771 search results for ""voter fraud""

It’s ghosts, goblins and yahoos season

Like Lewis Carroll’s oysters, election conspiracy theories are coming “thick and fast,” and “more, and more, and more.”

A voter engagement group yet unnamed by Pennsylvania law enforcement submitted batches of voter registration applications suspected of being fraudulent both in York and Lancaster counties. Or about 60 percent of those examined in Lancaster.

“It is not uncommon, especially in presidential election years, for paid workers of such groups to turn in fabricated applications,” explains Katie Bernard of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

It won’t matter who is paying the group. Donald Trump will use the episode to declare the election invalid when he loses Pennsylvania next week.

Bernard deconstructs Trump’s claims about what elections officials discovered:

Lancaster County was not “caught with 2600 Fake Ballots and Forms, all written by the same person,” as former President Donald Trump claimed on Truth Social Monday night.

Trump, who has a long history of spreading false information about Pennsylvania elections, took aim at Lancaster and York Counties, both of which have reported encountering voter registration applications that showed signs of fraud.

But Trump’s post drastically overcounted the affected documents, and went beyond reality to falsely claim that Lancaster County had encountered “Fake Ballots.”

“No actual ballots have been deemed fraudulent,” reports WGAL Harrisburg. Nevertheless, Trump is priming his base for Insurrection 2.0.

Federal officials are on alert for election conspiracy-inspired violence between now and the presidential inauguration, reports NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny:

U.S. intelligence agencies have identified domestic extremists with grievances rooted in election-related conspiracy theories, including beliefs in widespread voter fraud and animosity toward perceived political opponents, as the most likely threat of violence in the coming election. 

In a Joint Intelligence Bulletin that was not distributed publicly but was reviewed by NBC News, agents from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security warn state and local law enforcement agencies that domestic violent extremists seeking to terrorize and disrupt the vote are a threat to the election and throughout Inauguration Day. 

The report identified the potential targets as candidates, elected officials, election workers, members of the media and judges involved in election cases. The potential threats include physical attacks and violence at polling places, ballot drop boxes, voter registration locations and rallies and campaign events.

The documents obtained by Property of the People, a nonprofit government transparency group, “are unmistakably a product of a radically heightened threat environment,” said Ryan Shapiro, executive director.

FKA Twitter under Elon Musk has become a constant vector for spreading “super-nova viral lies” and disinformation about elections and stolen votes, Chris Hayes said Tuesday in introducing Zadrozny’s reporting.

The reports follow others released in recent weeks that warn of an increase in online chatter about an impending civil war, as well as several incidents of violence or thwarted attacks before the election. Agents wrote that some extremists were “reacting to the 2024 election season and prominent policy issues by engaging in illegal preparatory or violent activity that they link to the narrative of an impending civil war.”

A separate October bulletin from Colorado’s state threat assessment center highlighted threats posed by people who dispute the legitimacy of the 2020 election results. The report underscored the problem of “insider threats,” in which people with authorized access to the election process might attempt to derail it. It also noted a “continued dialogue amongst individuals on extremist discussion groups and forums that the results of the 2020 elections were inaccurate.”

Former Mesa County, Colorado, clerk Tina Peters was sentenced on Oct. 3 to nine years in jail for distributing screenshots of election software in 2020. The Colorado bulletin suggests other potential conspirators are not deterred by her conviction.

Hayes asked how seriously we should take these warnings.

“Incredibly seriously,” Zadrozny replied. On Jan. 5, 2021, people wrote about chatter that reactionaries were headed to the Capitol, bringing guns, and “all hell’s going to break loose,” she said. Yet there wasn’t any joint intelligence bulletin released to local law enforcement. There was instead concern over trampling free speech protections. Yet this bulletin mentioned “two thwarted attempts and three actual attacks” based on election lies. Elections offices have invested in increased security for 2024.

“Maricopa County looks like a war zone, with snipers on the roof and panic buttons,” Zadrozny said.

Trump is running to stay out of jail over federal prosecutions and, like a cornered animal, will do anything to escape the trap. He’s devious, but not clever. He’s planning to run the same election schemes that failed him in 2020 in 2024, including capitalizing again on the “Red Mirage” to allege election theft and preemptively declare vistory.

Robert Reich explains how the “Red Mirage” and “Blue Shift” feed into conspiracists’ stolen election narrative (and potential 2024 election violence). “But if you know what they are, you won’t be fooled by them,” Reich naively advises.

Trump’s dirty election night trick doesn’t work if you know it’s coming. Let me explain. pic.twitter.com/hTRilkPqus

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) October 29, 2024

But MAGA is a movement that luxuriates in spreading misinformation in pursuit of dominating the majority of us by hook or by crook, which, in MAGAstan is all that matters. They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.

Politico took a look at what the Trump[ers are plotting in the event he loses the election. It’s a long shot, but it’s theoretically possible:

“No one knows exactly what Trump’s attack on the electoral system will be in 2024,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the Jan. 6 select committee. “What will he do this time?”

