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The Trump administration’s efforts to demobilize and delegitimize the upcoming midterms hardly began or ended with the Hail Mary efforts to take over voting by mail. Indeed, even as the Supreme Court seems to have halted that attempt in its tracks, there are hydralike tentacles of election subversion that have risen up in its stead. On this week’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick spoke with one of her ride-or-die elections experts, professor Richard Hasen of the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, about what’s coming next and how to calibrate panic vs. preparedness dials in the upcoming weeks as we look forward to more election threats while still trying to get this democracy thing right. Hasen is the founding director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project and the author of Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy. A portion of their conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, appears below.

Dahlia Lithwick: Last week the Supreme Court finally pulled the plug on Donald Trump’s mail- voting shenanigans. There was some real fear that this would go the other way, but it seems to be a fairly conclusive, very brief order by the court that essentially says the application for the stay that was presented to the court is denied, right? Should we worry that two of the nine justices legitimately thought not only that the administration should have won, but that this was an emergency that should have forced, as you wrote, every state to not be able to do mail voting?

Rick Hasen: Well, the first thing to say is that even though the unsigned majority opinion was only three sentences, those sentences packed a punch. I filed a brief with three other law professors, and we focused on what’s called the balance of the equities, which is this idea that when you’re talking about a preliminary injunction or a stay, something that’s going to have to be done in the interim until the court can take a full look at the case, not only do you look at which side’s likely to win on the merits (i.e., does the post office have the authority to do this?); you also look at: What’s the harm going to be to the other side, and what’s the public interest here? The brief that we wrote basically said that you don’t even need to look at whether the U.S. Postal Service has the authority to do this. On the one hand, the government said that there was a problem with voter fraud but........

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