The GOP assault on election integrity has already begun

If you needed just one fact to show that in the world’s greatest democracy one of the two major parties is perversely devoted to suppressing and even subverting the vote, you couldn’t do better than this: The senior counsel for the Republican National Committee’s “election integrity team” — Orwellian doublespeak come to life — is a criminal defendant in Arizona’s case against 18 Republicans who tried to overturn the state’s 2020 vote for Joe Biden.

But there are so many more such facts, alas, and they provoke trepidation about postelection chaos of the sort that Donald Trump and his party unleashed four years ago.

As a Republican involved in pre-Trump presidential contests put it to me, when it comes to support for our electoral system, “Trump has taken the party to a bad place.”

Dangerously for democracy, Republicans’ belief in systemic fraud by Democrats is now an article of faith. Witness the elected officials in 2024 still dodging reporters’ questions about who won in 2020, for fear of angering Trump and worshipful party voters. “All they want to do is cheat,” Trump said of Democrats at a recent Wisconsin rally. Ominously, two-thirds of Republicans say they’d trust Trump about whether to accept the results next month, far more than they’d trust a government-certified outcome, according to an August poll from the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-10-13/election-voter-fraud-pennsylvania