198 search results for ""election integrity""

Why Republicans love the electoral college

From the Federalist:

The left is at it again, and conservatives need to be on high alert. The left has been pushing for a national popular vote to elect the president of the United States for years. Since 2017, 10 more states have either signed the National Popular Vote bill into law or approved the bill in one state legislative chamber. This should be a grave concern because it directly undermines the electoral system established by our Constitution. If not stopped, the American system of presidential elections will be changed potentially forever.

The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It has been enacted by 15 state legislatures plus Washington, D.C., and passed in 41 legislative chambers in 24 states. For the proposal to become the law of the land, enough states totaling at least 270 electoral votes would be required to enact the law, and states would then commit their electoral votes to the candidate with the most popular votes nationally, regardless of which candidate won at the state level.

The states that have enacted the compact represent 195 electoral votes: Delaware, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Vermont, Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, California, New York, and the District of Columbia. States with passage in one chamber include Arkansas, Arizona, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Virginia. Successful passage in all of these states represents 283 electoral votes, enough to change the law and make our presidential election decided via popular vote rather than the Electoral College. 

He thinks that’s a bad thing…

Democrats have long been unhappy with the electoral process, unless, of course, their candidate won. When their candidate loses, debate begins anew about how unfair the Electoral College is. The argument is always the same. Since we conduct our elections by democratic process, it makes sense to elect our nation’s executive according to the will of the majority with a voting plurality.

Five times, presidential candidates have won elections without the popular vote: John Quincy Adams (1824), Rutherford B. Hayes (1876), Benjamin Harrison (1888), George W. Bush (2000), and Donald Trump (2016).

Can this be any more specious? There have only been two cases of winners without the popular vote in more than a hundred years. They both happened in this century and both times Republicans won. Trump also lost the popular vote in 2020 and staged an insurrection when he didn’t win the electoral vote anyway. But Democrats are accused of being unhappy with the electoral process unless their candidates win.

Here is the usual argument that Real Americans would be cheated out of representation:

Minority and Less Populated Areas Would Lack Representation

The commonly heard sentiment during election cycles is “every vote matters.” However, what is not fair is that if the president is elected based on a plurality, then the minority would not have a chance of having their candidate elected. Only the concerns and interests of more heavily populated areas, such as the East and West coast cities, would be represented. Interests of the minority and less populated areas would naturally be set aside and of little interest to future presidential candidates. Worse, the executive would be beholden and accountable solely to the majority.

This condition was not the intent of our founders. Their intent was to ensure that the nation’s highest executive, as well as the executive branch, represented the interests of all Americans regardless of political affiliation. A future president would need to appeal to those concerned about not just national but also regional issues.

Further, the Electoral College provided a means to disburse and decentralize power. State electors are elected just days before and are unknown until just prior to an election to prevent undue influence to stay true to the people’s votes in their states. Our founders framed it so as to prevent collusion and cabalist (their word) behavior, preclude violence, and thwart involvement of foreign powers.

Again, who is he talking about? One party has committed all of those acts in just the last two elections and it wasn’t the Democrats…

Cabalism Comes to Light

Following the 2020 election, our founders’ concerns came to light and fruition. Our national elections have been fraught with cabalist behavior, undue influence, numerous forms of cheating, as well as foreign interference. The tyranny they feared came to pass, driven by collusion among the administrative state, the legislative branch, legacy media, Big Tech, and nongovernmental organizations. An independent executive branch separate from the legislature has become an illusion.

In Federalist Paper 68, Alexander Hamilton wrote, “the process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of the president will never fall with a lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue and a little arts of popularity may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first owners of a single state, but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole union.” Hamilton would have been appalled today to have witnessed the travesty undermining his sentiment.

He would have been appalled by Donald Trump, certainly, a man who illustrates every one of his fears. Can this argument be any more obtuse?

So why does all this matter?

An Oppressive Majority

It matters because the idea of a national popular vote is gaining steam and if adopted by enough states, the Electoral College will become irrelevant. Minority voter interests will no longer matter at the national level. Only the whims of the majority will. And the result will be precisely why Socrates opposed a democratic form of government. Once a majority is established, it finds a way to remain permanent, and the majority class will become oppressive to the minority class. There will be no means to overturn the majority, no matter how skewed the majority’s view may be.

The implications for the country are vast and would make the United States just another oppressive tyrannical state. The ultimate reason for the success of the U.S. was that its founders held a belief that we are created and guided by a higher power, and they recognized that men are inherently corruptible. They implemented controls to prevent those with ambitions from achieving outright power over the minority, thus making the U.S. unique among nations.

Right. Outright power over the majority was their vision all along.

The left’s tactics are in high gear, accelerating in an attempt to overwhelm conservatives and Republicans to a tipping point at which the left acquires complete control and the right becomes powerless.

The left’s all-out assault has become abundantly clear since President Joe Biden took office. As soon as Democrats attained the presidency and the narrowest of majorities in the House and Senate, they pressed forward with their agenda, nearly unimpeded had it not been for the likes of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and perhaps divine intervention.  

