The last of the Donald Trump-inspired ‘Big Lie’ cases falls

Remember after the last presidential election, when even here in blue Washington, scores of Republicans sued contending that the election had been stolen?

The lawsuits, filed by a group called Washington Election Integrity Coalition United along with some GOP congressional candidates, contended that “6,000 votes were flipped, over 400,000 votes were added and/or thousands of votes were removed in one or more statewide races.”

No evidence was provided for any of this, so judges across the state started tossing the cases as frivolous. Several times they fined the people involved for wasting everybody’s time.

Cornell Clayton.
Clayton

Back in early 2022, Cornell Clayton, a Washington State University political science professor who has studied democracy for 35 years, told me that things looked bleak. “All the lights are blinking red” on the American experiment, he said. I asked him this past week to give democracy a follow-up checkup.

“I guess I’d say it’s no longer blinking red quite as urgently,” he said. “Maybe it’s blinking yellow. It’s definitely still saying, ‘Proceed with extreme caution.’ ”

On the plus side, both the courts and voters have rallied to democracy’s aid. The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled against gerrymandering and rejected the right-wing “independent state legislature theory” that could have emboldened states to pursue “fake elector” schemes, as some tried to do for Trump in 2020.

Congress also reformed the Electoral Count Act, making it tougher for any candidate to mess around with congressional certification of the vote.

“These things are extremely important in preventing any further erosion of democratic norms,” Clayton said.

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