The answer, according to lawmakers, congressional investigators, party operatives, election officials and constitutional law experts, goes something like this:

— He will deepen distrust in the election results by making unsupported or hyperbolic claims of widespread voter fraud and mounting longshot lawsuits challenging enough ballots to flip the outcome in key states.

— He will lean on friendly county and state officials to resist certifying election results — a futile errand that would nevertheless fuel a campaign to put pressure on elected Republican legislators in statehouses and Congress.

— He will call on allies in GOP-controlled swing-state legislatures to appoint “alternate” presidential electors.

— He will rely on congressional Republicans to endorse these alternate electors — or at least reject Democratic electors — when they convene to certify the outcome.

— He will try to ensure Harris is denied 270 votes in the Electoral College, sending the election to the House, where Republicans are likely to have the numbers to choose Trump as the next president.

Some of the necessary ingredients for this extraordinary campaign are in place. Trump has already embarked on a clear mission to stoke as much uncertainty as possible about the results of the election. He claims that the only way he can lose to Harris is if Democrats cheat — despite no evidence that any significant fraud occurred in 2020 or is underway in 2024. Dutiful allies have amplified these messages. And many of the officials who stood in Trump’s path four years ago have been ousted or retired, ceding power to more compliant Trump-aligned successors. Meanwhile, threats against election officials and growing fears of civil unrest have intensified — potentially at polling places, ballot counting facilities and Electoral College ceremonies — which Trump detractors worry could bolster any election subversion campaign.

Trump allies say the former president is singularly focused on winning the election outright and has not personally engaged in the war-gaming scenarios he might look to if Harris wins. The Trump campaign declined repeated requests for comment about Trump’s plans for the post-election period and whether he has deputized allies to consider all contingencies. Meanwhile, Trump refused again this week to publicly say he would back a peaceful transfer of power.

It’s possible Trump and his allies won’t make a sustained effort to overturn his election defeat. An overwhelming Harris victory would make it harder for Trump to rally Republicans to his side. (If Trump wins, no one expects a comparable effort by Democrats to subvert the election.) But to a person, election observers, elected leaders and some of Trump’s own allies agree on one operating premise: On election night, no matter what the results show, how many votes remain uncounted and how many advisers tell him otherwise, Donald Trump will declare himself the winner.

And from there, he could embark on a risky but plausible challenge to overturn the legitimate election results and install himself in the White House.

Read the rest for the details. I don’t know that he could pull it off. But I think it’s inevitable that he will try.

But first things first. Harris needs to win. It would have been nice to get an overwhelming victory but it doesn’t look as if that’s in th cards. So be prepared. It’s going to be a stressful winter no mattr what happens on election day.

Axios reports:

In the heat of this historic election, educated elites who should know better — billionaires, elected officials, journalists — keep falling for fakes, conspiracy theories and outright lies…

Each day on the digital campaign trail has brought a torrent of false or misleading claims, often courtesy of partisan accounts with massive audiences. In the last few weeks alone:

-MAGA influencers breathlessly spread the false claim that Vice President Kamala Harris used a teleprompter during her Univision town hall, which the X algorithm then promoted in its trending topics as fact.

-Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) posted a purported screenshot of a headline in The Atlantic that read: “To Save Democracy Harris May Need To Steal An Election.” It was fake, and Roy deleted the post.

-Bill Ackman, a hedge fund billionaire with 1.4 million followers on X, obsessively promoted allegations from an ABC News “whistleblower” that the network had given Harris questions in advance of her debate with Trump. On Wednesday, more than a month later, Ackman admitted it was “fake.”

 Elon Musk, whose takeover of X has enabled fake news slop at scale, is among the most consistent offenders — credulously promoting baseless claims about voter fraud that rack up billions of views.

“Is this true?” the pro-Trump billionaire will often ask his legions of followers about blatant bunk, helping it spread like wildfire.

Musk frequently touts the “Community Notes” system, whereby X users can vote to add fact checks to false posts, but many posts don’t get the Community Notes treatment until well after they go viral, if at all.

Axios reports that liberals do this too, noting that there was a viral untrue rumor that Karl Rove was stumping for Harris and a spate of conspiracy theories about the Trump assassination attempt. (I might add that the rumors were even more plentiful on the right about that last one.)

Anyway, as we know this takes a real toll on people’s lives when it affects the information necessary to help people in a disaster.

“The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality,” The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel wrote in an article about hurricane conspiracies headlined: “I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is.”

And apparently, 54% of respondents in an Axios Vibes survey published last month agreed with the statement, “I’ve disengaged from politics because I can’t tell what’s true.”

Come on people. It’s crazy out there for real. We all know that. Just look at the circus sideshow the Republicans are trying to sell us for the presidency. And it’s also crazy out there because our media econsystems are full of lies and BS. But if you use your intuition and your brain you can get your way through it even if you screw up once in a while and believe something that’s fake. But it’s important to stay engaged. Reality still exists.