Whether changing voting laws in its favor, creating crises to circumvent the laws already in place, continually flooding the courts with litigation designed to throw sand in the gears of transparent elections, or changing the electoral process altogether, the left’s efforts to gain and retain control, by any means necessary, will not relent.

In addition to ongoing election integrity efforts across the nation, it is imperative that conservatives push back attempts to advance a national popular vote. It is incumbent upon individual citizens to tell their state representatives that it is not the desire of the people to circumvent the constitutional process for electing our president.

Failure to stop a national popular vote could take generations to reverse.

It’s hard to believe that any Republican in their right mind could make this argument after Donald Trump but there you have it. They are living in Bizarroworld and it’s one of the most disorienting aspect of our current era. It’s mind-boggling.

Just ask yourself what they will say the first time (if it ever happens) that a Democrat wins the electoral college and loses the popular vote. You will be able to hear the collective primal scream on the moon.

Why didn’t we know about this before?

I don’t want to get my hopes up about this revealing anything new. It may have just been a celebration of the Trump family. Still, it’s intriguing:

The House select committee investigating Jan. 6 sent a subpoena last week to ALEX HOLDER, a documentary filmmaker who was granted extensive access to President DONALD TRUMP and his inner circle, and who shot interviews with the then-president both before and after Jan. 6. The existence of this footage is previously unreported.

A source familiar with the project told Playbook on Monday night that Holder began filming on the campaign trail in September 2020 for a project on Trump’s reelection campaign. Over the course of several months, Holder had substantial access to Trump, Trump’s adult children and VP MIKE PENCE, both in the White House and on the campaign trail.

According to the subpoena, which was obtained exclusively by Playbook, the committee wants three main things from Holder:

(1) Raw footage from Jan. 6.

(2) Raw footage of interviews from September 2020 to present with Trump, Pence, DONALD TRUMP JR., IVANKA TRUMP, ERIC TRUMP and JARED KUSHNER.

(3) Raw footage “pertaining to discussions of election fraud or election integrity surrounding the November 2020 presidential election.”

Holder is expected to fully cooperate with the committee in an interview scheduled for Thursday. Read the full subpoena

It appears that the committee believes Trump was planning his coup before the election. (We know he planned to say that the election was stolen if he didn’t win…) maybe there’s something here.

Trump "blindsided" that documentary makers who taped him during a crucial period of time, because someone close to or in the family thought this was a smart project, kept the footage https://t.co/4jRAUXlkjJ

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) June 21, 2022

This is curious:

Senior campaign officials were unaware of the project, according to one former official.

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) June 21, 2022

This is what will happens when all these conspiracy theorists take over the election machinery

Get ready for the crazy:

Otero County is once again facing an election scandal as the Republican-controlled county commission is threatening to throw out over 7,000 votes by refusing to certify the results of the June 7 primary.

“Democratic Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver on Tuesday asked the state Supreme Court to order the three-member Otero County commission to certify June 7 primary election results to ensure voters are not disenfranchised and that political candidates have access to the general election ballot in November,” the Associated Press reported Tuesday. “On Monday, the commission in its role as a county canvassing board voted unanimously against certifying the results of the primary without raising specific concerns about discrepancies, over the objection of the county clerk.”

The county counted 7,123 votes in the state’s gubernatorial primaries.

“Members of the Otero County commission include Cowboys for Trump co-founder Couy Griffin, who ascribes to unsubstantiated claims that Trump won the 2020 election. Griffin was convicted of illegally entering restricted U.S. Capitol grounds — though not the building — amid the riots on Jan. 6, 2021, and is scheduled for sentencing later this month. He acknowledged that the standoff over this primary could delay the outcome of local election races,” the AP reported.

The complaints over the primary stem from GOP conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines.

Trump won over 60% of the vote in Otero County in 2020, but Griffin conducted a door-to-door “audit” anyway.

“The post-election canvassing process is a key component of how we maintain our high levels of election integrity in New Mexico and the Otero County Commission is flaunting that process by appeasing unfounded conspiracy theories and potentially nullifying the votes of every Otero County voter who participated in the primary,” the secretary of state explained.

The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a lawsuit in March seeking to have Griffin removed from office.

Griffin was at the Capitol on January 6 and he was convicted on one misdemeanor count. But sure, this guy should be in charge of vote certification.

This wonderful fellow:

The founder of the Cowboys for Trump political support group in a live Facebook video urged people who support performances of the Black national anthem at football games to “go back to Africa” and condemned as “vile scum” people who portray the Confederate flag as racist.

There are a lot more where he came from:

Jim Marchant, one of the organizers of a Trump-inspired “America First” slate of candidates who continue to question the legitimacy of the 2020 election, easily won the Republican nomination for secretary of state in Nevada, a key political battleground.

His victory was called by The Associated Press.

