Freedom for vs. freedom from
It’s Super Tuesday. Do you know where your polling place is?
MSNBC last night pointed to a New York Times story I’d missed, perhaps because it’s old news to me. The voter fraud fraudsters are — say it with me — doubling down:
A network of right-wing activists and allies of Donald J. Trump is quietly challenging thousands of voter registrations in critical presidential battleground states, an all-but-unnoticed effort that could have an impact in a close or contentious election.
Calling themselves election investigators, the activists have pressed local officials in Michigan, Nevada and Georgia to drop voters from the rolls en masse. They have at times targeted Democratic areas, relying on new data programs and novel legal theories to justify their push.
What began with True the Vote in Texas has spread into a nationwide network of voter fraud sleuths in places such as Michigan.
The Michigan activists are part of an expansive web of grass-roots groups that formed after Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat in 2020. The groups have made mass voter challenges a top priority this election year, spurred on by a former Trump lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, and True the Vote, a vote-monitoring group with a long history of spreading misinformation.
Their mission, they say, is to maintain accurate voting records and remove voters who have moved to another jurisdiction. Democrats, they claim, use these “excess registrations” to stuff ballot boxes and steal elections.
The theory has no grounding in fact. Investigations into voter fraud have found that it is exceedingly rare and that when it occurs, it is typically isolated or even accidental. Election officials say that there is no reason to think that the systems in place for keeping voter lists up-to-date are failing.
Same as it ever was. Michigan pays data experts from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) to keep its voter rolls as up to date as the law allows. (“Federal law requires clerks to keep voters who may have moved on the rolls for two election cycles, unless they receive notice from the voter,” the Times reminds.) But ERIC, you may recall, is part of a vast, left-wing voter fraud conspiracy. It’s given side-eye by the right’s “election intergrity” shock troops since being “exposed” by Gateway Pundit in January 2022 as a “left-wing plot to add more racial minorities to the voter rolls.”
Never fear. The voter fraud Scoobies are here.
The Scoobies’ goal in 2024 is not just flagging “questionable” registrations, but intimidating local election clerks, bogging down elections staff chasing their “leads,” and laying the groundwork for a replay of 2020 election challenges when Donald “91 Counts” Trump loses in November.
In Nevada, the Pigpen Project has set out to clean the voter rolls. Two longtime conservative activists, Chuck Muth and Dan Burdish, have organized door-to-door canvassing and enlisted landlords to compare voter rolls with their leasing records. More than once, they have escorted landlords to the Clark County registrar’s office so that they can flag registrations of former tenants.
Stephanie Wheatley, a spokeswoman for Clark County, said that the evidence was not enough to remove a voter but that it was “enough for the election department to do research and investigate.”
Nevada is also an ERIC state. And like Michigan, a blue state in 2020.
For readers new to my work, I attended a 2013 “election integrity” boot camp hosted by the Voter Integrity Project of NC (VIP-NC) a True the Vote spinoff led by one Jay DeLancy. The workshop taught aspiring voter fraud Scoobies how to sniff out bad registrations, including by “driving by abandoned homes and vacant lots, taking photos to prove to the local Board of Elections that people registered there no longer live there” (Crooks & Liars, 2013):
Arguing by anecdote, DeLancy related a story about people showing up to vote with clean, never-folded power bills for ID. He flashed on the screen a copy of former Gov. Bev Perdue’s power bill and asked, how do you think I got that? He made it on his computer. Those people with the power bills? It might be voter fraud. See, because it’s possible to mass-produce fake utility bills, someone, somewhere might be forging them to commit widespread voter fraud, undetected.
“How is fraud widespread if it’s undetected?” Colin Powell asked caustically while visiting Raleigh in August.
(This Super Tuesday, North Carolina voters must for the first time produce acceptable photo IDs to vote.)
What’s both sad and pathetic about our democracy-averse neighbors is not how they’re wasting their time, but what the Scoobies are not doing with it (added emphasis):
America is headed for greater plurality that will shift the political power balance. The sad part is, such legislation and citizen “boot camps” feel like white-knuckled exercises in protecting a demographic patch of electoral turf that’s shrinking beneath supporters’ feet. State after state erects barricades to voting and retreats behind them as for a siege. Not once did any speaker this weekend suggest opening up the franchise to greater participation, registering new voters and encouraging them to go the polls to exercise their right to vote.
This is what these Real American™ paranoiacs believe about their neighbors:
Nice, decent white people wake up on Election Day, shower, dress, eat breakfast, then go the polls to do their patriotic duty by casting their votes. OTHERS — Poors numbering in the invisible millions — are not like US. They go instead to commit felonies punishable by five years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense just to add a single extra vote to their team’s total.
The voter fraud Scoobies’ concept of freedom is negative, freedom from not freedom for. They are maximizing their freedom by keeping feared others from enjoying any.
From 2019:
A priest friend jokes, in America you are expected to have faith. Not faith in anything in particular, just faith. In a similar vein, politicians peddle abstractions like freedom. Not freedom for anything in particular. Just freedom.
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