Kathleen Culliton
August 12, 2024
A Trump-themed flag is flown by supporters across the street from Trump Tower before former U.S. President Donald Trump holds a press conference in New York City on May 31, 2024. (Photo: Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images)
Donald Trump's allies have readied swing states across the U.S. to challenge his potential defeat in the upcoming presidential election by means recently described as a "5 alarm fire for democracy" in Georgia, experts warned Monday.
Republicans for years have been quietly readying election workers to not certify 2024 presidential election results should Trump lose to the Democratic nominee, the Guardian reported Monday.
“You can force certification through legal mechanisms, [but] those events tend to be like rocket fuel for conspiracy theories and misinformation and undermining confidence in the election," Ben Berwick, a lawyer at the non-profit Protect Democracy, told the Guardian. "There’s damage done even where certification is eventually forced."
Voting rights experts told the Guardian that Trump, allies such as firebrand Cleta Mitchell and MAGA politicians at the Republican National Committee have learned subtly in the years following the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, 2021.
Christina Bobb, an election denier facing criminal charges for her effort to return Trump to the White House in 2020, is leading an election litigation team preparing to challenge results as the RNC recruits tens of thousands to "observe" polls on Nov. 5, the Guardian reports.
“I think we saw efforts by Republicans in 2020 that were pretty ham-handed,” voting rights lawyer Marc Elias reportedly said. “I worry that there will be both legal and extralegal efforts by Republicans to keep ballots from being counted.”
Their efforts have been eased by the entryway of far-right conspiracy theory into the mainstream as election denialism became a pillar of conservative movement, the Guardian reports.
"This is no longer the province of people who thought that there were bamboo filaments in paper or mythical sea creatures involved in the election with Venezuelan dictators," Elias reportedly said.
“It has become now the standard position of the Republican party.”
In Georgia, Republicans have already managed to pass a "reasonable inquiry" rule that empowers voting officials to investigate results before certifying results.
This could provide Republicans the means to push certification beyond a vital Dec. 11 deadline that could put swing state results at risk, said Berwick.
“The point is to have enough of it stick to create enough uncertainty for that critical post-election period," Berwick said. “If we get past that deadline, it opens up a lot of questions, like tricky legal questions and room for shenanigans."
The MAGA plot to steal 2024 election is on a 'different level than 2020': experts
Alex Henderson, AlterNet
August 12, 2024
When Bill Maher predicted, in 2020, that Donald Trump would not concede the presidential election if he lost, Trump's defenders accused the "Real Time" host of having "Trump derangement syndrome." But Trump, just as Maher predicted, refused to admit defeat after losing the 2020 election to now-President Joe Biden.
Now, four years later, a variety of Trump critics — from Maher to Democratic elections lawyer Marc Elias — are warning that Trump will do the same thing again if he loses the 2024 election.
But The Guardian's Sam Levine, in an article published on August 12, stresses that there is a crucial difference between 2020 and 2024: Trump and his MAGA allies "may be better prepared" to steal the election this time.
"(Cleta) Mitchell, a close Trump ally, has spent the last few years building up a network of activists focused on local boards of elections," Levine explains. "And the Republican National Committee's election litigation team is now being led by Christina Bobb, an election denier who is now facing criminal charges for her efforts to overturn the 2020 race."
The reporter continues, "The RNC claims it is recruiting an army of 100,000 poll observers who could provide significant disruption during voting and counting…. But more significantly, the idea that the 2020 election was stolen has moved from the fringes to being a pillar of the Republican Party. A January poll from PRRI found that 66 percent of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen.
Elias laments that election denialism has become the GOP's "standard position."
The attorney and Democracy Docket publisher told The Guardian, "I think we saw efforts by Republicans in 2020 that were pretty ham-handed. I worry that there will be both legal and extralegal efforts by Republicans to keep ballots from being counted."
Similarly, Ben Berwick, an attorney for Protect Democracy, told The Guardian, "It's all part of creating sort of a pretext to say, 'Oh, we need to throw out this set of ballots' or 'We can't really know who the real winner is.' I think much of it won't stick, but I think the point is to have enough of it stick to create enough uncertainty for that critical post-election period."
Richard Pildes, an election law expert at New York University, told The Guardian he is "definitely concerned" that there will be "a lot of efforts to disturb" vote counting.
Sean Morales-Doyle of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, believes that MAGA election denialism is much more sophisticated in 2024 than it was four years ago.
Morales-Doyle told The Guardian, "This has started earlier in the cycle and is louder and is more consistent. That is all just at a different level than it was before 2020.”
Read The Guardian's full report at this link.
No comments:
Post a Comment