MAGA is just getting warmed up
Vote suppression is not the gravest threat to democracy, argues Michelle Cottle of the New York Times editorial board. It’s just the easiest to explain. And it doesn’t always produce the results people predict.
Tuesday was National Voter Registration Day. Coincidentally, it was the day the Trusted Elections Tour stopped through Asheville. A bipartisan panel addressed voters’ concerns about ballot security . No, ballot-counting machines here are not connected to the internet. There are checks at multiple steps along the way to prevent anyone unauthorized from hacking the machines or altering results. Virtually the entire state of North Carolina votes on paper ballots. The machines just speed up the counting and are more accurate than human counts anyway. Everything is checked and rechecked from vote totals to absentee ballot validation.
I can vouch for that. Try to screw with the election process or intimidate voters at the precinct level in my county and the response comes via 911.
“This is not a political process,” said Western Carolina University political science professor Chris Cooper. “This is an administrative process with political results.”
Or it is supposed to be. It depends who the administrators are.
“So let’s not let the GOP off the hook here,” says Cottle about suppression tactics in a Times video report. “This mission to erect barriers is anti-democratic. These laws are appalling and, frankly, racist.”
“But this is what should really take you off and scare the holy living shit out of you,” she continues. “It has less to do with controlling who can vote and everything to do with who decides which votes actually count.”
Republicans are working to install an army of election workers who will document supposed irregularities (voter fraud) and throw a wrench in the works at the precinct level.
Johnny Harris and Cottle describe the MAGA attempt to rig the system so far down into the plumbing that it goes unnoticed. Novice election workers are being recruited and primed to challenge voters and to officially document those challenges to build a paper trail (“evidence”) better than what Rudy Giuliani assembled from rando kooks in 2020. Next time, they hope they’ll be more successful challenging election results in court.
But let me remind you again how that approach really works:
When Erich von Daniken’s “Chariots of the Gods?” was a best-seller (speaking of pyramids), Johnny Carson asked a NASA astronaut what he thought of von Daniken’s theories about aliens influencing human history. After a pause, the astronaut replied that when von Daniken looks around the world and sees something he doesn’t understand, he attributes it to aliens. And since there’s a lot in this world von Daniken doesn’t understand, he finds them everywhere.
Watching Brother Giuliani’s traveling Republican salvation show last year, it was clear most of his Trump-fawning witnesses to “massive fraud” applied von Däniken’s approach to the 2020 election. Whenever they saw an election process they did not understand, they attributed it to voter fraud. And since there was a lot about election processes they didn’t understand, they saw fraud everywhere.
Now the GOP is systematizing that. The precinct strategy is only one piece of the rigging strategy. Take time to view the Times report (26 min.).
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