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Fight fire with fire [1]

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Date: 2022-10-24

Ok, it is a little late in the game for this, but I am hoping some democratic Super PAC has already figured it out. It’s what we might refer to as “voter suppression” From the musical, Annie Got Your Gun, “Anything you can do I can do better.” In other words, Democrat aligned PACs and groups should be organizing efforts to suppress or limit Republican votes. Sounds awful, but I support any LEGAL means to win. There are legal ways to do it. It is not even new.

Let’s start by identifying the most heavily conservative/ Trump counties in the key swing states. Key counties in Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, Ohio, and Pennsylvania which voted very heavily for Trump in 2020. Each state has it’s own laws regarding voting, poll watchers, etc. So any effort must be organized to comply with local laws and regulation. That said, as far as I know every state allows poll watchers from campaigns and/ or political parties. As long as designated individuals do not wear campaign badges or have any materials promoting a candidate, they are allowed inside polling places to observe. In accordance with state laws, designated poll watchers may challenge voters as they enter a polling place and identify themselves.

One typical legal ground for challenging a voter would be that they do not live at the address at which they are registered. In the very first campaign I ran, our opponent mailed out first class letters to new voters, assumed likely to vote for my candidate. They made lists of all the letters which were returned, organized by precinct. They then had poll watchers at the precincts challenge every voter who tried to vote from an address from which a letter had been returned — on the basis that they may have been registered at said address illegally. It ground the voting process in our key precincts to a crawl. Some who had their votes challenged quit and went home. Others decided not to wait in the long lines. Those who insisted on voting had their votes set aside, only to be counted if the election were close enough. (We did win in spite of it all.)

In today’s high tech world there are other ways to generate grounds to legally challenge voters on a large scale. Data bases of voters could be matched against any number of public records. People who may have moved, changed their name, or may not have proper identification could be subject to challenge. Done in a very conservative rural precinct, for example, it can slow the process down considerably and cause some people to go home. Done in a targeted way, it could swing an election.

This is not the type of election tactic Democrats like. I get that. But the stakes are high. Trump people tried a little bit of this in 2020, but actually executed it very poorly. Lets not wait for them to get it right.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/10/24/2130889/-Fight-fire-with-fire

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