198 search results for ""election integrity""

The most alarming thing you will read this year is this piece from Barton Gellman in the Atlantic. It’s very long and full of frightening details. I urge you to read it. We are in big trouble. Here is the opening:

Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect.

The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. Given the opportunity, they will act. They are acting already.

Who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today. It is not even apparent who will try. Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real. Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake.

“The democratic emergency is already here,” Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC Irvine, told me in late October. Hasen prides himself on a judicious temperament. Only a year ago he was cautioning me against hyperbole. Now he speaks matter-of-factly about the death of our body politic. “We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024,” he said, “but urgent action is not happening.”

For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.

By way of foundation for all the rest, Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response.

Any Republican might benefit from these machinations, but let’s not pretend there’s any suspense. Unless biology intercedes, Donald Trump will seek and win the Republican nomination for president in 2024. The party is in his thrall. No opponent can break it and few will try. Neither will a setback outside politics—indictment, say, or a disastrous turn in business—prevent Trump from running. If anything, it will redouble his will to power.

As we near the anniversary of January 6, investigators are still unearthing the roots of the insurrection that sacked the Capitol and sent members of Congress fleeing for their lives. What we know already, and could not have known then, is that the chaos wrought on that day was integral to a coherent plan. In retrospect, the insurrection takes on the aspect of rehearsal.

Even in defeat, Trump has gained strength for a second attempt to seize office, should he need to, after the polls close on November 5, 2024. It may appear otherwise—after all, he no longer commands the executive branch, which he tried and mostly failed to enlist in his first coup attempt. Yet the balance of power is shifting his way in arenas that matter more.

Trump is successfully shaping the narrative of the insurrection in the only political ecosystem that matters to him. The immediate shock of the event, which briefly led some senior Republicans to break with him, has given way to a near-unanimous embrace. Virtually no one a year ago, certainly not I, predicted that Trump could compel the whole party’s genuflection to the Big Lie and the recasting of insurgents as martyrs. Today the few GOP dissenters are being cast out. “2 down, 8 to go!” Trump gloated at the retirement announcement of Representative Adam Kinzinger, one of 10 House Republicans to vote for his second impeachment.

Trump has reconquered his party by setting its base on fire. Tens of millions of Americans perceive their world through black clouds of his smoke. His deepest source of strength is the bitter grievance of Republican voters that they lost the White House, and are losing their country, to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power. This is not some transient or loosely committed population. Trump has built the first American mass political movement in the past century that is ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed, for its cause.

It’s very long and I can’t post it here. But if you can’t read it, know that it goes into every swing state which has Republican power, whether in the legislature, the Governor’s mansion or the courts. and shows just how thoroughly they are subverting the democratic election process. I guess we knew they were doing it. I had no idea how much of it there was.

He interviews a Trumper who is devoted to the Big Lie and tries to plumb the depths of his conspiracy addled mind. It’s quite … something:

Patterson was not in Washington on January 6, but he is fluent in the revisionist narratives spread by fabulists and trolls on social media. He knows those stories verse by verse, the ones about January 6 and the ones about the election rigged against Trump. His convictions are worth examining because he and the millions of Americans who think as he does are the primary source of Trump’s power to corrupt the next election. With a sufficient dose of truth serum, most Republican politicians would likely confess that Biden won in 2020, but the great mass of lumpen Trumpers, who believe the Big Lie with unshakable force, oblige them to pretend otherwise. Like so many others, Patterson is doing his best to parse a torrential flow of political information, and he is failing. His failures leave him, nearly always, with the worldview expounded by Trump.

We fall into a long conversation in the sweltering heat, then continue it for weeks by phone and email. I want to plumb the depths of his beliefs, and understand what lies behind his commitment to them. He is prepared to grant me the status of “fellow truth-seeker.”

“The ‘Stop the Steal’ rally for election integrity was peaceful,” he says. “I think the big takeaway is when Old Glory made its way into the Rotunda on January 6, our fearless public officials dove for cover at the sight of the American flag.”

What about the violence? The crowds battling police?

“The police were seen on video in uniform allowing people past the bicycle-rack barricades and into the building,” he replies. “I mean, that’s established. The unarmed crowd did not overpower the officers in body armor. That doesn’t happen. They were allowed in.”

Surely he has seen other video, though. Shaky, handheld footage, taken by the rioters themselves, of police officers falling under blows from a baseball bat, a hockey stick, a fire extinguisher, a length of pipe. A crowd crushing Officer Daniel Hodges in a doorway, shouting “Heave! Ho!”

Does Patterson know that January 6 was among the worst days for law-enforcement casualties since September 11, 2001? That at least 151 officers from the Capitol Police and the Metropolitan Police Department suffered injuries, including broken bones, concussions, chemical burns, and a Taser-induced heart attack?

Patterson has not heard these things. Abruptly, he shifts gears. Maybe there was violence, but the patriots were not to blame.

“There were people there deliberately to make it look worse than what it was,” he explains. “A handful of ill-behaved, potentially, possibly agents provocateur.” He repeats the phrase: “Agents provocateur, I have on information, were in the crowd … They were there for nefarious means. Doing the bidding of whom? I have no idea.”urn:uuid:81b357bf-aa57-1b9b-51fa-1b9baa5781b3

“‘On information’?” I ask. What information?

