Professor of election law Jerry Goldfeder was interviewed on a segment of CNN’s New Day With John Berman and Brianna Keilar, which discusses the dark consequences of Donald Trump’s term as president and the ‘big lie.’
“We knew who we were dealing with, an authoritarian personality in Trump, and we knew that there were very multiple vulnerabilities in our electoral system. Listen, none other than Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, testified to Congress in 2019 that if Trump were defeated, there would not be a peaceful transition. We’ve had fifty-nine presidential elections in this country, 10 incumbents have been defeated; they were not re-elected, and they were not happy about the whole thing. But they graciously — or not so graciously — turned over the keys to the White House and left. We always had a feeling that Trump would not do that.”
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“It’s not just about Trump anymore. We worry about legal issues as well as non-legal issues: the legal issues, [that]there are many Republican states … that are changing the laws so that election administrators are being replaced by partisans. So, in the presidential election or even in the congressional elections, if partisan legislatures don’t like the results, they will have the authority to say, ‘I’m sorry that there was fraud, you guys didn’t win, we won.’ And that is legal because those laws are being passed by the various legislatures. Now, they’re being challenged, those laws. But I’m not so sanguine that those laws won’t hold up.
And then there’s also the the non-legal aspect: we saw that on January 6th … the insurrectionists invaded the capital to try to stop Mike Pence from confirming the Electoral College results. Well, who’s to say that when Electoral College votes are being counted in the 50 capitals in 2024 — after the 2024 election — that we won’t have invaders in those various capitals in battleground states trying to stop the Electoral College votes from being counted.
And the legislatures in those Republican states can just say, ‘well, the Electoral College votes have not been counted. We are declaring that Trump, or whoever the Republican candidate is, won.’ Now, I don’t want to be Professor Doom here, but we need to be cognisant. We need to be aware, we need to be alert as a citizenry that these legal and perhaps extralegal violent actions might very well occur.”