Two men have re-engineered the US electoral system in favor of Republicans | David Daley

Now their willfully minoritarian creations threaten the very essence of a representative democracy: if Donald Trump, rightwing courts, gerrymandered state legislatures and an extreme Republican caucus in the US House of Representatives create constitutional chaos over the certification of this presidential election, two men cleared the path.

The single-minded determination of Leonard Leo built a conservative supermajority on the US supreme court and stacked lower and state courts with Republican ideologues that have pushed the nation to the right via the least accountable branch of government.

This grim result is a US supreme court that has been captured by conservatives, which has delivered a decade of anti-democracy decisions that have advantaged the Republican party in elections, as well as an audacious plan to gerrymander Republicans into power in state legislatures nationwide and helped produce ever-more-extreme caucuses eager to adapt draconian voter restrictions in the name of stopping fraud that they cannot prove exist. The Roberts court has blessed this as well.