“You can look up this name,” he says. “Retired three-star Air Force General McInerney. You got to find him on Rumble. They took him off YouTube.”

Sure enough, there on Rumble (and still on YouTube) I find a video of Lieutenant General Thomas G. McInerney, 84, three decades gone from the Air Force. His story takes a long time to tell, because the plot includes an Italian satellite and Pakistan’s intelligence service and former FBI Director James Comey selling secret U.S. cyberweapons to China. Eventually it emerges that “Special Forces mixed with antifa” combined to invade the seat of Congress on January 6 and then blame the invasion on Trump supporters, with the collusion of Senators Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell, along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

In a further wrinkle, Pelosi, by McInerney’s account, became “frantic” soon afterward when she discovered that her own false-flag operation had captured a laptop filled with evidence of her treason. McInerney had just come from the White House, he says in his monologue, recorded two days after the Capitol riot. Trump was about to release the Pelosi evidence. McInerney had seen the laptop with his own eyes.

It shook me that Patterson took this video for proof. If my house had caught fire 10 years before, my life might have depended on his discernment and clarity of thought. He was an Eagle Scout. He earned a college degree. He keeps current on the news. And yet he has wandered off from the empirical world, placing his faith in fantastic tales that lack any basis in fact or explicable logic.

McInerney’s tale had spread widely on Facebook, Twitter, Parler, and propaganda sites like We Love Trump and InfoWars. It joined the January 6 denialist canon and lodged firmly in Patterson’s head. I reached the general by phone and asked about evidence for his claims. He mentioned a source, whose name he couldn’t reveal, who had heard some people saying “We are playing antifa today.” McInerney believed they were special operators because “they looked like SOF people.” He believed that one of them had Pelosi’s laptop, because his source had seen something bulky and square under the suspect’s raincoat. He conceded that even if it was a laptop, he couldn’t know whose it was or what was on it. For most of his story, McInerney did not even claim to have proof. He was putting two and two together. It stood to reason. In truth, prosecutors had caught and charged a neo-Nazi sympathizer who had videotaped herself taking the laptop from Pelosi’s office and bragged about it on Discord. She was a home health aide, not a special operator. (As of this writing, she has not yet entered a plea.)

The general’s son, Thomas G. McInerney Jr., a technology investor, learned that I had been talking with his father and asked for a private word with me. He was torn between conflicting obligations of filial loyalty, and took a while to figure out what he wanted to say.

“He has a distinguished service record,” he told me after an otherwise off-the-record conversation. “He wants what’s best for the nation and he speaks with a sense of authority, but I have concerns at his age that his judgment is impaired. The older he’s gotten, the stranger things have gotten in terms of what he’s saying.”

I tell all of this and more to Patterson. McInerney, the Military Times reported, “went off the rails” after a successful Air Force career. For a while during the Obama years he was a prominent birther and appeared a lot on Fox News, before being fired as a Fox commentator in 2018 for making a baseless claim about John McCain. Last November, he told the WVW Broadcast Network that the CIA operated a computer-server farm in Germany that had helped rig the presidential vote for Biden, and that five Special Forces soldiers had just died trying to seize the evidence. The Army and U.S. Special Operations Command put out dutiful statements that no such mission and no such casualties had taken place.

Of course, Patterson wrote to me sarcastically, “governments would NEVER lie to their OWN citizens.” He did not trust the Pentagon’s denials. There are seldom words or time enough to lay a conspiracy theory to rest. Each rebuttal is met with a fresh round of delusions.

Patterson is admirably eager for a civil exchange of views. He portrays himself as a man who “may be wrong, and if I am I admit it,” and he does indeed concede on small points. But a deep rage seems to fuel his convictions. I asked him the first time we met if we could talk “about what’s happening in the country, not the election itself.”

His smile faded. His voice rose.

“There ain’t no fucking way we are letting go of 3 November 2020,” he said. “That is not going to fucking happen. That’s not happening. This motherfucker was stolen. The world knows this bumbling, senile, career corrupt fuck squatting in our White House did not get 81 million votes.”

He had many proofs. All he really needed, though, was arithmetic. “The record indicates 141 [million] of us were registered to vote and cast a ballot on November 3,” he said. “Trump is credited with 74 million votes out of 141 million. That leaves 67 million for Joe; that doesn’t leave any more than that. Where do these 14 million votes come from?”

Patterson did not recall where he had heard those figures. He did not think he had read Gateway Pundit, which was the first site to advance the garbled statistics. Possibly he saw Trump amplify the claim on Twitter or television, or some other stop along the story’s cascading route across the right-wing mediaverse. Reuters did a good job debunking the phony math, which got the total number of voters wrong.

I was interested in something else: the worldview that guided Patterson through the statistics. It appeared to him (incorrectly) that not enough votes had been cast to account for the official results. Patterson assumed that only fraud could explain the discrepancy, that all of Trump’s votes were valid, and that the invalid votes must therefore belong to Biden.

“Why don’t you say Joe Biden got 81 million and there’s only 60 million left for Trump?” I asked.

Patterson was astonished.

“It’s not disputed, the 74 million vote count that was credited to President Trump’s reelection effort,” he replied, baffled at my ignorance. “It’s not in dispute … Have you heard that President Trump engaged in cheating and fraudulent practices and crooked machines?”

