Opinion: Election denial has morphed into democracy denial in Colorado

“It’s not over on Election Day, it’s over on Inauguration Day,” Chris LaCivita, a top Trump campaign official, said about the upcoming election during the Republican National Convention in July (Ashley Murray/States Newsroom).

After the 2020 election, supporters of former President Donald Trump all too willingly acted on his lie that he won. Their efforts to prove that the last presidential election was stolen occupies less space in the national conversation as the country prepares for the next one. But that initial election denial has evolved into democracy denial, a movement focused not on the fairness of a single election but rather on rejecting the principle of fairness in any election, including the one in November.

Contempt for democratic processes and admiration for authoritarian methods is becoming normalized for an alarmingly large segment of the American right. The movement claims it wants to ensure fairness, but this veneer obscures its true aim — to ensure the success of favored candidates, no matter whom the electorate prefers.

The movement is national, but it emerged again in Colorado recently in several striking examples.

After the state’s primary elections in June, three Republican members of county canvass boards refused to certify election results, as Newsline’s Sara Wilson reports today. Refusal to certify has become one of the main threats to the completion of free and fair elections around the country. Canvass board members are supposed to act as scorekeepers, their ministerial role mostly limited to tallying a vote rather than adjudicating purported irregularities. But democracy denial has inspired some local officials to exploit the canvassing process as an occasion to disrupt elections.

“If county officials successfully obstruct certification, it could have a cascading effect on state and federal certification deadlines. It could also lead to mass disenfranchisement of qualified voters,” says a recent report from the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

The report cites Colorado and seven other states as hotspots for “rogue election officials” who pose a threat to elections.

Last year, the Colorado Republican Party alleged — without evidence — that the general election was compromised by “systemic fraud” and advised county canvass boards not to certify results. Republican canvass board members in Boulder, El Paso, Jefferson, La Plata and Larimer counties ran with this advice and refused to certify local tallies. Similar refusals occurred this year in Boulder, El Paso and Jefferson during the presidential primary and primary elections. 

Challenges to voter rolls are another top threat to elections this year. Numerous groups throughout the country falsely allege that official lists of eligible voters are substantially inaccurate, and they’ve launched legal efforts to purge millions of voters from the rolls.

“The recent rise of mass voter challenges is creating a massive strain for county clerks, registrars, secretaries of state and other election officials who are tasked with maintaining clean voter rolls,” according to Democracy Docket.

Colorado last week became the latest state to face a voter-roll challenge. As Newsline senior reporter Chase Woodruff wrote, the Missouri-based nonprofit United Sovereign Americans filed a federal lawsuit against state officials and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, claiming, based on dubious evidence, that an entire third of Colorado voter registrations were erroneous in the 2022 election. The organization has filed similar lawsuits in a handful of other states.

Secretary of State Jena Griswold, one of the defendants, called it “a sham lawsuit filed by election deniers as a part of a national campaign to undermine voter confidence.”

That’s just it — democracy deniers are less concerned with proving a particular claim about a given election’s validity and more interested in rendering validity impossible. Undermining voter confidence in elections allows them to claim power by other means. The Jan. 6 insurrection was only the most dramatic instance of this strategy so far, but there’s more to come.

How do we know? They’re telling us.

“It’s not over on Election Day, it’s over on Inauguration Day,” Chris LaCivita, a top Trump campaign official, said about the upcoming election during the Republican National Convention in July. This astonishing remark made explicit otherwise behind-the-scenes preparations to thrust Trump back into the White House no matter what the election results say. Trump himself has repeatedly told supporters that they “don’t have to vote.” This advice is bizarre on its face, but it makes perfect sense in light of “how Trump and MAGA are attempting to undermine faith in the coming election,” as The New Republic noted.

Trump has already signaled that he will refuse to accept a loss in November. And Republicans “are engaged in an unprecedented legal campaign targeting the American voting system” and “laying the groundwork to contest an election that they argue, falsely, is already being rigged” against Trump, reported The New York Times. The Trump campaign has every reason to be confident that after a close election loss, even a spurious legal challenge is likely to be decided in its favor by the U.S. Supreme Court, which in multiple cases has treated Trump with shocking deference.

The conservative majority that ruled in July that presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution — a stance that no previous court or president had seriously entertained — shielded this hero of democracy denial from accountability. 

Colorado has experienced many other democracy denial tactics that experts say are common, such as attempts to discredit voting machines, disruptive public records requests, threats against election officials and workers, and election equipment tampering. The Republican former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters became a national symbol of election denial after she took part in a scheme to tamper with secure election machines in her own office.

But Peters’ case offers some hope for Americans who abhor authoritarianism and want to see democracy survive. A jury convicted her of felony counts last month for her involvement in the election security breach.

This kind of accountability for democracy deniers must be more frequent. Most Americans support democracy. If there’s a steep price to pay for election norm-breaking, intimidation, lies and crimes, bad-faith actors will be deterred, and the people’s will, as it has since the country’s founding, might persist as the basis for choosing the country’s leaders.

Editor’s note: The opinion column first appeared on Colorado Newsline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com. Follow Colorado Newsline on Facebook and X.