Mr. Marchant, who was also a member of Nevada’s alternate slate of pro-Trump electors seeking to overturn Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the state in 2020, has said he would have refused to certify that year’s election had he been in office.

In his push to become Nevada’s top election official, he has proposed decertifying Dominion voting machines and pushing for the hand counting of paper ballots, which experts say would bring lengthy delays and chaos to the voting process.

In the general election, he will face Cisco Aguilar, a Democratic lawyer who once worked for former Senator Harry Reid, in what will be a closely watched race that could hinge on the outcome of Senator Catherine Cortez Masto’s re-election bid. Down-ballot races for offices like secretary of state have often — though not always — closely mirrored results for top-of-the-ticket elections.

A former state assemblyman, Mr. Marchant unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2020. But rather than concede a race he lost by more than 16,000 votes, or about 5 percentage points, he blamed fraud for his loss, filing a lawsuit that echoed many debunked claims about the 2020 election that Republicans put forward elsewhere.

A red wave will sweep people like this into office. And then Donald Trump will be president again. Don’t think it can’t happen.

Promise the marks the stakes are apocalyptic and they are the Chosen

Still as true as when LBJ said it in 1960:

“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” — Lyndon B. Johnson, as told to Bill Moyers

The Jan. 6 panel on Monday played tape after witness tape confirming that Donald Trump’s closest advisers knew his stolen election narrative was “bullshit,” and said so. So they claim now under oath, having done nothing to alert the public when it might have saved lives. The committee also emphasized that promoting the Big Lie as a fundraising gimmick (for his nonexistent “Official Election Defense Fund”) netted Donald John Trump roughly $250 million.

Ja’han Jones writes at the ReidOut Blog that Trump could wind up paying for those lies. He’s already been sued by several Capitol and D.C. police officers. And more:

Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine is investigating the Jan. 6 attack and has filed a civil suit seeking damages from members of extremist groups — such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers — accused of participating in the riot. Multiple members of both groups have been charged with seditious conspiracy for their roles in the attack. If the committee continues to provide evidence Trump was responsible for the attack, it seems increasingly likely he’ll be added as a defendant in the D.C. lawsuit. 

On top of that, Trump is also facing a lawsuit filed by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which claims his campaign’s effort to discard 2020 votes in cities with large Black populations was illegal. 

Not facing war crimes charges, former President George W. Bush is painting in his retirement. Trump could spend his facing lawsuits from attorney’s general across the country over his “Official Election Defense Fund.”

Amanda Wick, a senior investigative counsel to the committee noted in video testimony, “Claims that the election was stolen were so successful, President Trump and his allies raised $250 million, nearly $100 million in the first week after the election.” (In the small print, IIRC, the mailings did mention a portion of the funds would go to Trump’s PAC.)

Not specifying these reports directly, New York Attorney General Tish James tweeted on Monday that investigating fraud is part of her remit. She is already investigating Trump for financial misconduct in New York.

The new details revealed tonight related to January 6 are disturbing.

It’s my duty to investigate allegations of fraud or potential misconduct in New York.

This incident is no exception.

— NY AG James (@NewYorkStateAG) June 14, 2022

The Department of Justice has in the past “charged a number of operators of so-called scam-PACs” for raising money that went to consultants and not to the advertised purpose. See Steve Bannon’s “We Build the Wall” campaign.

But, says the New York Times:

The experts said that any investigation of Mr. Trump’s fund-raising would likely target his aides, not the former president himself.

And they pointed out that the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, the campaign committee that sent out most of the solicitations for the election defense fund, transferred funds to the Republican National Committee, which spent money on legal fights related to the 2020 election.

“In contrast with some of these other scam PAC prosecutions — where effectively none of the money raised went toward satisfying donor intent — Trump might argue that a portion of the funds raised in the postelection period went toward litigation, and an additional portion went toward future ‘election integrity’ efforts,” said Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance expert at the watchdog group Documented.

“It would certainly be novel for the Justice Department to pursue a fraud case against a former president’s PAC, but Trump’s fraudulent postelection fund-raising was novel, too,” Mr. Fischer said, adding that the amount Mr. Trump’s team had raised after the election was “entirely unprecedented.”

Stephen Spaulding, an official at the good government group Common Cause who advised Ms. Lofgren on election law issues in 2020, said the Justice Department should examine whether the misleading fund-raising “crossed the line into wire fraud.”

“We Build the Wall” campaign crowd-funders Brian Kolfage and Andrew Badolato in April pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The charge carries a maximum of 20 years. Steve Bannon received a pardon from Trump.

But will Trump’s faithful even care that they were scammed?

In conversation with Greg Sargent, historian Rick Perlstein suggests they may not. Televangelists have fleeced their followers for decades. Seeing their supporters as “marks” goes back to the earliest days of movement conservatism in the 1960s (Washington Post):

Sargent: You see that overlap very clearly here: Trump and his allies told millions of voters that the election was being stolen from them — and that their country was being taken from them as well.

