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Republicans are filling precincts with MAGA thugs to challenge ballots, possibly including yours [1]
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Date: 2022-09-21
The video, titled “Inside the Completely Legal G.O.P. Plot to Destroy American Democracy” is below.
I cannot stress this enough: All Democrats should watch this video in its entirety. But, I know some of you have busy schedules, so I’ve edited up to what I consider the most pertinent segment, below.
x YouTube Video
The initial 6-7 minutes of the report address GOP voter suppression efforts which most on this site are familiar with, so I won’t reiterate them here. Both Harris and Cottles generally conclude that while those efforts are sinister enough in their broad-brush application of racism, the end results of such suppression efforts have been mixed to some degree thus far, with voter turnout even increasing in some areas as a response to the suppression efforts. They could have spent much more time on this complex subject but they probably realize their audience’s attention span would wander.
It is the remaining aspect of the video that will tell you something you probably aren’t aware of.
According to Harris and Cottle’s reporting, the GOP national strategy to delegitimize the election process involves four basic stages: Recruiting, Training, Challenging and Overturning. All of these efforts focus on the hidden hierarchy -- the “plumbing” as the authors call it — that decides our elections.
The first step, recruitment, has already been largely accomplished. The authors cite ProPublica’s reporting, which found 8500 new Republican sign-ups for “low-level” precinct positions since the 2020 elections in 41 of the 65 counties contacted for their survey. There was no comparable surge — indeed, no surge at all — among Democrats.
What that means for Democratic election volunteers, poll watchers and poll workers is that you are likely to encounter far more Republicans at your polling places than you are accustomed to. But these are not the same Republicans you may have rubbed elbows with in years past; many are, for the most part, hardcore MAGA election denialists. And they are there for one purpose: to challenge any voter they deem doesn’t “look right” to them, prepare a “challenge” report in the precinct’s logbook, and report to the GOP operative in his boiler room. You can use your imagination regarding the specific types of voters they intend to challenge, but as Steve Bannon hyperbolically declares in a segment quoted by the authors, they will have free reign to “challenge every ballot”
The authors also cite a Powerpoint presentation from the RNC which produced some of the GOP’s “training” manuals for such precinct workers, describing how to make such challenges:
The purpose of this is to create a paper trail, for “every piece of fraud they think they see.” The Times authors also cite reporting by Politico in which tapes of Republican strategy sessions were obtained. In one of the tapes, attributed to the Matthew Seifried, a Republican “election integrity director” for the state of Michigan. In it, Seifried describes recruiting an “army” of lawyers who the Times report indicates will be staffing these “hotlines” or “boiler rooms.” The purpose of this is to collect a body of evidence that will be used to justify challenges to elections that Republicans lose, but which they believe can be overturned by sympathetic state officials.
It bears repeating that these “reports” from the local precinct level are being prepared by MAGA election denialists specifically recruited for that purpose, not by people who are at all interested in full and fair elections. In Democratic precincts these planned tactics will have the practical effect of lengthening the time it takes to vote, creating long lines of frustrated voters, while simultaneously creating a paper trail for the GOP’s bogus fraud assertions.
The remainder of the report address the prevalence of these same type of election denialists and MAGA fanatics currently running for Secretary of State in places like Arizona, Wyoming and Nevada, and cites the incident in Otero county where an all-Republican election board recently refused to certify the results of an election based on the “gut feeling” of a county commissioner that there had been fraud involved (there was none). The commissioner, a Trumpite fanatic named Couy Griffin, has since been banned from public office for his participation in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
The authors point is that Griffin is not an anomaly; there are Trump-supporting election denialists either now installed or running for offices throughout the country, all of them eager to overturn an election upon the GOP’s demand. Importantly, and as the authors point out, the primary motivation of all of these Republicans is not to preserve the integrity of our electoral system but to exact revenge for what they perceive as the “stolen” 2020 election.
A word of caution. Just because these people are out there doesn’t necessarily mean all of them will be in voters’ faces on Nov. 8. It is one thing to profess your allegiance to the Trump cult from the safety of your online perch, saying you’re prepared to do whatever Steve Bannon thinks is necessary, and quite another to face the daunting and intimidating task of actually physically challenging a voter based only on your misguided delusions, paranoia and racist impulses.
But the only remedy for this, as Cottle stresses at the end of the video, is for more Democrats to volunteer to counter these people who apparently plan to be as obtrusive and thuggish as possible. Many more Democrats are needed to staff the polls in every precinct and volunteer to monitor the ballot counting process, both at the polls themselves and to safeguard against the forthcoming GOP challenges to provisional and mail-in ballots. And many more Democrats need to run for these often neglected but crucial positions in the hierarchy of our election system.
None of this ought to surprise anyone. It's how a political party with unpopular ideas and a shrinking, racist and paranoid voter base could be expected to behave. They have no interest in democracy and no interest in serving the needs of the American people. The only thing they want is power, and this is what they've come up with to try to hold onto power.
We cant say we weren't warned.
Xaxnar reported on the Times video earlier today as well. It deserves as much as exposure as we can give it.
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https://dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/21/2124374/-Republicans-seeding-voting-precincts-with-MAGA-thugs-to-challenge-ballots-possibly-including-yours
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