Conspiracy theories percolating in the wingnut-o-sphere sometimes fail to catch my attention. When they do, they can produce a baroo response that demands a closer look.

Perhaps Roger Stone was simply pimping two Saturday Las Vegas events organized to raise money for his legal defense costs when he appeared on Alex Jones’ Infowars network on September 10. Nevada is not not likely a pivotal electoral prize. But Stone’s remarks on Nevada balloting raised a stir online after Media Matters published a show clip Friday afternoon in which the career ratf*cker suggested that Donald Trump have federal marshals seize ballots in Nevada on election night.

A jury convicted Stone in November on seven felony counts, including lying to Congress. The acting president commuted Stone’s 40-month prison sentence in July. A full pardon is still possible.

Media Matters reports:

Stone argued that “the ballots in Nevada on election night should be seized by federal marshalls and taken from the state” because “they are completely corrupted” and falsely said that “we can prove voter fraud in the absentees right now.” He specifically called for Trump to have absentee ballots seized in Clark County, Nevada, an area that leans Democratic. Stone went on to claim that “the votes from Nevada should not be counted; they are already flooded with illegals” and baselessly suggested that former Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) should be arrested and that Trump should consider nationalizing Nevada’s state police force.

Operation Eagle Eye revisited

“Send federal marshals to the Clark County Board of Elections, Mr. President!” Stone demanded. And if that was not enough to sell tickets for “Roger Stone Ungagged!” on Saturday, Stone had more:

Beyond Nevada, Stone recommended that Trump consider several actions to retain his power. Stone recommended that Trump appoint former Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA) as a special counsel “with the specific task of forming an Election Day operation using the FBI, federal marshals, and Republican state officials across the country to be prepared to file legal objections and if necessary to physically stand in the way of criminal activity.”

Operation Eagle Eye revisited, no doubt. And for the first time in decades, the RNC is allowed to launch organized “election protection” efforts without prior court consent. I have written about that 1982 consent decree multiple times,

Stone still was not done:

Stone also urged Trump to consider declaring “martial law” or invoking the Insurrection Act and then using his powers to arrest Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, “the Clintons” and “anybody else who can be proven to be involved in illegal activity.”

“Proven” being in the eye of Trump’s U.S. Attorney General. Bill Barr has already shown his willingness to throw federal officers into cities. Stone would like to see that again.

“The votes from Nevada should not be counted!” Stones announced. “They are already flooded with illegals. If Harry Reid is involved, take Harry Reid into custody and charge him,” Stone said, prefaced by saying he was not jumping to conclusions.

Listen to the clip to catch the manic tone in Stone’s voice.

Stone repeated his allegations about vote-by-mail to reporters ahead of the Las Vegas event. “It does not make sense to me to mail a ballot to every voter in Clark County who has not requested a ballot,” Stone said, “and in some cases, including in those outgoing mailings people who have not voted in six or eight years.”

Bernie Sanders voters will be a key factor in a Biden victory in Nevada, the Los Angeles Times reports. Interviews suggest they will vote for Joe Biden. Democrats have won three straight presidential votes in an “increasingly urban and suburban” Nevada:

Sanders has signaled to his backers the importance of staying in the Democratic column, more persistently than he did after losing to Clinton in 2016. He cited Biden’s support of 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave and universal childcare as the kind of policies that would come only with a Democrat in the White House.

“I am not going to sit here and tell you that Joe Biden is the most progressive guy in the world,” Sanders said on SiriusXM radio recently. “He is not, but his program is reasonably progressive.” Sanders pledged that he and other progressives would make “damn sure” Biden follows through on his promises.

The Democratic nominee also benefits from the support of the 60,000-member Culinary Workers Union, which represents hotel and restaurant workers, mainly in the state’s casino industry.

One wonders how many tickets Stone sold?

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

This is actually a big deal:

This is good to see. @robkelner is a (still-practicing) very prominent Republican election lawyer. His endorsement of Ben Ginsberg’s column matters a lot and takes courage in this environment. More of this please. https://t.co/iyS6tUSxDo

— Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) September 9, 2020

Here is that article:

Legions of Republican lawyers have searched in vain over four decades for fraudulent double voting. At long last, they have a blatant example of a major politician urging his supporters to illegally vote twice.

The only hitch is that the candidate is President Trump.

The president, who has been arguing that our elections are “rigged” and “fraudulent,” last week instructed voters to act in a way that would fulfill that prophecy. On Wednesday in North Carolina, he urged supporters to double vote, casting ballots at the polls even if they have already mailed in absentee ballots. A tweet claiming he meant only for people to check that their ballots had been received and counted sounded fine — until Trump renewed his original push on Thursday evening in Pennsylvania and again Friday at a telerally.

The president’s actions — urging his followers to commit an illegal act and seeking to undermine confidence in the credibility of election results — are doubly wrong. They impose an obligation on his campaign and the Republican Party to reevaluate their position in the more than 40 voting cases they’re involved in around the country.

The president’s words make his and the Republican Party’s rhetoric look less like sincere concern — and more like transactional hypocrisy designed to provide an electoral advantage.

And they come as Republicans trying to make their cases in courts must deal with the basic truth that four decades of dedicated investigation have produced only isolated incidents of election fraud.

My emphasis there. Oh my God. 40 years of this stuff and Ginsburg is finally admitting they were full of shit:

These are painful conclusions for me to reach. Before retiring from law practice last month, I spent 38 years in the GOP’s legal trenches. I was part of the 1990s redistricting that ended 40 years of Democratic control and brought 30 years of GOP successes in Congress and state legislatures. I played a central role in the 2000 Florida recount and several dozen Senate, House and state contests. I served as counsel to all three Republican national party committees and represented four of the past six Republican presidential nominees (including, through my law firm, Trump 2020).