Biden was the one accused of rigging the vote. Everybody said so. And for reasons unspoken, Patterson wanted to be carried away by that story.

This guy is super engaged so he probably has more disinformation at his fingertips than most. Nonetheless, his general attitude is shared by millions of people, many of them ready to take up arms if their candidates don’t win every election going forward. They believe it is impossible for them to lose — just like Donald Trump.

As I said, we are in trouble.

There was a time when I would have thought this would end up being of benefit to the Democrats because these people are so batshit. But I never make that assumption these days. The crazy is powerful and nearly half the country wallows in it.

Here’s the latest:

A coalition of right-wing MAGA candidates, including multiple Trump-backed figures, are seeking to take control of elections in states across the U.S.—and one says they’re formally working with a group of conspiracy theorists, as well as with a QAnon influencer who some in the conspiracy movement believe in John F. Kennedy Jr. in disguise.

The group consists of five GOP candidates running for the key election position of secretary of state in Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Georgia, and California, as well as one Pennsylvania lawmaker who may run for governor, which in Pennsylvania appoints the secretary of state.

The reported coalition is just the latest example of how extreme QAnon-inspired conspiracy theories about election fraud and vote rigging have become pervasive in the Republican Party, and how those conspiracies are now driving this group to seek to take control of key election positions across the country ahead of the 2024 election.  

The existence of the group, which doesn’t appear to have a name, was revealed by Nevada secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant at the “For God & Country: Patriot Double Down” conference that took place in Las Vegas over the weekend.

Marchant, a former Nevada state legislator who lost a hotly contested race for Congress in 2020, told the crowd that the genesis for the coalition began on November 4 last year, the day after he lost out to Rep. Steven Hosford in the race for a House seat. Like Trump, Marchant claims the election was stolen from him, and so, in his words, he “got to work.”

“I got a suite in the Venetian hotel across the hall from the Trump attorneys and the Trump people that came in to start investigating the election fraud here in Nevada,” Marchant said Monday. “And guess who showed up at my suite? Juan O Savin.”

Savin is the alias for an anonymous QAnon influencer and author who until this weekend never showed his face in public and was best known because some QAnon followers believed he was John F. Kennedy Jr. in disguise.

“We need to take back the secretaries of state offices around the country. So not only did they ask me to run, they asked me to put together a coalition,” Marchant claimed.

It is unclear how Marchant knew Savin but “for the next three to five months we worked on trying to expose the election, the fraudulent election here in Nevada and everywhere actually.”

And on May 1, according to Marchant, the coalition held its inaugural meeting in Las Vegas. Marchant said he and Savin were joined by MyPillow CEO and renowned election fraud conspiracist Mike Lindell, and Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne, who pushed Trump to declare martial law to stay in power at a White House meeting late in his presidency and has since spent millions of dollars investigating election fraud conspiracies. Marchant added that founder of the conspiracy website the Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft, and his twin brother Joe Hoft, “zoomed into” the inaugural meeting. Brian Kennedy, a senior fellow and former president of the right-wing think tank the Claremont Institute, also attended, according to Marchant. 

“That was our inaugural meeting to start strategizing for the coalition. I can’t stress enough how important the secretary of state offices are. I think they are the most important elections in our country in 2022. And why is that? We control the election system,” Marchant said after recounting the meeting’s attendees. “In 2022 we’re going to take back our country.”

Marchant was light on details about exactly what form this “coalition” will take, not mentioning what legal structure it will have, what its specific goals will be past getting hardline Trump acolytes into powerful positions to run the 2024 elections, and whether there will be serious money behind the efforts. Marchant, Lindell, Byrne, Kennedy, and all the candidates Marchant said are involved didn’t reply to requests for comment. But both Lindell and Byrne have deep pockets, and could fund a major effort to back these candidates. 

The coalition already includes three candidates backed by former President Donald Trump. 

These include Kristina Karamo, a GOP activist running for Michigan secretary of state who has Trump’s endorsement. Karamo spoke immediately after Marchant at the same QAnon conference, and thanked him for putting together the effort. 

“I want to thank Jim Marchant for putting the coalition together. We owe him so much,” Karamo said before calling the incumbent, Democratic Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, “evil” and claiming there was widespread voting fraud in Michigan despite piles of evidence to the contrary.

Also in the coalition is Rep. Jody Hice, a sitting congressman from Georgia. Hice is the strong favorite to win the GOP nomination for secretary of state—Trump has endorsed him and is seeking payback against Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for refusing his attempts to flip his loss. He may have the edge in the general election too; Georgia is a GOP-leaning swing state and 2022 will be a tough election environment for Democrats.

Mark Finchem, a sitting Arizona state lawmaker, also has Trump’s endorsement for the secretary of state position, and likely starts off with the edge in a crowded primary field, though even by the standards of this crowd he’s controversial.

Another member of the coalition is Pennsylvania lawmaker Doug Mastriano, who has been pushing hard for a Maricopa-style recount in his own state.

Mastriano, who has discussed election issues with Trump, is eyeing a run for governor, and if he were to win, he’d have the power to appoint the secretary of state in Pennsylvania. 

