The Supreme Court’s rejection last week of the lawsuit from Texas and 18 other Republican-led states effectively ended the legal efforts by President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn his election defeat.
But the case likely marks the start of a new round of Republican efforts to challenge the basic rules of American democracy by limiting access to the voting booth and potentially again seeking to undo elections they lose. And an assertion buried deep in Texas’ final filing to the Supreme Court helps explain why.
In that legal brief, Texas raised a specter common to all of the challenges from Trump and his allies against the results: the unsupported claim that the election was being stolen through massive voter fraud in large cities with substantial populations of African Americans and other minorities. …
For Republican voters who have responded for years to claims from Trump and leading voices in the conservative media environment that a shadowy alliance of elites and minorities centered in cities is trying to hijack their heritage and transform the country into something unrecognizable, it’s a short step to believing that the same groups are literally stealing the results of elections. CONTINUED
Ronald Brownstein, CNN
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