Each Election Day since 1984, I’ve been in precincts looking for voting violations, or in Washington helping run the nationwide GOP Election Day operations, overseeing the thousands of Republican lawyers and operatives each election on alert for voting fraud. In every election, Republicans have been in polling places and vote tabulation centers. Republican lawyers in every state have been able to examine mail-in/absentee ballot programs.

The president has said that “the only way we can lose … is if cheating goes on.” He has asserted that mail-in voting is “very dangerous” and that “there is tremendous fraud involved and tremendous illegality.”

The lack of evidence renders these claims unsustainable. The truth is that after decades of looking for illegal voting, there’s no proof of widespread fraud. At most, there are isolated incidents — by both Democrats and Republicans. Elections are not rigged. Absentee ballots use the same process as mail-in ballots — different states use different labels for the same process.

The Trump 2016 campaign, of which I was not a part, could produce no hard evidence of systemic fraud. Trump established a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in 2017 to expose all the fraud he maintains permeates our elections. He named the most vociferous hunters of Democratic election fraud to run the commission. It disbanded without finding anything.

The Heritage Foundation Election Fraud Database has compiled every instance of any kind of voter fraud it could find since 1982. It contains 1,296 incidents, a minuscule percentage of the votes cast. A study of results in three states where all voters are mailed actual ballots, a practice at the apex of the president’s outrage, found just 372 possible cases of illegal voting of 14.6 million cast in the 2016 and 2018 general elections — 0.0025 percent.

The president’s rhetoric has put my party in the position of a firefighter who deliberately sets fires to look like a hero putting them out. Republicans need to take a hard look before advocating laws that actually do limit the franchise of otherwise qualified voters. Calling elections “fraudulent” and results “rigged” with almost nonexistent evidence is antithetical to being the “rule of law” party.

Many of the GOP’s litigation concerns are meritorious in principle. But the president’s inflammatory language undercuts the claim that Republicans seek merely to uphold statutory safeguards needed to validate the results’ credibility.

Republicans need to rethink their arguments in many of the cases in which they are involved — quickly. Otherwise, they risk harming the fundamental principle of our democracy: that all eligible voters must be allowed to cast their ballots. If that happens, Americans will deservedly render the GOP a minority party for a long, long time.

I’ll admit that this stuns me. Ginsburg has been a top GOP henchman for decades, leading the charge for phony “voter fraud” and helping to create this widespread Republican belief that Democrats have been cheating in elections for years so the GOP could justify measures to suppress their vote.

The GOP lawyers who have fanned out across the country to carry water for Trump may or may not listen to him. If they don’t Ginsburg will make a good witness against them in court. You can bet that after writing this, the Democrats will call him.

Many of us have long warned that this fall would see a dirty campaign without precedent, that Donald Trump would stop at nothing to foment chaos, and so forth. But up till now there has been a certain abstractness about it. Who knew exactly what form it would take and whether it would have any real effect?

It’s here, and it’s not abstract any longer. What was assumed to be just more of the usual Trump lunacy is starting to feel terrifying. He and his campaign really are pulling out all the stops and they are doing it in the middle of a deadly pandemic that has ravaged the people and destroyed the economy. Creating even more disorder and turmoil in middle of this crisis, in an effort to concoct or create an electoral victory he will not have earned legitimately, is over-the-top even for him.

This week the president gave a number of interviews and rallies in which he sounded more unhinged than usual. In fact, they were so bad that if his plans only depended upon him, we could probably feel a bit reassured. Unfortunately, his henchmen all seem to be on board and none more so than Attorney General Bill Barr, who appeared on CNN Wednesday and signaled that he’s prepared to enlist the Department of Justice and federal law enforcement in Trump’s election chaos strategy.

Barr always has an arrogant, supercilious attitude, whether he’s facing Congress or members of the media. But he was downright angry with anchor Wolf Blitzer and it took him off his usual game. More than any other interview I can remember, this one revealed that Barr’s insolence is actually cover for the fact that he really doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The man who once told the New York Times that investigating the silly, manufactured Clinton-related Uranium One “scandal” was more justified than any probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election still sees the world from the perspective of a Fox News viewer, rather than as the leader of the federal government’s most powerful law enforcement agency. And like his boss, Barr is much too egotistical to have a clue how ignorant that makes him.

He showed how little he knows or cares about the ethics of his position by saying that he wouldn’t talk about the case of Jacob Blake case (the Black man in Kenosha, Wisconsin, who was shot seven times in the back by a police officer) and then proceeded to share his conclusion that Blake was armed and in the process of committing a felony. When Blitzer pointed out that this was not established fact, Barr came back with “I’ve stated what I believe …” In other words, he was prejudging the facts of the case on television, which totally taints the Justice Department’s investigation.

He couldn’t simply say, “I won’t comment on the case because the department is investigating,” as any other attorney general would have done. That was because Barr clearly has a political agenda, which became more explicit as he went on to deny the existence of systemic racism. He said that “the narrative that the police are on some, you know, epidemic of shooting unarmed Black men is simply a false narrative and also the narrative that that’s based on race.” He elaborated on this by saying that Black men are stopped more often by police is not the result of racism but rather of “stereotypes” about Black people being criminals. In other words, he doesn’t even know what racism is, nor does he have the self-awareness to know that his own antediluvian attitudes are racist — another thing he has in common with President Trump. (I really shouldn’t have to say this, but Barr is wrong about all of this.)