A new biography of Mitch McConnell drawing on his diaries and oral histories has some interesting tidbits:

The comments about Trump quoted in the book came in the weeks before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Trump was then actively trying to overturn his loss to Democrat Joe Biden. McConnell feared this would hurt Republicans in two Georgia runoffs and cost them the Senate majority. Democrats won both races.

Publicly, McConnell had congratulated Biden after the Electoral College certified the presidential vote and the senator warned his fellow Republicans not to challenge the results. But he did not say much else. Privately, he said in his oral history that “it’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days” until Trump left office, and that Trump’s behavior “only underscores the good judgment of the American people. They’ve had just enough of the misrepresentations, the outright lies almost on a daily basis, and they fired him.”

“And for a narcissist like him,” McConnell continued, “that’s been really hard to take, and so his behavior since the election has been even worse, by far, than it was before, because he has no filter now at all.”

Before those Georgia runoffs, McConnell said Trump is “stupid as well as being ill-tempered and can’t even figure out where his own best interests lie.”

Trump was also holding up a coronavirus aid package at the time, despite bipartisan support. “This despicable human being,” McConnell said in his oral history, “is sitting on this package of relief that the American people desperately need.”

On Jan. 6, soon after he made those comments, McConnell was holed up in a secure location with other congressional leaders, calling Vice President Mike Pence and military officials for reinforcements as Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. Once the Senate resumed debate over the certification of Biden’s victory, McConnell said in a speech on the floor that “this failed attempt to obstruct the Congress, this failed insurrection, only underscores how crucial the task before us is for our republic.”

McConnell then went to his office to address his staff, some of whom had barricaded themselves in the office as rioters banged on their doors. He started to sob softly as he thanked them, Tackett writes.

“You are my family, and I hate the fact that you had to go through this,” he told them.

The next month, McConnell gave his harshest public criticism of Trump on the Senate floor, saying he was “ practically and morally responsible ” for the Jan. 6 attack. Still, McConnell voted to acquit Trump after House Democrats impeached him for inciting the riot.

[…]

McConnell also had doubts about Trump from the start. Just after Trump was elected in 2016, as Congress was certifying the election, McConnell told Biden, then the outgoing vice president, that he thought Trump could be trouble, Tackett writes.

The book channels McConnell’s inner thoughts during some of the biggest moments after Trump took office, as McConnell held his tongue and as the two men repeatedly fought and made up.

In 2017, as Trump publicly criticized McConnell for the Senate’s failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Trump and McConnell had a heated argument on the phone. Weeks went by with no contact. Then Trump invited McConnell to the White House and called a joint news conference without telling him first. McConnell said the event went fine, and “it’s not hard to look more knowledgeable than Donald Trump at a press conference.”

After the passage of a $1.5 billion tax overhaul that same year, McConnell said, “All of a sudden, I’m Trump’s new best friend.”

He blamed Trump after House Republicans lost their majority in the 2018 midterm elections, Tackett writes. Trump ”has every characteristic you would not want a president to have,” McConnell said in an oral history at the time, and was “not very smart, irascible, nasty.”

In 2022, as Trump continued to criticize McConnell and made racist comments about his wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, McConnell told Tackett that “I can’t think of anybody I’d rather be criticized by than this sleazeball.”

“Every time he takes a shot at me, I think it’s good for my reputation,” McConnell said.

Also in 2022, McConnell said in his oral history that Trump’s behavior since losing the election had been “beyond erratic” as he kept pushing false allegations of voter fraud. “Unfortunately, about half the Republicans in the country believe whatever he says,” McConnell said.

By 2024, McConnell had again endorsed Trump. He felt he had to if he were to continue to play a role in shaping the nation’s agenda.

“It was the price he paid for power,” Tackett writes.

He is a despicable piece of work, a total sell-out to everything America stands for. And he does it knowing what harm it causes.

Get a load of this “statement” to the AP about this story:

“Whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what JD Vance, Lindsey Graham, and others have said about him, but we are all on the same team now,” McConnell said.

He’s more responsible for that atrocity we call a Supreme Court than Trump is and he will go down in history as one of the worst congressional leaders American has ever produced. He’s 82 years old and knows what Trump is. But he backs him anyway to maintain power, which is literally all that really matters to him. All his “private” acknowledgements of Trump’s unfitness show that he’s an even more loathesome creature than we knew.

Better late than never, Axios has decided to look at what will happen if Trump wins the White House. In this case their patented style is actually quite useful:

If former President Trump wins the election, and Republicans keep the House and flip the Senate, the U.S. would witness a dramatic consolidation of new right-wing populist power at scale.

A Washington fully controlled by Trump and his allies would institutionalize the MAGA movement, with massive consequences for governance, civil rights and international relations.

This period, lasting at least two years, until the next congressional races, would allow Republicans to move ambitiously — with few brakes beyond the Senate filibuster.