That had the effect of bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars. But it has also had the effect of creating something akin to a social movement.

Perlstein: Right-wing voters are acclimated into an understanding of the world in which they are being victimized by dark forces. That’s a great way for conservative leaders to get money shoveled in their direction. But it’s also a great way to form what Marxists used to call a “cadre,” a group of fanatically dedicated followers.

Now we face the phenomenon of millions of people, many of them armed, who are identifying their own safety, comfort and flourishing as human beings with the political success of Donald Trump and his allies.

Once, Republican used direct mail pitches pioneered by Richard Viguerie in the 1970s. Today, it is social media. Both do two things simultaneously, Perlstein observes. They raise money while spreading the misinformation gospel:

Perlstein: The mainstream of the population wakes up to discover that millions of people believe that babies are being harvested in a pizza basement. The only reason that can happen under the mainstream’s nose is the structure of social media and targeted algorithms.

In the same way, direct mail was news that people got that wasn’t from a newspaper or network news. It was news they got directly from the instigators of this conservative countercoup.

Like so much of the relationship between Reagan-era conservatism and Trump-era conservatism, it’s the same phenomenon — supercharged.

Yes, it’s confounding. Why don’t they rebel against being conned, David Roberts asks in a tweet thread. Why aren’t they furious?

Lyndon Johnson answered that 60 years ago.

It’s a wonder the former president is not hawking Trump-branded prayer cloths.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.
If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com

Sand in the gears

Since the days of Jim Crow, conservatives determined to keep the “wrong” people from voting have done most of their election suppression outside the polling place. They were Democrats before the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement; they are Republicans today. Beatings, threats, intimidation, poll taxes, literacy tests and more in the old Confederacy. Since Republicans took over the election suppression business, their methods have been more subtle, mostly, and mostly outside the polling place. Post 2020, they mean to change things up a bit.

Heidi Przbyla reported this week in Politico that rather than deploy volunteers outside to disrupt operations and challenge voter eligibility, the GOP is recruiting and training poll workers, the taxpayer-paid election judges and administrators who operate inside the polls for local boards of election:

The plan, as outlined by a Republican National Committee staffer in Michigan, includes utilizing rules designed to provide political balance among poll workers to install party-trained volunteers prepared to challenge voters at Democratic-majority polling places, developing a website to connect those workers to local lawyers and establishing a network of party-friendly district attorneys who could intervene to block vote counts at certain precincts.

“Being a poll worker, you just have so many more rights and things you can do to stop something than [as] a poll challenger,” said Matthew Seifried, the RNC’s election integrity director for Michigan, stressing the importance of obtaining official designations as poll workers in a meeting with GOP activists in Wayne County last Nov. 6. It is one of a series of recordings of GOP meetings between summer of 2021 and May of this year obtained by POLITICO.

Backing up those front-line workers, “it’s going to be an army,” Seifried promised at an Oct. 5 training session. “We’re going to have more lawyers than we’ve ever recruited, because let’s be honest, that’s where it’s going to be fought, right?”

Seifried also said the RNC will hold “workshops” and equip poll workers with a hotline and website developed by Zendesk, a software support company used by online retailers, which will allow them to live-chat with party attorneys on Election Day. In a May 2022 training session, he said he’d achieved a goal set last winter: More than 5,600 individuals had signed up to be poll workers and, several days ago, he submitted an initial list of more than 850 names to the Detroit clerk.

The people who administer elections are recommended by the major parties but are supposed to act in good faith in the public interest to administer elections fairly and dispassionately. Those who do not get the boot. (That happened to one Republican judge here during the North Carolina primary; the decision by the county board of elections was bipartisan.) The GOP appears to have plans to game that system as well. Politico has video.

This is Republicans’ “precinct strategy,” former Trump adviser Stephen Bannon tells listeners to his podcast.

“Democrats have had a monopoly on poll watching for 40 years, and it speaks volumes that they’re terrified of an even playing field,” said RNC spokesperson Gates McGavick. “The RNC is focused on training volunteers to take part in the election process because polling shows that American voters want bipartisan poll-watching to ensure transparency and security at the ballot box.”

Read closely. Poll watching is not the same as poll working. The RNC is conflating the two here. Poll watchers are inside observers only and may only interact with the chief judge if there are problems with long lines, broken machines or other voting issues. Poll workers are paid and trained by the boards of elections as good-faith election administrators. Or, that’s the idea. It’s just not what the RNC has in mind.

Democratic National Committee spokesperson Ammar Moussa said the DNC “trains poll watchers to help every eligible voter cast a ballot,” but neither the DNC nor the state party trains poll workers. The DNC did help recruit poll workers in 2020 due to a drop-off in older workers amid the pandemic; but he says it is not currently doing so and has never trained poll workers to contest votes.