Barr blatantly lied when he said that Russia hasn’t been interfering in the election up until now and that China is a greater threat to the integrity of the process, despite the fact that the U.S. intelligence community and the FBI have said the opposite. Indeed, the very next day the Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin saying it has high confidence that “Russian malign influence actors” have targeted the absentee voting process “by spreading disinformation” since at least March:

Russian state media and proxy websites in mid-August 2020 criticized the integrity of expanded and universal vote-by-mail, claiming ineligible voters could receive ballots due to out-of-date voter rolls, leaving a vast amount of ballots unaccounted for and vulnerable to tampering. These websites also alleged that vote-by-mail processes would overburden the U.S. Postal Service and local boards of election delaying vote tabulation and creating more opportunities for fraud and error.

The attorney general must be on their mailing list because these were exactly the arguments he set forth in the CNN interview, at one point getting very testy with Blitzer on the subject. He insisted that the nation is “playing with fire” by changing the method of voting in this election, fatuously insisting that it will cause people to lose faith in the process — which of course is exactly what he is doing in spreading this hysterical propaganda.

When Blitzer asked him about Trump’s recent exhortation to his voters to vote by mail and then go to the polls to try to vote again, the attorney general said he couldn’t comment because he didn’t know the laws in individual states, as if any of them allowed voting twice in the same election. When quizzed about how many cases of voter fraud the Justice Department is pursuing, he said he didn’t know, although he did mention one case that purportedly had 1,700 cases of mail-in voter fraud. That story was totally wrong and the DOJ had to issue a correction saying Barr had been given incorrect information.

Barr’s most ludicrous contention was that foreign countries are going to counterfeit ballots and mail them in. He has no evidence other than what he calls “logic” to back up this ridiculous claim, which proves how divorced from reality the attorney general of the United States actually is. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump explains:

For one thing, any number of those ballots would conflict with existing submitted ballots and be rejected. For another, ballots meet particular design and production standards that would need to be matched. But most important, ballots submitted by mail are validated upon receipt, usually by matching the ballot’s signature to the recorded signature for the voter. As a forgery expert with whom we spoke in June made clear, this would be nearly impossible to fake.

Barr is essentially spreading a ludicrous conspiracy theory about foreign interference with mail-in ballots, while also helping a foreign adversary interfere in the election by spreading several different conspiracy theories. It’s insane.

We’ve long known that Barr was happily performing the role of Trump’s “Roy Cohn,” seeing his primary role as leader of the Justice Department as leading a war against Trump’s political enemies. But Barr is also a true believer, not just a cynical fraud. His willingness to distort the rule of law to benefit his patron, while at the same time falling down the rabbit hole of one right-wing conspiracy theory after another, is the very definition of Trumpism in action. And he’s not even trying to hide it.

My Salon column republished with permission

Pres. Trump appeared to suggest that his supporters should commit voter fraud by attempting to vote both by mail and in person pic.twitter.com/zcvdzYCY8x

— NowThis Impact (@nowthisimpact) September 2, 2020

He was called on that and this was his response: he wants his voters to “test the system.”

Based on the massive number of Unsolicited & Solicited Ballots that will be sent to potential Voters for the upcoming 2020 Election, & in order for you to MAKE SURE YOUR VOTE COUNTS & IS COUNTED, SIGN & MAIL IN your Ballot as EARLY as possible. On Election Day, or Early Voting,..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 3, 2020

….after you Vote, which it should not, that Ballot will not be used or counted in that your vote has already been cast & tabulated. YOU ARE NOW ASSURED THAT YOUR PRECIOUS VOTE HAS BEEN COUNTED, it hasn’t been “lost, thrown out, or in any way destroyed”. GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 3, 2020

You know what this means. He wants his yahoos, possibly armed, to go clog up the lines, go into polling stations and demand to see if their (alleged) mail-in vote has been counted. If they have not been counted, they are supposed to demand a ballot and vote again.

All of this is ridiculous at best (you can go online to see if your ballot has been received) and at worst attempted voter fraud. But it’s obvious that his real motive is to turn election day into a massive clusterfuck so that he can invalidate the election.

Can it work?

As the Democrats staged a successful virtual telethon-style convention over the past four days, Donald Trump has been running around the country saying that there’s no way he can lose the election unless it’s “rigged” and telling Fox News that he plans to send law enforcement to polling places, “to Democrat areas, not to the Republican areas, as an example. Could be the other way too, but I doubt it.” He’s also pretty much endorsed the conspiracy cult QAnon, saying they are people who like him “very much.” On Thursday he watched yet another of his 2016 campaign leaders hauled off in handcuffs by federal agents.

It would be just another week in the surreal world of Donald Trump if it weren’t for the fact that the election is just around the corner and his rantings have become quite serious. Certainly, seeing his former White House strategist and campaign “CEO” Steve Bannon face indictment, on the same day that another judge ruled he would have to turn over his tax returns to New York prosecutors, may have focused the mind.

Bannon and three others were indicted on federal charges for allegedly siphoning off more than a million dollars of small-donor money from the private fundraising group We Build the Wall, which had promised that all money donated would be spent on President Trump’s cherished border wall. This sort of thing is a familiar theme in Trump World: Recall that just before he assumed office in 2017, he settled a $25 million lawsuit over his fraudulent Trump University.

