Coup 2.0, An Inside Job: The Republican Plot To Steal Elections

by

In the first of a new series, The Guardian looks at how November’s midterm elections could be an inflection point as election deniers seek to take control of the vote counting process. Democracy, poisoned: America’s elections are being attacked at every level (excerpt):

[Sandra Merlino, Nye County Clerk] was alarmed. She knew that what they were saying was bogus – the county’s election systems aren’t connected to the internet and there’s no evidence they were not secure. Counting ballots by hand was costly, not reliable, and would take a long time after the election to complete. “It’s so prone to error,” she said. “It just is a nightmare as far as I’m concerned.”

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A longer count could also leave more time for chaos after election day, said Jessica Marsden, a lawyer for Protect Democracy, a government watchdog group. “That’s exactly the kind of change that would slow down the count, giving you time to sow confusion and cry about fraud – all the mayhem we saw in 2020,” Marsden said.

The episode in Nye county is just one example of a new poison that has seeped deep into the bloodstream of American politics since the 2020 election. While there have long been fights in America over who gets to vote, this new toxin is focused on how the vote is counted and on undermining confidence in results. Its prevalence has raised an alarming possibility that once seemed unfathomable in one of the world’s leading democracies – that the result of a valid election could be overturned.

“People need to stop fooling themselves. This is unlike anything that’s happened in American history,” said Sean Wilentz, a Princeton professor who was among a group of historians that met with Biden earlier this year to discuss the threat to democracy. “It is continuing and it is grave. And I think the country needs to wake up.”

The movement threatens American elections from the top down and the bottom up at the same time. At the top, there is a push to install statewide officials who would have no reservations about making baseless claims of fraud and overturning an election result. From the bottom, it seeks to harass, threaten and ultimately remove non-partisan local election officials and make it harder for them to administer elections. If there is an overarching strategy to the movement – and it’s not clear there is one – it seems to be to cause as much chaos, as much confusion, and as much uncertainty, as possible.

Since the 2020 election, this movement has enjoyed a once unimaginable amount of success. Candidates who questioned the 2020 election performed remarkably in the GOP primaries this year, advancing to the November ballot in 27 states. Facing unrelenting pressure and harassment, election officials are retiring from their jobs. And to work the polls this fall Republicans are recruiting people who believe the 2020 election was stolen.

This is why today The Guardian is launching The Fight for Democracy, a series focused on investigating the threats facing the democratic system in one of its supposed bastions. Building off an impactful series on US voting rights, it will scrutinize the movement to undermine election legitimacy, weaken voting rights and target election officials – a movement that ultimately seeks to codify a system of minority rule fundamentally opposed to the promise of a multiracial, multicultural, representative, constitutional democracy.

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Election deniers

A recent analysis by FiveThirtyEight estimated that 60% of Americans will have election deniers on the ballot in November.

The threat posed by individuals prepared to throw out legitimate election results is especially pronounced in the handful of key battleground states that were decisive in 2020.

That suggests a concerted effort to target roles with the goal of possibly overturning valid election results, a phenomenon that has come to be called election subversion. “It’s not just the number of election deniers who are running, worrying though that is. It’s the way these candidates have focused on the very positions that are most pivotal in determining the outcome of state and presidential elections,” said Jessica Marsden, a lawyer with Protect Democracy.

Among the Republican candidates are four extreme election deniers running for governor in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Doug Mastriano, competing in Pennsylvania, was a central figure behind the plot to send fake Trump electors to Congress on January 6 even though Biden won the state by 80,000 votes.

There are also three extreme election deniers running for secretary of state – the top election administrator post – in Arizona, Michigan and Nevada. In Arizona, state representative Mark Finchem actively lobbied to overturn Biden’s victory and hand the state’s 11 electors to Trump; he has been involved with the far-right Oath Keepers militia and was at the Capitol on January 6. In Michigan, Kristina Karamo first came to prominence when she falsely claimed a miscount in Detroit based upon a basic misunderstanding of election procedures.

In Nevada, Jim Marchant, who led the presentation in Nye county, is now the Republican nominee to be the state’s top election official.

