We spoke with election law scholar Rick Hasen about the significance of Jan. 6 and what needs to happen next to safeguard American democracy.
In a cruel twist, the demonstrably false claim that the 2020 election was stolen — a claim made repeatedly by former President Donald Trump and his allies, and which helped trigger the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol — has significantly raised the odds of an actual stolen U.S. election. That’s according to UC Irvine Prof. Rick Hasen, who serves as co-director of UCI’s new Fair Elections & Free Speech Center and is considered one of the nation’s preeminent scholars on U.S. election law. A year after the violence of Jan.6,2021, Americans can’t even seem to agree on what to call the day’s events, with some on the right disputing that it qualifies as an insurrection and some on the left equating it to terror on par with Sept.11. We spoke with Hasen about the meaning of Jan.6 and what needs to happen next to safeguard American democracy. “First of all, I think it is emblematic of the problem that people are disputing what happened on that very day. It shows you how far we have come from a shared understanding of the truth. That millions of people would think it was Antifa or the FBI or other forces than Trumps’ own supporters who were storming the Capitol is a sign of how hard it is to accept the truth. “It’s not that facts are hard to find. It’s that there is an effort on the part of the former president and some of his supporters to deliberately spread false information related to the 2020 election and the subsequent insurrection at the Capitol for political reasons.” While those on Trump’s side of the fence have done “a lot of excuse making about what Jan.6 represents,” Hasen said, for most people deeply embroiled in politics or who study elections, it was a key “moment of danger” in the United States. “I think it is the low point in modern American democracy.” Unlike the disenfranchisement of Black voters, which Hasen noted took place over a century, Jan.6 was an “instant, cataclysmic attack on the integrity of the election system.” That’s why he thinks some people equate it to Sept.