In fact, this isn’t all that different from the charges Trump may well face from the Manhattan district attorney’s office relating to his licensing and real estate projects. There is evidence that he and others in the Trump Organization have misrepresented how much of their own money was at stake to other potential buyers, banks and investors. And then there’s the question of whether they committed tax fraud. (Spoiler: Almost certainly, whether or not that can be successfully prosecuted.)

Trump claimed on Thursday that he was always against the private wall project that got Bannon into trouble, but his image was all over the group’s website and Donald Trump Jr. is on video endorsing it. One of the board members, Kris Kobach —who headed Trump’s short-lived “voter fraud” commission and keeps losing elections back home in Kansas — is also on video claiming that Trump told him the project had his blessing.

One of the more suspicious connections with this scam was Trump’s relentless insistence that a North Dakota construction firm called Fisher Industries should get the contract for the official border wall. According to this Washington Post story from May of 2019, Trump demanded that the military award the job to this obscure company even after its bid had been rejected by the Army Corps of Engineers, which alarmed Homeland Security officials about the appearance of corruption. And guess what?

Even as Trump pushes for his firm, Fisher already has started building a section of fencing in Sunland Park, N.M. We Build the Wall, a nonprofit that includes prominent conservatives who support the president — its associates and advisory board include former White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon, Blackwater USA founder Erik Prince, ex-congressman Tom Tancredo and former Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach — has guided an effort to build portions of the border barrier on private land with private funds.

Jared Kushner pushed Fisher Industries as well, but in the end the firm didn’t get the government contract. It ended up building a small piece of the private wall that has been described faulty and flawed. Trump distanced himself from the We Build the Wall project last month, apparently out of the blue, saying he never believed in it in the first place.

I disagreed with doing this very small (tiny) section of wall, in a tricky area, by a private group which raised money by ads. It was only done to make me look bad, and perhsps it now doesn’t even work. Should have been built like rest of Wall, 500 plus miles. https://t.co/L8RUPCAhqc

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 12, 2020

None of this smells right: He spent months pushing the government to award that company a multi-billion-dollar contract, and suddenly their shoddy work makes him “look bad.”

On Friday we will see yet another corrupt Trump henchman appear on Capitol Hill when Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major Republican donor, testifies before the Senate. The sabotage of the U.S. Postal Service in advance of the election is almost certainly the most corrupt act this administration has yet undertaken.

Trump openly admitted that he opposes funding the post office in order to make mail-in voting impossible during the pandemic. It’s pretty clear that the point of the various “efficiencies” DeJoy has implemented in the past few weeks, such as destroying sorting machines, removing mailboxes and ending overtime for mail carriers, are designed to make mail-in voting difficult or impossible during this deadly pandemic.

Of course, this has also had the effect of turning the Postal Service into what a small business owner interviewed by the Los Angeles Times described as “Armageddon,” with packages of rotting food and dead baby chicks piling up in postal facilities, and deliveries taking weeks instead of days. DeJoy claimed earlier this week that he would not implement any more “efficiencies” until after the election but reports from all across the country suggest the service cuts are continuing.

We can expect that DeJoy will be asked about all this at the Senate hearing Friday and a House hearing on Monday. Let’s hope the committees ask him about his reported meeting with the president earlier this month as well:

By the way, while we're asking questions: Has DeJoy, since becoming Postmaster General, had conversations with anyone at the Trump campaign? In the political office at the White House? At the Trump Super PAC? The RNC? Have any of his aides? https://t.co/aiZDxgLwFf

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) August 16, 2020

Trump has said he didn’t meet with DeJoy on that date, which is almost certainly a lie. What are the odds Trump didn’t tell him he wanted the post office crippled in advance of the election to prevent mail-in voting?

Trump’s corruption often has a blatant financial component, of course. Take his aborted gambit to hold the G7 summit at his Trump National Doral resort in Miami, for instance. Maybe there’s a money angle for him in the border wall and the post office too. But to be fair, his corrupt gambits aren’t always driven by financial gain. They can also be about personal, political benefit, even if that’s often based on an ignorant misunderstanding.

According to the Washington Post, Trump’s obsession with the Fisher Industries, the obscure North Dakota firm, stemmed from the CEO’s frequent appearances on Fox News, in which he promised he could build the wall cheaper and faster than anyone else. Trump’s antipathy toward the post office predates his panic over mail-in voting, and reflects his delusional belief that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is so much wealthier than Trump is because he’s getting a sweetheart deal from the Postal Service.

These are just two of Trump’s many nonsensical and corrupt obsessions, pursued on his orders by flunkies and henchmen who often know their assignments but carry them out anyway. Quite a few of them have been caught bilking the taxpayers and ended up losing their jobs at this point, and there’s an ignominious list of Trump’s campaign cronies who have been indicted or convicted of federal crimes, to which Steve Bannon added his name this week.

Whether Trump’s underlings are motivated by opportunism, careerism or just plain old greed, you have to ask yourself why anyone would sign on to work for this insane, childlike president. Maybe someone will ask Louis DeJoy that question when he appears on Capitol Hill. At this point the country deserves to know.

My Salon column reprinted with permission

One of the more tedious tasks in writing about politics is that every single election year it’s necessary to discuss the latest cheating schemes cooked up by the Republican Party to suppress the votes of minorities, challenge the legality of perfectly legal votes and otherwise make all elections they do not win look suspect in the eyes of American voters. Needless to say, this year is worse than usual because Donald Trump makes everything worse than usual.