“You shouldn’t have poll workers who are reporting to political organizations what they see,” said Rick Hasen, a law and political science professor at U.C. Irvine who operates Election Law Blog. “It creates the potential for mucking things up at polling places and potentially leading to delays or disenfranchisement of voters,” especially “if [the poll workers] come in with the attitude that something is crooked with how elections are run.”

And if they find nothing crooked, Republicans mean to crook it. With a focus on Michigan for now.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.
If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com

They’re being trained to create chaos

The Republicans are plotting to turn our elections into Trumpian circuses:

Video recordings of Republican Party operatives meeting with grassroots activists provide an inside look at a multi-pronged strategy to target and potentially overturn votes in Democratic precincts: Install trained recruits as regular poll workers and put them in direct contact with party attorneys.

The plan, as outlined by a Republican National Committee staffer in Michigan, includes utilizing rules designed to provide political balance among poll workers to install party-trained volunteers prepared to challenge voters at Democratic-majority polling places, developing a website to connect those workers to local lawyers and establishing a network of party-friendly district attorneys who could intervene to block vote counts at certain precincts.

“Being a poll worker, you just have so many more rights and things you can do to stop something than [as] a poll challenger,” said Matthew Seifried, the RNC’s election integrity director for Michigan, stressing the importance of obtaining official designations as poll workers in a meeting with GOP activists in Wayne County last Nov. 6. It is one of a series of recordings of GOP meetings between summer of 2021 and May of this year obtained by POLITICO.

Backing up those front-line workers, “it’s going to be an army,” Seifried promised at an Oct. 5 training session. “We’re going to have more lawyers than we’ve ever recruited, because let’s be honest, that’s where it’s going to be fought, right?”https://player.simplecast.com/e7b8bddc-0397-4831-8ac0-e8c1bbb75ae6?dark=false

Seifried also said the RNC will hold “workshops” and equip poll workers with a hotline and website developed by Zendesk, a software support company used by online retailers, which will allow them to live-chat with party attorneys on Election Day. In a May 2022 training session, he said he’d achieved a goal set last winter: More than 5,600 individuals had signed up to be poll workers and, several days ago, he submitted an initial list of more than 850 names to the Detroit clerk.

Democrat Janice Winfrey, who serves as the clerk, would be bound to pick names from the list submitted by the party under a local law intended to ensure bipartisan representation and an unbiased team of precinct workers.

Separately, POLITICO obtained Zoom tapings of Tim Griffin, legal counsel to The Amistad Project, an self-described election-integrity group that Donald Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani once portrayed as a “partner” in the Trump campaign’s legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election, meeting with activists from multiple states and discussing plans for identifying friendly district attorneys who could stage real-time interventions in local election disputes.

On the recording, Griffin speaks of building a nationwide network of district attorney allies and how to create a legal “trap” for Winfrey.

“Remember, guys, we’re trying to build out a nationwide district attorney network. Your local district attorney, as we always say, is more powerful than your congressman,” Griffin said during a Sept. 21 meeting. “They’re the ones that can seat a grand jury. They’re the ones that can start an investigation, issue subpoenas, make sure that records are retained, etc.,” he said.

POLITICO obtained about a dozen recordings from people who were invited to listen to the meetings. Seifried referred POLITICO’s requests for comment to the RNC. Griffin, through the Thomas More Society, which runs Amistad, did not return repeated calls and texts to spokesperson Tom Ciesielka.

A spokesperson for the RNC said the party is attempting to rectify an imbalance in favor of Democratic election workers in large urban areas, particularly Detroit, a city that votes reliably Democratic by more than 90 percent. Just 170 of more than 5,400 Detroit election officials were Republicans in 2020, according to the RNC.

“Democrats have had a monopoly on poll watching for 40 years, and it speaks volumes that they’re terrified of an even playing field,” said RNC spokesperson Gates McGavick. “The RNC is focused on training volunteers to take part in the election process because polling shows that American voters want bipartisan poll-watching to ensure transparency and security at the ballot box.”

In the introduction graphic on his training presentation, Seifried says the RNC’s goal is to “make it easy to vote and HARD TO CHEAT.”

But election watchdog groups and legal experts say many of these recruits are answering the RNC’s call because they falsely believe fraud was committed in the 2020 election, so installing them as the supposedly unbiased officials who oversee voting at the precinct level could create chaos in such heavily Democratic precincts.

There is little doubt that the bigger strategy is to create enough chaos and disruption in states with GOP legislatures that they will take over the electoral process and install their own electors. It will be challenged in the courts but I think it’s entirely possible that the Supremes will take a case and validate this whole “independent state legislature doctrine.”

Read the whole Politico article. This is a serious strategy and they are putting some real money and organizational heft behind this.

A Bizarro World Republican organizes election vigilantes

Right wing lawyer Cleta Mitchell has escaped the scrutiny and humiliation of Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell but she shouldn’t have. She was right in the middle of everything. And she still is:

In a hotel conference center outside Harrisburg, Pa., Cleta Mitchell, one of the key figures in a failed scheme to overturn Donald J. Trump’s defeat, was leading a seminar on “election integrity.”