• The vast majority of congressional leaders are now Trump loyalists. The days of empowered never-Trumpers are basically over, at least in Congress.
• Trump would pursue a dramatic expansion of presidential power — gutting the federal bureaucracy and installing thousands of executive branch loyalists to rip off the guardrails that restrained his first term.

The big picture: We got our hands on a fascinating private presentation by FGS Global, a worldwide communications and public affairs consultancy advising huge clients on how to prep for various election outcomes. The presentation is based on a CIA method of anticipating, understanding and navigating geopolitical outcomes.

• FGS uses it to help corporations brace for big, potentially sweeping, changes to policies or regulations in the new government. We realized it would also help Axios readers brace for what’s next.
• This is the first of four columns exploring the most likely outcomes — and consequences — of the election. It combines our reporting with the FGS “Alternative Futures” analysis.

What to watch in FGS’ “MAGA momentum” scenario, with Republicans controlling both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue:

Immigration, border control

Trump’s immigration policies would echo nationally — and quickly. The wall along the Southwest border would likely be expanded. Efforts to curb both legal and illegal immigration would accelerate.[…]

• A Trump source told us: “90% of what Trump will do on the border will happen under executive action, so it won’t matter who wins Congress.” […]

Culture wars intensify

Social and cultural issues would become legislative priorities, as Trump and the GOP lean heavily into the culture wars. Expect significant legislative attention on what the GOP calls “woke” policies in education and corporations.

• Efforts to defund diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives would gain traction. New restrictions on gender-affirming care, particularly for minors, would become central to the agenda.
• Republican lawmakers would push anti-LGBTQ+ policies, and may seek to impose restrictions on teaching race and gender in schools.
• A Justice Department stacked with Trump loyalists could prosecute political enemies, including in the corporate world. Republican-led investigations into tech companies, accusing them of anti-conservative bias, would likely intensify.
• Schools, workplaces and local governments would become battlegrounds on issues of race, gender and free speech. Washington Republicans would side with local Republicans.
• Corporate America, under pressure from both sides, would struggle to balance these demands, with risk to consumer relations.
  
  Foreign policy, global relations

An unrestrained Trump surrounded by “America First” loyalists — rather than the generals and establishment hawks who held key posts in the first term — would take U.S. foreign policy in unpredictable directions.

• He’d likely withdraw further from international institutions, opting for bilateral deals focused on U.S. advantage. U.S. relations with some key allies would become strained as Trump focused on a more transactional, quid pro quo foreign policy.
• A strong anti-China stance would dominate, with tariffs and sanctions becoming central. Tensions with Beijing could escalate as GOP hawks push a “decoupling” agenda, roiling global markets and trade.
• Trump would likely move to cut off U.S. funding for Ukraine, forcing Kyiv into a peace settlement that favors Russia. He’d pressure NATO countries to ramp up their military spending, while broadly disengaging from the alliance’s strategic priorities.
• Trump would seek to reinstate his “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign against Iran and empower Israel to “finish the job” of eliminating Hamas in Gaza and crippling Hezbollah in Lebanon.
• An emerging axis of right-wing populists would give Trump new friends on the world stage, empowered to reshape the liberal international order, strengthen borders and challenge “globalist” priorities like fighting climate change.

Post-election risks: This path could lead to significant instability. A close or contested election could mean protests or violence.

• Claims of voter fraud, particularly in key battleground states, could undermine confidence in the electoral system and inflame tensions. The legitimacy of institutions — especially the courts and election bodies — could come into question, deepening the divide between left and right.
• Protests — think the 2017 Women’s March — are likely. Asked on Fox News about potential Election Day violence, Trump warned about “the enemy from within,” and floated deploying the National Guard or military against “radical left lunatics.”

There’s much more on topics such as health care, social spending, trade and economic policy etc., all of which are nightmares. I just highlighted the worst of it.

Axios will likely publish the same analysis for Harris but I think we all know that it will not be this kind of fascist agenda, even if she were to win the trifecta. I would imagine they will present it as a similar threat to what you just read above, however. And that’s a big part of our problem.

For all of Trump’s “distancing” this is little different than Project 2025. The wingnuts always have some ridiculous plan and nobody pays attention to it because it’s so outlandish and extreme. This time, we must. They’re serious.

Some of it, at least

That was last night. This is today:

Special counsel Jack Smith has outlined new details of former President Donald Trump and his allies’ sweeping and “increasingly desperate” efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, in a blockbuster court filing Wednesday aimed at defending Smith’s prosecution of Trump following the Supreme Court’s July immunity ruling.

Trump intentionally lied to the public, state election officials, and his own vice president in an effort to cling to power after losing the election, while privately describing some of the claims of election fraud as “crazy,” prosecutors alleged in the 165-page filing.

“When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” the filing said. “With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost.”

When Trump’s effort to overturn the election through lawsuits and fraudulent electors failed to change the outcome of the election, prosecutors allege that the former president fomented violence, with prosecutors describing Trump as directly responsible for “the tinderbox that he purposely ignited on January 6.”

