After the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump and his allies denied that Joe Biden had won. To this day, election deniers refuse to accept that Trump lost the election. Efforts to thwart Biden from becoming president, including the Trump-inspired insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, were ubiquitous. Trump’s supporters filed dozens of lawsuits to stop the certification of Biden’s win, none of which was successful.

One of the tactics the election deniers used was the refusal of local officials to certify the results of the 2020 election, based on the false claim that there was widespread voter fraud. Fortunately, safeguards built into state laws held, and they prevented Trump from stealing the election from Biden.

During the 2022 midterm elections, “several rogue local officials” in multiple states “refused or threatened to refuse to certify valid election results based on false claims of widespread fraud. All of these efforts were unsuccessful,” Lauren Miller Karalunas, counsel in the Brennan Center’s democracy program, told Truthout.

In this interview, Miller Karalunas explains the mandatory duty of election officials to certify the results. She details what would happen if the 2024 election results are not certified by the constitutional cut-off date, the legal remedies available to protect certification of the results of the election, and whether the strategies of the election deniers to undermine the outcome could be successful.

Marjorie Cohn: What is election certification, what is its purpose, and who carries it out?

Lauren Miller Karalunas: Certification is the process by which election officials sign off on the completion of election results. They make sure that the many processes to tabulate the results and confirm they are correct have taken place. It is a formality that is procedurally important, but substantively very narrow.

Do members of county election boards have discretion to refuse to certify the election results in their districts or is certification mandatory?

Certification is mandatory. Local officials certifying an election must follow detailed state laws and regulations, all of which make very clear that certification is not optional. It is not the time for certifying officials to investigate election results; there are other procedures, such as post-election contests and court proceedings, that are specifically designed to answer legal questions about election results. There is no wiggle room for certifying officials to take matters into their own hands. Their only duty during certification is to sign off on the completeness of the results.

Was certification refusal prevalent after the 2020 presidential election and how were the election results ultimately protected?

In the days after the November 2020 presidential election, Michigan saw the first instance in which election officials refused to certify election results based on claims rooted in election denialism — the false idea that the election was stolen and that widespread fraud pervaded our election system. Fortunately, the election was ultimately certified. Two members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers tried to rescind their........

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