Mastriano hasn’t officially jumped into the race—he’s said he’s looking for a sign from God that he’ll raise enough money—but has previously said that Trump asked him to run for governor, a sign the former President is likely to endorse should Mastriano jump in. Former Pennsylvania Rep. Lou Barletta, a strong Trump backer who lost a 2018 run for Senate, is currently the front-runner in that race.

Marchant doesn’t have Trump’s endorsement—yet—and faces a crowded field for the GOP nomination, including former Las Vegas news anchor Gerard Ramalho, former judge Richard Scotti, and Sparks Councilman Kristopher Dahir. The general election could be a tight one in the swing state, where Republicans usually do quite well in the midterms. Democratic attorney Cisco Aguilar, a one-time staffer for former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, is the early favorite to be the Democratic nominee.

The final member of the coalition is California’s Rachel Hamm—but Republicans have almost zero chance of winning that race in the deep blue state.

Marchant said he is close to getting another candidate in Colorado to sign up for the coalition, but he didn’t want to name them yet.

Karamo, Hamm, and Finchem all appeared alongside Marchant at the QAnon conference, discussing their plans for undermining election integrity during a panel discussion on Monday.

During the panel discussion Marchant laid out the coalition’s priorities should they get any of their candidates elected. These include advocating for voter ID laws, getting rid of Dominion voting machines, limiting voting to a single day, eradicating all mail-in ballots, “cleaning up” voter rolls, and allowing the public in to watch vote counting.

Another aspect of their plan is to introduce what Marchant called “anti-counterfeitable” ballots. In fact, the coalition members visited a company in Texas recently that Marchant said that makes paper that is difficult to tamper with. 

Those measures include the use of hologram labels and are made of proprietary material that can only be read by special machines.

“No more ballots from China,” Marchant told the crowd, winking at a QAnon conspiracy theory that boxes stuffed with ballots from Asia were used to swing the election in Maricopa County in favor of President Joe Biden.

Who is Juan Savin?

It is unclear how Savin came into contact with Marchant, but as one QAnon researcher put it on Twitter: “I cannot emphasize enough how much you’d have to be Q-pilled to know anything about Juan O Savin. Prior to this event, Juan had never even broadcast his face. You’d HAVE to be deep into the movement to see him as a famous person.”

Until this weekend, Savin was only known by those deeply read into the QAnon world and he has protected his identity by never appearing on camera during podcasts and other interviews, preferring to show only his cowboy boots.

Savin’s real name is not widely known, but a biography on the book catalog website Goodreads lists a book written by Savin with the following blurb:

“This book is a four chapter transcript of speeches by Wayne Willott, using his nom de plume Juan O Savin. Wayne is a major player in the Conspiracy movement having established for himself excellent credibility as a QAnon.”

Goodreads did not immediately respond to VICE News’ question about who wrote the blurb.

Last weekend Savin stepped into the spotlight, appearing on stage for the first time, though he continued to use only his alias.

During several appearances on stage, Savin spouted his typical mixture of conspiracies about everything from COVID-19 to the Oklahoma City bombing. At one point he showed off a dress he claims was the one being worn by Melania Trump when the former first lady departed the White House for the last time. 

Savin claimed the patterned dress actually included a message hidden in “the language of semaphore.”

Another notable aspect of Savin’s mythos within the QAnon community is that many people believe that he is actually John F. Kennedy Jr. in disguise. Savin has never disabused people of this in any public statement and during the weekend, many QAnon supporters once again compared the pair.

I just can’t …

I love this headline:

Ya think?

For months, conspiracies about the 2020 election being stolen from Donald Trump have fueled Republican efforts nationwide to rewrite election laws. But now, some GOP operatives and Trumpworld luminaries are worried that the truly wild conspiracists may be mucking it all up.

Hogan Gidley, one of Donald Trump’s top lieutenants, took a subtle dig at some Trump allies and put some distance between their efforts and his group’s work on election reform. Other Republicans have expressed fears that talk of “audits,” machine rigging and foreign plots will depress voter turnout and discourage some people from seeking office.

“People are going to do whatever they want, and I can’t answer for any of those other groups,” said Gidley when asked about misinformation and efforts by Mike Lindell and others to overturn the 2020 election.

“But as it relates to election integrity and voter protection, it is vital that we help states get these simple, popular security mechanisms in place to ensure honesty for the 2022 midterms,” added Gidley, who is heading the Center for Election Integrity at the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. “I want to make sure that the data we gather and the information we share is built on solid ground as opposed to sinking sand.”

That ship has sailed, I’m afraid. They need to have a chat with this guy:

President Trump Responds on Pennsylvania’s 2020 Election

President Donald J. Trump to the Wall Street Journal:

“Actually, the election was rigged, which you, unfortunately, still haven’t figured out. Here are just a few examples of how determinative the voter fraud in Pennsylvania was…

• 71,893 mail-in ballots were returned after Nov. 3, 2020, at 8 p.m…None of these should have been counted according to the U.S. Constitution

• 10,515 mail-in votes from people who do not exist on the Pennsylvania voter rolls at all.

• 120,000 excess voters not yet accounted for by the Pennsylvania Department of State—far more votes than voters!

