David Graham of the Atlantic warns, our election system, which withstood those assaults, might not survive the next ones.

And his cover story for the December issue of the Atlantic, Graham explores how the next election, the midterms, might succumb to a sustained political attack, writing, quote,

to understand the threat of democracy and how it might be stopped,

I spoke with experts on election, administration,

constitutional law, and law enforcement.

Many of them are people I've known to be cautious, sober, and not prone to hyperbole.

Yet they used words like nightmare and warned that Americans need to be ready for,

quote, really wild stuff. If you're not frightened, Hannah Frye, the executive editor,

executive director of the voter access group, all voting is local, told him, you are not paying

attention. That's right. I mean, I think it's important to remember that five years ago,

nobody expected something like Trump's sustained effort to overturn the 2020 election.

Famously, a top administration official told the Washington Post, you know,

what's the harm in humoring him? It's not like he's going to try to stay there.

Nobody imagined a mob trying to

overrun the Capitol. So a lot of things that I think we just can't imagine are on the table.

One of the things that worried me most in addition to how concerned these generally sober people are

was just a number of ways that somebody who wanted to subvert the election system could do it.

There are ways to mess with the rules ahead of the fact. There are ways to suppress votes in the moment. There are ways to

try to get votes thrown out or to get elections overturned or simply not to seat the winners,

as in that 1985 example potentially. So it's sort of a full court press and people who want to

defend the system have to be looking at any number of options and be ready for things that would have been unimaginable in the past.

You do talk about things that happened the last time around and how they might happen again and how Donald Trump might be in a better position to have the folks around him act on his impulses.

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