Eliza Newlin Carney wrote in The Fulcrum (a non partisan, nonprofit digital news service) that the Country was able to hold onto its democracy (at least as of this post) despite the President’s extreme and unprecedented pushing of the Nation towards a National crisis, due to six institutional factors. 

She wrote that the nation’s brush with autocracy was troublingly close, and the damage to public confidence in elections could be lasting. Still, it’s worth acknowledging the guardrails that have held fast against the nation’s severe democracy stress test, and against Trump’s specious and ongoing fraud allegations. There’s no guarantee these railings would hold against a more sophisticated adversary, and the need to shore up voting rights and election administration remains urgent.

These are the six most important factors that so far have saved us:

The military: Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stated that the military would play “no role” in any post-election disputes.

And after Trump raised fresh alarms with his post-election firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper and some of his top Pentagon aides, Milley declared pointedly on Veterans Day: “We are unique among militaries. We do not take an oath to a king, or a queen, a tyrant or a dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual. … We take an oath to the Constitution.”

The courts: The long list of judges who rejected Trump’s election challenges include several conservatives nominated by Trump and his GOP predecessors, who debunked the president’s legal claims as baseless in the extreme.  I am disappointed that the judges gave so much leeway to baseless claims and have not apparently sanctioned lawyers under CR 11 but there may be more on that front in the near future.

The states: Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, has drawn justifiable notice for withstanding personal threats and calls for his resignation to certify his state’s election results, stating memorably: “Numbers don’t lie.”  Thousands of rank-and-file election administrators, poll workers and volunteers from both political parties have carried out their duties to the Nation and honored the sanctity of the vote despite opposition by unpatriotic and uninformed Trump followers who blindly accepted claims of fraud as fact. State legislators, too, refused to step in and overrule voters, sensing public backlash but also in some cases resisting White House pressure.

The media: Mainstream news outlets, and even in some instances conservative Fox News, have choked the Trump campaign’s Russia-style firehose of campaign disinformation with relentless fact checks and around-the-clock reporting. The misrepresentations continue, and the president’s fabrications of voter fraud have been swallowed whole by millions of Republican voters. But fact-based reporting has made it harder for the Trump campaign to advance its false claims in court, and helped mobilize voters to hold public officials accountable.

The hardware: An estimated 95 percent of votes this year were cast either using a mail-in paper ballot or a voting machine that produced a verifiable and auditable paper trail — equipment installed thanks to decades of lobbying by voting rights advocates and election security experts.

Voter-verifiable paper trails are considered an essential backstop against voting machine breakdowns, the best possible guard against hacking and as a crucial tool for audits and recounts. Existing state requirements vary, and counties in some states still use paperless voting machines despite the risk, pointing to the need for federal guidelines. But in Georgia, where a new system this year allowed voters to cast ballots with a verifiable paper trail statewide for the first time, paper records proved crucial in facilitating not one but two watertight recounts, and in debunking on its face Trump’s unfounded claim that Dominion Voting Systems had somehow altered the state tally.

The voters: Almost 160 million voters turned out in this election, at almost 67 percent, the highest percentage of the eligible population since the first presidential election of the 20th century. A coup or Constitutional crisis will only succeed if the masses show indifference and allow it to happen.

“You get the government you deserve.” Not exactly what Thomas Jefferson said, but you get the gist.