“We are taking the lessons we learned in 2020 and we are going forward to make sure they never happen again,” Ms. Mitchell told the crowd of about 150 activists-in-training.

She would be “putting you to work,” she told them.

In the days after the 2020 election, Ms. Mitchell was among a cadre of Republican lawyers who frantically compiled unsubstantiated accusations, debunked claims and an array of confusing and inconclusive eyewitness reports to build the case that the election was marred by fraud. Courts rejected the cases and election officials were unconvinced, thwarting a stunning assault on the transfer of power.

Now Ms. Mitchell is prepping for the next election. Working with a well-funded network of organizations on the right, including the Republican National Committee, she is recruiting election conspiracists into an organized cavalry of activists monitoring elections.

In seminars around the country, Ms. Mitchell is marshaling volunteers to stake out election offices, file information requests, monitor voting, work at polling places and keep detailed records of their work. She has tapped into a network of grass-root groups that promote misinformation and espouse wild theories about the 2020 election, including the fiction that President Biden’s victory could still be decertified and Mr. Trump reinstated.

One concern is the group’s intent to research the backgrounds of local and state officials to determine whether each is a “friend or foe” of the movement. Many officials already feel under attack by those who falsely contend that the 2020 election was stolen.

An extensive review of Ms. Mitchell’s effort, including documents and social media posts, interviews and attendance at the Harrisburg seminar, reveals a loose network of influential groups and fringe figures. They include election deniers as well as mainstream organizations such as the Heritage Foundation’s political affiliate, Tea Party Patriots and the R.N.C., which has participated in Ms. Mitchell’s seminars. The effort, called the Election Integrity Network, is a project of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a right-wing think tank with close ties and financial backing from Mr. Trump’s political operation.

Ms. Mitchell says she is creating “a volunteer army of citizens” who can counter what she describes as Democratic bias in election offices.

“We’re going to be watching. We’re going to take back our elections,” she said in an April interview with John Fredericks, a conservative radio host. “The only way they win is to cheat,” she added.

Can you believe the chutzpah?

The good news is that as long as Republicans win elections there won’t be a problem. It’s only when they lose that our country will be under assault. So that’s good.

Guy at Trump rally in WY today says he thinks Liz Cheney will be defeated. “If not, we’ll know that the system’s rigged.” pic.twitter.com/RQ1VHZOORm

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 28, 2022

Lest you think this is some fringe movement by loonies like Sidney Powell. Note that the RNC and the Heritage Foundation is involved.

Loyalty only goes one way

I love this story about Trump and Mastriano. There could not be a more loyal lieutenant than the former colonel. But Trump didn’t think he tried hard enough so he refused to endorse him until it was clear he was going to win. In the process he seems to have upset nearly everyone.

Not that they won’t vote for him in 2024, of course …

Donald Trump and some of his top lieutenants spent the last year privately disparaging Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano.

The far-right lawmaker played an instrumental role pushing forward Trump’s conspiracies about the 2020 election results in Pennsylvania. There was no soldier more loyal to the cause. And like almost every aspiring Republican candidate in the state, Mastriano was eager to win Trump’s endorsement.

Yet Trump — who scrutinizes candidates for their presentation and star power — remained unconvinced. Mastriano’s loyalty alone wasn’t enough to earn his support. Trump wanted more concrete action.

Trump was skeptical of Mastriano, according to a source familiar with his thinking, because he had “done nothing on the audit promises in a year,” a reference to an investigation of the 2020 election that he pushed in the state.

The former president’s last-minute decision to publicly back Mastriano gave him another win to boast of on primary night, but at some cost. The endorsement stung not only some of his own aides and allies — who warned him about Mastriano’s electability issues — it also roiled a large swath of influential lawmakers and party officials in the state who now say Trump’s endorsement could end up damaging his own 2024 prospects in Pennsylvania, in the event he runs again.

“He’s alienated a lot of people on these endorsements. I guess the old saying in politics is that it’s better to be kingmaker than king. He just looks at who’s ahead in the polls and goes with that,” said former Pennsylvania GOP Rep. Tom Marino. “I’m very disappointed. Pissed off, to tell the truth.”

Marino supported Lou Barletta, the runner-up in the governor’s race, who has been among Trump’s most loyal allies in Pennsylvania. In 2016, Barletta was one of the first members of Congress to endorse Trump. But in the end, none of that mattered. Trump wanted to burnish his win-loss record and appease his base, which was frustrated by his endorsement of Dr. Mehmet Oz in the Senate primary, according to interviews with more than a dozen Trump aides, allies and Pennsylvania Republicans.

But by backing both Oz and Mastriano, Trump managed to upset nearly everyone — rank-and-file Republican voters who disliked the celebrity doctor, as well as state GOP insiders worried their gubernatorial nominee can’t win in November.