“The defendant also knew that he had only one last hope to prevent Biden’s certification as President: the large and angry crowd standing in front of him. So for more than an hour, the defendant delivered a speech designed to inflame his supporters and motivate them to march to the Capitol,” Smith wrote.

The lengthy filing — which includes an 80-page summary of the evidence gathered by investigators — outlines multiple instances in which Trump allegedly heard from advisers who disproved his allegations, yet continued to spread his claims of outcome-determinative voter fraud, prosecutors said.

“It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell,” Trump allegedly told members of his family following the 2020 election, the filing said.

“It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”

Yowza:

The redacted brief, made public by Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the Federal District Court in Washington, adds new details to the already extensive public record of how Mr. Trump lost the race but attempted nonetheless to cling to power.

Part of the brief focuses, for example, on a social media post that Mr. Trump sent on the afternoon of the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, telling supporters that Vice President Mike Pence had let them all down. Mr. Smith laid out extensive arguments for why that post on Twitter should be considered an unofficial act of a desperate losing candidate, rather than the official act of a president that would be considered immune from prosecution under a landmark Supreme Court ruling this summer.

After Mr. Trump’s Twitter post focused the enraged mob’s attention on harming Mr. Pence and the Secret Service took the vice president to a secure location, an aide rushed into the dining room off the Oval Office where Mr. Trump was watching television. The aide alerted him to the developing situation, in the hope that Mr. Trump would then take action to ensure Mr. Pence’s safety.

Instead, Mr. Trump looked at the aide and said only, “So what?” according to grand jury testimony newly disclosed in the brief.

Hey JD. Do you think he’d treat you any differently? You’ve sold your soul and he won’t give it back

“The stakes are much higher now”

It’s been pretty much love and light for Democrats since their national convention in August. The ceremonial roll call that named Vice President Kamala Harris the party’s 2024 presidential nominee became a dance party. Descension was minimal and all but invisible. Harris crushed Donald Trump at last Tuesday’s presidential debate. Polling looks good. Momentum is with the Democrats. But even if Harris wins in a popular vote landslide, this election won’t be over until she and Tim Walz are sworn in on Jan. 20, 2025.

Post debate polls. Happy Saturday!
Harris 50-45 (+5) MorningC
Harris 47-42 (+5) Ipsos
Harris 51-47 (+4) RMG
Harris 50-46 (+4) D4P
Harris 49-45 (+4) YG/Yahoo
Harris 49-45 (+4) YG/Times
Harris 47-43 (+4) TIPP
Harris 50-47 (+3) Leger
Harris 48-45 (+3) SoCal
Harris 44-42 (+2) R/W

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) September 14, 2024

That’s because Republicans are working feverishly to make it harder to vote, harder to count votes, and harder to certify election results in a timely fashion.

Here is the Republican plan for 2024:

1. Make it harder for you to vote.
2. Harass election officials and challenge voters.
3. Prevent accurate timely election certification.

Stay informed: https://t.co/bH6OZHvU6Q pic.twitter.com/pYdww3V42D

— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) September 14, 2024

Between now and Jan. 20 anything might happen. Last week, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, GOP candidate for vice president, gave oxygen to an internet rumor that was false both backwards and sideways. It might have triggered a pogrom against legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio and elsewhere. Trump on Saturday refused to condemn bomb threats made against Springfield, saying, “I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats. I know that it’s been taken over by illegal migrants, and that’s a terrible thing that happened.”

Should he reclaim the Oval Office, Trump is determined to launch massive roundups and deportations of nonwhite residents of non-European heritage. Their status as naturalized or birthright citizens doesn’t matter to him. Expelling anyone whose complexion he doesn’t like is what he’ll do (with Stephen Miller’s help).

“Woman who first spread Springfield rumor regrets it.”

“I deleted the post. I was wrong. I messed up royally. I never meant to cause so much hate.”

This woman has more courage than JD Vance. Please share this video far and wide. pic.twitter.com/2s0OyEWNHP

— Heath Mayo (@HeathMayo) September 14, 2024

The First World War was not exactly an accident — geopolitical fault lines were in tension and ready to slip — but a wrong turn based on misunderstood directions triggered it. When Trump loses in November, something as minor as a hyped internet rumor or as deliberate as a MAGA propaganda campaign could trigger violence.

Trump and Vance are inciting hate and racism. https://t.co/2sRR9KP8Xq

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) September 14, 2024

The U.S. Secret Service last week designated the Jan. 6 electoral vote count a National Special Security Event. Security will look more like what I saw in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention in August. Meaning, federal officials will secure the perimeter of the U.S. Capitol with more than bicycle racks. Oath Keepers and Proud Boys brushed those aside in 2021 when MAGA insurrectionists stormed the building shouting “Where’s Nancy?” and “Hang Mike Pence!”