Marchant, who is closely linked to the QAnon movement, is also leading a nationwide group of election deniers vying for secretary of state positions; should he win in November, he told The Guardian he plans to scrap all electronic voting machines and switch to paper-only counts.

Out-of-state funding

These candidates are being supported by a flood of money that’s unprecedented for secretary of state races, which have long drawn little attention.

In six states with competitive secretary of state races this year, candidates raised $16.3m overall as of the beginning of August, more than double the amount raised at the same point in 2018, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Not accounting for incumbents, who have a significant fundraising advantage, election denier candidates have far outpaced those who have not questioned the election results.

Much of the money is coming from outside the states where the candidates are running. Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO, who has been one of the most prolific financial backers of election denialism, has been a major donor. So has Richard Uihlein, a GOP mega-donor.

“In years past, a lot of people wouldn’t have been able to name their own secretary of state, never mind one of another state. So the idea that a candidate could raise a majority of their money, as some of these are, from out of state, is very surprising,” said Ian Vandewalker, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, who has been tracking funding in these races.

One of the most successful fundraisers has been Finchem, in Arizona, who had raised $1.2m in his race, 59% of which came from out-of-state donors. In Nevada, candidates have raised more than five times the amount of money raised at the comparable point in past cycles.

“To some extent, it’s the usual suspects. People who have been involved in election challenges, including to one degree or another, January 6, who are either directly supporting candidates or are spending in ways that help them or their message,” Vandewalker said. “At the same time, there clearly is some degree of a broad base of financial support for these candidates.”

Eyes and ears

There is a long US tradition of politicians alleging voter fraud, a specter that in recent years has been used to justify sweeping new voter restrictions, including polling place closures, aggressive voter purging and limits on mail-in voting.

The push to put election deniers in control of statewide elections has been complemented by an equally forceful push to exert more influence over election administration at the local level.

One part is an aggressive effort to recruit poll observers and poll workers to be eyes and ears in the polling place.

Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who was closely linked to Trump’s effort to overturn the election, is playing a leading role. Working through the Conservative Partnership Institute, which is linked to Trump’s political apparatus, she’s held a series of events across the country encouraging people who doubt the 2020 election results to sign up to be poll workers. The group encourages attendees to become embedded in their election offices and to become a “permanent presence” in every election office and to determine whether government officials are “friend or foe”.

A second part of this effort appears to involve putting as much pressure as possible on local election officials, making it harder for them to run elections and seeding the ground for more chaos. Since the 2020 election, election officials have faced an unprecedented wave of harassment and many are choosing to leave the field. Nearly one in five officials surveyed by the Brennan Center earlier this year said they were “very” or “somewhat likely” to leave the field by 2024.

See: Trump allies have interviewed nearly 200 election officials to probe for weaknesses (excerpt):

Two of Donald Trump’s most prominent allies in his fight to overturn the 2020 election are leading a coordinated, multi-state effort to probe local election officials in battlegrounds such as Michigan, Arizona, and Texas ahead of the November election.

The America Project, an organization founded by Michael Flynn, a retired three-star general and former national security adviser, and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, has so far interviewed or attempted to interview officials in nearly 200 counties across eight swing states, according to copies of notes, recordings of the interviews, and other documents Votebeat found on web pages associated with the organization. The survey questions reflect the same debunked conspiracies and misleading information about elections that Flynn and Byrne have been propagating for years.

The survey questions appear intended to detect potential weaknesses in local election systems and gather detailed information about how elections are run. Election experts say the information could easily be used to fuel misinformation campaigns, disrupt voting, or challenge results.

“It seems consistent with their efforts to really understand how to manipulate the machinery of election administration in this country,” said Ben Berwick, counsel at national nonprofit Protect Democracy, a research and advocacy group.

In 2020, Byrne and Flynn were among the Trump loyalists who devised a plan to seize voting machines across the country and dig up enough evidence of fraud to persuade state lawmakers, Congress, or the vice president to overturn the election results. Now, they are focusing their efforts on the midterm election, with new strategies. A group backed by The America Project, for example, is attempting to purge voter rolls in Georgia ahead of the election.