“I’m not very happy with his involvement in local races and endorsements,” said Rob Gleason, former chair of the Pennsylvania GOP, who endorsed former U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain for governor. “He doesn’t live in Pennsylvania. His name isn’t on the ballot. He might be wearing out his welcome.”

Mastriano’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Mastriano, a retired Army colonel who supports expanding gun rights, sponsored a bill to ban abortion once a heartbeat is detected, and was a leading voice against Covid-19 restrictions, has used those criticisms as a battle cry for his supporters. At his election night party, he said his movement is “under siege.”

“Our biggest problem,” said Mastriano on Steve Bannon’s “War Room: Pandemic” podcast on Tuesday, “is going to be these feckless RINO-type Republicans here that will not allow us to have a fighter as governor. But we’re going to beat them and they’re going to lose power, and they’re going to be put to shame.”

Down at Mar-a-Lago, prior to the endorsement, Trump was visited by a steady stream of Mastriano’s competitors who vied for his support. Barletta, businessman Dave White, and state Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman, who had become a golf partner with Trump, all courted him. But Trump didn’t want to back Barletta, who had lost a Senate run in 2018, wasn’t impressed by White’s polling, and, despite some chemistry, didn’t see a pathway to victory for Corman, who trailed in polls.

After Corman eventually dropped out last week, he and Trump spoke on the phone to discuss the race and Corman shared that he was supporting Barletta. At the time, Trump gave no indication of what he was going to do.

But according to multiple people, it was unlikely he would support Barletta, whom Trump had referred to at times as a “loser” because of his failed 2018 Senate campaign.

Asked for comment for this story, Barletta said: “At least I’m not a sore one.”

Oooh. Deep cut. Is it possible that some Republican officials are seeing the truth about their Dear Leader?

Sure. They always did. It’s their voters who don’t and they won’t say otherwise.

With only a few days remaining until the Republican primary, a number of people in Trumpworld told the ex-president not to endorse at all. And with far-right Senate candidate Kathy Barnette’s numbers surging as she campaigned in the state with Mastriano, others actively lobbied Trump against endorsing Mastriano, if only to curb Barnette’s rise.

One person particularly concerned with Barnette’s momentum was Fox News host Sean Hannity, who slammed the Senate candidate as “unelectable” on his show. In a sign of just how involved Hannity was in primary machinations, Oz thanked him in his election night speech for his “behind the scenes” work.

Donald Trump Jr. was another who voiced concerns internally to Trump’s staff about Mastriano’s electability in November, according to a person familiar with the conversations.

“The question here is, was the juice worth the squeeze? I think no,” said one prominent Republican involved in the governor’s race. “His standing and reputation — it took a big, big hit with both Oz and Mastriano [endorsements]. There is a third of the electorate that loves the endorsements, but there’s a great number of Republicans that don’t.”

Local party leaders were also frustrated by Trump’s eleventh-hour decision to wade into the governor’s race.

Asked if she was upset with Trump for endorsing Mastriano, Jackie Kulback, chair of the Cambria County Republican Party, said, “Yes. Absolutely.”

“We had our ground game in place,” said Kulback, whose county party backed Barletta and White. “We cannot ignore our countless hours of research and be swayed by the last-minute endorsement of former President Trump.”

All along, Mastriano had some key Trumpworld figures in his corner — and in Trump’s ear. Trump’s former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik, attorney Jenna Ellis, former OAN anchor Christina Bobb and Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington were all supportive of the Pennsylvania lawmaker. Michael Glassner, Trump’s former campaign chief operating officer, was also a consultant for Mastriano.

One person close to Trump said that in the end, the biggest factor in his decision to endorse Mastriano was his commitment to “election integrity” in the key swing state.

“The biggest reason why he did it was he said, ‘Mastriano was there for me and I need to be there for him,’” the person said, making comparisons to Trump and the criticisms he faced over electability when he ran for president in 2016.

Oh bullshit. He waiting until the Friday before the election! He waited until he saw that Mastriano was unbeatable!

“He endorsed someone who is going to be very difficult to elect. I’ve heard from so many people who’ve said to me, ‘He obviously isn’t running for president,’” said former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who had backed Corman. “And their rationale is, ‘If he actually cared about winning the presidency, he would not want a Democratic governor or Democratic secretary of state to do what they did two years ago.’”

Lol! Uhm, no. Trump is trying to put in place people who will steal the 21024 election for him and nobody is more committed to doing that than Mastriano. The only surprise is that he didn’t do it earlier.

And think about what Santorum just said: “he would not want a Democratic governor or Democratic secretary of state to do what they did two years ago.” What they did was conduct a free and fair election and refuse to overturn it. They just casually blurt out that Big Lie as if it’s the most banal truth in the world. Very depressing.

The Christian Right is right in the middle of it

Sarah Posner wrote this on twitter and I think it’s something to which we haven’t paid as much attention as we should.

