NEW: Democrat Lawmakers Signal They Won’t Certify Election If Donald Trump Wins

Some Democrat lawmakers are signaling they won’t certify the election if Donald Trump wins, and some of the names are going to sound very familiar. According to Axios, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who has long accused Republicans of being a “threat to democracy,” will only vote to certify the results if he feels the election was “free, fair, and honest.” 

Who gets to make that determination? Raskin and his colleagues, of course.

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ALSO SEE: Jamie Raskin Appears to Say Democrats Will Disqualify Trump
If He Wins the Election

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What they’re saying: Raskin, the House Oversight Committee ranking member and former Jan. 6 committee member who objected to Trump electors in 2017, told Axios in an interview that if Trump “won a free, fair and honest election, then we would obviously accept it.”

• However, Raskin said he “definitely” doesn’t assume that Trump would use free, fair and honest means to secure a victory.
• Trump “is doing whatever he can to try to interfere with the process, whether we’re talking about manipulating electoral college counts in Nebraska or manipulating the vote count in Georgia or imposing other kinds of impediments,” Raskin said.

It’s honestly hilarious how much some of this language mirrors the things Republicans have been lambasted for in the past. Anytime a GOP politician even suggests that they will only certify the results if the election is “fair,” they are piledriven by the press as promoting “insurrection.” Yet, when Democrats do the same thing, the mainstream journalists give a collective shrug.

Raskin wasn’t the only one singing that tune, though. Several others with a history of objecting to the Electoral College also mused that things must go “as we expect it to” for them to certify a Trump victory. 

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), a senior chief deputy whip who voted to object to George W. Bush electors in 2005, said of Trump, “I don’t know what kind of shenanigans he is planning,” adding: “We would have to, in any election … make sure that all the rules have been followed.” 

• Schakowsky later said in a statement that she was “proud to … join all my Democratic colleagues in certifying the 2020 election” and looks forward to “doing the same in January 2025.”

Zoom in: House Rules Committee Ranking Member Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), who also objected to Trump electors in 2017, said Democrats would certify a Trump victory “assuming everything goes the way we expect it to.”

• “We have to see how it all happens,” McGovern told Axios – though he added, “My expectation is that we would.”

Understand that what they are saying makes no sense. If Donald Trump wins the Electoral College, why would there be “shenanigans” leading up to the certification? That leaves only one possibility, which is that these Democrats are suggesting Republicans are going to commit voter fraud. Raskin even hints at that by mentioning the supposed “manipulating” of vote counts in Georgia. For context, that never happened. 

So are Democrats teeing up a claim that election fraud happened and, thus, certification must be delayed? Because if so, that would break every irony meter in existence.

Expectedly, Axios finished out its piece by defending Raskin and his colleagues, claiming that while both parties have objected to certification, it’s different when Democrats do it.

Zoom out: The two parties have very different histories when it comes to election objections, with Democrats lodging doomed, symbolic challenges as part of largely uneventful proceedings.

• In 2005, Democrats’ objection to Bush’s win in Ohio failed 31-267 in the House and 1-74 in the Senate. 
• In 2017, a half dozen House Democrats filed objections to ten Trump elector slates, but failed to get the backing of a senator and were unable to force any votes.

By that logic, Republican objections to certification were also symbolic, given there were never close to enough votes for them to succeed. That’s one of the reasons I thought at the time that the entire episode was stupid. Why even do it when it 1) had no chance of passing, and 2) would simply hand political fodder to your opponents for years to come? 

At the end of the day, I would think Democrats wouldn’t walk into the buzzsaw of trying to block a Trump victory, but perhaps I’m giving them too much credit. If that’s a road they want to go down, I’d say go for it. Let’s see how it turns out.