The surveys are part of The America Project’s latest mission, dubbed “Operation Eagles Wings,” which is organized on foramericafirst.com, with web pages for each of the swing states the group is focused on. Key to the effort is building relationships with local election officials, according to two manuals for local volunteers on the organization’s websites. The officials are asked their opinions on debunked conspiracy theories, perhaps to determine whether they are like-minded individuals. Interviewers are also marking down which clerks are particularly helpful.

Berwick points out that it’s the mission of prominent Trump supporters to fill positions of power — from governors down to local clerks — with people who believe their allegations of election fraud and improprieties. Noting who does and does not support the cause, he said, may be the group’s way of determining “who will be sympathetic to their efforts in the future.”

[T]he America Project was the top funder of the Arizona Senate’s election review, and Byrne supported the now-discredited investigation of voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan. Both have said they’ll continue to work to remake American elections.

The Guardian continues:

Already beefing up security in their office, election officials are now being swarmed with voluminous records requests related to the 2020 election, forcing them to reallocate resources to fulfill them that would otherwise be going towards getting ready to run the elections.

Lynn Constabile recently stepped down as the elections director in Yavapai county in Arizona after working there for nearly two decades. Trump handily won Yavapai county, but that didn’t stop false claims about the election from spreading.

“After the 2020 election, we just had to put up with kind of a barrage of garbage that came our way. Every day a new conspiracy theory – taking up time that I needed to plan the 2022 election. So probably around last fall I decided I really wasn’t being effective any more in my county,” she said.

UPDATE: Maricopa County officials received death threats from unhinged MAGA/QAnon cult members.

“People would call us on the phone and yell at us. I’ve been called a communist. And you know, it gets old. We got a barrage of records requests. I would get 10-page records requests. Just threatening that if I didn’t fulfill it, they were gonna sue us. You’re trying to do your job but there’s not enough hours in the day,” she added.

She didn’t get explicit death threats, but she did get menacing messages that said things like “watch your back” and “you should be nervous”. She installed security cameras around her house – not something she thought she would ever have to do. It also became hard to find people to fill both full-time and seasonal jobs.

“The people that were applying, they didn’t really want to work for us, they wanted to watch us,” she said.

Update:

 

Perfect storm

The multiple pressures bearing down on US elections could come to a crunch when Americans choose their next president in 2024. “We face a perfect storm,” Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of the new book Power Politics: Trump and the Assault on American Democracy, told The Guardian.

“There are restrictions on voting rights, a toxic information ecosystem, political violence – there’s lots of mischief that could take place.”

With Trump hinting strongly that he plans to run again, the conditions for West’s perfect storm are all too conceivable: Trump stands, Trump loses in the same swing states that defeated him in 2020, Trump launches a false “stolen election” plot 2.0.

Only this time the forces of subversion are far more organized, sophisticated and powerful. Which is one reason so much is at stake in the midterm elections in November.

At state level, should election deniers win governor or secretary of state positions they would be empowered to wreak havoc around the 2024 presidential election on a scale that will make Trump’s first “stolen election” effort look like a tea party.

Take Finchem in Arizona. He has already made several unsuccessful attempts to overturn Biden’s 2020 win by decertifying results in pockets of the state. As secretary of state, the top election administrator in Arizona, his fraudulent ploys would carry much more weight.

[T]he Finchems and Mastrianos would be well placed to throw out just enough votes on fake grounds of mass fraud to swing the result in their states to Trump.

“The way election subversion would most likely play out in 2024 is that the secretary of state would refuse to count a certain segment of votes, claiming they were tainted by fraud, and that would lead to a different slate of electors being sent to Congress,” Marsden said.

At that point, the crisis would switch to Congress itself. Here too the stakes couldn’t be higher in November.

Should the Republicans take control of the House of Representatives, elevating Kevin McCarthy, an avid backer of Trump’s stolen election lie, to the role of speaker, they would be in a strong position to accept the electors sent to Congress fraudulently by election deniers in the states.