Last night windows were smashed and acid thrown on Haitian owned cars. Now these Neo-Nazis are on the streets of Springfield. Trump and company are sponsoring America's own "Kristallnacht." It's disturbing and-frightening. https://t.co/RghRPWVnsG

— Luis Moreno (@LuisMorenolg) September 14, 2024

MAGA plotters failed to overturn the 2020 election when faced with less security and with the Oval Office still in Trump’s hands. They won’t attempt that route when Trump loses again but commands no troops or law enforcement.

The stakes are much higher now

What MAGA activists and attorneys will do is throw a metric fuckton of rhetorical smoke bombs at state capitals, loudly scream “VOTER FRAUD,” and swear that where there’s smoke there’s a stolen election. Sanewashing media will accord Trump’s and fellow authoritarian travelers’ frivolous lawsuits and evidence-free allegations credibility by reporting them uncritically. The press will give cover to MAGA politicians willing to lie and subvert the will of the people and the U.S. Constitution. Trump lackeys will interfere with states certifying their elections so they might turn over deciding the presidential election to the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

That’s one scenario, anyway.

Trump’s estranged niece, psychologist Mary Trump, offers a similar warning:

The stakes are much higher now than they were in either 2016 or 2020, and he will stop at absolutely nothing to get back into the White House—which, at this point, is the only thing that will save his dwindling fortune or keep him out of prison.

[…]

Donald is signaling clearly to us what’s coming and we can’t depend on corporate media to confirm it. This election is too important to for us to rely on outlets that continue, against all evidence to the contrary, to normalize a deeply unwell traitor just so they can preserve the horse race of it all.

For Donald’s part, he’s not really trying to win anyway. He knows that he just needs to keep it close enough so he can cheat by having his friends in the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court throw the election to him.

As a reminder, this is just one of the ways Trump attempted to hang onto power in 2020. He still faces a federal indictment stemming from it:

pic.twitter.com/Po7qA3xecf

— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) June 10, 2022

We watched that movie four years ago. Now there’s a sequel in development and its plot is more sophisticated than the last.

We know that the Secret Service is securing the Capitol. We know that in Washington, D.C., military veterans gamed out what might go down between the 2024 election and Inauguration Day 2025. They considered “what happens if the military fragments on January 6, 2025, and we’re faced with a crisis?”

What I don’t know and need to is this. What are Democrats in state capitols prepared to do to secure the election from a post Nov. 5 coup when it starts closer to home? When it’s perhaps a physical intervention, not just a court battle? What contingency plans for dealing with intimidation and violence have they made beside lawsuits, press releases and harsh language?

I’ve been trying to get answers from my election protection people. It’s been 10 days. I’m still waiting.

“People need to know what they’re up against”

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick spoke with Ari Berman of Mother Jones, author of “Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People―and the Fight to Resist It.” He warns that anti-democracy forces inside this country are doing what the far right always does: doubling down.

Republicans love few things more than a twofer. They have one in spreading a new conspiracy theory that noncitizens are voting in numbers and tipping elections away from decent, All-American white people.

Berman says, “[I]t’s the newest version of the Big Lie, and it’s really a twofer for them because they are fusing voter fraud paranoia with anti-immigrant hysteria. And in doing so, they’re building support both for new restrictions on voting, but also for new restrictions on immigration. So it’s basically taking two of the most important planks of the MAGA agenda and putting them together.”

But that’s just filigree. The real meat of Stop The Steal 2.0 is far more sophisticated than Rudy Giuliani’s Four-Seasons-Total-Landscaping presser and dripping hair dye:

This is a much more organized effort, because they have changed the laws in a number of places to make it easier to effectuate these outcomes. They don’t need to bang on the doors outside the polling place in Michigan anymore, because they’re inside the polling places in a lot of these places now. They are the election officials who will be counting the ballots, or election observers who will be much closer to counting the ballots.

They’re inside the courts too.

Berman continues:

That’s why they changed the rules in Georgia well ahead of time. To get ahead of the thing so they don’t need to challenge it after the election. They’re already laying the groundwork not to certify the election in Georgia. We don’t know if they’ll be successful—it’s very likely their efforts to try to not certify elections will be blocked by the courts ahead of time or blocked by the courts after the fact; I think most people are confident of that.

What I worry about most is that they’re also trying to send a signal to other states and other Trump people to do this ahead of time. I worry that the votes were counted in 2020 and then lawsuits were filed to overturn the votes, but the votes had already been counted. What if the votes aren’t counted? What’s a court going to do then? That changes the whole process. Then you might have disputes that look much more like Bush v. Gore as opposed to what we saw in 2020 and just outright trying to steal an election.

Very clever, these criminal minds. And like Ford’s pardon of Nixon, the legal system going easy on the people behind the insurrection means they’ve just learned from their 2020 mistakes. They’re thinking ahead:

Not only did the “Stop the Steal” people seemingly face no accountability other than maybe being slapped on the wrist here or there, maybe disbarred or losing their license, but basically they have been resurrected to lead “Stop The Steal” 2.0, which is a lot more sophisticated than it was the last time. All of these Trump-aligned think tanks are laying the groundwork for these policy changes this time around. You have the Conservative Partnership Institute raising millions and millions of dollars to work with state officials and to put election deniers in positions of authority.