• Hundreds of thousands of votes unlawfully counted in secret…while GOP poll watchers thrown out

• 39,771 people voted who registered after the Oct 19 deadline

• 305,874 voters were removed from the rolls after the election on Nov. 3rd

• 51,792 voters with inactive voter registrations at the end of October 2020 nevertheless voted

• 57,000 duplicate registrations

• 55,823 voters who were backfilled into the SURE system

• 58,261 first-time voters 70 years and older

• 39,911 people added to voter rolls while under 17 years of age

• 17,000 mail-in ballots sent to addresses outside of PA

• 98% of the eligible voting population in Montgomery co was already registered to vote—not possible

• Montgomery Co canvass identified 78,000 phantom voters, roughly 30% were unaware people are voting from their address

• One nursing home in Lancaster co had 690 registrations and an extremely high turnout rate of 85% in 2020, while nursing homes were closed due to Covid.

One of these residents said she had not voted in the past 3 years, but had a mail-in ballot cast in her name

• 25,000 ballots were requested from nursing homes at the exact same time

• Numerous affidavits attested to poll watcher intimidation and harassment, by brute force

• Attorney General Bill Barr ordered U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain to stand down and not investigate election irregularities

• Mark Zuckerberg poured over $17 million to interfere in the Pennsylvania election, including…for drop boxes where the voting pattern was not possible

“And so much more! This is why Democrats and the Fake News Media do not want a full forensic audit in Pennsylvania. In reality, 80,555 ballots are nothing when there is this much corruption or voter irregularities.” – Donald J. Trump

I guess the Wall St. Journal thought it would be ok to print his lies. It really isn’t.

But it is revealing to read his daily, obsessive, “statements” about all this in which he goes over these details again and again. He is truly irrational on this subject and there is nothing anyone can do to stop him. I think losing cause a sort of psychotic break in him.

David Brock has an op-ed in the NY Times in which he says that he had always underestimated Trump and even saw him as a slightly kooky but fairly typical Republican president (which I find weird — he was a shockingly bizarre president and his behavior on the world stage was beyond outrageous.)

Anyway, he’s changed his mind:

Once he was in office, I misread Mr. Trump again. Having worked inside the conservative movement for many years, I found his policies familiar: same judges, same tax policy, same deregulation of big business, same pandering to the religious right, same denial of science. Of course, there were the loopy tweets, but still I regarded Mr. Trump as only a difference of degree from what I had seen from prior Republican presidents and candidates, not a difference of kind.

When a raft of books and articles appeared warning that the United States was headed toward autocracy, I dismissed them as hyperbolic. I just didn’t see it. Under Mr. Trump, the sky didn’t fall.

My view of Mr. Trump began to shift soon after the November election, when he falsely claimed the election was rigged and refused to concede. In doing so, Mr. Trump showed himself willing to undermine confidence in the democratic process, and in time he managed to convince nearly three-quarters of his supporters that the loser was actually the winner.

Then came the Capitol Hill insurrection, and, later, proof that Mr. Trump incited it, even hiring a lawyer, John Eastman, who wrote a detailed memo that can only be described as a road map for a coup. A recent Senate investigation documented frantic efforts by Mr. Trump to bully government officials to overturn the election. And yet I worry that many Americans are still blind, as I once was, to the authoritarian impulses that now grip Mr. Trump’s party. Democrats need to step up to thwart them.

Are Democrats up for such a tough (and expensive) fight? Many liberal voters have taken a step back from politics, convinced that Mr. Trump is no longer a threat. According to research conducted for our super PAC, almost half of women in battleground states are now paying less attention to the political news.

But in reality, the last election settled very little. Mr. Trump not only appears to be preparing for a presidential campaign in 2024; he is whipping up his supporters before the 2022 midterms. And if Democrats ignore the threat he and his allies pose to democracy, their candidates will suffer next fall, imperiling any chance of meaningful reform in Congress.

Going forward, we can expect bogus claims of voter fraud, and equally bogus challenges to legitimate vote counts, to become a permanent feature of Republican political strategy. Every election Republicans lose will be contested with lies, every Democratic win delegitimized. This is poison in a democracy.

As of late September, 19 states had enacted 33 laws that will make it harder for their citizens to vote. The Republican National Committee’s “election integrity director” says the party will file lawsuits earlier and more aggressively than they did in 2020. Trump wannabe candidates like Glenn Youngkin, running for Virginia governor, are currying favor with the Republican base by promoting conspiracy theories suggesting that Virginia’s election may be rigged.

More alarmingly, Republicans in swing states are purging election officials, allowing pro-Trump partisans to sabotage vote counts. In January, an Arizona lawmaker introduced a bill that would permit Republican legislators to overrule the certification of elections that don’t go their way. In Georgia, the legislature has given partisan election boards the power to “slow down or block” election certifications. Why bother with elections?

Democrats now face an opposition that is not a normal political party, but rather a party that is willing to sacrifice democratic institutions and norms to take power.

The legislation Democrats introduced in Congress to protect our democracy against such assaults would have taken an important step toward meeting these challenges. But on Wednesday, Republicans blocked the latest version of the legislation, and given the lack of unanimity among Democrats on the filibuster, they may well have succeeded in killing the last hope for any federal voting rights legislation during this session of Congress.