Potentially the only person left who could stave off democratic disaster would be Kamala Harris, the vice-president, who under the US constitution will preside over certification just as Mike Pence did in 2020. But should she attempt to block the Republicans from certifying Trump as president on the back of fraudulent state actions, she could trigger a confrontation between the executive branch in the form of the vice-president and the legislative branch in Congress.

“It’s all about power now,” West said. “If you have power, you can use it to your own advantage – we’re seeing a lot of that in American politics these days.”

The best defense to protect American democracy is to reject every Republican candidate of every stripe, at every level of office – a “zero tolerance” defense.





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4 thoughts on “Coup 2.0, An Inside Job: The Republican Plot To Steal Elections”

  1. The Washington Post reports, “RNC seizes on political affiliations of poll workers in swing states”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/07/rnc-poll-workers/

    For months, conservative activists who tried to overturn the 2020 election results have urged Republicans to become poll workers so they can be on the front lines of watching for fraud. Yet for the August primary in Arizona’s Maricopa County, the number of Democrats working at the polls was 18 percent higher than the number of Republicans.

    Such a gap is typical and legal, county leaders say, but Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel has seized on it in an effort to cast doubt on the way elections are run in the swing state’s most populous county that is home to Phoenix. That has angered county officials, many of them fellow Republicans, who see this as a new attempt to spread misinformation, erode faith in the voting process, lay the foundation to contest results should GOP candidates lose and unfairly focus attention on election workers, some of whom have endured threats and harassment after Joe Biden narrowly won the state in 2020.

    The RNC and the Arizona GOP filed two lawsuits this week that seek to make the county shorten shifts for poll workers to make the jobs more accessible and force the release of records about who worked the polls in the primary. McDaniel mischaracterized the scope of the lawsuits in a tweet Wednesday, falsely claiming that Arizona Republicans have been “shut out of the process.” The RNC did not respond to a request to explain how Republicans have been excluded.

    “This is a lie,” responded Maricopa County Supervisor Thomas Galvin (R). “Ronna Romney McDaniel is wasting GOP donor money &, more importantly @MaricopaCounty resources & tax dollars on a PR stunt thats using AZ’s court system as a political playground … I’m sick of grifters attacking AZ.”

    As the Justice Department arrested an Iowa man on Thursday on accusations of threatening a fellow Republican Maricopa County supervisor after the 2020 election, Galvin referenced the RNC lawsuit in another tweet: “IT’S OPEN SEASON on honest election officials.”

    The party has filed a similar lawsuit in Nevada and has raised questions about the party affiliations of poll workers in two major Michigan cities, Flint and Kalamazoo.

    [F]or the Arizona primary, Maricopa County used 712 Republicans and 857 Democrats as poll workers, according to the RNC lawsuits. In one suit, the RNC alleged the county asks poll workers to work “onerous” shifts of up to 14 hours and often makes them work weekends. [This has ALWAYS been the rules.] That lawsuit seeks to make the county relax its shift rules [to accommodate MAGA/QAnon election denier] Republican poll workers who can quickly fill positions when others quit.

    Tom Liddy, the civil services division chief for the Maricopa County attorney’s office, said the claims against the county “are made up out of whole cloth and completely inaccurate.” Liddy said potential poll workers who are unvaccinated against the coronavirus [Anti-vaxxer Covid deniers] might be turned away if they seek to work at a polling place in a nursing home that requires visitors to be vaccinated.

    “You can’t sue Maricopa County for refusing to hire a volunteer to work in a nursing home if a volunteer refuses to follow the nursing home’s anti-covid-19 protocol,” Liddy, a former deputy counsel to the RNC, told The Washington Post.

    Before the lawsuit was filed, the county planned to start releasing records related to poll workers on Friday, and RNC officials had agreed to the county’s approach, according to a letter Liddy sent the RNC this week. He asked the party to drop its records lawsuit and said he may pursue sanctions against their attorneys if it does not [don’t forget to fie a bar compaint as well]. The county began producing records Thursday evening, Liddy said.

