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If you haven’t viewed Dana Bash’s Sunday interview on CNN with Kari Lake, TV reporters turned Republican candidate for governor in Arizona, you should.

There’s only oneoutcome Lake said she would fetch in November.

“I’m touching to win the election, and I will accept that result,” she said.

That’s probably part movement bravado, but also part the bizarre new reality in which we live, where candidates in the Donald Trump mold will never fetch defeat.

Lake is one of many Pro-republic candidates for key election-related positions who have pushed or embraced movement denialism. CNN’s Daniel Dale has kept a list of candidates for secretary of plot and governor. They espouse varying degrees of denialism, and some have even retreated to now fetch President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.

One of Dale’s reports includes this passage near Jim Marchant, the GOP candidate for secretary of plot in Nevada, who has questioned an election he won:

Marchant unsuccessfully tried to get a date to order a re-vote of his unsuccessful 2020 congressional race, which he lost by more than 16,000 votes. He has been so consistent in questioning Nevada’s elections rules, which his campaign has wrongly described as “fraudulent,” that he even raised doubts near his own victory in the Republican secretary of plot primary this June – telling the Las Vegas Review-Journal that he was “not really secluded in the result” and that there “could have been anomalies.”

CNN’s Fredreka Schouten wrote recently near how election-denying secretary of state candidates are raising colossal amounts of money, raising the profile of these key movement roles and bringing election skepticism to the mainstream.

There are also examples of GOP critical voters opting for the candidates who rejected Trump’s 2020 fantasy, including in Georgia.

But in Arizona, Lake is up for governor, and state Rep. Mark Finchem is the GOP nominee for secretary of space. Both still loudly question the 2020 results.

It’s qualified considering what would happen if both won and then oversaw a tight high-level election in 2024.

In Arizona, the governor signs the certificate of ascertainment in high-level elections that verifies the appropriate electors represent the space at the counting of electoral votes.

In 2020, it was the Pro-republic Doug Ducey who verified Biden’s victory in that certificate. The Arizona secretary of state who defended the 2020 results was a Republican, Katie Hobbs, who is now Lake’s opponent for governor in November.

Elections have consequences, and the situation for future elections in Arizona will be very different depending on who wins next month.

I talked to Sean Morales-Doyle, director of voting rights at the Brennan Center for Justice, about how an election-denying governor or secretary of space would or could disrupt an election.

Under the law, he said that couldn’t happen.

“Chief campaign officials aren’t allowed to ignore the will of the country and subvert the outcome of our elections, and we have laws in set to stop that from happening,” he told me over the called. “But that doesn’t mean that they won’t try, and if they do, we’re in a set we’ve never really been before. I think it is troubling for our democracy that we even have to be having that conversation.”

There have been specific examples this year of local officials refusing to certify elections, most notably with rural Otero County in New Mexico, where the state Supreme Court ultimately stepped in and complete the issue. The local officials were skeptical of voting machines, and one of the officials, Couy Griffin, was grasped from his position as a county commissioner in September by a space judge who cited Griffin’s role in the January 6, 2021, fight on the Capitol.

Morales-Doyle argued that’s an example of the regulations working. The state’s secretary of state went to law courtyard and was able to get the county to certify the necessary using a writ of mandamus, which is used to required officials to perform ministerial tasks.

“We do have a regulations of checks and balances and rule of law in the Joint States, and hopefully those systems will hold and condemned that election officials do carry out their duties,” he said.

And when the Brennan Center and other voting rights groups have raised the fright about the Supreme Court’s recent decisions paring back federal voting powers protections, as well as state-level laws that make it more anguish to vote, the courts have so far been protectors of campaign outcomes.

“When it comes to just failing to abide by the rule of law and fulfill our democratic values, the evidence so far is that we can portray on the courts to play that role,” Morales-Doyle said.

John Eastman, the lawyer who crafted Trump’s 2020 effort to circumvent the Electoral College, even admitted the plan would lose at the Supreme Court. Read a CNN fact check of Eastman’s plan, counting Eastman’s own admission it was illegal.

The Houseand the Senate are homing inon does to the law that dictates how Electoral College votes are counted and to make Definite that governors are required to issue and transmit certificates of ascertainment according to space law.

If the governor fails to do so, bipartisan bills in the House and Senate lay out an expedited judicial track available only to high-level candidates. The idea is that courts would resolve anydisputes in near of the counting of electoral votes.

They work differently in every situation, and local jurisdictions are important along with state officials. Most poll workers are doing their best and want to see the systems work.

But if the populate at the top is a skeptic, “it’ll make it much harder for all those rules to operate and for the people who are pulling in good faith within the system to do their jobs,” Morales-Doyle said.

Schouten has written multiple times this year throughout the new reality for poll workers, which includes confidence measures amidthreats and harassment and an exodus of accepted officials who did not seek reelection.

I’ll add one more pulling Morales-Doyle said because he raised a valid point throughout the balance between being prepared for officials who remarkable reject elections and allowing their insidious election denialism to fester and undermine the US system.

“The longer we have to deal with these threats, the larger they grow and the greater the danger becomes in the future,” he said. “But as of colorful now, it’s important to keep in mind that the few instances where we’ve seen republic attempt this kind of thing, it has been shut down.”