Beware of People Knocking on Your Door Claiming to Be "Election Integrity" Officials
This latest in-person intimidation scheme is one of the last-ditch attempts of a desperate breed of conspiracy theorists living in an alternative reality.
In just three months, Americans will be asked to go to the polls again to vote in the 2022 mid-term election.
A handful of primaries and special elections are happening has you read this.
Some are hailing the midterms one of the most important elections in our lifetimes, considering it will be the first post-Roe vs. Wade in almost 50 years and the threat of impending fascism looms like it hasn’t in a generation.
One element of fascism is the suppression and/or outright stripping away of people’s democratic right to choose their representatives in free and fair elections.
The danger to it has never been greater.
Since the last presidential election, threats to poll workers spiked as right-wing Donald Trump supporters targeted their animosity toward those they baselessly felt were helping to “steal votes” from Trump.
Now they’ve expanded the conspiracy to “votes being stolen” from all republican candidates.
And they’re taking it right to Americans’ doorsteps.
Under the guise of “a voter verification project,” “U.S. Election Integrity Plan” (USEIP) election deniers, led by Shawn Smith, an ally of former Trump strategist Steve Bannon and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, are knocking on people’s doors like regular, ordinary candidate canvassers, and inquiring whether people voted in the 2020 presidential election, for whom, by which means (mail-in ballot or in person), and how many times, all geared to circle back to the unproven claim the election was fraudulent.
Michelle Garcia of Denver, Colo. is one such voter the group’s representatives visited.
She explained:
“His specific questions were, ‘Did you vote by mail-in ballot? How many times have you voted?’ He wanted to know who I voted for, who I supported. ‘How do I know that it wasn’t changed?’ And a lot of it was targeted at the [county] clerk and recorder’s office and that it was fraudulent.”
After she informed the man she did not want to discuss her voting record and that she did not have any problems with casting her ballot, he got aggressive.
“There was no boundaries with their ethics or with civility,” she said. “They will push until you give an answer. They are very intimidating. It’s not a question of, ‘Do you think that this was done? How do you feel about it?’ It is, ‘We know that this is done. How do you know it wasn’t?’”
In March, the Colorado state chapter of the NAACP, the League of Women Voters and Mi Familia Vota, filed a lawsuit alleging the U.S. Election Integrity Plan’s voter intimidation tactic violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, a post-Civil War law intended to prevent white domestic terror groups from intimidating Black Americans into not voting.
The lawsuit states:
“Defendants’ objectives are clear. By planning to, threatening to, and actually deploying armed agents to knock on doors throughout the state of Colorado, USEIP is engaged in voter intimidation. USEIP’s public-facing actions are a clear signal to Colorado voters — especially voters of color — that to vote in an upcoming election means facing interrogation by potentially armed and threatening USEIP agents at their doorstep thereafter.”
According to the suit, U.S. Election Integrity Plan volunteers refer to a “County & Local Organizing Playbook” to “undertake citizen audit activities to either refute or confirm serious allegations of election malfeasance” to “support future legal action.”
But they don’t just come armed with the “County & Local Organizing Playbook”.
Some come armed.
As in, with guns.
Last year, USEIP leader Charity McPike suggested armed members provide the group “security.”
Some are even photographing and filming homeowners.
Some come wearing “badges.”
As the lawsuit explains:
“Sometimes armed and donning badges to present an appearance of government officiality, USEIP agents interrogate voters about their addresses, whether they participated in the 2020 election, and — if so — how they cast their vote. It is reported that multiple agents have claimed to be from ‘the county,’ and have, without any evidence, falsely accused the residents of casting fraudulent ballots."
The Brennan Center For Justice’s Democracy Program acting director, Sean Morales-Doyle, warned:
“This lie that the election was rigged has already done a great deal of damage and continues to do damage in a number of different ways. Going around door to door and continuing to spread this misinformation can only do more harm.”
Until about a year ago, election deniers were hanging their hopes on statewide audits, like the farce perpetrated in Maricopa County, Arizona that confirmed — again — Joe Biden was the undisputed winner over Trump.
This latest in-person intimidation scheme is one of the last-ditch attempts of a desperate breed of conspiracy theorists living in an alternative reality.
As reported in Salon:
“USEIP appears to have fully embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory. Its website and the first page of its ‘playbook’ include the slogan ‘We Are the Plan,’ frequently associated with QAnon believers.”
This is nothing more than another example of how the fascist right-wing republican base has become more emboldened and violent in its attempts to impose a so-called “Christian” autocracy in the United States.
Over the past year, we have seen more evidence America is closer to fascism than ever.
Jason Stanley, writing for The Guardian, stated:
“The contemporary American fascist movement is led by oligarchical interests for whom the public good is an impediment, such as those in the hydrocarbon business, as well as a social, political, and religious movement with roots in the Confederacy. As in all fascist movements, these forces have found a popular leader unconstrained by the rules of democracy, this time in the figure of Donald Trump.”
Even Canadians fear the American experiment is on the precipice of ending.
In his new book, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future, Canadian author Stephen Marche warns:
“The United States is coming to an end. The question is how.”
He isn’t alone.
Cascade Institute executive director Thomas Homer-Dixon begins a Globe & Mail piece titled “ The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare” with a harrowing assertion:
“By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.”
Trump supporters, regardless of how tightly they cling to him, don’t need Trump.
Neither does the republican party.
What they need is a strongman, and it makes no difference who that strongman is so long as he (because it is always a he) continues sucking up to the economic royalists who don’t want to pay three percent more in taxes, playing the middle class and poor against each other as foot soldiers in an oligarchic race-fueled class conflict.
While a joyous day Trump’s prosecution would be, it still wouldn’t be time to celebrate.
The would-be fascists will still be out there, infiltrating the republican party, working the levers of power.