“It’s hard to pinpoint, but there’s a soft argument of ‘Well, this is silly, even if he tossed out votes in one state, he lost in these other ones.’ That kind of misses that it would be a far worse crisis if a president tried this in an election with one decisive state. If we’d already gone through recounts and a president was trailing by similar margins in one state, you don’t spot them a free one by weaponizing partisan state/local officials because they can. It would still be a plot to overturn an election. The margins just make it harder. The most dangerous aspect of this is it’s now normalized – in fact something R voters will know to ask and demand of leaders in relevant positions – to try to overturn election results and backfill it with a false conspiracy TBD. That’s extinction-level bad for democracy” – NBC News policy editor Benjy Sarlin.
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