Victories by Trump-aligned Republicans over the next year in state races and in the courts could open the door to a worst-case scenario for 2024 that, if the election is as tight as the past two presidential races, is both dangerous and entirely plausible, says Ben Berwick, a counsel for Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group founded in late 2016 to fight authoritarianism in the U.S. First, Berwick told me, Trump backers in the closest tipping-point states would “manufacture doubt about the results, and then use that doubt to allow state legislatures to step in and say, ‘Well, we can’t really be sure of the winner, so we’re just going to decide which slate of electors to choose.’” As my colleague Barton Gellman reported before last year’s election, ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which provides instructions to Congress for resolving disputes, could lead to chaos when lawmakers meet to tally the results.

Presiding over the assembly will be Harris, who, as Pence, Biden, and Gore did in previous elections, will likely appear on the ballot herself. What will she do—what can she do—if Republicans empowered with congressional majorities refuse to accept the certification of a Democratic win in one or more key states? How would she handle a certification from a Republican governor or secretary of state that appeared to subvert the popular vote in that state? What if, in other words, it were up to her to stop the steal? I asked Harris’s office how she viewed her role and whether she had, more than three years in advance, received briefings on her authority in those scenarios. “Vice President Harris will always fulfill the constitutional duties of the office,” Sabrina Singh, a spokesperson for Harris, replied. “We learned in 2020 that the most important principle in our democracy is that voters, not partisan politicians, choose the president.”…

Without new legislation clarifying the Electoral Count Act, advocates worry, the January 6 session could devolve into a messy battle of parliamentary maneuvers.