This Election Will Need More Heroes

True political courage — the principled stand, the elevation of country over party pressure, the willingness to sacrifice a career to protect the common good — has become painfully rare in a polarized world. It deserves to be celebrated and nurtured whenever it appears, especially in defense of fundamental American institutions like our election system. The sad truth, too, is the country will probably need a lot more of it in the coming months.

In state after state, Republicans have systematically made it harder for citizens to vote, and harder for the election workers who count those votes to do so. They are challenging thousands of voter registrations in Democratic areas, forcing administrators to manually restore perfectly legitimate voters to the rolls. They are aggressively threatening election officials who defended the 2020 election against manipulation. They are trying to invalidate mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, even if they meet the legal requirements of a postmark before the deadline. They are making it more difficult to certify election results, and even trying to change how states apportion their electors, in hopes of making it easier for Donald Trump to win or even help him overturn an election loss.

Though many of these moves happened behind closed doors, this campaign is hardly secret. And last month, Mr. Trump directly threatened to prosecute and imprison election officials around the country who disagree with his lies.

Against this kind of systematic assault on the institutions and processes that undergird American democracy, the single most important backstop are the public servants, elected and volunteer, who continue to do their jobs.

Consider Mike McDonnell, a Republican state senator from Nebraska, who showed how it’s done when he announced last month that he would not bow to an intense, last-minute pressure campaign by his party’s national leaders, including former President Trump, to help slip an additional electoral vote into Mr. Trump’s column.

Currently, Nebraska awards most of its electors by congressional district, and while most of the state is safely conservative, polling shows Vice President Kamala Harris poised to win the elector from the Second Congressional District, which includes the state’s biggest city, Omaha. In the razor-thin margins of the 2024 election, this could be the vote that determines the outcome. That was the intent of Republican lawmakers in Nebraska, who waited until it was too late for Democrats in Maine, which has a similar system, to change the state’s rules to prevent one congressional district from choosing a Republican elector.