person's elected president and vice president of the United States. This leaves no doubt that Joe Biden is going to be sworn in as president in two weeks. The chair declares the joint session dissolved. But in that moment, I think many people in the country

were shaken by what had felt like a very close call for democracy. Yes, and January 6th is the terrifying culmination of that very close call. But the whole process of transferring power in this country is built on the expectation that everybody is basically going to go along with the process peacefully and with some degree of grace. And at every stage, really between November 3rd, the election, and January 6th, the formal certification date, that did not happen on the Trump side.

You saw a sitting president of the United States and his political allies, sometimes at his explicit instructions, sometimes taking matters into their own hands with his rhetoric as inspiration, testing the limits of the system all the way along. sometimes taking matters into their own hands with his rhetoric as inspiration, testing the limits of the system all the way along. Right. It was a pretty sprawling, you might even call it scattershot, effort, particularly in the battleground states, the swing states where the votes were very close and where the outcome was going to have been determined. Michael, I remember talking at the time to Democrats who were on the other side of this

battle, people who were trying to thwart what Trump was up to, and they were profoundly disturbed by the things that he and his allies were doing. But they were also puzzled because it sure seemed like there wasn't any particular strategy to it. It was, I think, scattershot is the right word for it. Remember Georgia. Okay. Thank you very much. Hello, Brad and Ryan and everybody. We appreciate the time and the call. So we've spent a lot of time on this. And if we could just go over some of the numbers, I think it's pretty clear that we won. We won very substantially, Georgia.

President Trump famously called the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, the official who oversees elections in the state. So look, all I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more that we have. 80 votes, which is one more that we have. And during a recount, spent an hour or more pressuring him to, quote, find 11000 votes that would make up the difference between Trump and Biden. That's not really a strategic request. It's a request that a state official wave a wand and change the outcome. But it's an extraordinary and dangerous thing for a president to do. I don't know. Look, Brad, I got to get I have to find 12000 votes and I have them times a lot. And therefore, I won the state. That's before we go to the next step, which is in the process of right now. step, which is in the process of right now. President Trump is trying a new approach in his fight to overturn the election, personal political pressure. In Michigan, you had a

sitting president calling members of the local canvassing board in Wayne County. That's the county where Detroit is located. He personally hosted several of Michigan's Republican state lawmakers, including the Senate majority leader and the Speaker of the Michigan House at the White House, asking them not to certify Biden's victory there. Now the president's biggest battlegrounds, the courtrooms in the states that will decide the presidential race. And then you have this avalanche of lawsuits in pretty much every remotely competitive state that Joe Biden carried. His lawyers are desperately clinging to lies and incendiary claims while offering no proof. I know crimes. I can smell

them. It's enough to overturn any election. It's disgraceful what happened. You had the president's lawyers and lawyers implicitly affiliated with his campaign filing litigation in places like Pennsylvania with these brazen requests that the courts throw out tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of mail-in ballots, enough that could, at least in theory, should a series of judges make some really radical decisions, change the outcome of the election in those places. Many of the campaign's lawsuits across the country were rejected for a lack of evidence. They did not go anywhere.

But I think a lot of people in the immediate aftermath of January 6th felt that if any one of those pieces had gone a little bit differently, if you had had a handful of less responsible federal judges or a handful of rogue officials at the state level, that perhaps things could have been much, much, much more dangerous for democracy. Right. And suddenly it felt like what this all exposed, that we all learned, is that our election systems come down to a lot of individuals upholding state and local election laws, essentially out of a respect for the process. And more than that, they have a legal obligation to uphold those state and local election laws. And so if Donald Trump's efforts in 2020 to subvert those obligations felt like the first kind of profound threat to the democratic system, what we've seen in the years since,

a campaign led by Trump and his supporters to essentially strengthen their own hand in contesting future elections, looks a lot like the next phase of the same threat. This looks like the beginning of a long-range preparation to attack the 2024 election even more aggressively than Trump attacked the election in 2020 to make sure that it's tougher to vote next time and that if the election goes the wrong way, there are more options to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power. We need election integrity and election reform immediately. Republicans should be the party of honest elections that can give everyone confidence in the future of our country.