Having underestimated Mr. Trump in the first place, Democrats shouldn’t underestimate what it will take to counter his malign influence now. They need a bigger, bolder campaign blueprint to save democracy that doesn’t hinge on the whims of Congress.

We should hear more directly from the White House bully pulpit about these dire threats. The Jan. 6 investigators should mount a full-court press to get the truth out. Funding voting rights litigation should be a top priority.

Where possible, Democrats should sponsor plebiscites to overturn anti-democratic laws passed by Republicans in states. They should underwrite super PACs to protect incumbent election officials being challenged by Trump loyalists, even if it means supporting reasonable Republicans. Donations should flow into key governor and secretary of state races, positions critical to election certification.

In localities, Democrats should organize poll watching. Lawyers who make phony voting claims in court should face disciplinary action in state bar associations. The financiers of the voting rights assault must be exposed and publicly shamed.

The good news is that liberals do not have to copy what the right is doing with its media apparatus — the font of falsehoods about voter fraud and a stolen election — to win over voters. Democrats can leapfrog the right with significant investments in streaming video, podcasting, newsletters and innovative content producers on growing platforms like TikTok, whose audiences dwarf those of cable news networks like Fox News.

Issues like racial justice, the environment and immigration are already resonating online with audiences Democrats need to win over, such as young people, women and people of color. Democratic donors have long overlooked efforts to fund the media, but with so much of our politics playing out on that battlefield, they can no longer afford to.

He’s right about all of that, although I remain mystified how anyone could have missed the autocratic impulses in this guy and the personality defects that would inevitably lead to an attempted coup should he lose election. The idea that he would just “cry it out” then leave and play golf was always ridiculous. He had said outright that he would never accept an election he didn’t win and laid out the argument long before anyone voted. He is psychologically unable to accept that he isn’t a massively popular super star that everyone in America reveres.

Anyway, I think Brock’s solutions are right but so far it’s hard to see the kind of energy required to get that done. I hope I’m wrong.

Be a shame if anything happened to it.

Greg Sargent upacks the meaning of that weird statement. It was probably just Trump being an idiot … but there is a method to his madness even if it was unintentional:

Donald Trump called in to a rally for Virginia Republicans late Wednesday night, joining a festival of derangement featuring former adviser Stephen K. Bannon hallucinating aloud that Trumpism will rule the United States for the next century. The former president declared Virginia GOP gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin “a great gentleman.”

Yet that came only hours after Trump issued a splenetic statement about fellow Republicans, fuming that if they don’t “solve” the invented problem of a stolen 2020 election, “Republicans will not be voting in ‘22 or ‘24.”

How to reconcile Trump’s renewed endorsement of Youngkin with his tacit threat to punish Republicans for failing to reverse his election loss by urging his voters to stay home? Here’s how: In Trump’s eyes, Youngkin’s relentless pandering to Trump’s lies about 2020 has, for now anyway, passed his litmus test.

Which captures something essential about the post-Trump GOP: Republicans recognize that continuing to pander to those lies may be absolutely essential to keeping Republican voters engaged without Trump on the ballot doing it instead.

Trump’s statement has been analyzed as either the latest projectile vomiting to issue from his disordered mind or as a genuine political problem for Republicans. But few have paused to ask whether it might actually be true that energy among GOP voters turns on keeping alive the idea that the 2020 outcome was dubious or illegitimate, and what that might mean.

The Virginia contest is testing this premise. Youngkin has employed all sorts of oily and disingenuous tricks to pander to voters in thrall to Trump’s 2020 lies about our election system, while pretending not to.

For instance, one of Youngkin’s most devoted campaign trail surrogates is a Virginia lawmaker who has spun crackpot conspiracy theories about Democrats rigging the system against Trump, while alleging a plot to steal the election from Youngkin himself.

Youngkin has said the 2020 outcome was legitimate, while going to great lengths to send the opposite message from the other side of his mouth. He vows to restore “election integrity” and is demanding an “audit” of voting machines — both coded ways to humor Trumpian mythology that our election system renders rigged outcomes, and that Trump voters are the victims of it.

Youngkin recently refused to say whether he’d have voted as a member of Congress to count the rightful 2020 electors, before backtracking. That’s suddenly germane again: At Bannon’s rally, attendees pledged allegiance to a flag that was present at the Jan. 6 insurrection.

So Trump endorsed Youngkin at a rally where the insurrection continued to be treated as a glorious last stand of sorts that has been invested with near-messianic significance.

The most charitable interpretation of all this is that Youngkin is actively encouraging and seeking to harness this type of energy, while strategically paying lip service to the idea that 2020’s outcome was legitimate.

The straddle is obvious: Going too far down the Trumpian rabbit hole might complicate peeling off the educated and suburban voters a Republican needs to win in Virginia, voters Youngkin is appealing to with his businessman-turned-politican routine as well. But feeding Trumpian pathologies to whatever degree he can get away with is essential to keeping Trump base voters engaged.

That latter notion helps explain a key aspect of the continuing GOP enthrallment to Trump’s 2020 pathologies — the refusal of some GOP leaders to state unequivocally that he lost; the sham “audits” in numerous states; the trend in GOP candidates running on an openly declared vow to subvert future losses; and the relentless whitewashing of Jan. 6.

