How to steal a US election: Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig on Trump’s new threat

Lawrence Lessig has a message for America: Donald Trump’s assault on democracy in 2020, with his stolen-election lie and refusal to concede the White House, may have been shocking, but wait till you see what’s coming next.

“We are in a profoundly dangerous moment,” the Harvard law professor says. “This is a catastrophic year, and the odds are not in our favor.”

Such a blunt warning carries the gravitas of its source. Lessig is a leading thinker on how public institutions can be corrupted, and has probed deeply into vulnerabilities that leave US democracy undefended against authoritarian attack.

Lessig has teamed up with Matthew Seligman of the constitutional law center at Stanford. Their new book, How to Steal a Presidential Election, asks whether a second Trump attempt to subvert democracy could succeed. Their answer makes for uncomfortable reading.

“We are convinced,” they write, “that an informed and intelligent effort to undermine the results of a close, free and fair election could work in America – if the rules governing our presidential elections are not changed.”

It is a sign of troubled times that prominent scholars are wargaming the next election. A country that has long prided itself as an exemplar of constitutional democracy finds itself under surgical lights.

Nor is this Lessig’s first such thought experiment. Four years ago, months before Trump launched his stolen-election conspiracy, Lessig and Seligman devised a class at Harvard law school: Wargaming 2020. They looked at whether it would be possible to hack the presidential election and send the losing candidate to the White House. Their conclusion was that American democracy had dodged a bullet.

“We discovered that Trump didn’t really understand what he could