This story, via @washingtonpost, about far-right GOP donor Steven Hotze being prosecuted for a scheme in which he allegedly dispatched a former cop to surveil an HVAC contractor, claiming he was delivering fraudulent ballots in the 2020 election, is something else. Thread:

I’ve written about Hotze, and his lawyer, Jared Woodfill before. Read the story. I have a few thoughts.

There are a lot of twists and turns here, but the gist is that Hotze, who has been criminally charged, allegedly bankrolled the ex-cop, through his nonprofit Liberty Center for God and Country, to find “voter fraud,” and he settled on some random HVAC repairman.

The ex-cop allegedly rammed this poor guy’s van and tried to make a “citizens’ arrest.” The DA in Harris County says of Hotze and the ex-cop:

Read the whole thing for all the twists, conspiracies, mishaps, and denials, including that there is a taped telephone conversation between Hotze and Ryan Patrick, a federal prosecutor in Texas under Trump, and the son of Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (Hotze’s friend).

Basically it looks like Hotze was trying to urge the younger Patrick to bring a federal case. (The HVAC repairman is suing Hotze, et. al.) Hotze is being represented by his friend, the lawyer and activist Jared Woodfill, whose campaign against trans people in Texas I wrote about in 2018.

Hotze has been around in the religious right for a long, long time. For a long time he was considered fringe; now he’s basically regular. For decades he has called for a Christian takeover of government.

For example:

This is Christian Reconstructionism. For more, see @julieingersoll, the true expert.

Hotze and Woodfill have been highly active around Texas GOP politics, always aiming to push the state party further and further to the right, attacking other Republicans as insufficiently conservative.

Woodfill told me in 2017 that they go to the same church as their friend Dan Patrick, whose son Hotze allegedly tried to convince to prosecute imagined voter fraud.

Starting in 2014, Woodfill and Hotze spearheaded a campaign that became the germ of today’s anti-trans assaults in red states across the country.

Woodfill told me in 2017 his ultimate goal is overturning Obergefell, and that he saw Trump, with his judicial nominations, as the path to doing that. Read the whole piece via @typeinvestigations or @RollingStone

So basically in this really convoluted story about Hotze’s “voter fraud” scheme, you see this progression: Christian nationalist activist believes Christians must take over government. Works tirelessly for decades to achieve result, precinct by precinct, law by law.

Public opinion seems to be turning the wrong way. Obergefell and LGBTQ rights, especially, even as they think they can ultimately reverse Roe. So the task becomes more urgent, in their minds.

So they support Trump. They get the judicial nominees they want. But once they’ve had that power they don’t want to let it go, by any means necessary.

I think a lot of people don’t really appreciate the extent to which the aims of (and disappointments of) the religious right are tied up in Trump’s stolen election lie, and the quest to hold onto power because their ideology and political position is unpopular.

(That’s also why we saw #capitolsiegereligion, as documented by @plmanseau and others. See also: Abortion’s Last Stand in the South: A Post-Roe Future is Already Happening in FLorida) and why we’ve seen new Christian Right support for voter suppression (under the guise of “election integrity”).

When you have people, like Hotze, who think they are carrying out a divine mission to take over government from secularists, “communists,” or “sodomites,” things get dangerous very fast, as evidenced in this alleged plot, for which hopefully there will be accountability.

Originally tweeted by Sarah Posner (@sarahposner) on May 7, 2022.

In Utah!

You can’t make this stuff up. Seriously, how do these people get driver’s licenses or find their way to the grocery store?

For Salt Lake County Republicans, warnings of voter fraud came from inside the party on Saturday. The vote to nominate a GOP candidate for Salt Lake County Clerk was marred when a pair of delegates were caught attempting to vote more than once, with one extra vote making it into a ballot box at Saturday’s county nominating convention.

The extra vote did not impact the outcome, as Goud Maragani easily won the nod from delegates over Nancy Lord. After the two cheaters were caught, the remaining delegates voted to expel them from their positions within the party. Republican officials said they planned to press charges, but it’s unclear what laws may have been broken since Saturday’s vote was conducted as part of a private organization and not a governmental entity.

Saturday’s attempted ballot box stuffing at the Republican convention was more election fraud than has been proven in Utah’s entire 2020 election.

The irony of the situation was undeniable, given how tightly the Salt Lake County GOP has embraced former President Donald Trump’s false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election. It was at the center of Maragani’s successful pitch to delegates and other candidates spoke on the issue up when it was their turn to address the convention. Party chair Chris Null broached the topic, teasing a forthcoming report from the party.

“We put together an election integrity committee, and they put together a report that we’ll be releasing very soon. There are some significant problems with our current mail-in voting system,” Null said.

Even Rep. Burgess Owens got in on the action, playing footsie with the “stop the steal” crowd, and going as far as comparing the 2020 election to historic attacks on the country.

“After events like The Alamo, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 and 2020 is when people start to wake up. Once we see we’re at war, we wake up,” Owens said.

It’s become clear that these people are all suffering from some kind of mass hysteria.