Hours after the US Capitol was secured against a violent insurrection on 6 January, the Senate reconvened in a late-night session to move ahead with certifying Joe Biden’s electoral college victory. It was a dramatic moment designed to send a clear message: democracy would prevail.

“To those who wreaked havoc in our Capitol today, you did not win. Violence never wins. Freedom wins,” the then vice-president, Mike Pence, said as senators reconvened. “As we reconvene in this chamber, the world will again witness the resilience and strength of our democracy.”

“They tried to disrupt our democracy. They failed,” Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, said on the Senate floor.

But while the attack on the Capitol failed on 6 January, the attack on US democracy has continued unabated. It continued immediately after the riot, when Republican lawmakers continued to object to the electoral college results in that late-night session, and has only grown in the six months that followed.

“We saw the makings of the big lie between November and January, but the consequences of the big lie seem much worse now, six months later, than even in the midst of the big lie leading up to January 6,” said Ned Foley, a law professor at the Ohio State University.

In state capitols across the country, Republicans have weaponized lies about the 2020 election to push laws that make it harder to vote. They have embraced amateur inquiries into election results that have already been audited. And they have enacted measures that make it easier to remove local election officials from their posts, opening up the possibility of partisan meddling in future elections.

A quarter of Americans, including a staggering 53% of Republicans, believe Donald Trump is the “true president”, a May Reuters/Ipsos poll found.

“The fact that the January 6 insurrection didn’t scare us and prompt many Republicans to start aggressively rejecting those claims, and instead Republicans continue to embrace those claims as a justification for imposing additional restrictions means that our democracy remains in real trouble,” said Franita Tolson, a law professor at the University of Southern California.

While Donald Trump and his allies failed in their effort to get local election officials to overturn the election, Republicans across the US have moved to make it easier to overturn future elections.

After Aaron Van Langevelde, a Republican appointee on the Michigan board of canvassers, refused to block the certification of his state’s election results, Republicans declined to reappoint him to a new term. In Georgia, Republicans stripped the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, of his role as chair of the state elections board after Raffensperger, a Republican, pushed back on Trump’s claims of fraud. Under a new law, the legislature will appoint the chair of the board, which now has the power to remove local election officials from their posts.

In Arkansas, Republicans passed a new law authorizing a legislative committee to investigate election complaints and allows the state’s board of election commissioners to take over running elections in a county if the board believes there is an election violation “would threaten either a county’s ability to conduct an equal, free, and impartial election, or the appearance of an equal, free and impartial elections”. In Iowa, Republicans enacted a new law that imposes new criminal penalties on election workers for failing to adhere to election law.

The most visible effort to undermine the election results continues in Arizona, where the Republican state senate authorized an unprecedented inquiry into ballots and voting equipment in Maricopa county, the largest in the state. The effort, funded by Trump allies, is being led by a firm with little experience in election audits and whose founder has expressed support for the idea that the election was stolen. It also comes after two previous county audits affirmed the results of the 2020 race.

Even as experts have raised alarms about the Ariziona inquiry, which includes far-fetched ideas like looking at ballots for bamboo fibers, Republicans in other US states have embraced it. There are calls for similar reviews in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan, among other places.

Republicans have also continued the ethos of the 6 January attack by enacting measures that make it harder to vote after a presidential election that saw the highest turnout in nearly a century. In Georgia, the same new law that allows for interference in elections also requires voters to provide identification information both when they request and return a mail-in ballot. The same law also curtails the availability of mail-in ballot drop boxes, allows for unlimited citizen challenges to voter qualifications, and prohibits volunteers from distributing food and water while standing in line to vote.

In Florida, a state long praised for its widespread use of mail-in ballots, Republicans enacted a measure that significantly limits drop boxes and requires voters to provide identification information when they request a mail-in ballot. Iowa Republicans also passed a law that cuts the early vote period by nine days, and requires polls to close earlier.

In Montana, Republicans tightened voter ID requirements, made it harder for third parties to collect and so voters can no longer register at the polls on election day – a move that will probably have a big impact on the state’s sizable Native American population. In Arizona, where mail-in voting is widely used, Republicans changed a state policy so that voters could no longer permanently remain on a list allowing them to automatically receive a mail-in ballot for every election.

While Republicans ultimately weren’t successful in blocking the certification of Joe Biden’s win, there are still deep concerns that it could succeed next time.

The Electoral Count Act, the law that governs the counting of electoral votes, appears to authorize state legislatures to step in and appoint electors in the event of a failed election, but offers no guidance on what would constitute such a scenario. If there is a dispute between the houses of Congress over a state’s slate of electors, the same federal law defaults to whichever group of electors has been certified by a state’s governor. Republicans are poised to take control of the US House in 2022, a perch from which they could wreak havoc when it comes time to count electoral votes.

Federal law also says that Congress isn’t supposed to second-guess the certification of electors as long as states reach an official result by the so-called “safe harbor” deadline about a month after election day. But when members of Congress and senators objected to the electoral college results in January, Foley noted, there was little discussion of that deadline, which every state except Wisconsin met in 2020.

Foley, the Ohio state professor, has been worried about the ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act long before 2020, warning that Congress was ill-equipped to resolve a legitimately disputed close election. He has urged Congress to revisit and clarify the law before the next election crisis.

But last year, he was alarmed at how far Trump and allies took their fight over the election, even with little evidence of fraud.

“As I look ahead to 2024, I think the pathology that’s going on culturally with respect to acceptance of defeat, the inability to accept defeat, that is really, really dangerous,” he said. “That seems new in a way we haven’t seen.”