If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The workers are more powerful with their hands in their pockets than all the property of the capitalists. --Joe Ettor (IWW labor organizer)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IASdERt3-m0
Tuesday, August 6, 2024
First a Truly Great Campaign Ad, Then Analysis of How and Why Republicans in the Trump / Project 2025 forces will not Accept a Standard Electoral Defeat
4). “Trump doesn't need to win the vote, he just plans to contest the results”, Aug 02, 2024, Frank Vyan Walton, The Daily Kos, (there are two good embedded videos in this article, the first near the top of the article that is 6:19 long and features Rachel Maddow discussing statements by Trump that: “just vote this November and you'll never have to vote again”, and the repeated statements Trump has made that “we have all the votes we need, you don't need to vote at all, even this November”, and near the bottom another video that is 16:06 long and features ab discussion by Brian Taylor Cohen with Marc Elias as well as some highlights from the Rachel Maddow video that appears at the top of the article), at < https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/8/2/2259478/-Trump-doesn-t-need-to-win-the-vote-he-just-plans-to-contest-the-results >.
5). “Extremist White Christian Nationalists Prepping For War | Brad Onishi | TMR”, Jul 16, 2024, Sam Seder & Emma Vigeland interview Brad Onishi, The Majority Report, duration of video 48:58, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq5z1xdHN9Y >. Onishi is the author ofPreparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism – And What Comes Next.
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction by dmorista: First in Item 1)., “These Guys Are Just Weird”, this stunning and clever political ad, produced by Won't PAC Down, catches the essence of the crazed aspects of the Extreme-Right Agenda, that a second Trump Regime would impose on the American population. It would be nice to see it get wider distribution. It has a similar tone that the famous Republican House Member telling a couple about ready to engage in sex that he is enforcing the Republican Agenda and they cannot use a condom; but takes the issue quite a bit farther.
All four of the remaining articles / videos discuss non-electoral methods by which the Republicans plan to take power in 2025. Item 2)., “GOP plans to win ….”, Item 3)., “The GOP’s Secret Weapon ….”, Item 4)., “Trump doesn't need to win ….”, and Item 5)., “Extremist White Christian Nationalists ….” all discuss different aspects of the Trumpista / Republican plans to not accept an electoral defeat and to take power by any one of several methods.
The Far-Right has worked assiduously, certainly since at least the early 1970s, to take power and push the socioeconomic norms of the U.S. much farther to the right than used to be the case previously. They accept that their advance has been episodic and partial, but take any political development that pushes the norms of the country to the right, and then renew their attack on civil society from the new position. They also have no compunctions about using coercive and behind the scenes operations to push their agenda. The leadership of the Right also realizes that, in reality, they lost the ideological part of "the Culture Wars". The majority of the American people do not want to live in a Prudish Oppressive Theocratic Authoritarian society. Thus their only option is to impose that sort of socioeconomic order, that carefully protects the interests of the Rich, by stealth and secrecy.
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GOP plans to win this election — in court, if not at the ballot box
House Speaker Mike Johnson’s threat got overwhelmed by the news of Joe Biden’s departure from the presidential race, but it may have given away the Republican Party's fall strategy.
On the same Sunday that Biden announced his exit and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, Johnson predicted that his party would file lawsuits to keep Biden’s name on the ballot in several states, including such competitive battlegrounds as Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin.
Republicans wouldn’t have had much of a case. Biden, after all, had yet to be nominated, so any lawsuit would have looked to force his name on a ballot where it hadn’t yet appeared.
But the fact that Republicans greeted Harris’ entry into the race with the threat of litigation provides a sobering reminder that the GOP has little intention of conceding an electoral loss on Nov. 5. That’s simply when a second contest will begin — one aimed not at swing-state voters but a battalion of right-wing Federalist Society-approved judges installed on federal courts and the deeply conservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court.
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Look closely and that second battle is already underway. While the usual rituals of an election play out nationwide — rallies, TV ads, conventions, sofa memes — a shadow fight is already unfolding in battleground-state courts. They include lawsuits in Michigan, Arizona and Nevada that seek to knock voters off the rolls in the weeks before the election, as well as litigation in Nevada and elsewhere hoping to void absentee ballots received after Election Day.
