I can’t say that I’m surprised the Republicans are working hard to undermine and rig the vote in every swing state. I am a little bit surprised they are openly admitting it:
THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION this year will come down to seven states — but there’s one that Donald Trump and his most committed lieutenants see as a blueprint for corrupting future local and national elections: Georgia.
The Peach State is unique — it’s the sole battleground state in which the Republican Party has total control over the levers of power: a trifecta in the state House, Senate, and governorship. Over the past four years, Trump-loving elements of the Georgia GOP have wielded that advantage in a crusade to convert discredited election-conspiracy theories into policies well ahead of Election Day 2024. It is an alarmingly anti-democratic experiment that Trumpland and much of the GOP hope to take national.
“Georgia is our laboratory,” a source close to the former president tells Rolling Stone. “If you can get this up and running in Georgia, you get a road map for other states, maybe the country as a whole.”
[…]
Republican operatives have remade Georgia’s state election board, executive branch, Legislature, and legal ecosystems, all in Donald Trump’s image. Conservatives in the state Assembly have unleashed thousands of voter eligibility challenges on county election boards — an effort that will be turbocharged with a new election law. Lawmakers also worked to limit Raffensperger’s role in overseeing elections, while sapping resources for election administration.
Conservative activists heckle election officials on a regular basis with the conspiracy theories Trump birthed, and an indicted election denier — now the state’s lieutenant governor — pushes Trump’s agenda in the Assembly as he eyes higher office. Trump sits atop this sprawling network, receiving updates on progress from political advisers and other MAGA acolytes.
Lawyers close to Trump are already preparing for the former president to claim fraud in Georgia and challenge the results of the election — even in the event that he wins — just to prove a point about imaginary “fraud” in Democratic areas. “There’s massive fraud, so that should be … solved, no matter who wins in Georgia or any state,” says one lawyer and conservative-movementarian who has discussed the matter with Trump, although they present no evidence to back such claims. “You can’t let the left get away with it just because their cheating did not work.”
He challenged results in places he didn’t win last time. And he certainly did it in 2016 when he formed a voter fraud commission to investigate the election. (They didn’t find anything, of course.)
Trump tells his people that he actually won the popular vote in both 2016 and 2020. I have no doubt that he will say the same thing this time. The Republican party is now institutionalizing his delusional sore-loserism. I don’t know what it will take to change the minds of the sad sack whiners who believe this tripe.