But it’s important not to ascribe the latest attempts to manipulate the election results solely to Trump and his minions. Even though he is more crude and obvious about what he’s doing, he is actually following in a longstanding tradition of the modern GOP, traceable all the way back to the 1960s.

Obviously there has been cheating in elections since the founding of the republic. Once upon a time, it was institutionalized by the big-city bosses, who were almost entirely Democrats. For a century, African Americans were denied the vote by Democrats in the white supremacist Jim Crow South with the deployment of a whole arsenal of restrictions, including onerous poll taxes, literacy tests and residency requirements.

As everyone is aware, Southern party identification began to switch to the GOP in the 1960s with the civil rights movement and the passage of the Voting Rights Act, at which point the newly converted Republicans eagerly stepped up to the task of disenfranchising Black people and other ethnic minorities. They’ve been very creative about it ever since.

For instance, they’ve done “vote caging” ever since the ’60s, as described in this voluminous report about the practice by Project Vote:

Voter caging is a practice of sending non-forwardable direct mail to registered voters and using the returned mail to compile lists of voters, called “caging lists,” for the purpose of challenging their eligibility to vote. In recent years, other techniques, such as database matching, have been used to compile challenger lists.

They have used more direct forms of voter intimidation such as “Operation Eagle Eye” and the modern knockoff “True the Vote” and have created large, well-funded legal organizations, most notably the Republican National Lawyers Association and the Voting Integrity Project, devoted to challenging laws throughout the country that make voting accessible. This was the institutional legal apparatus that immediately launched into overdrive during the disputed presidential election in Florida in 2000.

For more than 50 years the Republican Party has been working feverishly to ensure that Democratic voters are denied the right to vote, especially African Americans and other minorities. It hasn’t just been Southern white supremacists in deep-red states doing this. Such campaigns have been sanctioned and endorsed by the highest reaches of the Republican establishment. The corruption that lies at the heart of this project has been demonstrated by Republican Departments of Justice and the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, with essentially no repercussions.

So, let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that because Donald Trump is crude and ignorant his current attempt to sabotage the November election by defunding the post office and delegitimizing the vote-by-mail system is an anomaly. It may not have the subtlety of vote caging or the elegant sophistry of insisting that counting all the votes will disenfranchise voters, but it’s very much in line with the Republicans’ ongoing program of vote suppression.

Trump is taking it to a new level, however, by attempting to suppress Republican votes right along with Democrats. For years the GOP has been pushing voting by mail to help their senior and rural constituencies who have tended to prefer it. R Roughly one-fourth of Trump’s votes in 2016 were delivered by mail.

The attacks on the U.S. Postal Service are also going to hurt his own voters just as much as Democrats. Republicans like to get their mail on time too. And many of them are just as nervous about standing in line for hours on Election Day in the middle of a deadly pandemic as Democrats are — although there’s some evidence that they will do it because their president wants them to.

Officials in Trump’s claimed home state of Florida apparently convinced him that he could lose the state this way because he amended his blanket condemnation of voting by mail by claiming that Florida alone knows how to do it correctly. He and the first lady have already requested their mail-in ballots, which raises the question of why he can’t go to the voting booth on Election Day as he expects everyone else to do.) But Trump still insists the rest of the country is incapable of running elections as efficiently as Florida (!) and cannot be trusted to handle a large number of mail-in ballots.

His obsession with the Postal Service originally stemmed from his erroneous belief that the main function of government is to make a profit (except for the military, of course, which is to be smothered in cash beyond any possible necessity). Trump is also jealous of Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and thinks he can destroy him by destroying the post office. Now he’s attacking the agency in order to suppress the vote by making people believe their ballots won’t make it in time and won’t be counted for months, if ever.

All of this is downright self-defeating if he wants to get out his vote, but that’s clearly not what he’s trying to achieve. Recall that in 2016 he also claimed the election was “rigged” and during one presidential debates refused to say whether he would accept the results. He amended that shortly thereafter:

You may also recall that even when after he won his fluke Electoral College victor, Trump convened a “voter fraud” commission in an effort to prove that he had actually won the popular vote as well. It was quietly disbanded a few months later, without issuing any kind of report.

It appears that all this nonsense is in service of a plan to contest his defeat if the vote count is delayed or if there’s any significant confusion, regardless of the vote margin. And he won’t have to go it alone. The New York Times reported last May that the Republican Party was gearing up to help him:

The Republican program, which has gained steam in recent weeks, envisions recruiting up to 50,000 volunteers in 15 key states to monitor polling places and challenge ballots and voters deemed suspicious. That is part of a $20 million plan that also allots millions to challenge lawsuits by Democrats and voting-rights advocates seeking to loosen state restrictions on balloting. The party and its allies also intend to use advertising, the internet and Mr. Trump’s command of the airwaves to cast Democrats as agents of election theft.

This isn’t a Trump thing. It’s a GOP thing. And it’s been going on for a very long time. At some point, this country is going to have to come to terms with the fact that the Republican Party is fundamentally hostile to democracy and do something about it.

My Salon column reprinted with permission.

Update

Don’t believe me? Check this out:

From acting incredulous that I suggested he'll challenge election results to confirming he will challenge election results in about a minute. https://t.co/p8nwose1H7

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) August 17, 2020

Whatever happens on November 3, many Americans will distrust the election results. They’ve been primed for it. Donald Trump sees himself both as a winner and a victim. Either way, he will spin the results both as a victory and an attack as he did in 2016, even if only he believes it.