These lawsuits rely heavily on unsubstantiated Republican fantasies about dead people and non-citizens casting ballots. Even if these cases go nowhere, they could redound to the GOP’s benefit simply because they seed the groundwork for claims that the election has been stolen and cast doubt among the party’s base about the process and the legitimacy of the results.
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But while most such cases are likely to be dismissed or brushed aside, as were nearly five dozen cases related to similar claims after the 2020 election, it’s a mistake to remember Rudy Giuliani’s press conference outside Four Seasons Landscaping and write these off as a joke.
The GOP’s election-denial legal machinery has been fine-tuned since then. The promotion of discredited fraud assertions is now at the very heart of the Republican Party: The Republican National Committee, now co-chaired by Lara Trump, the ex-president’s daughter-in-law, is already part of more than 90 active voting and election cases across nearly two dozen states. Many of the GOP’s failed challenges in 2020 were dismissed by courts because they were filed too late, after the election; Republicans learned their lesson and got a head start this time.
The RNC, now co-chaired by Lara Trump, is already part of more than 90 active voting and election cases across nearly two dozen states. Republicans learned their lesson from 2020 — and got a head start this time.
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Sharper and more sober legal minds abound in 2024 as well. Consovoy McCarthy, the elite Washington, D.C., law firm that’s deeply connected to the GOP and the conservative legal movement — well known for hiring Justice Clarence Thomas' former clerks after their tenure and training at the Supreme Court — is at the forefront of several important cases.
Conservatives have also mastered the intricacies of circuit-shopping, the dark art of placing the nuttiest legal theories cooked up in Federalist Society hothouses before the most rabidly ideological judges. File even the most ludicrous election-related case in Amarillo, Texas, and it there is a nearly 100 percent chance it will be heard by Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. He founded the Fort Worth chapter of the Federalist Society and was later plucked from an extreme religious liberty organization by right-wing judge whisper Leonard Leo and installed as the only federal judge at the Amarillo courthouse; Kacsmaryk then suspended nationwide access to mifeprestone, a drug used to induce abortion, and overruled the Biden administration to reinstate the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” immigration policy.
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It’s all too easy to imagine a Judge Kacsmaryk, or a Judge Aileen Cannon, causing chaos with a decision that slows down the certification process after Election Day and before the Electoral College meets in mid-December. This, in turn, could open the doors to all sorts of potential chicanery regarding elector slates in GOP-led state legislatures and multiple questions that the U.S. Supreme Court would need to decide.
The Roberts court has already demonstrated, during this year's case on presidential immunity, that the conservative supermajority is happy to slow-walk the process to benefit Trump and the Republicans, aiding his strategy to postpone any prosecution until after the election, before ultimately placing Trump above the law. The same court moved quickly, on the other hand, to reverse Colorado's decision to Trump from its primary ballot for his actions in fomenting an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.
It’s cases like these where many Americans still want to believe that the court will come to the defense of American democracy. They — along with many in the media — cling to the hope that Chief Justice John Roberts is the umpire and institutionalist that he has long claimed to be, rather than the lifelong Republican who has looked to unravel the Voting Rights Act since his earliest days in Washington. He is also the jurist responsible for the decisions that have gutted and corrupted our politics, drowning it in billions of dollars in dark money (Citizens United), unleashing a new era of voter restrictions and suppression across the South (Shelby County) and blessing the most extreme partisan gerrymanders in our nation’s history (Rucho v. Common Cause).
After all, the GOP’s determination to capture the courts — which comprise the third branch of the federal government, not a neutral tiebreaker — has always been about cementing its control over power and elections, determining which voices count and which do not. It is worth remembering that three of the current justices proved their bona fides to the Federalist Society and the conservative legal movement that put them on the bench through their work for the GOP on the 2000 case Bush v. Gore, which halted the Florida recount and installed a Republican in the White House.
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John Roberts is not your friend. Now this muscular conservative supermajority, secure in its power, has come into its own. One need not be a democracy doom-and-gloomer to worry about the litigious six weeks that will surely follow this election. One need only remember Bush v. Gore.
On Nov. 5, 175 million of us will cast ballots. Sometime after that, nine justices might render the only votes that count.
