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By David French

Opinion Columnist

As we approach Election Day, I’m cautiously optimistic — not so much about the outcome of the election (it’s way too close for either side to feel confident), but rather about the durability and integrity of the process itself. The legal arguments Donald Trump used to try to reverse the election outcome in 2020 have been decisively rejected, and the legal loopholes he tried to open have been closed.

I’m not arguing that we should be complacent. We should expect MAGA lawyers to bombard courts and state legislatures with frivolous arguments to try to reverse the outcome if Trump loses — and we shouldn’t be shocked or surprised if MAGA ultimately resorts to violence like it did on Jan. 6 — but I don’t think most Americans know how well our election system has been fortified against Trump’s legal schemes. He can’t run the same playbook he ran in 2020.

To understand how we’ve changed our system, it’s necessary to understand the Trump team’s strategy leading up to Jan. 6. As I’ve explained before, it had two key components: the conspiracy theory and the coup theory.

The conspiracy theory was the election lie itself, that Trump had been cheated out of an electoral victory that was rightly his. This required him to essentially commandeer a compliant and corrupt right-wing media establishment to broadcast his election lies to tens of millions of angry and disappointed Republicans.

The conspiracy theory created the demand for the coup. Without right-wing rage, there would be no appetite to try to overturn the election. And stealing the election required a legal plan.

And that brings us to the coup theory, the actual legal mechanism for overturning the election. The core plan was called operation “Green Bay Sweep.” It was named after an old football play, which called for an end run around the defensive line.

The goal was two-pronged: to use a series of objections to extend the debate over state certification for up to 24 hours and to pressure key states to decertify their election results, granting Trump a majority of electors and reversing the outcome of the election.

The Trump team also arranged for slates of fake electors to be ready to cast ballots for Trump the instant that state legislatures invalidated the original election results. The plan depended on exploiting a foolish provision of the Electoral Count Act, the convoluted 1887 law that governed the certification of elections.

According to the Act, if a single senator and a single member of the House objected in writing to the certification of a state’s count, then the House and Senate would adjourn and deliberate over the objection. The Act did not precisely define the grounds for overturning a state election, and this ambiguity gave MAGA hope.

Operation Green Bay Sweep failed, but it failed in part because Mike Pence refused to play his part in the scheme. Had he not demonstrated integrity and constitutional fidelity on Jan. 6, America would have faced a much deeper crisis.

Imagine, for example, if Pence had........

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