Can another major attack on American democracy be withstood?
By 
[SPOILER ALERT]
The brilliant and stressful most recent episode of Succession is one of the most chillingly accurate portrayals of fascism and its various enablers and collaborators in the history of American pop culture.
Menkyn — a more refined purveyor of the art than DeSantis, let alone Trump — going progressively more fash as the ATN execs reconcile themselves with their efforts to ratfuck him into the White House whole rewarding a reactionary terrorist attack on the election — is all-too-perfect.
Rick Hasen has a useful overview of how this scenario would play out in 2024:
Wisconsin’s election statutes do not appear to speak to what would happen with the massive destruction of ballots on Election Day. Many states interpret vague election statutes to favor enfranchisement of the voter, but Wisconsin gives less protection for absentee ballots, as the key state Supreme Court justice in the 2020 case of Trump v. Biden explained. If the justices on the state Supreme Court divided along party lines, as is often (but not always) the case, thanks to the recent election of Janet Protasiewicz, the court likely would side with the left-leaning candidate and offer some kind of remedy. Doing so would prevent voter disenfranchisement. If the same scenario were to take place in a potential tipping-point state that had a more conservative-leaning state Supreme Court, such as North Carolina, however, it could go another way.
To carry on the hypothetical based on the premise of a divided state court with a pro-democracy lean, like in Wisconsin: Perhaps the state court would require a partial revote in Milwaukee, as was suggested by Shiv in the Succession episode and by Claire Woodall-Vogg, executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, who consulted on the Succession episode. Woodall-Vogg explained that election officials would have records to know whose absentee ballots were destroyed in the fire.
But a revote may violate federal law, which requires that there be a uniform day on Election Day. (My former dean Erwin Chemerinsky unsuccessfully tried to get a revote in Palm Beach County, Florida, in 2000 after many voters were misled to vote for Pat Buchanan rather than Al Gore by the infamous butterfly ballot.) And any order from the state court requiring a revote might violate the so-called independent state legislature theory, which, if adopted by the Supreme Court, would potentially limit state court remedies in federal elections when such remedies are not directly written into a statute. (The scope of this theory is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court in the Moore v. Harper case.)
On the other hand, preventing a revote would clearly violate the equal protection or due process rights of voters protected by the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment. It is easy to imagine a federal district court, particularly one in Milwaukee, saying that the Constitution requires a revote or some other remedy to prevent disenfranchisement.
Ultimately, the case would be decided by the United States Supreme Court, where, in some of the most contentious election cases, the justices split along party lines. Who is to say what this court might do?
American democracy in the hands of John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh. Did I mention how stressful how even the fictional version was? Especially if it comes down to a single state I trust the both of them about as much as I trust Kendall Roy.