Here’s a little clip of the rally in Virginia last night in which they brought in a flag used on January 6th to say the Pledge of Allegiance. No word on whether it was soaked in policemen’s blood:

At the rally last night for GOP VA Gov candidate Glenn Youngkin, they said the ‘Pledge of Allegiance’ to a flag that was carried during the insurrection on Jan 6, as if it was sacred or something. pic.twitter.com/NGEaFFAvdF

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) October 14, 2021

As a space pirate once said, we’re not out of this yet (New York Times):

MADISON, Wis. — In three critical battleground states, Democratic governors have blocked efforts by Republican-controlled legislatures to restrict voting rights and undermine the 2020 election.

Now, the 2022 races for governor in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — states that have long been vital to Democratic presidential victories, including Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s — are taking on major new significance.

Republicans will be back, leaving Govs. Tony Evers of Wisconsin, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania facing “a rising Republican tide of voting restrictions and far-reaching election laws.”

Reid J. Epstein and Nick Corasaniti write:

Republicans have aggressively pursued partisan reviews of the 2020 election in each state. In Pennsylvania, G.O.P. lawmakers sought the personal information of every voter in the state last month. In Wisconsin, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice, who is investigating the 2020 election results on behalf of the State Assembly, issued subpoenas on Friday for voting-related documents from election officials. And in Michigan on Sunday night, Ms. Whitmer vetoed four election bills that she said “would have perpetuated the ‘big lie’ or made it harder for Michiganders to vote.”

Republican candidates for governor in the three states have proposed additional cutbacks to voting access and measures that would give G.O.P. officials more power over how elections are run. And the party is pushing such efforts wherever it has the power to do so. This year, 19 Republican-controlled states have passed 33 laws restricting voting, one of the greatest contractions of access to the ballot since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. Democrats in Congress have tried without success to pass federal voting laws to counteract the Republican push.

“I would’ve never guessed that my job as governor when I ran a couple years ago was going to be mainly about making sure that our democracy is still intact in this state,” said Evers, once Wisconsin’s superintendent of schools.

Now Evers worries that if his reelection campaign fails next year, Wisconsin Republican legislators would have a clear path to overturning the state’s 2024 presidential election results. “Governors are required to submit to Congress a certificate of ascertainment of presidential electors,” Epstein and Corasaniti write. What would happen if a Republican governor refused?

“It’s full of hyperbole and exaggeration, which is what the Democrats do best on this election stuff,” Robin Vos, the speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, said in an interview last week at the State Capitol. “All we’re trying to do is make sure that people who were elected were elected legitimately.”

See, Republicans are all about restoring faith in election systems they have worked decades to undermine with relentless, unsubtantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud. Tear down the building and you can rebuild from the ground up. Your way.

In Pennsylvania and Michigan as well, Republican candidates for governor are running on “election integrity,” essentially, on erecting new barriers to voting or else prohibiting making voting easier.

Michigan was also home to one of the most forceful and arcane attempts at reversing the outcome in 2020, when Republican election officials, at Mr. Trump’s behest, tried to refuse to certify the results in Wayne County and stall the certification of the state’s overall results. That memory, combined with new voting bills and Republican attempts to review the state’s election results, makes Michigan’s election next year all the more important, Ms. Whitmer said.

“If they make it harder or impossible for droves of people not to be able to participate in the election,” she said, “that doesn’t just impact Michigan elections, but elections for federal offices as well, like the U.S. Senate and certainly the White House.”

Democracy-optional Republicans have dropped all pretense of allowing voters to decide who represents them.

It’s not as if Republicans have not telegraphed the move. Under Michigan’s Public Act 436, then-Gov. Rick Snyder appointed emergency managers empowered to take control of city governments and school boards, particularly minority-majority cities, elected by voters. Chris Savage (Eclectablog) noted in 2013 that half of Michigan’s black residents were living “in cities where their elected officials have been replaced by a single, state-appointed ruler.”

Chris Lewis wrote in The Atlantic in 2013:

“It totally decimates democracy,” Detroit resident Catherine Phillips says of state takeover. “We have the right by federal law to allow us to go and choose by way of voting who we want to represent us in municipalities and school districts. By implementation of this dictator law, they have taken that right away.”

A study published Sept. 14 in the journal State and Local Government Review finds that the law affected more than drinking water in Michigan:

“Our findings provide evidence that decisions about state takeovers in Michigan are not entirely, or perhaps primarily, driven by objective measures of financial distress. Cities with larger Black populations and a higher reliance on state funding are more likely to be taken over,” said study lead author Sara Hughes, an environmental policy analyst and assistant professor at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability.

“We also find that cities that have had takeovers are more likely to see changes to their drinking water systems, such as rate increases and privatization. Whether these patterns are the product of racial bias, flawed policy and implementation, or broader political motivations is a question that could be taken up in future research.”

The most notorious recent example of water-system changes during a Michigan municipal takeover occurred in Flint, which was under emergency management when critical decisions about the city’s water supply and water treatment protocols were made, and where emergency managers were resistant to public concerns about the safety of the city’s drinking water. For nearly 18 months, from April 2014 to October 2015, the city of Flint delivered inadequately treated Flint River water to residents, exposing thousands to elevated lead levels and other contaminants.

