772 search results for ""voter fraud""

I could be wrong but this smells like a tease to me. “What’s he going to say? Will he act like a crazy man? Will he be presidential instead? Who knows? Tune in to see!”

On Saturday evening, Donald Trump, the former president and current leader of the GOP, is scheduled to deliver another one of his red-meat-hurling, post-presidency speeches at the North Carolina Republican Party’s annual convention. And there is one particular morsel that various Trump advisers and confidants are praying that the twice-impeached former president does not serve to his followers this weekend—or, ever.

“I conveyed something [to Trump] to the effect of, ‘It would be a terrible idea to even say the word, ‘August’ [at Saturday’s event],” said a person who is still in contact with the Republican ex-president.

In the time since New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted on Monday that “Trump has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August,” several close allies of the former president have made a point of getting in touch with Trump to deliver a simple message, according to three sources familiar with the matter.

The message: Whoever is trying to get in your ear to tell you that you could be “reinstated” in the White House by August, or at any time during President Joe Biden’s term in office, doesn’t know what they’re talking about, and repeating their deranged theories in public could be used against you by your enemies. Furthermore, they told him, it would be better to focus on the 2022 midterm elections and, subsequently, the 2024 presidential race.

These knowledgeable sources said that the people close to Trump who’ve sought to dissuade him from talking about this publicly have counseled him gently and diplomatically, determining that pushing too hard could risk inadvertently nudging the mercurial ex-president towards actually talking about it.

The idea that Trump would be “reinstated” in a few weeks is the stuff of MAGA fan fiction—but that hasn’t stopped Trump from privately entertaining the baseless August theory. He has claimed the theory is something that many “highly respected” people have recently assured him is possible (once the nonexistent evidence of massive 2020 voter fraud is finally revealed), as The Daily Beast reported this week. The former president has refused to accept reality and admit that he legitimately lost the last U.S. presidential election, and has spearheaded the Republican Party’s anti-democratic crusade that kicked into high gear in November and continues to this day.

The theory of Trump’s August re-ascension to power, which is being promoted by a segment of MAGA diehards and election dead-enders, isn’t based on any particular intel or insider gossip, even. It’s based on a guess.

In an interview with The Daily Beast earlier this week, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a mega Trump ally who helped fund several efforts to overturn Biden’s victory, said, “If Trump is saying August, that is probably because he heard me say it publicly.”

He continued, “The month of August, for this, is subjective…but I don’t know if it’ll be that month, specifically…I spoke about it with my lawyers who said that they should have something ready for us to bring before the U.S. Supreme Court by July. So, in my mind, I hope that means that we could have Donald Trump back in the White House by August. That’s how I landed on August, and I’m hopeful that that is correct.”

Several advisers to Trump would only want him to mention August or “reinstatement” on Saturday, or any day, if he were to quickly deny that this kind of reinstallation is possible. But as of Friday evening, Trump’s office had yet to release a statement pushing back on this week’s reporting that he believes this, even though the former president hasn’t been shy about commenting on recent news items that he alleges are incorrect.

As of the start of this weekend, those in Trump’s social and political orbits who spoke to The Daily Beast did not know for sure if the ex-president would veer off-script on Saturday and say something about August or reinstatement that would cause them severe headaches. One of the sources who still talks to Trump said they discussed it with him not long after Haberman posted her tweet, expecting Trump to say the reporting was “bullshit” or “fake news,” only to have the ex-president decline to knock it down.

I have no idea what he’ll do. He operates on his own political logic. If I had to guess, he’ll rail on the stolen election but he won’t mention the August “reinstatement.” If he does it would indicate that he’s just decided to say “fuck it” which would show that his inability to accept his loss is truly delusional and not just driven by a base desire for revenge in 2024.

He does have an instinct for what his cult wants to hear so I expect he will give them what they want. It will be interesting to see if he thinks they are all as far gone as Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn and Mike Lindell.

This wild QAnon endorsement of a Myanmar-style military coup to reinstate Dear Leader didn’t come out of nowhere. Josh Kovensky at TPM tracked down the origins:

When Michael Flynn registered his support for a Myanmar-style military coup this week, he wasn’t just advocating for the violent overthrow of the government.

Flynn was playing into a specific fantasy that’s been brewing in the QAnon fever swamps since a February coup took place in Myanmar. The fantasy posits that the country’s military takeover offers a preview of what will happen in the U.S. to reinstate Trump.

QAnon supporters have tacked on to some similarities between the Myanmar coup and what the conspiracy foresees taking place in the U.S., using it as a touchstone for their own vision of the military overthrowing a fraudulently elected Biden and replacing him with Trump. The former president himself has reportedly said that he thinks he will be “reinstated” in August.

“Q always had the ideation of the military stepping in,” Mike Rothschild, author of the forthcoming book “The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything,” told TPM. “The Myanmar coup was the next evolution of that, because while Donald Trump was president, they didn’t want the military to overthrow him – but now with Joe Biden in office, they need the military to overthrow him to get Trump back into office.”

The Myanmar coup plotters used claims of voter fraud during their own November 2020 presidential election as a justification for taking power. The Myanmar military’s claims were broad, with one general alleging that 8 million fake votes had been counted. International observers at the election say that there were no major irregularities.