Trump had plenty of help in 2016 from the Russians, the Republican Party apparatus, third-party activist groups, online fake-news entrepreneurs, and the right wing noise machine. With the bully pulpit and the levers of power at his disposal this year, he is actively working to rig the election in his favor in ways he could not have dreamed of four years ago.

The others will still play their parts.

ProPublica and First Draft, a firm that researches misinformation, posted a report last month on the viral quality of social media posts, particularly on Facebook, aimed at delegitimizing the upcoming election. (Read them yourself. No need to repeat them here.)

“We have a long history in this country of voter suppression that goes all the way back to our founding,” said Jessica Gonzalez, the co-CEO of Free Press, an advocacy group focused on media and technology. “This is a new way to suppress the vote, and I don’t know why Facebook wants any part of it.”

Facebook claims to be creating a Voting Information Center for connecting people to authoritative information and to have removed 100,000 pieces of voter disinformation between March and May.

ProPublica and First Draft tracked Facebook posts using voting-related keywords — including the terms “vote by mail,” “mail-in ballots,” “voter fraud” and “stolen elections” — since early April, when Trump began attacking voting by mail. Mentions of these voting-related terms nearly tripled on Facebook, with interest in the topic spiking after Twitter attached a fact-checking label to Trump’s false tweets and directed users to a fact-check page on May 26. Twitter’s intervention prompted Trump to claim that Twitter is “interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election” and “stifling FREE SPEECH.” Facebook has refused to take down Trump’s false claims about voting by mail.

Facebook’s inaction on Trump’s posts spurred pushback over misinformation on the site. Gonzalez helped organize an advertising boycott of Facebook that now includes more than 1,000 companies and some of the platform’s biggest advertisers. Among other demands, they’re calling on Facebook to remove voting misinformation.

Breitbart, Fox News are still in the disinfo game along with conservative commentators, Trump surrogates, conspiracy sites, and some left-wing pages.

To pad out the 1088 "proven instances" in its VoterFraudCases_5.pdf database, Heritage lumps every form of election malfeasance (much of it not at the polls) under the blanket term "voter fraud" & feels obliged to reach back to 1948 to do it. Impersonation fraud at the Polls: 13

— @TomSullivan@mstdn.social (@BloggersRUs) August 6, 2020

Most common are overinflated allegations of voter fraud:

Exaggerating the prevalence of voting fraud can backfire. In a study released in June, researchers showed respondents a series of tweets. Some were actual 2018 tweets by Trump, Florida Gov. Rick Scott and Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio that put forth unfounded claims of voter fraud; others were more generic “placebo” tweets. The false claims reduced confidence in elections for everyone, the researchers found, especially Republicans and those who approve of Trump. Those groups “reported significantly lower confidence in elections after exposure to a low dose of voter fraud allegations even when those claims were countered by fact-checks.”

As a result, Trump’s rhetoric may cause fewer Republicans to vote by mail than Democrats, said Brendan Nyhan, one of the authors of the study and a political scientist at Dartmouth College. Still, Nyhan is worried about broader effects of misinformation. “The problem has clearly gotten worse in terms of elite rhetoric,” Nyhan said. “We’ve seen what happens in other countries when there isn’t a shared trust in the rules of the game in democracy and it’s not good.”

Realizing the damage his attacks on voting by mail have done to his own prospects, Trump last week tried reversing himself. He now claims voting by mail in Florida is “Safe and Secure, Tried and True” even as he sues Nevada for automatically sending voters mail ballots.

The pandemic has boards of elections across the country scrambling to retool procedures make voting as safe and secure for voters as possible. This means what you heard last week could be changed next week.

Here in North Carolina, Democrats have been in court challenging Republican voting changes since the GOP gained control of the legislature ahead of the last redistricting. Some of the voting changes the GOP implemented seemed designed not only to suppress the vote but to add to confusion. Others they passed only to have courts overturn them later. Voters here have been whipsawed for a decade.

Just last week, a federal district court in North Carolina ruled that due process demands that those who vote by mail must have the same chance to “cure” mistakes in their ballots that in-person voters receive:

GREENSBORO—Late today, a federal judge ruled in the League of Women Voters of North Carolina’s case that the North Carolina State Board of Elections must provide a notice and cure process for absentee ballots marked for rejection. As the number of voters choosing to cast ballots by mail is expected to surge due to the threat of COVID-19, the decision provides relief for tens of thousands of voters whose ballots would otherwise be rejected without recourse. 

“The establishment of a notice and cure process for absentee ballots is a major victory for North Carolina voters,” said Jo Nicholas, president of the League of Women Voters of North Carolina. “Now, even amidst all the uncertainty that the pandemic brings, voters can have assurance that their safely cast ballots will be counted in November.” 

Over 282,000 absentee ballots were rejected in North Carolina’s March primary election, 41% of which could have been cured if voters had been notified and given a chance to do so, according to data reviewed by Southern Coalition for Social Justice. The absence of a cure process in that election left 115,000 voters without a way to fix mistakes and ensure their ballots would be counted. 

Now, the state Board of Elections must scramble once again to figure out how to implement the judge’s ruling before local boards begin evaluating early absentee ballots here at the end of September. The rest of us will have to help educate voters once the procedure is in place. So it goes.