Without honest elections, Who has confidence? Who has confidence? So you see laws start to fly out of the state legislatures controlled by Republicans as early as last January. You see it in swing states. You see it in more solidly red states. There is an unprecedented new wave of state election laws on the horizon. And we can kind of break these laws into two categories. One is voting restrictions, often called voter suppression. Republican lawmakers in at least 43 states are considering more than 250 proposed bills that would make it harder to vote. So stricter voter ID requirements. The

bill would ban counties from holding early voting on Sundays. Shorter time periods to cast early votes or absentee votes. Many of the measures target early voting, which exploded in popularity during 2020 and led to historic turnout. Fewer voting sites. The bill also cracks down on mobile voting booths. There is an effort to impose even tougher restrictions in the name of fighting election fraud. And what's the second category of these laws? So the second category is about who actually administers elections in these states. Category one is what are the rules for voting, who gets to vote and how to do it. Category two is who oversees that whole system. And what you've seen in a number of states, including some critical swing states like

Georgia, is an effort to codify partisanship essentially in the system to give Republican officeholders or legislative bodies that are dominated by the GOP a stronger role in overseeing elections and in some cases ultimately adjudicating who won them. ABC News identified at least eight states, including Arizona, Georgia, and Florida, that have, quote, enacted 10 laws so far this year that change election laws by bolstering partisan entities' power over the process or shifting election-related responsibilities from secretaries of state. So to take Georgia as the main example here, you saw Republican state legislators change the role of the secretary of state. This new bill has made it so the secretary of state's office is less effective.

And it simply takes the control of elections significantly away from the Georgia secretary of state. And this character, Brad Raffensperger, who Trump tried to pressure into finding those 11,000 votes to change the outcome in the state. They removed him as an officer from the State Board of Elections, and they created a new office, the chair of the State Board of Elections, that is nominally nonpartisan, but is appointed by the state legislature, which again is dominated by Republicans. The state legislature in Georgia also gave itself the power to suspend county-level election officials from their duties. The New York Times has this in a new report.

Quote, across Georgia, members of at least 10 county election boards have been removed, had their position eliminated, or are likely to be kicked off through local ordinances or new laws passed by the state legislature. At least five are people of color and most are Democrats. The law doesn't say we're giving Republicans the power to remove Democratic municipal officials. But in practice, that's really what that law is. It's an assertion of power by a state legislature that is completely dominated by the GOP taking the prerogative to say, you know, Fulton County, DeKalb County, these Democratic-leaning areas, if we want to suspend the people who are elected or chosen locally to run your elections, we can do that with a relatively free hand. Alex, this all looks so overtly like clear partisan efforts to get a

different election result next time, that I'm left looking for any other rationale that some state lawmakers could possibly give for what they're doing. You have some Republican officials in the states who are genuine true believers who believe that the election was stolen in 2020 and believe that they need to overhaul the system from top to bottom in order to stop that from happening again. But most of what you're seeing from mainstream Republicans in the states is that they're pointing to their constituents, meaning Donald Trump's base, and saying the voters back home believe that the 2020 election was stolen, and they need to do something to reassure those people that they're taking action. And so you get this kind of circular logic with changes being made

to election procedure and election administration in order to reassure voters whom Donald Trump has persuaded to be concerned about a problem that doesn't exist. Right. So that's how Trump's big lie seeds its own ecosystem of laws and legislation that look to many like they're creating less fair elections. They're being done on the premise that officials are working to make elections more fair. That is the argument that these legislators make, and it's an argument that is geared towards the hardcore Trump supporters who decide elections back home for them. In reality, of course, yes, many or most of these laws would give a future President Trump or a Trump-like figure a stronger hand in these states and a different set of levers to use if they wanted to

obstruct the normal and nonpartisan administration of an election. And, you know, Michael, it's worth noting here that there were some really far out proposals in the states, just extraordinarily extreme that did not pass, but they're still notable and reflective of something that's going on in the Republican Party at the state level. In Arizona, you had a state legislator propose a bill that would say, at the end of the day, however the election goes, however the voters cast their ballots, it's ultimately the state legislature that will decide who wins the electors from that state. That is a really dramatic proposal to assert power by a legislature over the political process that if a Republican state legislature were to decide something is rotten in the way the election took place in this state, so we're just going to give the electors to the other guy. Again, that did not pass, but the underlying motivation there speaks to something