When the Myanmar coup first took place on Feb. 1, Q supporters reacted with recognition.

“QAnon is jealous of Myanmar’s military coup,” ran one Feb. 4 headline in Vice.

Jordan Sather, a QAnon video blogger with 59,700 subscribers on Telgram, wrote in the app that “Myanmar MIL moves today against what looks like a globalist puppet who had help rigging their elections.”

“I know many will cry “why didn’t our MIL do it before inaug!”, and as much as I wanted that too, there are sound arguments supporting the choice to let Biden have it for a moment and get DT “out of the picture” (temporarily),” Sather added.

On Feb. 5, Q News Official TV posted that “Myanmar Military just overthrew their government, claiming massive election fraud, and arrested their civilian ‘leaders,’ held them inside their government buildings and are promising an election redo that the citizens of Myanmar can trust.”

It’s all breathless, and maps closely on to what Q supporters want to occur in the U.S.

It came after Trump supporters spent months grasping at examples of real-world occurrences that match their fantasies of mass electoral fraud uncovered, leading to the reversal of an election.

Bruce Marks, a Philadelphia attorney who consulted on the Trump campaign’s Pennsylvania litigation , was himself involved in an early 1990s race in which instances of voter fraud were verified. Those allegations map closely on to what Trump and his supporters were claiming.

Like that long-forgotten early 1990s race, the Myanmar coup has become something of an exemplar for QAnon adherents, who continue to believe that Trump was not defeated, but has merely receded into the distance before a forthcoming military takeover returns him to power.

“It’s an example of the military and the people throwing off the shackles of the deep state, taking control and giving it back to the forgotten men and women, which is not whats actually happening,” Rothschild told TPM. “But that’s what they want.”

Other Q accounts have also boosted Myanmar-related messaging. Q-Tip, a Telegram channel with more than 108,000 subscribers, wrote in mid-February that “Don already gave control to the military to move forward with the plan under guise of a National Emergency.”

“Soon, the military will publicly step in, as they did in Myanmar and election fraud will be proven,” the post reads.

GhostEzra, another leading QAnon Telegram channel, shared a Reuters story in March about the U.S. government blocking Myanmar’s junta from withdrawing $1 billion from the country’s account at the New York Fed.

Flynn was asked “why what happened in Myanmar can’t happen here” at the For God & Country Patriots Roundup in Dallas, Texas.

“No reason,” Flynn replied. “I mean, it should happen here. No reason.”

Flynn’s language echoes that of many Q accounts that have mostly migrated to Telegram since major social networks began to shut down access following the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.

Flynn has tried to walk back his remarks, denying that he was advocating for a coup.

Rothschild pointed out that the remarks fit perfectly into the Q narrative.

“He knew that this was a crowd of Q people who idolize him and want this to happen,” Rothschild said.

I just don’t know what to say. The Republicans are in a state of mass hysteria and I don’t know what it will take to snap them out of it.

This is the city. Washington, D.C. I work here, I’m a congressman. I wear a pin. My name is Swalwell.

It was Wednesday, January 6th. It was cold in Washington….

The heat is on. Hundreds of Rep. Mo Brooks’ (R-Ala.) brothers-in-insurrection have been arrested and charged for the riot and deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6th instigated by Donald J. Trump with the help of Brooks and Republican colleagues.  

“Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass,” Brooks told the StopTheSteal rally on The Mall. He then asked rally attendees if they were willing, like their ancestors, to sacrifice “their blood, their sweat, their tears, their fortunes, and sometimes their lives” to fight for America. “Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America? [cheers and applause] Louder! Will you fight for America?“

No Republican officials have drawn charges yet, but Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) has detectives attempting to run down Brooks for his role. Brooks is dodging being served with a lawsuit (CNN):

Federal Judge Amit Mehta, after learning of Swalwell’s inability to serve Brooks with the lawsuit, gave the Democrat’s legal team another 60 days to get to Brooks with their formal notification. The judge, however, won’t allow the US Marshals to deliver the lawsuit to the Republican congressman “due to separation of powers concerns,” Mehta wrote, after Swalwell asked for the US Marshals Service’s help.

After Swalwell — a California Democrat — sued in March, his attorneys tried to reach the Alabama Republican through calls to the congressman’s office and by sending a letter to formally provide him notice he had been sued, a necessary step in this type of court proceeding.

When they couldn’t get the lawsuit to Brooks, the Swalwell legal team hired a private investigator to find him — only to be hampered in April and May partly by the visitor lockdowns around the US Capitol complex, which were put in place for Congress’ protection after the siege, according to their filing Wednesday.

“Counsel spoke to two different staff members on two separate occasions, and each time was promised a return call that never came,” Swalwell’s attorneys wrote on Wednesday.

Following the Swalwell team’s calls, they emailed, too. “Neither Brooks nor any member of his staff has responded to his request,” their filing said.

Swallwell’s attorneys have had to hire a private investigator to find and serve Brooks. Brooks is a slippery devil.

In the suit, Swalwell alleges that former President Donald Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr., Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Brooks broke Washington, DC, laws, including an anti-terrorism act, by inciting the riot, and that they aided and abetted violent rioters and inflicted emotional distress on members of Congress.