For the rest of you, be sure you are extra careful when filling out your by-mail or absentee-by-mail ballots. Here is some quick video advice. Rejection rates are low, but you don’t want to get caught in that small percentage.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

I don’t know about you, but when I saw Donald Trump do an abrupt pivot on his crusade to depict mail-in voting as a form of voter fraud on Tuesday, I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

That certainly wasn’t because I believe he’s seen the light and has realized that mail-in voting is perfectly safe, or that he realizes it’s imperative at a time when in-person voting may expose people to the deadly coronavirus. No, it was because he singled out Florida as the one state he believes really knows how to handle elections. Anyone who was around 20 years ago to observe the 2000 election will understand why I felt that awful sense of dread.

You may recall how that disputed election result, with a 538-vote difference in Florida and a recount in progress, was decided in favor of the Republican candidate — whose brother just happened to be the governor — helped along by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, two of whom happened to have been appointed by their father, the former president. Let’s just say that the Republicans controlled the levers of government and they knew how to use them.

The same is true today. Here’s what Trump said at his daily perfunctory coronavirus briefing on Tuesday when questioned about his change of tune on mail-in ballots in Florida:

“Florida’s got a great Republican governor. And it had a great Republican governor,” Trump said, citing Ron DeSantis (R) and Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.). “Two great governors. And over a long period of time they’ve been able to get the absentee ballots done extremely professionally.”

“They’re so well run. Florida’s a very well run state,” he added. “Low taxes, low everything. They’ve done a great job. Really a great job. And the two governors, between the both of them, they’ve really got a great system of absentee ballots and even in the case of mail-in ballots.”

Obviously, DeSantis and Scott got Trump on the horn in the last day or two and told him that he was screwing up their chances of winning Florida with his frenzied campaign against mail-in voting. There are a lot of senior citizens in Florida, a group that distinctly skews Republican, and they like to vote by mail. I’m sure they also reminded him that DeSantis had already gone the extra mile to disenfranchise the 744,000 ex-felons whom the state had voted to allow back on the voting rolls by instituting what amounts to a poll tax. (That would be the clearest reading of this Trumpian phrase: “Florida’s Voting system has been cleaned up we defeated Democrats attempts at change.”)

Florida Republicans have the system wired, which is why Trump has now excluded his adopted state from the list of states that he claims are rigging the election against him with mail-in voting. I won’t be surprised to see him endorse the practice in others as well, if governors there are able to assure him that they’ll look out for him.

But he doesn’t seem to understand how this muddles his case. After all, one of Trump’s primary objections to voting by mail is that the Postal Service is incapable of handling all the ballots. But unless Florida uses a different system to deliver ballots than the rest of the country, it’s hard to see how they can escape this calamity. And saying that only Republican-run states can competently handle vote by mail is too transparently self-serving, even for him.

According to the Washington Post, 78% of American voters can vote by mail in November. Thirty-four states and the District of Columbia already allowed anyone to vote absentee for any reason, well before the pandemic. There have been some adjustments in the process in some states to accommodate the coronavirus, but mail-in voting is perfectly normal. While the system may be strained this time because more people will use it, this manufactured hysteria is ridiculous. Unless Trump is able to destroy the Postal Service, as Salon’s Bob Cesca predicts he may be able to do, and unless the media decides to re-run its destructive coverage of the 2000 election, which they claim they have no intention of doing, the only chaos will likely be coming from Trump’s camp for his own purposes.

With all his braying about the election being “rigged,” it was pretty obvious back in 2016 that Trump believed he wasn’t going to win. There’s even some famous footage of him on election night giving a very tepid thumbs-up, looking stunned and even despondent.

The following was tweeted just as Trump took the lead in Electoral College votes:

Trump had said, “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it,” and that didn’t really work out for him. So I’m quite sure he was looking forward to making up for it once he lost. He was no doubt planning to parlay all that attention into a rumored media empire and completing those big deals like the Trump Tower Moscow plan he’d had to drop. He’d had fun on the campaign trail but actually being president clearly wasn’t something he’d thought too much about.

This time I think Trump really does want to win, if only to prove that he has a legitimate claim to the White House. (Protecting himself from legal trouble for another four years would be nice too.) But even someone as thick as he is can read the polls, and I would guess that he’s plotting to turn defeat to his advantage if the worst happens.

It would seem that his plan is to sow chaos if possible, challenge the result where he can, and claim that Joe Biden’s victory is illegitimate, regardless of the margin of victory. He can then set himself up as the president in exile, free to make money from speaking fees and books while trying to rehabilitate his tattered “brand.” Perhaps that rumored media empire will finally come to fruition. Most importantly, he’d be able to keep his cult alive with the tantalizing promise of a rematch in 2024.

I have no idea if Trump would actually want to do that — he might want to pass the torch to Don Jr. or Ivanka, and there’s no guarantee Republican voters would play along all over again. But in many ways, losing will offer him the opportunity to do what he loves to do most, and make money while doing it: tweet, shoot the breeze with media sycophants, play golf and bask in the adulation of his adoring fans. Who knows, he might even hold rallies. He could have all that without all the unpleasantness of trying to do a job he has never been able to figure out how to do.

It’s depressing to think that Donald Trump won’t simply fade into obscurity if he’s defeated this fall, I know. But I think he’s going to be like that obnoxious party guest who’s always the last to leave, whether we like it or not. The silver lining is that if he does decide to stay in the game, he’ll be like a lead weight dragging down the Republican Party for another four years. You know he’s going to make their lives even more hellish than the Democrats — and after their cowardly enabling of his monumental failures and criminal misdeeds, it’s exactly what they deserve. 

My Salon column reprinted with permission.

