Karen Rubin,
Republicans are purging voter rolls less than 30 days before the election – violating the federal 90-day voting rights law – giving no opportunity to contest or reinstate; South Carolina is illegally purging from lists those who registered to vote at 17 because they would be 18 on election day). Two states have sued to block votes from military and Americans overseas. They are shutting polling places or placing them in hard to reach locations, sending fewer machines and ballots and forcing people to wait on lines that stretch for hours, while making it illegal to provide food or water. They are illegally blocking college students from voting, shutting polling on campuses and setting up polling in hard-to-reach places to cut into young people’s votes.
They are delaying mail delivery, removing or moving ballot boxes in Democratic-leaning districts, while some domestic terrorists have even tried to incinerate ballot boxes. They are sending out false information about who can vote, when and where, while lying about “millions” of illegal aliens being imported into the country to vote illegally. They are sending thugs (election monitors) to intimidate voters. And even before voting has begun, Republicans have filed nearly 200 lawsuits to block the count and certification in order to create enough chaos as to enable Republican governors, legislators, Republican Congress members or Trump’s Supreme Court justices to choose their own slate of Electors.
The multi-pronged Steal the Vote campaign is underway, involving voter suppression, voter intimidation, political threats and violence of voters and election workers and even media; election subversion, court packing intended to undermine the accurate counting and certification of votes; foreign influence, propaganda and disinformation, and outsized and possibly illegal campaign funding. And if all that fails, they are sowing the seeds, fueling anger and rage, for another January 6 insurrection.
And just as in the 2016 election, when Trump was decrying a “rigged election” even before the first votes were cast and continued to lie about 2020 up to today – fomenting violence against election workers, officials, candidates and voters, actually paying millions to fund the January 6 insurrection and mounting more than 60 lawsuits, and each and every day – has been saying over and over again that the only way he can lose in 2024 is by Democrats cheating.
“The only way I can lose is if they cheat,” Trump says repeatedly. “We’re leading in the polls, we’re leading by a lot, we’re leading in every single state.”
Trump is laying groundwork, creating a sense of inevitability, so if he actually loses, the election must have been rigged.
The brainwashing, propaganda, misinformation continues with foreign actors (especially Russians, who are spending millions to finance trolls, just like in 2016) as well as home-grown ones , especially with Trump’s bromance with oligarch Elon Musk, the richest person in the world (and, as it turns out, an illegal immigrant who lied to become a US citizen), who has turned his social media mega-platform, X, into a political propaganda trolling machine and is very comfortable violating campaign finance laws because he knows that he, like Trump, is above any law.
At the same time Trump is promoting trolls and propagandists, he is threatening the media, reviving his “enemy of the people” and “fake news” attacks and threatening to shut down news organizations that reports adversely about him, or positively about his opponents. He is threatening journalists with his brand of “retribution” – prosecution or tax audits. They have reason to fear because these are the same weapons Trump used in his first term and to turn Republicans who know better into traitors to their oath of office to defend against enemies foreign and domestic, when arguably, there were “guardrails” to hold him back from his most dangerous demands (shooting protesters and migrants; prosecuting political opponents).
With political threats and violence, he has already forced out honorable election workers and commissioners and replaced them with operatives to question ballots, delay counts and then certification beyond the December 16 cut-off, so that their state’s electoral votes are omitted, House Republicans on January 6 again create chaos so that the Republican states get to select the winner instead of the popular vote, or the Trump Supremes can anoint the next president, as they did in 2000.
In addition to suppressing votes by illegally purging voters, the MAGA army has another weapon: intimidating voters and those who register them, and justifying their assault by lying about illegal immigrants voting by the millions, invited to invade the country by Democrats.
Trump’s foment and promotion of political violence on one hand, and his abuse of the pardon power on the other sends a message not to cross him, but if you commit crimes for him (insurrection, vote tampering, election interference), he will pardon you (already has, like Roger Stone, Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn) – and promises to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists “on Day 1”.
By laying the groundwork and creating a sense of inevitability, if Trump loses, the election must have been rigged. He’s already riling up his base, has put into place the judges (including on the Supreme Court), the legislators, the governors, the election officials who will do whatever it takes to hand him the presidency.
This is on top of the systemic anti-democratic factors that make “one-person, one vote” a mockery.
The difference from 2020 is that Biden, not Trump, is president and commander in chief, Merrick Garland not Bill Barr is Attorney General, and people are wiser to the threats and tactics Trump is deploying.
But I worry that the Trump army has had four years to prepare and come up with new ways to steal the election, helped along with complicit officials and judges who have replaced those who put country over party. And I worry that Trump, like in 2016 against Hillary Clinton, has basically trapped Democrats into vouching that American elections are “fair and free” so they won’t challenge the steals that take place in local districts, enough to garner the 44,000 votes across three states that delivered 2016 to Trump when Hillary got 3 million more popular votes.
This election underscores the lie of American “democracy” and the systemic, patently undemocratic elements: campaign finance laws that enable billionaires to spend hundreds of millions of dollars; the Electoral College that gives Wyoming voters 5x the voting power per vote as a Californian, rural voters more voting power than urbanites and the shenanigans wrought by gerrymandered state legislatures, while the ChristoFascist Supreme Court majority has been dismantling the 1965 Voting Rights Act protections and making a mockery of the “one person, one vote” ideal.
The fact is it is the Democrats have delivered the strongest economy in the world and the progressive policies that people want. Moreover, the demographics are working against Republicans – that’s why they are shutting down public education, banning books, demonizing liberals and immigrants, and why they can only win by cheating, lying and literally stealing elections.
It isn’t at all fair for a country that prides itself as being a “democracy” in which all are supposedly equal, but it is necessary to vote for Kamala Harris and Democrats up and down the ballot in numbers “too big to rig, too real to steal.”