Swalwell claims that the four men prompted the attack on Congress with their repeated public assertions of voter fraud, their encouragement that supporters go to Washington on January 6, and in their speeches that day. Each man had told the crowd that Joe Biden’s electoral certification in Congress could be blocked, and that Trump’s supporters should fight, the lawsuit alleges.

This story is true. The names have not been changed….

The only “problem” Texas Republicans “fixed” with their new vote suppression bills is the problem of too many eligible, legal voters in the big cities voting for Democrats. That’s it. There was no fraud and they know it.

In the course of several hours Saturday and early Sunday, Senate Republicans hurtled to move forward on a sweeping voting bill negotiated behind closed doors where it doubled in length and grew to include voting law changes that weren’t previously considered.

Over Democrats’ objections, they suspended the chamber’s own rules to narrow the window lawmakers had to review the new massive piece of legislation before giving it final approval ahead of the end of Monday’s end to the legislative session. This culminated in an overnight debate and party line vote early Sunday to sign off on a raft of new voting restrictions and changes to elections and get it one step closer to the governor’s desk.

Senate Bill 7, the GOP’s priority voting bill, emerged Saturday from a conference committee as an expansive bill that would touch nearly the entire voting process, including provisions to limit early voting hours, curtail local voting options and further tighten voting-by-mail, among several other provisions. It was negotiated behind closed doors over the last week after the House and Senate passed significantly different versions of the legislation and pulled from each chamber’s version of the bill. The bill also came back with a series of additional voting rule changes, including a new ID requirement for mail-in ballots, that weren’t part of previous debates on the bill.

But instead of giving senators the 24 hours required under the chamber’s rules to go over the committee’s report, including those new additions, state Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, moved to ignore that mandate so the Senate could debate and eventually vote on the final version of the bill just hours after it was filed.

Around 6 p.m. Saturday, Hughes acknowledged the Senate would consider the report “earlier than usual” but tried to argue he was giving senators “more time” by alerting them about his plan to debate the final version of SB 7 at 10 p.m.

“That’s a nice spin,” state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, shot back.

The Legislature is up against a Sunday night deadline to approve conference committee reports, like the compromise version of SB 7. Had the Senate waited until later Sunday to consider it, it could have left it in reach of a filibuster that could’ve killed the bill. The House is expected to vote on the final version of the bill later today.

Senate Democrats raised concerns that they had not had sufficient time to review the 180-page conference committee report, including a 67-page bill and a lengthy analysis of the negotiated changes. Roughly 12 pages of the bill contained additions that hadn’t been previously considered as part of the legislation and were added by the committee out of the public eye. The truncated schedule also left them without the opportunity to check in with local election officials in their districts or voting rights groups monitoring its passage, they said.

After Senate Republicans voted to suspend the rules, Hughes opened debate on a resolution to approve those 12 pages of additional changes, with Democrats questioning the origin of those changes and the lack of public input in tacking them onto the bill.

“I couldn’t in good faith vote to pass a bill the size of this one, that will affect the voting rights of every single Texan of voting age, when they’ve been deprived of the opportunity to voice their opinions on the final package of this bill,” state Sen. Beverly Powell, D-Burleson, said.

Throughout the debate, Hughes argued SB 7 was striving for “common sense” solutions that secured elections from wrongdoing and fraud.

“We want elections to be secure and accessible,” he said.

That’s the kind of unctuous double speak that makes me want to scream. The gall! There was no fraud!!!!!

The new provisions include language from separate Republican bills that failed to pass that would set a new voter ID rule for mail-in ballots, requiring voters to provide their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number, if they have one, on their applications for those ballots. For their votes to be counted, voters will be required to include matching information on the envelopes used to return their ballots.

Other changes, including a new window of 1 to 9 p.m. for early voting on Sundays, hadn’t come up until they were added to the conference committee report outside of public view. State Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, raised the possibility that change could hamper “souls to the polls” efforts meant to turn out voters after church services and questioned the justification for 1 p.m. start time.

There is no justification for any of it. They just want to make it harder, in any way they can, for people to vote.

I have to say, though, that they may not realize they are shooting themselves in the foot. They obviously believe that by making voting more complicated and arduous they are suppressing the Democratic vote because Democrats are more lazy and stupid than Republicans.

Are they really so sure about that? Have they been to a MAGA rally?

Update: I have been unable to determine if the late added provision allowing a judge to overturn the election results if some wingnut claims they have “a preponderance of the evidence” that there was voter fraud. For some reason the news reports I’ve seen don’t spell that out. I’ll update when it’s cleared up.

All the vote suppression stuff is horrible, undemocratic, Jim Crow bullshit. But these new laws that allow Republicans to simply steal elections legally is really, really scary. Texas was the first to propose something like this:

Texas Republicans just released the text of its voter suppression bill, SB7

Votes will be held before midnight Sunday

The bill includes a NEW PROVISION that allows judges to OVERTURN AN ELECTION “WITHOUT DETERMINING HOW INDIVIDUAL VOTERS VOTED”

Follow along if interested

This section appears to validate Trump’s claims that he won various states because a certain number of people voted “illegally” without any other details

Now people like Guiliani can take these absurd allegations to court and, with a sympathetic judge, OVERTURN AN ELECTION

3. Texas is poised to adopt this unprecedented and radical legal provision without ANY DEBATE IN EITHER CHAMBER

It was negotiated in a secret conference committee and released on a Saturday of a holiday weekend

This is another NEW PROVISION of the law straight from the right-wing fever swamp. It requires the Texas Secretary of State to ensure no county has more registered voters than people eligible to vote.