The 10 other Michigan cities that came under emergency management between 1990 and 2017, and which were analyzed in the study, are Highland Park, Hamtramck, Three Oaks Village, Pontiac, Ecorse, Benton Harbor, Allen Park, Detroit, River Rouge and Lincoln Park.

See link to Savage’s post above about the demography of those towns.

Hughes and her co-authors expected that at least one of the financial indicators used by the state, or a composite financial health score based on all the indicators, would be able to identify all 11 Michigan cities that have experienced takeover.

Surprisingly, that was not the case. The composite financial stress score captured just 45% of those cities. But a city’s level of reliance on state revenue sharing captured 82% of the takeovers, while the percentage of Black residents and median household income correctly predicted 64% and 55% of the takeovers, respectively.

“These findings support previous work challenging the technocratic and rational basis of state municipal takeover laws and pointing to the inherent politics in municipal takeovers, specifically the bias and structural challenges facing Black and poor communities,” the authors wrote.

You have been warned. This erosion predates Donald Trump. Under Republican rule democracy is now optional.

Election Law Blog‘s Rick Hasen is losing sleep. Not just over Donald Trump’s and his party’s “stolen election” narrative, but over nationwide Republican efforts to help the 2024 Republican presidential candidate steal the next (if voters who still can vote won’t hand it to him).

“You could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal,” says Hasen.

CNN:

Richard Hasen, an election law expert at University of California Irvine School of Law, said he once thought that it would require “some kernel of truth” for people to believe the falsehood that the 2020 election had been rigged.

“It turns out that no matter how much proof there is that the election was done fairly, people are going to continue to believe the ‘Big Lie’ because it’s being constantly repeated by Trump and his allies,” said Hasen, who co-directs the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center at UC Irvine.

“One would think in a real world, that even this fake audit, that was stacked in favor of helping Trump, that a finding in favor of Biden would have deflated the enthusiasm. And maybe it has among some,” he added. “But facts don’t matter when you’re incessantly lying about election integrity.”

The extremist right has moved on from working the refs to working its base, more vigorously than before. If nothing else, they are disciplined about it.

Hasen, who recently wrote a paper warning of the risks of election subversion in 2024, said it’s “incredibly dangerous” that people who continue to promote the “Big Lie” are running to oversee future elections.”

No. 1, it will further undermine people’s confidence in the process,” Hasen said. “And No. 2, someone who believes or purports to believe that the last election was stolen is more likely to act in a way to not conduct a fair election as a kind of payback for the supposed rigging the last time.”

People will not believe a thing can happen until it happens. Northerners scoffed at the idea that Southern states would secede, historians explain. Then Confederates fired on Fort Sumter. Many of us never thought the country so unbalanced that it would elect Donald Trump in 2016. Then it did. We failed to take Trump’s “Stop the Steal” as anything more than “a ridiculous stunt.” writes Jamelle Bouie. Then came the Jan. 6th assault on the Capitol.

Ten months later, Bouie writes, “Stop the Steal” has become “something like party orthodoxy, ideological fuel for a national effort to seize control of election administration and to purge those officials who secured the vote over Donald Trump’s demand to subvert it.”

Bouie continues:

Despite the danger at hand, there doesn’t appear to be much urgency among congressional Democrats — or the remaining pro-democracy Republicans — to do anything. The Democratic majority in the House of Representatives has passed a new voting rights act aimed at the wave of restrictive new election laws from Republican state legislatures, and Democrats in the Senate have introduced a bill that would establish “protections to insulate nonpartisan state and local officials who administer federal elections from undue partisan interference or control.” But as long as the Senate filibuster is in place — and as long as key Democrats want to keep it in place — there is almost no chance that the Senate will end debate on the bill and bring it to the floor for a simple majority vote.

It’s almost as if, to the people with the power to act, the prospect of a Trumpified Republican Party with the will to subvert the next presidential election and the power to do it is one of those events that just seems a little too out there. And far from provoking action, the sheer magnitude of what it would mean has induced a kind of passivity, a hope that we can solve the crisis without bringing real power to bear.

“The law is only as powerful as people’s willingness to abide by it,” Hasan told Politico:

“I feel like a climate scientist warning about the Earth going up another degree and a half,” Hasen told POLITICO Magazine in an interview this week. “The rhetoric is so overheated that I think it provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier ‘stolen’ election. People are going to be more willing to cheat if they think they’ve been cheated out of their just desserts.”

After everything that has happened since Trump decended the golden escalator, Democrats continue to behave as if it can’t happen here. New voting rights legislation has stalled as they focus on the infrastructure and Build Back Better reconciliation bills.

Hasan again sounded the alarm Monday evening on “All In with Chris Hayes,” saying,

Law — making legal changes — it’s so important. It’s my number one priority to push this over the next few years. But legal change alone is not going to protect American democracy. We’re going to have to be ready for mass, peaceful protest. We’re going to be ready to organize civil society, the kinds of things I never expected we’d have to talk about in the United States.

Hasan is right. After Trump’s 2016 election, women were so outraged that millions took to the streets nationwide and around the world, as many as half a million or more in Washington, D.C. It might take that and more after the Electoral College meets in 2024.

We assumed the legal battlements would hold in 2020, only to find months after the Jan. 6th attack how close Trump’s allies came to a successful coup. Faithful Americans might want to be better prepared in 2024.