Deep dive by Jim Rutenberg for NYT Magazine:

Much of that work would be done by Cleta Mitchell, a Republican lawyer who assisted Trump’s efforts in Georgia after the 2020 election and was on the phone call on Jan. 2, 2021, in which Trump fruitlessly asked Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes.” Later that same year, Mitchell started a new group called the Election Integrity Network that encouraged like-minded “citizen patriots” to infiltrate local elections offices. A how-to guide suggested appearing at their regular board meetings, filing records requests to learn internal processes, running for positions or appointments. On her “Who’s Counting?” podcast, she said, “We are going to retake our election system one county at a time all over America.”

Efforts like Mitchell’s were pursued in the name of making elections run more smoothly and accurately, to, as the Election Integrity Network handbook has it, “restore trust.” But inevitably the initiatives they pushed threatened to have the opposite effect. For instance, since 2020, an expanding constellation of election-integrity groups has requested that ballots be hand counted. This is well known by elections experts to be a less reliable system than machine counting, but it inevitably comes up with results that are slightly different from the machine count, which seems to justify the distrust that led to the hand count. The endless stream of information requests and voter challenges takes up valuable staff time, creating bottlenecks and greater distrust.

All of this fed into a barrage of increasingly complex conspiracy theories, and so the movement grew. Before 2020, there had only ever been a handful of instances in which election commissioners declined to certify an election; in the years since, board or commission members have voted against certifying results in at least 20 counties across eight states. As Election Day approaches, it is clear that there will be more to come. “They’ve been working hard over the past four years to tee up this strategy,” says Jessica Marsden, a lawyer with Protect Democracy, a group that monitors threats against fair elections. “It seems almost certain that they would try it.”

The legal system does not make it easy to nullify the popular will, and in 2022 Congress passed a bill — the Electoral Count Reform Act — that would make it even harder, in part by setting an unambiguous deadline for states to submit their final certified results: this year, Dec. 11.

But there is a path. The bill did not state the consequences for missing the certification deadline. A determined administrator could try to in effect run out the clock, creating a chain reaction of legal maneuvers that would culminate in the election’s being decided by simple majorities of the House and the Senate — each of which could by Jan. 6 be controlled by Republicans. The odds are small, but any administrator willing to face the consequences has a shot at overturning the election. “The whole system is dependent upon, one, everyone doing what they’re supposed to do, and two, doing what a judge has told them they have to do,” Bradley Schrager, a Democratic election lawyer in Nevada, told me. “After that, we’re into something else.”…