going on that's pretty unsettling for the state of democracy. So those are the legal changes that supporters and allies of former President Trump have achieved over the past year. What kind of pressures has Trump himself brought to bear in this effort to essentially finish the job in the future? Finish the job is exactly the right language to use for what former President Trump has been up to. His main activity in state-level electoral politics has been endorsing people for statewide office and even state legislative seats who were supportive of his challenge to the election last time and trying to defeat people who were not. There's about to be a GOP showdown in Georgia. The former Republican Senator David Perdue

announced today he's running for governor, and he just got an endorsement from President Trump a short time ago. You see him endorsing in gubernatorial elections. In a place like Georgia, he's called for the defeat of the sitting Republican governor, Brian Kemp, because he did not go along with efforts to obstruct the election. I said, Brian, listen, you know, you have a big election integrity problem in Georgia. And he's even backed candidates for secretary of state in multiple states, Michigan, Arizona, again, Georgia. They ignored monumental evidence of rampant fraud. We've all seen the video of ballots being pulled out from under the tables after kicking out all of the observers. Remember that?

This is not a typical arena for former presidents to get deeply involved in the role of the state's top election administrator. It's a pretty low-profile job under ordinary circumstances. But what you've seen from President Trump here is an effort to take retribution against people who did not do his bidding and to put people in those jobs who next time very well might go along with it. Many big liebackers are campaigning

to control the election systems in their states, including a candidate in Michigan who peddles conspiracies and lies. In the days and weeks after the November 3rd presidential election, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said he could find no signs of widespread voter fraud. Meanwhile, Georgia Congressman Jody Heiss has called the same election faulty and fraudulent, and now he says he wants to oversee the state's future elections. And Mark Fincham is also a Republican state lawmaker, as you mentioned, is now running for the secretary of state of Arizona. And while speaking at a Trump rally on Saturday, he called

for the election results here to be decertified, even though numerous audits and reviews have lacked any evidence of voter fraud. And Michael, there's a broader universe of people who are responding to Trump's call than just those people who he has personally backed. Again, you have the former president, effectively the leader of the Republican Party, out there beating the drum that the election was stolen. And there are millions and millions and millions of Republicans and conservatives who agree with him and who have embraced that view of the world. And some of them are running for office themselves. And so even beneath the level

of governors and secretaries of state, when you get down to low profile state legislative seats, obscure county level election boards, you have people filing for the ballot who believe sincerely that the last election was stolen and something ought to be done about it. Our colleague Charlie Homans reported on one of these people, a pastor, a substitute teacher from Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, who was at the Stop the Steal rally in Washington on January 6th before the attack on the Capitol, who was just elected to his local election board back home.

the Capitol, who was just elected to his local election board back home. And it's impossible at this point to predict or to precisely quantify exactly how many people with that profile or that worldview or that view of American democracy might find themselves swept into office in 2022 if it turns out to be a strong election year for Republicans. Right. So these are people who are true believers, not tapped on the shoulder by Donald Trump, and just want to ensure that another election is not, quote, stolen again. That's right. And if you are inclined to be a dot connector in the political world and you see all these chess pieces from the Trump world coming into place, the laws, the endorsements, the candidacies that are emerging, it starts to look like a very fast-moving threat to democracy.

looks like a developing set of circumstances that have the potential to put far more stress on the system in the next election than even what we saw after 2020. We'll be right back. So Alex, I think all of this has left a very pressing question. One year on, if we were to basically rerun the 2020 election, do it over again, where the votes are all the same, but all of these changes that you have just described are now in place, would we get the same result? So this has obviously been a subject of intense debate and speculation and concern. And I think if we ask ourselves that question in pretty black and white terms, with these new rules, you rerun 2020, does Joe Biden still end up as the president? I think there are a lot of reasons to believe that the answer is yes. Just to zoom out here, in modern American terms, this was not a super close election. He won the popular vote nationally

