“For the first time in American history, the losing candidate refused to concede the election – and rather than dismissing him as a sore loser, a startling number of Americans have followed Trump down his conspiratorial rabbit hole. The safeguards that ensured he left office last January after losing the presidential election may be crumbling: The election officials who certified the counts may no longer be in place next time he falsely claims victory; if Republicans take Congress, a compliant Speaker could easily decide it’s simply not in his interest to let the party’s leader lose. ‘You could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal’ says UC Irvine law professor Rick Hasen. As he sees it, it’s time for us to wake up.”

“‘I feel like a climate scientist warning about the Earth going up another degree and a half,’ Hasen told Politico Magazine. ‘The rhetoric is so overheated that I think it provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier ‘stolen’ election. People are going to be more willing to cheat if they think they’ve been cheated out of their just desserts.’ Hasen has ideas about how to preempt some of this – they range from the legal to the political. But even as he and other elections experts warn of a three-alarm fire, he’s troubled that Democrats in Washington seem to lack the same sense of urgency and focus” – Politico.