Berman believes Democrats are fighting asymmetric warfare where it comes to election protection and court battles. The real fight is happening now under their noses.

[Republicans are] not fighting on policy. They don’t care about policy. They’re laser-focused on changing the rules to make sure they can succeed where they failed in 2020. That is the overriding goal of the MAGA movement right now.

Question: If Donald Trump doesn't win, what will you do?

Trump supporter: I hope that I’m going to die. I don’t want to live like this anymore.

It's a cult pic.twitter.com/hthvsSUoTw

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) September 9, 2024

And they’ve got a large swath of MAGA voters convinced they are in an apocalyptic fight for “their” country. They’ve built a well-funded network of operatives planning to “win” elections no matter how the votes totals go. Democrats are bringing a butter knife to a gunfight, if I read Berman right.

I’m inquiring into what contingency plans are being made for direct, nonviolent actions if needed in the post-election period to protect the vote count and elector process from physical disruption. Taking nothing away from Marc Elias and his network of election protection lawyers, I worry that we’re going into democratic battle armed with little more than harsh language. 

Register. Vote. Volunteer.

Update: Will Bunch just weighed in on this topic.

“Americans are being impacted by the authoritarian threat right now,” Amanda Carpenter, the disaffected former aide to Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, posted on X/Twitter, referring to assaults on voting rights in Texas and Florida. “Believe it. This is what authoritarians want to put on steroids and enact on a federal level.”

I’m sure you’ve heard Trump bellowing his fatuous nonsense about how everyone always wanted Roe overturned so it could go back to the states where people can vote on it and “it’s a beautiful thing.” I’ll admit that I was derelict in seeing where this was going. Leave it to Ron DeSantis to show the way:

Florida voters who signed a petition to place a pro-choice abortion referendum on the ballot this November say they have been visited by police who are investigating claims of fraud at the behest of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration, the Tampa Bay Times reported Saturday.

Last year, DeSantis, a Republican, signed into a law a ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. In response, pro-choice campaigners gathered and submitted nearly one million signatures to place on the ballot Amendment 4, a referendum that would overturn the ban and restore reproductive rights in the state.

Now Florida’s Department of State is claiming it suspects fraud in the signature-gathering process. In an email to county election officials, the department’s Brad McVay requested that they hand over their already-verified petitions so that the signatures can be reexamined, claiming without evidence that those who circulated the petitions “represent known or suspected fraudsters,” Tampa Bay television station WTVT reported.

Isaac Menasche, a voter who signed a petition to place the abortion referendum on the ballot, told the Times that he too was contacted by people working for the Florida governor’s office. According to Menasche, a plainclothes police officer came to his home to question him, apparently seeking to verify that the signature on the petition was indeed his.“I’m not a person who is going out there protesting for abortion,” Menasche told the newspaper. “I just felt strongly and I took the opportunity when the person asked me, to say yeah, I’ll sign that petition.”

Another voter, Becky Castellanos, told the Times that she was visited by a state police officer who interrogated her about a family member’s petition signature. She said the incident felt intimidating. “It didn’t surprise me that they were doing something like this to try to debunk these petitions to get it taken off of the ballot,” she told the outlet.

This is the work of DeSantis’s Stasi-style “Office of Election Crimes and Security” which has over a million dollars at its disposal to intimidate voters.

Of course they would claim voter fraud. That’s how they will be able to rationalize these ballot measures showing support for reproductive rights. I don’t know what the chances are of them removing it from the ballot. But they really don’t have to. All they need to do is claim that the vote was “stolen” — as all votes that don’t go their way these days — and they will have at least set the stage for more attempts to ban abortion. I’m sure we’ll see more of this.

Update. Oh right. We already are:

More in anti-abortion attacks on democracy: Republicans are trying to push the Missouri pro-choice amendment off the November ballot using bullshit technicalities https://t.co/vINVqYwMAk

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) September 7, 2024

MAGA finds it easier to rig elections than win them

Is there a term for an entire political party suffering a case of flop sweat? The GOP’s brows are gleaming. Stuck with their degenerate (and degenerating) candidate for president and faced with an energized Democratic ticket raking in millions by the hundreds and volunteers by the tens of thousands, Republicans are engaged in a frenzied effort not to prop up their own slates but to strip the right of fellow Americans to express their will at the polls.

Republicans have long neglected serious efforts for turning out the vote in favor of suppressing the votes of people they perceive as lower-caste interlopers. Irresponsibles, I’ve called them (ironically). David Frum famously (and belatedly) declared in 2018, “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”

Frum was years late with that realization. The voter integrity “boot camp” I attended in 2013 was a white-knuckled exercise in “protecting a demographic patch of electoral turf that’s shrinking” beneath Republicans’ feet. Not once in that day-long workshop did any speaker suggest opening up the franchise to greater participation, registering new voters and encouraging them to go the polls to exercise their right to vote. No, the goal was to prevent Them from “stealing” the election from Real Americans™.