by 7 million votes. Obviously, we choose presidents through the Electoral College, but that kind of thing still matters. He flipped five states that Donald Trump won in 2016 and won the Electoral College with room to spare. So you're not looking at a situation where just by tinkering with the voter eligibility rules in one or two states, suddenly Joe Biden's advantage in this race totally evaporates. But when you zoom into a place like Georgia or a state like Arizona, where you have really tight margins in the popular vote, 11,000 votes in Georgia, and then you impose these changes to voting procedure and voting administration, and then you add the changes governing which officials would

adjudicate disputes over the results of an election, I don't know that you can say that in that one state, we would have had the same outcome in 2020 under this new set of regulations. Interesting. But again, just a reality check on the big, big picture here. Joe Biden didn't need Georgia to win the election. He was declared the winner of the presidential election before he was declared the winner in Georgia. So in the broadest, most black and white sense of the question, would the results of the 2020 election have held up? I do think Joe Biden would have quite a strong chance to still be the president anyway. But as you were alluding to, you said that's if we are looking at this as a black and white question of whether Joe Biden is still elected president.

What would it mean to not look at this as a black and white question? Right. If your test for this is just does the same guy end up in the Oval Office, that's a relatively narrow way to look at the state of American democracy and the health of our electoral systems. Right. Because there are a lot of possibilities that fall short of the election is stolen by the guy who lost that are still pretty distressing for the country. There are clearly many more opportunities now for bad actors in the political system to sow disorder and chaos and to obstruct the basic functions of election administration in a way that there were not a year ago. A secretary of state doesn't have the power to go out and say, you know, I hereby decree that Donald Trump won

and Joe Biden's 150,000 vote lead is meaningless. But a secretary of state can do plenty to cast doubt and sow suspicion and obstruct the normal process of tallying and transmitting election results in a way that has the potential to be deeply ugly for the resolution of an election. Right. You're saying the bar for a broken democracy shouldn't be whether or not the rightful winner wins or loses. It needs to be grayer and more nuanced than that. If the test we set for ourselves is, is this ailment dangerous enough to literally kill American democracy, kill American democracy, that is setting a really high bar for considering this a serious problem. I think a scenario that's awfully scary right now, even without a longer-range campaign to redraw election administration in the United States, is what if you had a future election where the results were actually not quite so convincing for one candidate or the other, where Joe Biden or a candidate like him hadn't flipped five states

with room to spare in the Electoral College, but had crossed the threshold for victory with the votes from one state? Think back to the 2000 election in Florida between George W. Bush and Al Gore. This is a massive state decided by barely 500 votes and with it, the presidency. If you were to have a scenario like that, where the entire outcome of an American presidential race hinged on one state, and that state happened to be one of these states that has redrawn its election administration to make it way more partisan and to make it much easier for partisan actors to intervene in the literal process of casting and counting ballots. That, to me, is an awfully scary scenario, even without any further sort of nightmare scenarios developing in the legal side of all this.

Good evening. Just moments ago, I spoke with George W. Bush and congratulated him on becoming the 43rd president of the United States. Because remember in 2000, that was a very contested election. A lot of people were very, very angry about the outcome, saw it as illegitimate. Let there be no doubt. While I strongly disagree with the court's decision, I accept it. But the losing candidate, Al Gore, accepted the results and walked away. And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession. There is a higher duty than the one we owe to political party. This is America, and we put country before party. We will stand together behind our new

president. Thank you, and good night, and God bless America. And that was the end. And that was the end. And now it's really hard to imagine a losing presidential candidate in a future election doing exactly what Al Gore did and walking away from a defeat that close, that gracefully. Because ultimately, this more than anything else is what Donald Trump did after the 2020 election. He crossed a line that no other presidential candidate in our lifetime has crossed and simply refused to accept the legitimacy of the winner's victory. Once you cross that line, a future candidate can cross it and they'll no longer be the first one to do it. The norm has been shattered. It doesn't even have to be a Republican in the future. It could be either party's candidate who sees a one state result as illegitimate and therefore the whole election is cast into doubt. And you have millions upon millions of voters who are prepared to believe it and prepared to carry on believing it well into the administration of the next president, whoever that might be.