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The GOP's secret weapon for 2024: bogus lawsuits
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On March 19, Staci Lindberg, the elected clerk of Nevada’s Lyon County, was hit with some unsettling news: She was being sued for the first time in her life. The plaintiff? Her own political party.
The Republican National Committee had filed a lawsuit against Lindberg and five other Nevada election officials, alleging they had failed to follow a 1993 federal law requiring they maintain accurate voter registration rolls. As evidence, the RNC pointed to three counties it claimed had more people on their rolls than voting-age residents.
Lindberg, who in 2022 campaigned for the clerk position as a “patriotic, hardworking, conservative Christian,” says she was “shocked” by the accusation. The RNC hadn’t even inquired about her voter roll maintenance processes before wielding such a serious allegation. “It hurt my feelings,” Lindberg, a soft-spoken grandmother of nine, told me. And she notes: “I truly feel we’re one of the most secure and safest counties when it comes to election integrity.”
Lindberg shouldn’t take the lawsuit too personally. Three of the other election officials sued alongside her were also Republicans. One, Jim Hindle, was such a Donald Trump diehard in 2020 that he was indicted last December for serving as one of Nevada’s fake Trump electors. (The case was dismissed; Hindle declined to comment.) Lindberg and her fellow Republican clerks are just collateral damage in an aggressive and far-flung RNC strategy to contest the 2024 election before a single vote has been cast.
In Lyon County—which is located in western Nevada and has not favored a Democrat for president since FDR—the RNC initially asserted that 105 percent of voting-eligible residents were registered, an “impossibly high” percentage, suggesting “an ongoing, systemic problem with its voter list maintenance efforts.” The RNC made similar claims for nearby Douglas (104 percent) and Storey (113 percent) counties.
More curious than these alarming numbers—and the implications of voter fraud—was how the party came up with them. To estimate registration rates in each county, the RNC compared voter data from the secretary of state to a US census dataset that averaged populations over five years. The census data does not account for the tens of thousands of people who migrated to Nevada during the pandemic. More crucially, it often misses people who are lawfully registered to vote but temporarily residing elsewhere—such as college students and military service members. The RNC’s lawyers also, at one point, projected what they thought Nevada’s voting registration should be by extrapolating from a census survey of 54,000 Americans nationwide, not Nevadans specifically.
“They take one measure of one thing in one place, purport to compare it with another measure of another thing in a different place, and arrive at a conclusion that does not follow,” says Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor and former adviser in the Biden administration. “It’s a little bit like saying, ‘My clock doesn’t match my thermometer, so that means I need to fill up my car.’” Or as Laena St-Jules, Nevada’s senior deputy attorney general, put it in a letter responding to the RNC’s allegations: “This is comparing apples to orangutans.”
Illustration by Tyler Comrie
However math-challenged, the RNC’s organized and well-financed legal approach is a sea change from 2020, when the party’s effort to hijack the Oval Office was frenzied and reactionary. The previous attempt was marked by a bevy of postelection lawsuits brimming with outlandish claims, and surreal press conferences headlined by the party’s legal frontman, Rudy Giuliani, who once famously addressed reporters outside a Philadelphia landscaping business next to a porn shop; in another briefing, black hair dye oozed from the former New York City mayor’s scalp as he stammered on about widespread fraud that he could never prove. (Giuliani was disbarred in July by a state appeals court that said he “baselessly attacked and undermined the integrity of this country’s electoral process.”)
Even those incoherent efforts had a notable effect. Just before the 2020 election, 55 percent of Republican voters expressed confidence in the electoral process, according to a Monmouth University poll. Two weeks after the election, as Giuliani, Trump, and other Republicans flooded the courts and the airwaves with baseless allegations of fraud, only 22 percent did.
The party’s recent maneuvering suggests a far more sophisticated—and more dangerous—strategy. Co-led by Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, the RNC is mobilizing what it has called the “most extensive and monumental election integrity program in the nation’s history,” which will involve “100,000 dedicated volunteers and attorneys.” Spearheading this effort is Christina Bobb, the former One America News personality and Trump lawyer who has been indicted in Arizona for her alleged involvement in Trump’s fake elector scheme.