A little update — The GOP lawyer who helped @kanyewest get on the ballot in Wisconsin is actively working for @realDonaldTrump's campaign. She's the lawyer of record in their lawsuit to try to get a @prioritiesUSA anti-Trump ad pulled. Original story: https://t.co/HL2EDzLYNj

— Cameron Joseph (@cam_joseph) August 5, 2020

In a close race this could make a difference. We know for a fact that the difference in several decisive swing states in 2016 was the third party vote.:

At least four people who have been active in Republican politics are linked to Kanye West’s attempt to get on the presidential ballot this year. The connection raises questions about the aims of the entertainer’s effort and whether it is regarded within the G.O.P. as a spoiler campaign that could aid President Trump, even as those close to Mr. West have expressed concerns about his mental health as he enters the political arena.

One operative, Mark Jacoby, is an executive at a company called Let the Voters Decide, which has been collecting signatures for the West campaign in three states. Mr. Jacoby was arrested on voter fraud charges in 2008 while he was doing work for the California Republican Party, and he later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.

Mr. Jacoby, in a statement, said his company was nonpartisan and worked for all political parties. “We do not comment on any current clients, but like all Americans, anyone who is qualified to stand for election has the right to run,” he said.

New York Magazine reported Monday evening on the campaign’s links to two other people with partisan ties. One is Gregg Keller, the former executive director of the American Conservative Union, who has been listed as a contact for the campaign in Arkansas. Mr. Keller, who did not respond to a message seeking comment, is a Missouri-based strategist. He was under consideration to be Mr. Trump’s campaign manager in 2015, a role that was ultimately filled by Corey Lewandowski, according to a former campaign official.

Another person linked to the West campaign is Chuck Wilton, who is listed as a convention delegate for Mr. Trump from Vermont and as an elector with the West operation who could potentially cast an Electoral College vote for Mr. West. Mr. Wilton could not be reached. He and his wife, Wendy, a Trump appointee at the United States Department of Agriculture, have been political supporters of the president. She hung up immediately when called at her office.

Late Tuesday, a local reporter in Madison, Wis., recorded a woman dropping off ballot signatures for Mr. West. A report in Vice identified the woman as a Republican elections lawyer, Lane Ruhland. Ms. Ruhland worked for the Republican National Committee during the 2016 presidential election recount in Wisconsin. She did not return requests for comment, and a spokesman for the law firm where she works, Husch Blackwell, did not have an immediate comment.

“It appears that the Kanye West made a smart decision by hiring an experienced election attorney,” said Alesha Guenther, a spokeswoman for the Wisconsin state Republican Party. “We welcome Kanye West and all other candidates who qualified for ballot access to the race.”

The nature of the financial relationships between the West campaign and the operatives, if any, was not immediately clear.

Mr. West was until recently a fervent supporter of Mr. Trump and said they shared a “dragon energy,” but he declared early last month that he would run for president himself. A few days later, Mr. Trump retweeted a post that said Mr. West could siphon votes from Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has clinched the Democratic nomination. “That shouldn’t be hard,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Corrupt Joe has done nothing good for Black people!”

This is gross exploitation of a mentally ill person. All we can do is hope that there are very few voters who will be fooled by what’s going on.

Frankly, I’m more worried about this:

Protect our democracy from destruction by declassifying key intel describing the danger of foreign subterfuge to our elections. Congress has been briefed, but sworn to secrecy—unacceptably.

— Richard Blumenthal (@SenBlumenthal) August 5, 2020

Hey, for all we know they’re working with Kanye too.

CNN reported this today:

Video of then-businessman Donald Trump struggling to vote in-person before declaring he would fill out an absentee ballot in 2004 has resurfaced this week amid a new round of unfounded attacks on mail-in voting from the President.

The “Access Hollywood” segment, filmed as Trump was attempting to vote in the 2004 election, shows Trump alongside TV host Billy Bush visiting multiple New York City polling locations. Trump, however, is blocked from voting at each location because he is not on any of the voter rolls at each stop.

Trump can be seen becoming increasingly frustrated before declaring, “I’m going to fill out the absentee ballot.”The segment ends with Trump filling out what Bush describes as a provisional ballot in his car.”I just voted,” Trump touted. “At least you can say the Trumpster doesn’t give up.”

Yeah. Hullabaloo readers have known about this since 2016:

August 5, 2016: The Donald tries to vote (I was unable to download the video from Access Hollywood at the time.)

October 2, 2016: When Trump tried to fraudulently vote they wouldn’t let him

And just a couple of months ago:

Remember when Trump had trouble voting in 2004?

Published by digby on May 21, 2020

Access Hollywood got it all on tape.

Trump is making a big deal about vote by mail, insisting that it’s rife with fraud. It isn’t, of course. Many states have been providing this option for some time and some even do it entirely by mail now.

But whatever. My personal feeling is that he’s just setting up the “fraud” excuse in case he loses. He knows he can’t stop states from doing vote by mail. If he wins, he’ll just do what he did last time and say that he won in spite of a huge number of fraudulent Democratic votes. In fact, it was really a landslide!

Yesterday he said that voting in person is an “honor” and that the only people who should be allowed to vote absentee should be those who are sick or are not going to be in the state on election day.

I guess he doesn’t remember this:

I’d guess he forgot to register and so his absentee ballot wasn’t counted. Some Republicans would say people like him should be charged with voter fraud.

But by his reasoning he should never have been allowed to vote that year at all. He didn’t have an excuse for voting absentee. He just didn’t turn up on the rolls.

BTW: You’d think this would have “resurfaced” in the mainstream media in 2016 from the moment Trump started braying about voter fraud and a “rigged” election.