WASHINGTON — This presidential electionsthe first from January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitolit will be a stress test of the new systems and guardrails that Congress has put in place to ensure America’s long tradition of the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

As a Republican Donald Trump and democrat Kamala Harris race to the finish, pro-democracy advocates and elected officials are bracing for a volatile period after Election Day as legal challenges are filed, bad actors spread misinformation and voters are waiting for Congress to confirm the results.

“One of the unusual features of this election is that so many of the potential dangers and so many of the attacks on the electoral system are concentrated in the post-election period,” said Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at the nonpartisan Brennan Center. for Justice.

After the Jan. 6 attack, Congress aimed to strengthen the process and prevent a repeat of that unprecedented period in which Trump, along with some GOP allies in Congress, refused to concede defeat to the president. Joe Biden. Trump spent months prolonging dozens of failed legal cases before sending his supporters to the US Capitol, where they disrupted the election count with a bloody riot. He faces a federal indictment for the scheme, which included fake voter lists in states that falsely claimed he had won.

While the new The law on the reform of the electoral number approved by Congress clarified post-electoral processes — to more quickly resolve legal challenges and reinforce that the vice president has no ability to change the outcome of the Jan. 6 election — the new law is by no means firm.

Much depends on the people involved, from presidential winners and losers to elected leaders in Congress and America’s voters who put their faith in the democratic system that has endured for more than 200 years.

A poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that American voters approach the election with a deep unease about what might come next.

Dick Gephardt, the former leader of the House, now serves on the executive board of the nonpartisan organization Keep Our Republic, which has worked to provide civic education about the process in the presidential battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

“We are concerned about one thing and one thing only: Can Americans still have valid confidence in elections and can we consistently have a peaceful transfer of power in all offices, including the presidency?” Gephardt said in a briefing earlier this month.

“I think January 6, 2021 was really a wake-up call for all of us,” he said.

It’s not just the onslaught of legal challenges that worries pro-democracy groups, as dozens of cases have already been filed by both Republicans and Democrats even before Election Day. They say the high volume of cases has the potential to sow doubt the balance sheet of the elections and give rise to disinformation, both domestic and foreign, as happened in 2020 when Trump’s legal team deployed far-fetched theories that turned out to be wildly inaccurate.

As Trump races to retake the White House, he’s already setting the stage for challenges to an election he wants to be “too big to rig.” The Republican National Committee has made the legal strategy its cornerstone Electoral integrity program.

Trump is supported by Republicans on Capitol Hill, including the Speaker of the House Mike Johnsonwhich adopted similar language, saying it would only accept the results if the elections were free and fair.

“We’re going to have a peaceful transition of power,” Johnson, who has led one of Trump’s 2020 legal challenges, told CBS. “I think President Trump is going to win and take care of this.”

A specific line of attack from House Republicans has been to suggest that there will be illegal voting by non-citizens, even though it is a crime to do so, and state and federal reviews have found that it is extremelyrare. Johnson pointed to previous House races, including one in Iowa in 2020 that was won by six votes, to back up his concerns.

Representative Joseph Morelle of New York, the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, said Johnson was “saying the quiet side loudly,” signaling how Republicans may challenge the result.

That “bothers me,” he said.

At the Brennan Center, they ran wargame-like scenarios for what might happen after the election, at a time when state election officials is experiencing a renaissance in conspiracy theories and misinformation about voting.

A series of deadlines between Election Day on Nov. 5 and Inauguration Day on Jan. 20 are included in the process, once routine steps that are now hit-or-miss milestones.

States are required to certify their electors by Dec. 11 ahead of an Electoral College meeting, which is set for Dec. 17 this year.

The new Congress convenes on January 3 to elect a speaker of the House and swear in lawmakers. Then, on January 6, Congress holds a joint session to accept the election count from the states — a usually ceremonial session presided over by the vice president.

To strengthen the process in the wake of the January 6 attack, the Voter Number Reform Act instituted several changes designed to support the process and ensure that disputes are resolved by the time Congress meets. Legal challenges to the results are to be resolved more quickly, with an accelerated timeline for judicial review, all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. If a the county refuses to certify its results, as some did during the 2022 midterm elections, the governor has more authority to certify the state’s tally.

On Jan. 6, the law now requires 20 percent of the House and Senate to challenge a state’s voters to force a vote to reject them, rather than a threshold of one member from each chamber.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., who had been the chief architect of the new law along with Republican Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said they did “everything we could” to protect the process.

“You know people have the right, if they have a problem with an election, to go to court and be heard,” Lofgren said. “The thing is, once it’s over, it’s over.”