“This is comparing apples to orangutans.”
The RNC says it is already involved in at least 78 election-related lawsuits in 23 states, often working with white-shoe law firms—including Consovoy McCarthy, which employs multiple former clerks to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who may eventually be called upon to hear the merits of some of the cases. Several of them focus on longtime GOP bugaboos, like signature verification laws and absentee voting protocols. Others are dressed-up versions of Trump’s wilder conspiracies, including his claim that a “tremendous number of dead people” cast ballots in 2020. Importantly, the buckshot legal onslaught is preemptive, not defensive, and appears intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2024 election results. (After Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the ticket, Republicans expanded their aim to question the legality of Harris becoming the presumed Democratic nominee. Republicans provided no basis for their argument; the RNC did not respond to broader questions about the legal strategy.)
“These claims are designed not to change policy between now and November, or to change administrative procedure in elections between now and November,” says David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, “but to seed the ground or claims that an election was stolen.”
Multiple timesa month, Ingham County clerk Barb Byrum sits down at her desk in a stone-clad government building southeast of Lansing, Michigan, and compares the recent death certificates her office has received against the county’s Qualified Voter File. Each death gets her condolences—and a distinct marking on the QVF: “CHALLENGED. DECEASED.”
This same process plays out in all 83 of the state’s counties and is just one of many ways the state maintains its voter rolls. After this county-level review, city and township clerks verify and finalize the county clerk’s markings. In Michigan, Nevada, and almost every other state, secretaries of state and county clerks share the responsibility of keeping their master rolls accurate. In addition to checking the lists against death certificates and Social Security data to cull deceased voters, state election officials cross-check with DMV data to identify changes of address. Further, election mail returned as “undeliverable” allows clerks to mark a voter “inactive” and—if that person doesn’t respond to mailings or vote for two more election cycles—remove them from the rolls.
Despite these safeguards, Byrum has received multiple emails from so-called election integrity activists urging her to purge batches of purportedly dead voters. Two of the lists she’s received in the last four months contained the same names, which the office investigated, but it found that the voters in question did not have death certificates.
Activists have besieged clerks around the state with similar lists, prompting Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to twice write to clerks to reiterate the proper rules and procedures for updating the QVF. The lists people send in “do not constitute permissible challenges and clerks should not reject or challenge ballots on the basis of these emails,” she wrote in one missive.
Such tactics extend beyond Michigan. In March, the New York Times reported that a “network of right-wing activists and allies of Donald J. Trump” was “quietly challenging thousands of voter registrations in critical presidential battleground states.” In some cases, this cabal “pressed local officials,” even cautioning that clerks may be breaking the law if they did not remove the flagged names. In Michigan, these self-appointed fraud watchdogs nicknamed their efforts “soles to the rolls,” a riff on the “souls to the polls” events some Black churches hold to encourage parishioners to vote.
The attempts may seem bush league, but the underlying allegation that state rolls are teeming with dead people is buttressed by a much more official effort, an RNC lawsuit against Benson this past spring alleging that “impossibly high” registration rates throughout Michigan “indicate an ongoing, systemic problem with its voter list maintenance efforts.”
If that language sounds familiar, it should: It’s the same phrasing the RNC’s lawyers from Consovoy McCarthy used in their lawsuit against the Nevada clerks. The RNC claims that the fraud it alleges in Nevada is even more pervasive in Michigan—that at least 53 Michigan counties have “more active registered voters than they have adult citizens who are over the age of 18,” and that an additional 23 have registration rates exceeding 90 percent of their adult populations. By this accounting, the rolls in all but seven of the state’s 83 counties would be crowded with voters who have died or moved away.
“These claims are designed not to change policy between now and November…but to seed the ground for claims that an election was stolen.”
Both RNC lawsuits rest on disingenuous interpretations of the National Voter Registration Act, says historian Alex Keyssar, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School. The bipartisan 1993 law was intended to increase public participation in elections. The Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965, had previously outlawed explicitly racist hurdles such as literacy tests, but until the NVRA was enacted, registering to vote remained challenging. “You had to go down to a voter registration office,” Keyssar says. “You had to figure out, depending on the state and sometimes even the city or county, where the office was, what hours it was open, and what identification materials they would need.”