This is a favorite tactic of far-right orgs alleging voter fraud

Since the number of voters in a given county who are eligible is constantly changing, right-wing groups like to point to counties with “too many registered voters” as “proof” of voter fraud

Under the bill, this can be used to force counties to engage in voter purges etc

I think this provision about “too many registered voters” should be read along with the provision allowing judges to overturn the election

It opens the possibility to judges overturning the election based on flawed data on how many voters were eligible to vote

Originally tweeted by Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) on May 29, 2021.

The Washington Post spreads the conventional wisdom about the GOP’s vote suppression strategy and it’s just wrong:

The continuing claim by Republicans that some states violated their laws in expanding ballot access may have helped foster the belief among many in the party’s base that the election was stolen.

A CNN poll released in April found that 70 percent of Republicans said that Biden did not legitimately win enough votes to be elected. The survey found a deep split between party members about election security, with 76 percent of Democrats saying it was too hard to vote, while 87 percent of Republicans said the rules weren’t strict enough.

Geoff Kabaservice, who chronicled the transformation of the GOP in his 2012 book, “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party,” said in an interview that party members are clinging to Trump’s false claims about the election to protect their own reelection.

“These people are afraid of their base,” Kabaservice said. “They know that if they actually come out and forthrightly tell these 70 percent of Republicans who believe Joe Biden did not legitimately win the election, that the base will turn against them, that they’ll end up with a primary challenge, Trump himself will get involved and they’ll lose and they’ll be out of politics.”

Even McCarthy, as the leader of House Republicans, feels compelled to deliver conflicting message out of self-preservation, Kabaservice said.

“He can say one thing, either behind closed doors or to reporters in a place like Washington. But he’s not going to go out on the road with Trump and say everyone acknowledges that Joe Biden is a legitimate president. He’s not going to do it. People don’t want to stand up against Trump on this issue.”

They aren’t cowards, they are craven opportunists and willing destroyers of our democratic system.

Republicans have been trying to disenfranchise as many of their political opponents as they can for decades. They are just seizing the opportunity that Dear Leader has provided to really crank up the distrust in the system so they can degrade the system even more. Until everyone understands what the game is on this, they are are going to get away with it.

Disenfranchising the Democratic Party is their electoral strategy. It’s been their strategy for years. Trump heard all the chatter about “voter fraud” and used it for his own purposes but he didn’t come up with it on his own any more than he came up with “Make America Great Again.” His entire agenda piggybacked on various things he heard from talk radio and added a couple of his own eccentric obsessions like trade wars and hammering NATO. Voter fraud was one of them and it fit his purposes perfectly.

Trumpism is Republicanism. They are all in. I’m sure they wish that the Dear Leader of their anti-democratic, autocratic, corrupt “movement” was someone with a little bit more finesse but I’m sure they also realize that his crude, ignorant, bullying style is actually the reason so many voters love him so much.

Trump gets their voters out and they are working hard to make sure the Democrats cannot do the same. That’s the only way they can win. They just don’t have the numbers and they know it.

The election “fraudit” continues in Arizona:

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer on Saturday called a Trump statement accusing the county of deleting an elections database “unhinged” and called on other Republicans to stop the unfounded accusations.

“We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer. As a party. As a state. As a country,” Richer tweeted.

I want to comment on Digby’s Saturday post on the circus happening in Arizona. That tweet thread from an election technology professional details the myriad of ways that the fraudit is a disaster. These tweets in particular caught my attention:

4/ When weaponized doubt undermines faith in elections forever, it's game-over for democracy.

And when it's game-over for democracy, there's no peaceful transfer of power. That's what's at stake. It's the diff btw civil society & fighting in the streets.

This is not hyperbole.

— Edward Perez (@eddie1perez) May 14, 2021

It could spread elsewhere, Perez warns. And it has. Or at least, it did. Trump Twitter is buzzing that Wisconsin has joined in with its own audit of 2020 results. Except that news is three months old. Whatever.

Weaponized doubt has been one of the right’s favorite tools for undermining democracy for decades. The rise of Fox News and social media (with the aid of foreign bots) simply pumped up the effect the way certain features enhance the yield of nuclear weapons. Only these bombs are designed to generate smoke, not fire.

A quick review (from 2012):

… some people really don’t want you to vote. Every couple of months, their agents (figuratively) fling smoke bombs into newsrooms and yell “voter fraud.” By the time the smoke clears and reporters realize there’s no fire — and no fraud — all viewers remember are hearing the words “voter fraud” over and over again, and the eye-popping crawlers on the news at six about dead people voting. Thus is spread an urban legend.

“Smoke” filling the studios of your local news outlet sticks in the brain more than reports that it was all right-wing fake news.

Here is a memorable example from South Carolina (from earlier in 2012):

After claims that hundreds of the walking dead had voted in the Republican primary, the Attorney General released the names of only six to the State Election Commission for review.

