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Does the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection demonstrate that the problems with the legitimacy of American elections exceed the capacity of election law to fix them?
Those of us in the field of election law were no more surprised that President Trump would threaten the peaceful transition of power if he lost the 2020 elections than epidemiologists were surprised by the deadly spread of COVID-19 in a country without a plan for containment. Last April, a multidisciplinary committee at UC Irvine issued a report on how to ensure a legitimate and fair election in 2020. It opened with the observation that “Americans can no longer take for granted that election losers will concede a closely fought election after election authorities (or courts) have declared a winner.”
Read The Letters That Outgoing Presidents Have Written To Their Successors
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Jan 20, 2021 @17:34 PM
Ours has always been a fragile democracy all democracies are but over the last four years, its fragility has become ever more apparent by the day. You need look no further than The Atlantic s November cover story by Barton Gellman, published just yesterday: it s titled The Election That Could Break America. Fragile things can and do break, after all.
The story largely concerns one of the great hallmarks of our system of government, the peaceful transition of power from one president to the next. A hallmark though it may be, it has never been guaranteed. Our Constitution does not secure the peaceful transition of power, but rather presupposes it, the legal scholar Lawrence Douglas writes in his book Will He Go? about the 2020 election.
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