Alex, I want to push back on that for a moment. Why do you see a version where either side is capable of rejecting the outcome of an election? Because so far, claims of electoral fraud and a refusal to accept defeat feel like the singular possession of the Republican Party right now. Look, let me be clear. There's only one party in this country that has shown a willingness to attack and obstruct the legitimate result of a presidential election. But in a future election, now that all these rules have been changed at the state level, and now that the nature of election administration in some pretty important states has been made much more partisan, I don't think it's far-fetched to imagine a scenario where a Republican wins the presidency based on a victory in one state

like Georgia, where Democrats in the state and around the country see the rules as rigged against them, perhaps with some reason, and they see the whole thing as simply not on the level. That's fascinating because we have talked so much about the way in which Donald Trump has convinced an almost unfathomable number of Republican voters that our election system cannot be trusted and that elections can be stolen.

You're saying in this other way, he may also have done something similar to Democratic voters. I think there's no question about that. I think as long as Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party, as certainly in any scenario where he's the candidate of the Republican Party, I think the widespread assumption among Democratic Party leaders and among many, many Democratic voters is going to be that if this guy can steal the election, then he is going to steal it, and they have some reason to worry about that. That's not just a totally invented possibility. But even in a post-Trump world, he doesn't run in 2024. Somebody else does. If a Republican wins the presidency based on the votes of one state and that state rewrote its election laws after 2020 in order to appease and strengthen Donald Trump, I think it's awfully hard to assume that Democratic voters around the country are going to just automatically assume that it's an election and fair is fair

and the other guy won. So in that sense, perhaps the greatest immediate threat to democracy is really the erosion of voters' faith in democracy. I think that's right. And I think this is another place where it's useful to just take a step back from the specifics of election administration and even the specifics of what happened on January 6th, that we know what happened last time and we know how scary it was for the country and how threatening it was to the peaceful transfer of power. If we're just asking ourselves, could the same thing happen next time but worse? That's probably underestimating the range of threats to democracy that are in

front of us right now. Because when you have a majority of one party believing solidly that the last election was stolen, and the other party, the winning party and the ruling party, sees the kind of campaign, the kind of anti-democratic crusade that Trump has been carrying on. You have laid the groundwork for a future presidential election or even elections for other offices where voters on either side are totally prepared to believe that the winning party has stolen this thing. And that doesn't necessarily need to take the shape of a sitting president bullying a secretary of state. It doesn't need to take the shape of a bunch of far out lawsuits being filed and rejected from the courts. And it doesn't need to look like an

angry mob storming the Capitol building. But when the climate of a democracy is one in which distrust of the system and lack of faith in the system is this pervasive. That's a threat that transcends the specifics of election machinery and administration and litigation. Well, Alex, thank you very much. Thanks, Michael. And here's the truth. The former president of the United States of America has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election. He's done so because he values power over principle. In a speech on Thursday marking

January 6th, delivered from inside the U.S. Capitol, President Biden sought to confront the growing lack of faith in American democracy by directly confronting Donald Trump's role in creating those doubts. The former president and his supporters have decided the only way for them to win is to suppress your vote and subvert our elections. Denouncing both Trump's lies about the election and Trump's efforts to change election laws across the country, Biden said he would use the power of his office to defend American democracy

against the former president and his supporters. I did not seek this fight brought to this Capitol one year ago today. But I will not shrink from it either. I will stand in this breach. I will defend this nation. I will allow no one to place a dagger at the throat of democracy. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. A tense standoff between demonstrators and the government of Kazakhstan has resulted in dozens of deaths

and prompted Kazakhstan's leader to call in troops from Russia. The violent protests, which were triggered by high energy prices, quickly spread to Kazakhstan's largest city, Almaty, where protesters burned City Hall and briefly took over the airport. The result was war-like scenes and shootouts across the city. Amid the clashes, the government said that at least eight police officers had also been killed. Today's episode was produced by Rachel Quester and Eric Krupke, with help from Robert Jimison and Diana Nguyen. It was edited by Lisa Tobin, contains original music by Marian Lozano and Dan Powell,

and was engineered by Brad Fisher. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderland. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.