By early February, the election officials were able to confirm all of the voters were legitimate: five were very much alive, and one had voted before dying. Clerical errors were blamed.

Even as Fox News pressed ahead with its zombie voter headlines, the State Election Commission pressed ahead with its investigation, reporting its findings this week:

In 197 of [the 207 cases examined], the records show no indication of votes being cast fraudulently in the name of deceased voters. Research found each of these cases to be the result of clerical errors, bad data matching, errors in assigning voter participation, or voters dying after being issued an absentee ballot. In 10 cases, the records were insufficient to make a determination.

With all that smoke, casual viewers conclude there must be a fire. And for smoke bombers, the truth is beside the point. The allegations land on Page 1 and on the news at six. Investigation findings showing no fraud occured wind up on page six.

It might be dead people. It might be busloads of “those” people using fake, pristinely uncreased utility bills for ID. It might be “double voters.” It might be “Chinese ballots” or voting machines rigged by Venezuela. It’s not voters who are dead. It’s truth.

Loud, well-publicized allegations are the point, just as in the ongoing miniseries in Arizona.

Here’s another clip from 2014 regarding alleged double voting:

Chris Kromm of the Institute for Southern Studies just as quickly debunked the study by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach whose office, after checking 5 million voter records in 2013, “couldn’t provide any evidence of a single instance in which the Interstate Crosscheck’s data had led to an actual legal charge of voter fraud.” Because the data, Kromm writes, ”offers no proof such fraud is occurring.” Requiring citizens to present identity cards to vote would have no effect on voting in multiple states.

Per Kobach’s method, a two-state match of just last and first names and a birthday are enough to flag someone as possibly voting in two states. “There are going to be a lot of David Lees on that list,” said Philadelphia elections commissioner Stephanie Singer last October of the Kobach Crosscheck of Pennsylvania’s database. In a 2007 study on the “Birthdate Problem,” Michael P. McDonald and Justin Levitt demonstrated how it is common, statistically, to find people sharing the same name and birthdate in a large population. They wrote, ”And common sense should expose the flaws in accusations like that against a New Jersey woman who, based only on a matched name and birthdate, allegedly voted at the northern tip of New Jersey in 2004 and then drove the length of the state to vote in-person for a second time.”

Yet, as Laura Clawson observes regarding old, straight white guys, “[I]f they aren’t on the winning side of discrimination, that’s like being discriminated against themselves, by their way of thinking.” If their side loses an election, someone must have cheated. The panic among the white Republican base over voter fraud, dead voters, messy voter rolls, double voting — the proximate threat varies — is because demographic trends in this country show that the numerical edge to which they feel entitled will be gone within decades. They avoided looking at that fact square on for years, maybe peeking through their fingers at the supposed threat posed by high Muslim birthrates and lamenting the West’s “lack of civilizational confidence” (instead of “banging away elsewhere,” as Michael Kinsley once suggested). But when a half-black man moved into the White House, they could no longer look away. Barack Obama embodies the demographic trends reducing white people to just another minority in this melting-pot country. And the Republican base knows how minorities are treated in America. Their European forebears did most of the treating here for several centuries. They are as scared as Stephen Stills at Woodstock.

One of the big questions that still seems to befuddle the media is “how in the world did the Republican Party get so crazy that they would embrace the Big Lie?”

The knee-jerk assumption is that Donald Trump, with his crude declaration back in 2016 that he would only accept the results of the election if he won brought this level of electoral lunacy to the GOP. While it’s true that believing (or pretending to believe) that Donald Trump is incapable of losing an election has become a litmus test for party membership, the anti-democratic machinations that are happening all over the country are not new at all. In fact, the party’s ongoing, meritless, insistence that undocumented immigrants are voting by the millions and that voter fraud is rampant among Democratic voters is why it was so easy for Donald Trump to persuade his rabid following that it happened to him.

You can go back many decades to find examples of disenfranchisement of Black people and immigrants, but as I wrote a while back, the modern conservative movement’s push to restrict voting really took off after the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s successful program to register voters in urban America. The Democrats fought back and passed major voting rights legislation which President George H.W. Bush promptly vetoed. That was the “motor voter bill” which required that states effectively register any citizen over 18 when they obtain or renew a driver’s license. It also allowed registration by mail and tasked government offices with voter registration duties. The Republicans howled like banshees, as usual, charging the Democrats with trying to expand their own ranks —as if Republicans don’t get driver’s licenses too — when President Bill Clinton signed the bill as one of his earliest actions upon taking office in February 1993. They haven’t stopped screaming about phantom “voter fraud” in the 30 years since.

And they didn’t just scream about it. Republicans took action on the state level, winning an early battle when George W. Bush managed to eke out a disputed victory after his brother, Governor Jeb Bush, purged the Florida voter rolls of many eligible voters in numbers that could have made the difference with such a razor-thin margin of victory. Year after year, Republicans have pounded the message to their base that the only way Democrats win is by cheating. (The irony that the two politicians most credibly accused of cheating are none other than GOP leaders Richard Nixon and Donald Trump cannot be overstated.)

