If there is one clear hero of the 2020 election season, it's Marc Elias, the DNC attorney who headed up the team which fought all of the Kraken lawsuits Donald Trump and Republicans filed to try and steal the election.
With every suit filed and every appeal filed after each loss, Elias and his team were there with the documents, the analysis, and most importantly, the wins.
In the end, Elias and the team won 59 major lawsuits and all the associated appeals to the original action. Trump won one, a minor Pennsylvania case involving a handful of votes. All of those actions and their associated documents are loaded up over on Democracy Docket.
With the 2020 election done, Elias has turned his attention to Georgia and the ongoing Republican efforts to try and suppress the voters who delivered the state to Joe Biden in 2020. You should subscribe to his Democracy Docket newsletter to stay current on their efforts too.
For all of his winning Twitter and courtroom ways, Elias is deadly serious about where our democracy is going and what reforms we need to repudiate the authoritarianism Republicans are demonstrating.
Trumpism has morphed from a racist attack on the first Black president into an all-out assault on the very idea of democratic elections. In this sphere, Trumpism’s defining feature is a belief that every electoral outcome that does not favor Trump and his allies must be fraudulent. Its logic is tautological—if Trump did not win there must have been fraud. If there was fraud, Trump did not win. Nothing more is required.
One might think that the simple end of this problem is for Donald Trump to simply leave the White House on the morning of January 20th as a disgraced one-term president. The Republican Party’s reaction to the Texas case suggests this will not be the case.
Read on...
From my standpoint, Elias is a true American hero. Also, he has an adorable dog.
Snow! pic.twitter.com/Mk2yCa5zG2
— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) December 16, 2020
For those two stellar achievements, Marc Elias gets my special Editors' Choice Good Guy Crookie Award for 2020.