The Midterm Election is Here. So Are the Groups Intent on Stealing It.
Insert name of wanna-be authoritarian here _____________________.
Photo by Arnaud Jaegers on Unsplash
Midterm election voting is underway, and the republican party is fulfilling its promise to confuse, frustrate, circumvent, and complicate the electoral process in an attempt to swing ballots in its favor.
We can’t say we weren’t warned.
Two years 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.
Just because they failed doesn’t mean they were going away.
Right-wing vigilante groups have been spending the past two years mobilizing.
Since the last presidential election, threats to poll workers have 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.
Protect Democracy policy advocate, Jennifer Dresden, warned:
“To be clear, we’re not yet at a point where political violence has fundamentally undermined our democracy. But when violence is connected to other authoritarian tactics, like disinformation and efforts to corrupt elections, that sets a dangerous path for our democracy that we cannot ignore.”
Threats against election workers isn’t just about intimidation about violence.
Its real intent is to frighten those who would work as poll watchers or inspectors into never performing those jobs again, because when there aren’t enough poll workers, the possibility of mistakes increases, bolstering the right-wing claim elections are inherently flawed; i.e., fraudulent.
It’s already happening.
A fraudulent ballot was discovered last week in Spalding County, Georgia, in what was, according to state elections director Blake Evans, an attempt to cast doubt on election integrity.
Evans explained the phony ballot was not printed on the same security paper as other ballots, and that state security checks were effective since it was not counted.
He warned, though, that since it took some effort and time to create, the ballot was not likely an anomaly.
“Clean Elections USA,” a right-wing election-denying group, announced on Donald Trump’s Nazi-infested social media platform Truth Social that “ballot stuffing has already begun in Arizona.”
“Ballot stuffing” isn’t the only crime being committed in Arizona.
Maricopa County law enforcement responded this weekend to reports of armed “poll watchers” dressed in tactical gear monitoring a ballot drop box.
One voter out of several who reported myriad incidents, stated he was harassed, photographed, and followed.
But some threats are coming inside poll sights, from official poll workers, infiltrating the process.
During August early voting, in Pima County, some poll watchers vociferously complained about “fraudulent elections.”
Some had to be reprimanded for trying to review private voter information.
A few even took pictures of elections inspectors and expressed “concern” over “out-of-state” license plates.
A report from Pima County Recorder’s Office states:
“Staff reported feelings of intimidation, harassment, and general uncomfortableness by these individuals. Voters often felt intimidated and reported individuals for harassing behavior.”
University of California, Los Angeles election-law expert, Rick Hasen, said:
“When you come in with a conspiratorial mindset, and not a lot of knowledge about how things work, it’s very easy to misconstrue what’s going on and to act in bad faith.”
According to a Brennan Center for Justice poll, one in six election officials has reported threats.
The Boston Globe’s “Under Siege: Democracy’s front lines in crisis” series segment titled “America’s Election Workers Are Leaving in Droves” reports about Central Lake, Mich. town clerk Judith Kosloski, who has had to withstand threatening phone calls and letters, declares, “There are days that I go home and just sit and cry. I’m done.”
She is going to retire in 2024, not because she wants to, but because she has tolerated too much intimidation the past few years.
She is not alone.
“I think a lot of clerks are doing the same thing,” she said. “We’ve had it.”
Center for Election Innovation and Research executive director and founder, David Becker, warned:
“It leaves a vacuum at best. At worst, (the departing employee) gets replaced by an election denier.”
Voter intimidation is illegal under the Voting Rights Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act, and Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday vowed to act against any attempts to cow voters, stating:
“The Justice Department has an obligation to prevent — to guarantee a free and fair vote by everyone who’s qualified to vote and will not permit voters to be intimidated.”
So much hate and violence have been lately directed at school board members and school district personnel, the FBI has gotten involved.
Librarians have also become targets of extremist threats from neo-Nazi and other right-wing extremist groups.
Republicans win when they cheat, and the legerdemain du jour is sowing so much confusion and fear that they have cause to call the election into question — unless their candidates win, of course.
This is a two-pronged attack.
The first prong is suppressing the vote and calling ballots into question so republican-majority legislatures can enact the laws they have been passing allowing them to supersede voters’ wills.
This is designed to secure republican majorities in state legislatures and Congress.
This, naturally, will set the proverbial stage for 2024 in that republicans will then have a lock on how the presidential election is determined.
But the voter intimidation shenanigans happening now are also capable of creating a January 6, 2021 scenario republicans are hoping this time is successful, ushering in a second term for Donald Trump — or a Ron Desantis, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, Rick Scott, Mike Pence.
Insert name of wanna-be authoritarian here _____________________.