The 2000 election must have reinforced their belief that Democratic vote suppression and disenfranchisement was a winning strategy because Republicans immediately set about using the federal government to get the job done. First, they embarked on a mission to “root out” voter fraud but after five years of trying they just couldn’t come up with goods. That’s because there really isn’t any to speak of. They even deployed the Department of Justice to create phony accusations of voter fraud and it was only because a handful of Republican U.S. Attorneys refused to go along (and were subsequently fired) that the facts came out and the Attorney General had to resign.

But the federal government wasn’t really a big player in this program. It was the think tanks and interest group organizations, backed by big money, that did the heavy lifting in the states. One of the Koch Brothers’ organizations, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which creates so-called “model legislation” for lockstep right-wing state legislatures to easily enact without having to even understand what they’re doing, was heavily involved in various vote suppression schemes over the past couple of decades. Anti-immigrant operatives, like former Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach, networked all over the country providing Republican politicians with templates of vote suppression bills. (You may remember Kobach was later tapped by Trump to prove that millions of non-citizens had voted in 2016, giving Hillary Clinton a popular vote victory, but he was unable to do it and slunk off back to Kansas where he keeps running for office and losing.)

A few weeks ago, Salon’s Igor Derysh took a deep dive into all of this noting that the rise in activity in this sector of right-wing activism had taken off in the wake of Trump’s loss. He listed groups that are involved in selling Trump’s lie that he won the election, from faith-based groups like The Family Research Council and the Susan B Anthony List to Freedomworks and the Tea Party Patriots, all of which were focusing their full attention on keeping the delusion going. Derysh homes in on the motive for many of them to do so:

Frank Cannon, senior strategist for the Susan B. Anthony List and American Principles Project, told The New York Times that conservative activists quickly realized that the only way they could keep donations rolling in is by making the effort to restrict voting access the “center of gravity in the party.”

Leave it to right-wingers to find a way to make a profit from The Big Lie. No wonder they love Donald Trump so much.

Derysh also noted that The Heritage Foundation and ALEC were working together on this project, creating some of that “model legislation” for Republican-led states to enact as quickly as possible. On Thursday, Mother Jones published a leaked video of Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action for America, giving big money donors an update on their progress:

“Iowa is the first state that we got to work in, and we did it quickly and we did it quietly,” she said. “We helped draft the bills. We made sure activists were calling the state legislators, getting support, showing up at their public hearings, giving testimony … little fanfare. Honestly, nobody even noticed. My team looked at each other and we’re like, ‘It can’t be that easy.'”

Heritage is busily doing that dirty work all over the country, notably in swing states like Georgia and Arizona. Meanwhile, the Democrats are counting on the federal government and the courts to mitigate the worst of the damage these bills are going to create.

This week Senator Joe Manchin, D-WV, threw cold water on the prospects for passage of the “For the People Act” the voting rights bill that just made it out of committee on a party-line vote. He fatuously insists that voter protection bills aren’t legitimate if they aren’t passed on a bipartisan basis which essentially means no vote protection bills can pass since the entire Republican Party is determined to prevent as many Democrats from voting as possible.

Still, Manchin did come out in favor of requiring “pre-clearance” of any changes to voting laws by the Justice Department in all 50 states which is actually more radical than any provision in the For the People Act or the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act which is also in the hopper. The chances that he can get 10 Republicans on board, which is what it would take to break the filibuster, is nil but it appears he wants to try.

So we are still in that place of waiting to see if the inevitable betrayal by Manchin’s GOP buddies will make him understand that the weapon of the filibuster is being used to destroy the country. I wouldn’t get my hopes up.

Salon

Not that this is surprising in any way, but it appears that Fox News is not only pushing The Big Lie, it’s pushing the bogus “remedy” in the states. This is important because it’s validating not only Dear Leader, it’s serving s validation for what the Republican Party is doing to abuse the democratic system for their political gain.

A Media Matters analysis shows that in the month and a half after Georgia’s voter suppression law was signed into effect on March 25, Fox News proceeded to defend or advocate for the newly codified restrictions on the right to vote in 270 segments. In fact, while a wide coalition of business leaders, democracy advocates, and local officials condemned the provisions of the Georgia law that were blatantly aimed at restricting the franchise in the wake of Republicans’ narrow 2020 losses in the state, Fox News aggressively took the opposite approach — framing 78% of all its segments on the law with the aforementioned support.

Fox News’ overwhelming push to justify the Georgia law stands in stark contrast to the analyses of independent experts and fact-checkers, who confirmed that crucial parts of the legislation were partisan power grabs and voter suppression, plain and simple. Dozens of companies have also come out publicly against voter suppression bills and restrictions on the right to vote across the country, including in Georgia. But some of these companies — such as General Motors and Dell Technologies — are heavy advertisers on Fox News. They should note that Fox is already well underway in its support of voter suppression efforts in Texas, Florida, and other states, just as it did with Georgia.

Previously known as Senate Bill 202, the Georgia law makes receiving and casting absentee votes more difficult, targets early voting in populous counties that tend to vote Democratic, increases the likelihood that legal provisional ballots will be discarded, bars additional funding for voter access from third parties, and shamelessly manipulates the composition of the state election board, as it empowers the Republican legislature to suspend local — and Democratic — election officials.