Also known as the Motor Voter Act, the NVRA made the process more accessible by requiring state governments to offer voter registration to people applying for driver’s licenses. It stipulated that states must make a “reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters,” but officials also must protect voters from arbitrary or partisan purges by waiting two full federal election cycles before removing anyone they have flagged as inactive.
The claim of inflated voter rolls in Michigan, according to the secretary of state’s motion to dismiss the RNC lawsuit, is based on a figure that includes inactive voters who cannot yet be removed legally, per the NVRA. The motion also counters that the RNC doesn’t “identify a single voter in any Michigan county that is ineligible to be registered but nonetheless appears as an active voter.”
Becker, of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, says the RNC is “misunderstanding the difference between active voter records and inactive voter records, and often conflating the two, possibly intentionally, to create the impression that there’s some massive fraud on the horizon when that’s of course not the case at all.”
What’s more, Michigan and Nevada each backstop their voter roll maintenance with help from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a nonpartisan information-sharing nonprofit whose 24 member states (plus DC) compare voter registrations against DMV data to identify people who are registered in multiple states, who have duplicate registrations within a state, who have died, or who, in extremely rare cases, have cast ballots in more than one state. In 2020, ERIC flagged the registrations of 1.5 million voters who may have moved between states, 1.2 million who may have moved within a state, 135,000 potential duplicate registrations, and 73,000 possibly deceased voters. Many had already been flagged, but ERIC is helpful as a fail-safe to ensure necessary fixes get made.
Yet in a wildly ironic twist, ERIC has itself become a right-wing target. Since 2022, nine GOP-led states have withdrawn from the compact based on unfounded claims that ERIC is a “left-wing voter registration drive” designed to boost Democratic candidates. This conspiracy theory was promulgated by the Gateway Pundit blog, which also claimed that survivors of the Parkland high school shooting were crisis actors and that Dr. Anthony Fauci planned an avian flu outbreak to promote vaccines. Never mind that ERIC’s mission is to improve the accuracy of the rolls and make elections more secure—or that the top election officials in four of the seven states that founded ERIC in 2012 were Republicans. The withdrawal of those nine states leaves ERIC with less data to cross-check.
Right-wing fantasies of voter rolls packed with dead and ineligible voters are nothing new, especially in Michigan. In September 2020, a conservative group calling itself the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) and chaired by Cleta Mitchell, an Oklahoma lawyer at the forefront of efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, began claiming that Michigan’s rolls may have contained more than 27,000 dead people. According to court records, PILF never produced the crossmatching information it supposedly used in its determination. The group couldn’t even prove all of the names it cited belonged to registered Michigan voters. It finally filed a lawsuit in November 2021. The case was dismissed this past spring, and the RNC filed a similar action two weeks later.
The federal judge who tossed the PILF case pointed to US Election Assistance Commission data indicating that Michigan election officials are actually quite good at keeping their rolls up to date: For the 2018 cycle, Michigan ranked fourth out of 50 states for purging the largest number of dead voters from its rolls; in 2020, it ranked fifth, removing 187,608 deceased people.
Michigan’s Senate, then controlled by Republicans, debunked similar 2020 claims that the dead were voting en masse. In June 2021, after hearing 28 hours of testimony from almost 90 people and reviewing thousands of pages of subpoenaed government documents, three Trump-supporting GOP lawmakers and one Democrat released a 55-page report proclaiming they’d found “no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud in Michigan’s prosecution of the 2020 election,” in which Joe Biden beat Trump by more than 154,000 votes.
“Is the drive to discredit the election process part of the plan? Absolutely.”
Court cases and investigations often drag on for months or years as fabricated allegations harm voter confidence and even incite violence, like Michigan experienced after Election Day 2020. Court records detail how staffers at the Bureau of Elections began receiving an onslaught of emails and calls, many threatening violence. Over the next few weeks, the bureau shut down its phone lines and closed its offices due to bomb threats. Officials had to hold meetings at undisclosed locations and even be provided with police protection. Dozens of gun-toting protesters showed up at the home of Benson, the secretary of state, as she was putting up Christmas decorations with her 4-year-old son.