The Georgia state election board’s attempt to implement a flurry of last-minute election rule changes has drawn both the ire of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and a lawsuit by the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Party of Georgia and county board members. The move by the board’s MAGA majority seems designed to undercut the state law mandating local officials certify election results (NBC News):

At the heart of the civil suit, filed in Fulton County, are two items the election board passed this month: the reasonable inquiry rule and the examination rule.

The suit says that the rules conflict with Georgia’s statutes governing certification and that the election board did not follow procedures for rulemaking as required by state law. It therefore asks the court to pause the two rules to the extent that they conflict with existing law.

The plaintiffs are also asking for a declaration that election results must be certified by Georgia’s statutory deadline of Nov. 12 and that certification is mandatory rather than discretionary.

A conservative party otherwise obsessed with size and strength is putting its weakness on public display. Fair fights are for losers, Donald Trump might say.

In America, voters pick our leaders. Unelected bodies beholden to MAGA Republicans do not pick which voters to heed and which to silence. Georgians deserve the freedom to cast ballot, have them counted & for will of the people to prevail. https://t.co/u3NymkLTWB

— Anat Shenker-Osorio 🟧 (@anatosaurus) August 26, 2024

“Voters in 28 states will face restrictions that weren’t in place in the last presidential election,” the Brennan Center reported in May. The overwhelming majority were red states in 2020.

“As MAGA Republicans and their plans—especially their assault on reproductive healthcare and the policies outlined in Project 2025—become increasingly unpopular, Republican-dominated states are ramping up their effort to keep the people they assume will oppose them from voting,” Heather Cox Richardson writes, summarizing additional GOP displays of self-doubt:

In Nebraska, Alex Burness reported in Bolts today, two Republican officials—Attorney General Mike Hilgers and Secretary of State Bob Evnen— last month stopped the implementation of a new state law, passed overwhelmingly by a Republican-dominated legislature earlier this year, that granted immediate voting rights to about 7,000 people with past felony convictions. In the process, Hilgers also declared unconstitutional a 2005 law that had allowed those convicted of a felony to vote two years after they completed their sentence. Evnen then told county-level elections offices that they could not register former felons.

The confusion has made people nervous about even trying to register. “People are scared they’re going to get charged with something if they try to vote and can’t vote, so a lot of people will just wash their hands of it,” Pamala Pettes told Burness. “They don’t want to go and vote unless they have a clear idea of what’s going on. They don’t have that.” More than 100,000 people are caught in this confusion. As Burness notes, the election could come down to the city of Omaha, where thousands of potential voters—overwhelmingly Black, Latino, and Native—have been blocked from registering.

As with Georgia’s plans for casting doubt on election results there (to borrow from King Crimson), if MAGA Republicans get their way, confusion will be democracy’s epitaph.

But HCR’s summary is not finished:

Voter intimidation is underway in Texas, too. On August 18, Fox News Channel personality Maria Bartiromo, who was a key figure in promoting the Big Lie, posted a rumor that migrants were illegally registering to vote at a government facility west of Fort Worth. The Republican chair and election administrator there said there was no evidence for her accusation and that it was false, but Texas attorney general Ken Paxton nonetheless launched an investigation.  

In addition to feeding the narrative that there is voter fraud at work in Texas, the investigation led Paxton’s team to raid the homes of at least seven Latino Democrats. No one has been charged in the aftermath of the raids. Latino rights advocates call them a “disgraceful and outrageous” attempt to intimidate Latino voters and have filed a formal complaint with the Department of Justice.

Today, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced that since 2021, Texas has removed more than one million people from the state’s voter rolls, and said the process will be ongoing. Abbott’s office said those removed are ineligible to vote because they have moved, are dead, or are not citizens. But more than 463,000 of those on the list have been removed because their county of residence is unaware of their current address. 

Even when voters do make their wishes known, in Republican-dominated states, those wishes are not always honored. David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo today pointed out an article in which Adam Unikowsky, who clerked for the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, eviscerated a recent decision by the Arkansas Supreme Court that will prevent an abortion rights initiative from appearing on the ballot in November.  

The reason? A technical defect in the submission: “They didn’t submit a photocopy that wasn’t required” of a document already submitted a week earlier. (The “defect” was quickly corrected.) If the ballot initiative sponsor had failed to count the number of beans in the jar, the court’s ruling would have been no different. Because keeping the abortion rights initiative off the Arkansas ballot, HCR notes, “will generally help Republicans.”

Just as Jim Crow helped southern segregationists maintain white supremacy for nearly a century. MAGA Republicans’ 21st-century attempts at resurrecting it would be humiliating if they were capable of shame. This makes Donald Trump’s sculpted comb over a fitting symbol of Republicans’ desperate efforts to hide their receding popularity from the world and from themselves. Nobody’s fooled.

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