Despite the continued lies of former President Donald Trump and right-wing media, none of these changes can be justified on the grounds of preventing voter fraud, a problem that does not exist in significant numbers either nationally or in Georgia.

Nevertheless, Fox News went all in on defending Georgia’s voter suppression law, a programming strategy that was not confined to the network’s “opinion” shows. From March 25 to May 9, Fox News had 344 segments about Georgia’s law and 270 of those segments, 78%, advocated for or defended the legislation. Fox & Friends, which aired 38 segments that defended the voter suppression law, led the charge, and America’s Newsroom (24 segments), Hannity (22 segments), and America Reports (19 segments), followed closely behind.

The network also hosted Republican Gov. Brian Kemp at least 11 times during that period, and he at times used the platform to attack companies that had spoken out against the law. In one interview with prime-time host Tucker Carlson, Kemp called corporations that had penned a letter against the law “hypocritical,” while Carlson asked of Delta Air Lines and The Coca-Cola Company, “Why doesn’t someone say, make your little diabetes-causing soft drinks, fly your little airplanes, why don’t you stay out of democracy?”

In the course of defending the law, Fox figures lied that it would actually make voting easier, lied that Georgia’s voting laws are similar to Colorado’s (where Major League Baseball moved the All-Star game), aired misleading graphics, and misled viewers about the Republican power grab over the process of overseeing the election. 

Fox News has also not been shy about pushing Trump’s lie that the 2020 presidential election results were supposedly fraudulent in Georgia and nationwide, a falsehood that has now been incorporated into the network’s defense of voter suppression on the spurious grounds of “election integrity.”

And it’s not just in Georgia that Fox News is defending restrictions on the right to vote. The network has started to defend the new voter suppression laws coming from other Republican-led states as well. On May 6, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis even signed Florida’s law live on Fox & Friends. As of May 9, 5 out of 8 Fox News segments (63%) on Florida’s new voter restrictions have advocated for them, while 10 out of 12 segments (83%) on Texas’ proposed voter suppression legislation — expected to be signed into law shortly — have also been supportive. Republican leaders from these states have also made multiple appearances on the network to defend various voter suppression laws, including the ones in Florida and Texas. DeSantis has made 3 appearances on the subject while Texas’ Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick have both made two appearances each.

It’s vitally important to always keep in mind that there is no systematic voter fraud of any kind. There was no cheating in the last election. These actions are all about preventing Democrats from voting in future elections. Fox News is onboard that nefarious anti-democratic project 100%. And they know very well it’s bullshit.

Fergawdsakes:

A New Hampshire town of just 16,000 residents has become the focal point of MAGA-world fantasies positing that a reversal of President Trump’s 2020 defeat is just around the corner. Their hopes are pinned to an audit beginning on Tuesday that is looking at a discrepancy that arose in the recount of a state representative race in Windham.

After the audit plans made it into the spotlight of conservative media, more than 500 people reportedly showed up at a meeting last week of the Windham Board of Selectmen — normally a sparsely attended affair — where the review was being discussed. Trump cheered on those agitating around the audit in a statement the day after the meeting that celebrated the “great Patriots of Windham, New Hampshire for their incredible fight to seek out the truth on the massive Election Fraud which took place in New Hampshire and the 2020 Presidential Election.”

Many in Trump’s circle claim the audit is one of several dominos about to fall that will finally validate his lies about the election being stolen from him — never mind that it will not examine the presidential results and that it will cover a number of ballots that’s well short of Joe Biden’s margin of victory in the state. An ongoing recount of the election results in Arizona’s largest county has become a magnet for 2020 election truthers who have been able shape its procedures around some of the most sensational mass voter fraud conspiracy theories of last year.

“This isn’t just about the town of Windham,” Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said Monday evening, according to a video posted to Facebook of him speaking to a crowd of New Hampshire Trump supporters who have rallied around the audit. “We’re seeing things take place across this entire country.”

But the circumstances of the Windham audit are quite different than the baseless claims that drove Arizona’s Republican Senate to order the shambolic recount of Maricopa County’s results. The Windham audit is the result of a bipartisan push to review a legitimate discrepancy between the initial tabulation of the town’s state legislative results and the results that came out of a recount. The auditors chosen by state and local officials are known entities in the election administration world. Meanwhile, the Florida-based cybersecurity consultant hired to lead the Arizona recount has attracted scrutiny for his lack of election experience and his promotion of false election fraud claims last year.

Many 2020 election truthers are now pushing for the Windham auditors to be replaced with Jovan Pulitzer, an election conspiracy theorist who was reportedly involved in crafting some of the most questionable aspects of the Arizona recount.

But with the Windham audit expected to be finished in the next two weeks, if not more quickly, they’re about run out of options to hijack the New Hampshire review. Their latest gambit is a lawsuit filed Monday in New Hampshire state court seeking to stop the official audit so that the ballots could be turned over to the activists to do their own audit instead. The Democrats who sought the audit in the first place remain skeptical that the Trumpists will be able to derail the current plans.

“The horse is out of the barn,” Kristi St. Laurent, a Democratic candidate in the race in question, told TPM.

