The Morning Star

According to Title 52, Section 20511 of the United States Code, anyone who “knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a state of a fair and impartially conducted election process” for federal office can be punished by up to five years in prison. Donald Trump certainly seems to have violated this law. He is on tape alternately cajoling and threatening Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes,” enough to give him a winning margin in a state that he lost. He may have also broken federal conspiracy law and Georgia election law. “This is probably the most serious political crime I’ve ever heard of,” Michael Bromwich, a former inspector general for the Department of Justice, told me. “And yet there is the high likelihood that there will be no accountability for it.” At this point, demanding such accountability feels like smashing one’s head into a brick wall, but our democracy might not be able to stagger along much longer without it. Republicans already often treat victories by Democrats as illegitimate. Their justification for impeaching Bill Clinton was flimsy at the time and looks even more ludicrous in light of their defenses of Trump. Trump’s political career was built on the racist lie that Barack Obama was a foreigner ineligible for the presidency. Now Trump and his Republican enablers have set a precedent for pressuring state officials to discard the will of their voters, and if that fails, for getting their allies in Congress to reject the results. True democracy in America is quite new; you can date it to the civil rights era. If Trump’s Republican Party isn’t checked, we could easily devolve into what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism, in which elections still take place but the system is skewed to entrench autocrats. Some are trying to constrain Trump’s lawlessness. Two Democratic members of the House, Ted Lieu and Kathleen Rice, asked the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, to open a criminal probe. In Atlanta, the Fulton County district attorney has expressed openness to bringing a case, saying, “Anyone who commits a felony violation of Georgia law in my jurisdiction will be held accountable.”