Must read in TIME:

As the American experiment nears its semiquincentennial, is it capable of holding a secure election with a trusted process and a widely accepted result? If the outcome is not to Trump’s liking, can democracy defend itself against another attempt to overthrow a President-elect?

Questions like these struck some readers as far-fetched when I asked them before the 2020 election in a darkly headlined story for the Atlantic: “The Election That Could Break America.” If then President Trump lost his bid for a second term, the story argued, the lead-up to Inauguration Day could bring a no-holds-barred struggle to prevent the transfer of power. Some of my forecasts came true: Fabricated claims of fraud. Attempts to halt the tabulation of votes. Partisan pressure to block certification. Appointment of fake electors. Incitement of violence. Desperate maneuvers in Congress on Jan. 6.

But for all it may have gotten right, the story was wrong in a deeper sense. I was uncertain that the nation’s electoral machinery could withstand Trump’s frontal assault. The system had not faced that kind of threat before. It might simply fail.

But it did not. State and federal judges threw out Trump’s baseless lawsuits and eventually sanctioned some of the lawyers who brought them. At critical junctures there were enough principled Republican office holders, none of them famous then—Aaron Van Langevelde on Michigan’s board of state canvassers, Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, Pennsylvania lawmakers Jake Corman and Bryan Cutler, Maricopa County supervisors Clint Hickman and Bill Gates—who did their legal duty in the face of crushing pressure to go along with a coup. Trump’s party recoiled, if only briefly, from the lawless violence of the mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol.

Now, four years later, I have fewer doubts about the resilience of our core exercise in democracy….