When November’s election results had St. Laurent just 24 votes shy of one of the four state representative seats up for grabs in the eight-person Windham race, she requested a recount. That recount produced discrepancies much larger than the normal variance that what would be expected for a hand recount of an election of this size. St. Laurent came out with 99 votes fewer, while the four Republican candidates who had beat her out each had 300 extra votes added to their tally.

She then sought a further review to determine what was behind the discrepancy. A debate dragged on about whether the kind of review she sought was permissible under state law and, if it was, who would have the authority to conduct it. Ultimately, the legislature unanimously passed legislation that authorized an audit of the Windham results. The bill laid out comprehensive and thorough rules for the review, which will also include a recount of the town’s votes in U.S. Senate and governor’s races, as well as an examination of the election machines.

St. Laurent told TPM her goal in pursuing of the audit was not to reverse her loss, but to understand whether it was the original tabulation or the recount that produced the flawed count.

For months, St. Laurent worried that the discrepancy in her race would be usurped by the Trump election-reversal crusade, particularly as the recount suggested that the Republican candidates may have been deprived of a few hundred votes in the original tabulation. If anything, she said, she was surprised it took this long for the MAGA-universe to latch on.

“I just hope we get some answers that are clear enough,” St. Laurent said. “I’m sure they’ll find something somewhere else to look for, but this will not be a feather in their cap.”

The biggest flashpoint in the Windham audit so far has been the Board of Selectmen’s choice of Mark Lindeman as one of the auditors, as the town was allowed to hire one of the three members of the audit team. Lindeman is co-director of Verified Voting, a well known election technology non-profit.

Right-wing blogs like the Gateway Pundit seized on the fact that Lindeman had signed a letter, along with other election experts, opposing the Arizona’s Senate launch of the Maricopa audit. There are also suspicions about Lindeman’s selection being announced shortly after Vice President Kamala Harris visited the state, Marylyn Todd — a “voter integrity” activist who is trying to coordinate a “citizen’s audit” — told TPM.

In addition to the lawsuit, there was also a petition drive over the weekend to collect the signatures of those who want Pulitzer on the audit team. Pulitzer — derided by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) as a “failed treasure hunter” when he tried to meddle in the election there — has fashioned himself as a “pattern recognition expert,” according to the Daily Beast, who claims he’s created key technology to examine ballot folds. He previously invented a scan code that, the Beast noted, was deemed by a computer trade magazine to be among the “Worst Tech Products of All Time.” The findings he’s turned up when he also tried his hand at treasure hunting have also been questioned.

Todd says her group has collected more than 1,000 signatures from Windham residents so far. (She herself is not a full time resident of Windham — she said she typically spends the summer months there and the winter months in Nashua, but has been seeking to become a full-time Windham resident since before getting involved in the audit.)

The townspeople think they’re very important because of their homeboy’s close relationship with the Dear Leader:

When Lewandowski — who is a Windham resident — spoke to Todd’s group on Monday, he was presented with a copy of the lawsuit filed Monday for him to show to Trump. Lewandowski told the crowd he was with Trump in Florida last week, the day before Trump put out his statement on the Windham audit, and that the former President “is actively watching whats happening.”

Lewandowski — when asked by TPM if he was serving as a liaison to Trump’s inner circle — said via text that he was getting involved “because I want ballot integrity” and because Windham is where he lives.

You may think they are grasping at straws, and they are. But the effect is to reinforce the idea that the election system is rigged against the Trump cult and they needn’t accept any results that don’t go their way.

An astute op-ed from Olivia Troye, the former Pence aide turned never Trumper:

The path from Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally to the Capitol was paved with lies about the 2020 election. Now, lies about what happened on Jan. 6 are becoming the Republican Party’s only strategy to regain power – and it’s working.

The Republican Party doesn’t have a governing agenda. It’s a pathetic predicament but obvious to anyone who stepped foot in Trump’s White House. One reason congressional Republicans are focused on cultural issues – Dr. Seuss, fake red meat regulations and a handful of transgender high school athletes around the country – might be to avoid judgment on how they used power: no health care reform, no infrastructure package, heading toward 600,000 dead from the pandemic, and the attack on the Capitol.

She has a point there. The contrast between the Democrats and the Republicans just in terms of legislative activity is striking. It does expose the fact that during Trump’s term they were basically just dancing fools and sycophants, accomplishing nothing but confirmations of judges and running their mouths. You can see why they’d want to distract the public with bullshit.

I also thought she hit on something important I don’t think I’ve seen anyone mention:

The strategy is simple: Obfuscate, lie, change the subject and hope voters hold the other party to a higher standard. It’s cynical, un-American and, as exasperating as it may be, effective.

That part I highlighted is a big part of their plan. They are shameless and will eagerly attack Democrats for anything that even remotely resembles the kind of blatant authoritarianism and corruption they commonly practice. Their hypocrisy is one of the things their followers most admire about them — the same way that some people admire bullies and punks for being smart-asses.

And while it’s perfectly correct to hold the Democrats to a high standard, they also know that Democrats will be driven to prove their moral superiority to the Republicans and many will willingly join even a bogus pile-on if the GOP can get it going. (I don’t think I have to remind anyone of “emails” do I?)

This is part of their strategy and I think Democrats (and the media) should think in advance about how they plan to deal with it.

Update: Katha Pollitt’s column speaks to this. Well worth reading.