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MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow last night called attention to some very strange things that Donald Trump has been saying lately, connecting them to what seems likely to be a crucial part of Republicans’ plans to throw the outcome of the 2024 election into doubt. It sounds at first a little paranoid and conspiracy-theory-ish, except by damn there really is some “there” there to be concerned about, especially given the efforts by Trump and his allies to cast doubt on Joe Biden’s win in 2020.
It doesn’t rely on anything so exotic as Italian satellites changing people’s votes or an army of nonexistent crimers submitting hundreds of thousands of undetected fake ballots, either. Like so much Trumpfuckery, it’s completely out in the open, and not so much an effort to rig the election as to create chaos, pouring maple syrup into the gas tank of democracy while cramming a banana up the tailpipe of election certification. (Do we know our audience, or what?)
Here’s the video, which lays out a pretty straightforward case for at least one component of MAGAWorld’s hopes for ratfucking the 2024 election:
Maddow starts off with that bizarre Trump assertion at a rally Friday that if Christians just vote in sufficient numbers this fall, he will get America “fixed so good” in just four years that “it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore.” Well yes, that sounds just a little facscist, given the whole “a republic if you can keep it” thing we’ve been working on for nearly 250 years.
But while that line is entirely worrying enough on its own, Maddow followed up with another set of statements that have gotten less attention, which are strange because Trump isn’t talking about that glorious no-voting-needed paradise coming in the future, but saying it’s here right now, as he did at a June rally in Florida: “I actually tell our people we don’t need your vote. We have so many votes, we don’t need them.”
And again when he told Fox & Friends on July 25 the very same thing: “In fact, my instruction — we don’t need the votes. I have so many votes.”
Could be routine Trump braggadocio about how invincible he is, of course, because the first rule of being a Mafia don is never to speak too explicitly, to always have some plausible deniability — no, he’s not going to end elections, he’ll just make America such a paradise for fundagelicals that there won’t be any need to fight so hard in 2028, wink wink.
But then there’s this other shoe hitting the floor, as Maddow calls attention to this joint investigation by Rolling Stone and the politics newsletter American Doom (worth the $5/month subscription) found: There are roughly 70 elections officials in swing states who have publicly stated — often on social media — that they buy into Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was fraudulent. What’s more, quite a few of them have already delayed or refused certification of election results, even though legally they aren’t supposed to have that power. As Rolling Stone explains,
Certification of election results is what legal experts consider a “ministerial task,” and one required by state and local law. But as Trump’s lies about the 2020 election have taken hold, Republicans nationwide have decided that certification provides them an opportunity to hear fraud allegations — and refuse to officially count their local votes. Republicans have refused to certify election results at least 25 times since Trump lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.
The story cites Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias, who has more experience knocking down crappy GOP vote suppression efforts than anyone, saying that,
“I think we are going to see mass refusals to certify the election” in November. […] “Everything we are seeing about this election is that the other side is more organized, more ruthless, and more prepared.”
The story is careful to note that such attempts to delay or refuse certification haven’t held up in court, but that in two states, Georgia and Arizona, lawsuits making their way through state courts are seeking to have certification declared “discretionary,” so Trump-friendly elections officials could jam up the works in November.
If employed on a large scale, the certification refusal movement would have disastrous consequences, fueling the fire of election conspiracies and delaying the tallying of votes crucial to determining the next president.
The investigation by Rolling Stone and American Doom was simple enough, combing through media reports of officials’ refusal to certify election results (let’s do eleventy-million hand-counts, too!) as well as “searching the social media profiles of hundreds of election officials in the six swing states” (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania).
Big surprise: Not only are a lot of these folks election deniers, many believe every crazy rightwing conspiracy that comes down the pike, too, a “veritable stew simmering with the toxicity of the online American right.” If you haven’t used up your one free guest visit at Rolling Stone this month, do read the whole thing.
How much damage can these very weird people (there’s that word again) actually do, come November? Marc Elias says it could be substantial, as part of a larger 2024 GOP strategy of attacking the election results from every angle possible, including challenges to voter rolls, forcing recount after recount, and flat out refusal to certify results. Republicans, Elias says,
“are counting on not just that they can disrupt the election in big counties, they are counting on the fact that if they don’t certify in several small counties, you cannot certify these statewide results.”
It’s an electoral version of Steve Bannon’s media strategy: Flood the zone with shit and sow chaos, and there’s always the chance that sympathetic courts will help you to victory, or at least slow the outcome of the vote count down enough to precipitate a crisis that Trump’s six best pals on the Supreme Court would have to “resolve.”
Oh, what interesting times we live in.
[Rolling Stone / MSNBC on YouTube / Photo: Greg Morgan, Creative Commons License 2.0]
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