The last of the ‘Big Lie’ cases falls, as democracy’s on a win streak

Remember after the last presidential election, when even here in blue Washington state, scores of Republicans and other voters sued contending that the election had been stolen?

The lawsuits, filed by a group called Washington Election Integrity Coalition United along with some GOP congressional candidates, contended that “6,000 votes were flipped, over 400,000 votes were added and/or thousands of votes were removed in one or more statewide races.”

No evidence was provided for any of this, so judges across the state started tossing the cases as frivolous. Several times they fined the people involved for wasting everybody’s time.

But one of the cases forged on. Incredibly, the one here in King County persisted for nearly two years, through the filing of more than 100 documents and pleadings as well as a nearly three-hour-long deposition this spring of the King County director of elections, Julie Wise. Apparently it survived so long because it included a public records dispute as well as the meritless rigged-election claims.

In any case, it, too, has now been tossed — dismissed on June 16 by a King County judge. “No responsive pleadings or evidence was presented by these plaintiffs,” the judge said in a refrain that sums up the entirety of the “Stop the Steal” movement.

The ruling means that finally, more than 2 ½ years on, all the Donald Trump-inspired “Big Lie” lawsuits here have been dismissed (pending any appeals). Justice took that long, even though no one ever provided any hint of proof that Washington state’s 2020 election was compromised, tilted, botched or rigged.

The commitment to this contrived obsession has been cultlike. But today, in the spirit of the upcoming national birthday on July Fourth, I’m going to look at it from a different angle. Which is: Chalk up another win for democracy.

Seriously: After being pummeled onto the ropes, democracy is making a comeback.

All the bogus vote-fraud court cases have lost, and almost all the local and national “election denier” candidates who weren’t in safe seats were rejected by voters. That includes everyone involved in these local lawsuits: Tamborine Borrelli, who ran for Washington secretary of state and lost; Doug Basler, a Republican who lost to Rep. Adam Smith, D-Bellevue, by 43 points; and Joe Kent, who lost the 3rd Congressional District seat for Republicans after they’d held it for a dozen years.

It was “a crazy lawsuit,” says Kevin Hamilton, a lawyer for Perkins Coie who worked on the case for the Democratic Party. “It’s a win, but over such stupid claims that it’s absurd that we ever had to even fight it.”

True, but nobody said democracy was going to be a garden party. I like to think of it as a dive bar. No drunken statement is too ridiculous to be considered. But bouncers are still stationed at the door for a reason.

Back in early 2022, Cornell Clayton, a Washington State University political science professor who has studied democracy for 35 years, told me that things looked bleak. “All the lights are blinking red” on the American experiment, he said. When losing candidates attempt election-denying coups, and their own party embraces them, that’s the stuff of banana republics, not functioning free societies.

I asked him this past week to give democracy a follow-up checkup.

“I guess I’d say it’s no longer blinking red quite as urgently,” he said. “Maybe it’s blinking yellow. It’s definitely still saying, ‘Proceed with extreme caution.’ ”

On the plus side, both the courts and general election voters have rallied to democracy’s aid. In addition to everything mentioned above, the U.S. Supreme Court in the past two weeks ruled against gerrymandering of districts in the South and rejected the right-wing “independent state legislature theory” that could have emboldened states to pursue “fake elector” schemes, as some tried to do for Trump in 2020.

Congress also reformed the Electoral Count Act, making it tougher for any candidate to mess around with congressional certification of the vote.

“These things are extremely important in preventing any further erosion of democratic norms,” Clayton said.

The problem, he said: “The underlying virus is still there.”

“After everything that’s happened, Donald Trump is still leading the Republican Party,” he went on. “The way democracies die is when parties become consumed by a proto-authoritarian figure like this, and the rest of the party leaders not only won’t denounce it but start to double down on anti-democratic strategies. That’s what’s still happening with the GOP.”

Clayton said America is also a 21st century country using 18th and 19th century political traditions (such as the Electoral College).

“Without big institutional reforms, we’re likely to stay extremely polarized and keep facing these challenges,” he said.

Still I’ve been impressed by how “preserving democracy” is no longer an academic debate but a major voting issue with the public.

At the “lights blinking red” depths in the winter of 2022, Democrats in Olympia proposed to fight back by making lying about election results a crime, with jail time up to a year. This seemed, to me, to be using anti-democratic extremism to counter anti-democratic extremism, and I wrote a column denouncing it. I was nervous, though. I thought I might come to regret that stance if the election denier movement only got stronger.

Instead, the bill didn’t pass, and then a wondrous thing happened: Voters took matters into their own hands. They booted out five of the Legislature’s most obsessed election deniers (in several cases by replacing them with more moderate Republicans, showing there might be hope for the GOP yet).

It’s why in this year’s legislative session, zero time got wasted on election conspiracy theories, nor were there fact-free proposals floated for the sole purpose of creating doubts about the voting system. It wasn’t because the deniers had been muzzled. It’s because the people had bounced ‘em right out of the bar.

That’s democracy, baby. Just the way the founders drew it up.

So I say, have a happy Fourth everyone. Not only has democracy made it alive for another year. It’s on a winning streak.