In Maryland and Pennsylvania, the United Sovereign Americans, a far-right group that has claimed to measure “the effect of millions of instances of apparent election fraud,” is pursuing voter roll lawsuits similar to the PILF case. But experts say the Michigan and Nevada lawsuits, with their RNC imprimatur, could prove more dangerous. “We now have a major political party bringing these lawsuits, and what that does is strengthens this narrative that there’s something wrong,” says Caren Short, director of legal and research for the League of Women Voters, which has filed motions to intervene in several suits initiated by the RNC, including the Michigan case. “Regardless of whether they win, whether the case is dismissed, as they usually are, it still has the impact of creating mistrust.”
Democrats and Republicans alike have long engaged in legal battles over election rules. Some cases challenging new voting procedures are “legitimate efforts by partisans,” says Becker.
Days before Wisconsin’s April 2020 primary elections, for example, a federal judge extended the state’s absentee ballot receipt deadline by a week at the request of the Democratic National Committee and other groups. Citing an unprecedented surge in absentee ballot demand and postal delays during the pandemic, the judge ruled that ballots postmarked after Election Day must be counted as long as they were received by the extended deadline. The RNC appealed the decision to the US Supreme Court, arguing the change was ordered too close to Election Day. The Supreme Court agreed. Fair enough.
More recently, voting rights groups sued to block a new North Carolina law that would have permitted officials to discard the ballots of same-day registrants if a single notice sent to their mailing address had been returned as “undeliverable.” Following a January court injunction striking down part of the law, the state elections board issued a memo requiring that election officials reach out to the registrants by mail, email, and phone to allow them an opportunity to “cure” their ballot and have it counted if they could provide proof of address. Makes sense.
But another category of lawsuits—the sinister type—is abounding this cycle. These lawsuits, Becker says, are “not designed to win” but are regurgitating previously rejected arguments or challenging years-old election laws in hopes of gaining an edge, if only by manufacturing distrust. “They are premised on a view of the world that does not comport with reality,” says Loyola’s Levitt.
In addition to the voter roll cases in Michigan and Nevada, the RNC is recycling allegations over absentee ballot receipt deadlines that have been rejected repeatedly by the courts. This serves two purposes: Regardless of the outcome, the legal claims will inspire doubt in every state where they are filed. And the RNC may eventually find a conservative court willing to accept its argument.
That’s the approach that appears to be playing out in deep red Mississippi, where the RNC asked a federal court to strike down a state deadline on absentee ballots. A 2020 law passed nearly unanimously in the Republican-controlled state legislature allows the counting of absentee ballots that arrive up to five days after the election, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. (This differs from the Wisconsin case, which involved ballots postmarked after Election Day.) In its complaint, filed in a conservative division, the RNC argues the Mississippi law “extends the election” in violation of federal law and dilutes “honest votes” in a way that “specifically and disproportionately harms Republican candidates and voters.” (Trump’s baseless attacks on absentee voting have alienated some Republicans from that voting method.)
More than a dozen states have similar deadlines for mail-in ballots. It’s an important policy that safeguards the rights of voters whose ballots arrive late through no fault of their own, said Greta Martin, the litigation director of Disability Rights Mississippi, which filed an amicus brief in the case. These voters include overseas service members casting ballots from their deployments. As with the lawsuits challenging voter roll maintenance, the RNC’s claims in the Mississippi lawsuit have been previously debunked. Federal judges in Illinois and North Dakota—both Trump nominees—dismissed challenges to the post-election receipt deadlines, with the judge in Illinois writing: “Plaintiffs’ votes here are not diluted by other valid, lawfully cast votes.” (An appeal is pending.)
A federal judge also dismissed, in 2020, an RNC lawsuit challenging a New Jersey provision that allows clerks to accept nonpostmarked ballots up to 48 hours after polls close. (To arrive within that window, they would have likely been mailed before Election Day.) Here the claims of vote dilution were deemed “too speculative.” But this past spring, the RNC challenged Nevada’s similar policy on nonpostmarked ballots received no later than three days after Election Day. (The case is ongoing.) The Trump campaign is a plaintiff in both cases.
“Is the drive to discredit the election process part of the plan? Absolutely,” says Levitt.
Back in Nevada, Lindberg, the Lyon County clerk, is a little less cynical. She came to see the RNC’s lawsuit against her and the other clerks as an opportunity for election officials to build some trust and “share information” in a court setting. “I have an open-book policy,” she says. If any local voter wants to come watch her do voter roll maintenance, she says she’ll “get him a chair and a cold water.”
A judge dismissed the Nevada case on June 18, but some locals are still riled up. “We get a lot of people yelling at us, calling us names, saying that we’re trying to cheat them,” Lindberg told me after the court ruled in her favor. (On July 2, the RNC filed a last-ditch effort to revive its claims.)
Byrum, the Ingham County clerk, thinks the RNC’s Michigan case, too, will eventually be dismissed, but she doesn’t believe winning was the group’s primary objective. “The court cases,” she says, “are an attempt to divert attention and resources away from election management and election administration, with the added bonus of sowing additional seeds of doubt in the integrity of our election.”
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Trump doesn't need to win the vote, he just plans to contest the results
Friday, August 02, 2024 at 12:05:21p EDT
As described by Rachel Maddow, Trump has said to his flock multiple times that “They don’t need to vote.” Why does he say that?
Rolling Stone and American Doom identified at least 70 individuals working as county election officials in swings states like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania who questioned the validity of Donald Trump's 2020 election loss or refused to certify results, including at least 22 who refused or delayed the certification of election results in recent years.
“I think we are going to see mass refusals to certify the election,” said Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias. “Everything we are seeing about this election is that the other side is more organized, more ruthless, and more prepared.”
Certification of election results is considered a "ministerial task" required by state and local law, but the former president's lies about his loss nearly four years ago have resulted in Republicans using that process to hear spurious fraud allegations and challenging the rules guiding certification.
“At this moment there are NO guidelines on what is required to certify an election in Georgia,” wrote David Hancock, an election official in Gwinnett County, Georgia, on his Facebook page in late May. “But some of us are working to change that. Stand by.”
Republicans have refused to certify election results at least 35 times since Trump lost to President Joe Biden, and while none of those delays have held up in court, some lawsuits over the issue are currently before state judges.
Continued…
“From the influence of calling for hand counts of ballots, to the pressure to not certify an election … it’s all connected to this broader effort to change the rules, so that, if needed, election deniers can change the results of an election,” said Lizzie Ulmer, a senior vice president at the States United Democracy Center.
“It makes sense that certification has become one of the tactics used by the election denier movement to throw sand into the gears of running a free, fair, and smooth election.”
GOP state legislatures have passed 22 bills aimed at so-called "election integrity" that Ulmer says takes away authority from election officials, increases penalties for mistakes and limits the ability to register voters online. Right-wing groups have already challenged thousands of voter registrations using an app created by election conspiracists.
“In 2020, there were 85 or so lawsuits filed concerning the election. Right now there are more than 150 lawsuits currently in court, and about half of them are filed by vote suppressors or election deniers,” Elias said. “If I would have proposed in 2020 the idea that there was a species of people like this who are trying to make it harder to vote and not certify elections, you wouldn’t have believed me.”
This is why Trump doesn’t care if people vote or not. He doesn’t need them to vote, it doesn’t matter what the results are — they’re going to challenge the results no matter what. They’re going to argue that they've “won” no matter who actually wins. If the votes come out in their favor they’ll treat it as business as usual, if it doesn’t they’ll argue that there are “irregularities” and that there was “fraud” and they won’t need any evidence of that at all — they’ll just claim it and refuse to certify the vote.
This will hang up the results in contested swing states and leave the electoral count up to those states that are far outside a close margin of error.
He doesn’t care about the actual votes because they have a plan to steal the election.
You won't have to vote in four years, he said, "because the country will be fixed, and frankly, we won't even need your vote anymore."
"I thought everybody understood it," Trump added.
Ingraham proceeded to ask him if he would leave office voluntarily after four years. "I did last time," said Trump. "I keep hearing it, he's not going to leave, he's not going to leave. Look, they are the threat to democracy."
"I thought everybody understood it," Trump added.
Ingraham proceeded to ask him if he would leave office voluntarily after four years. "I did last time," said Trump. "I keep hearing it, he's not going to leave, he's not going to leave. Look, they are the threat to democracy."
He did leave, but he never conceeded. He still claims to this day that he really “won” even though he doesn’t have a shred of evidence. He was never able to get past very first stages of any court case, either because of lack of standing and/or lack of evidence. He wasn’t able to contest the certification of the vote in any state.
Now, he doesn’t even have to provide evidence — the certifications will be blocked automatically.
These efforts will lead to court challenges which will likely fail due to lack of standing and evidence as they did in 2020, however several states have moved the determination of certifying elections out of non-partisan hands into the state legislatures.
Analyzing the Voting Rights Lab's state-level bill tracker and bill descriptions, ABC News identified at least eight states, including battlegrounds Arizona and Georgia, that have enacted 10 laws so far this year that change election laws by bolstering partisan entities' power over the process or shifting election-related responsibilities from secretaries of state.
ABC News
Each law was enacted by a Republican governor or by Republican-controlled legislatures voting to override Democratic governors' vetoes.
Recent Stories from ABC News
These new laws include one that requires local election boards in Arkansas to refer election law violation complaints to the State Board of Election Commissioners -- made up of five Republicans and just one Democrat -- instead of their respective county clerks and local prosecutors; another that generally bars the executive and judicial branches in Kansas from modifying election law; and one in Texas requiring the governor, lieutenant governor and state house speaker to "unanimously agree" to the secretary of state granting local election commissions' or boards' requests to accept donations over $1,000.
Gov. Brian Kemp and other Republicans have defended the law as "making it easy to vote and hard to cheat," but Democrats, including Kemp's 2018 opponent, Stacey Abrams, described it as "Jim Crow 2.0."
Both Marsden and Kline pointed to its provisions shifting control over elections as among the most concerning enacted so far.
The law removed Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who withstood direct pressure from then-President Donald Trump to "find" enough votes to overturn the election, as chairman and a voting member of the State Election Board, which investigates potential fraud and irregularities.
But the provision the two experts highlighted is one allowing state legislators to request a "performance review" of local election boards. If the State Election Board, which currently has three Republicans and one Democrat, determines a review yields enough evidence of wrongdoing or negligence under the law, the state will appoint a superintendent who takes on the local, multi-person board's responsibilities, including hiring and firing power, and certifying elections.
Enough Republican lawmakers have already called for a performance review in Democratic-leaning Fulton County, the most populous in Georgia and the target of several 2020 election conspiracies. It's a long way from any potential "takeover," which is how Democrats describe the process, but up to four counties could have a superintendent at once.
How a "takeover" could impact a future election's outcome is unclear, but the concept itself injects "confusion and uncertainty" into the election process, Marsden argued.
That’s how Trump will win - have his stooges claim “fraud” and deny any result. If things come down to Arizona and Georgia, we could have some problems.
"If you're a Republican county official — do your job," the Democratic lawyer said. "If you're not prepared to do your job, to administer fair elections to certify accurate results, now is the time to resign. Get out of office. You're not cut out for the job you've been given. If you cannot celebrate democracy and the outcome of free and fair elections, regardless of whether the candidate you support won or lost — you're in the wrong business. Leave the election business and go do something else."
Elias emphasized, "But if you stay in this job, if you choose to be in a position to administer elections and to certify the election results, and you don't do your job, you're gonna get sued. And you're gonna lose. And you're gonna go down in history as one of the villains in American history. And that is true for the county election officials, it is true for the state election officials, and, by the way, it is true for those Republican members of Congress listening: If you can't accept the outcome of free and fair elections — shame on you. Go find another line of work."
Yup.
You can join me debating the issues and the facts inside the belly of the beast on my Facebook Group: Army for Truth.
Have a listen to my new Vocal Cover — "Dreams" originally recorded by Van Halen with Sammy Hagar
And check out my new Patreon where you can download copies of my covers and original songs. You can also stream tracks from my previous Solo CD from ReverbNation.
On the issue of what we can do about all this. We have to fight back.
We can — and will — challenge in the courts, but what we can also do is get involved in our local elections either as an election worker, poll worker or poll watcher. We need eyes out there to be witnesses and refute these bogus charges and bullshit. As many as possible.
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