    [T]he RNC filed its [frivolous] suits just before McDaniel visited the battleground state, where early voting will soon begin. Nearly all GOP candidates for key statewide office in Arizona have based their campaigns on false claims about the 2020 election and pushed for trying to reverse President Biden’s win there.

    In the swing states that Trump lost, Republicans have tried to change voting policies, often seeking to reduce mail-in voting, eliminate ballot drop boxes and tighten rules on absentee ballots. Meanwhile, they have sought to recruit more Republican poll workers and questioned any disparities they [believe they] find.

    In addition to having a partisan mix of workers, many election officials are increasingly worried about threats to their systems, whether from outsiders or from workers themselves.

    Officials have also raised concerns about threats against election workers that have been on the rise since 2020. Many election clerks have bolstered security in their facilities and, in some cases, have given poll workers de-escalation training.

    -MAGA/QAnon Republicans are the enemies of democracy. They should not be hired so they can pull an inside job of election subversion. Screening question should be: “Have you ever posted or reposted anything from QAnon?” If so, automatic rejection. Of course they will lie, because lying is part and parcel of being a MAGA/QAnon Republican – they model their behavior on “Dear Leader.”

  2. The Washington Post editorializes, “How to confront the rising power of the GOP’s election-denying wing”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/06/election-deniers-republicans-count-congress/

    Election deniers increasingly dominate the Republican Party — and could soon gain unprecedented power over the nation’s democratic system. That is the takeaway from an alarming investigation by The Post’s Amy Gardner. Her analysis found that a majority of GOP nominees in congressional and key statewide races this November — 299 in all — have engaged in some form of election denialism. More than 60 percent of the House candidates are running in districts with partisan profiles suggesting they are unlikely to lose. Only two states — Rhode Island and North Dakota — did not nominate a single election denier in any of the races examined by The Post, while Republicans in Montana, Tennessee, West Virginia and Wyoming nominated election deniers for every major race. And The Post’s latest tally captures only part of the threat.

    The country does not have to sit by and watch the system unravel. Any leader claiming to believe in democracy has options to act forcefully and immediately to bolster the system against another 2020-style attack. It’s past time for them to do so.

    The Post’s numbers are ominous — but not shocking. Conspiracy-theorizing candidates defeated moderate Republicans in primary after primary this summer. The Post analysis counted candidates for Congress, governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state and attorney general who had questioned President Biden’s victory, opposed counting his electoral college votes, supported partisan ballot reviews or lawsuits seeking to overturn the 2020 results, or attended the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021.

    Many of the offices for which these candidates are running oversee critical parts of the election process. Governors could refuse to certify state electors or even certify bogus alternative slates. Secretaries of state not only have authority over election procedures, but they could spread public distrust after a vote by refusing to certify results or calling for unnecessary audits and recounts. And, as the country saw in 2021, members of Congress can spuriously object to counting the electoral votes states submit.

    The Post’s count does not even capture the mischief that could take place at the local level. There has been an exodus of experienced poll workers, with conspiracy theorists and partisan operatives increasingly filling the void. Election officials are also increasingly under pressure from harassment campaigns, including coordinated records requests that waste officials’ time and resources. Several states have passed laws empowering partisan poll watchers, forcing election administrators to prepare for more confrontations at polling sites.

    Then there are rogue county clerks and other local officials who could do considerable damage to democracy but often fly under the radar. In Coffee County, Ga., a local elections official told The Post that she had opened her office to election deniers searching for evidence of voter fraud. A criminal investigation into the voting systems breach is ongoing. State canvassers, who are responsible for certifying vote totals, can do significant harm: In Michigan, for example, Republican state canvassers attempted this year to block an abortion rights amendment from getting onto the ballot, forcing the state Supreme Court to intervene. In 2020, Michigan’s canvassers came under pressure to refuse to certify Mr. Biden’s victory in the state — and they nearly buckled. The country might not be so fortunate next time.

    Because states and localities administer elections in the United States, responsibility for preparing the electoral system for another 2020-style assault falls firstly on them. The most immediate task is investing in training and security for poll workers. While they are at it, local officials should seek to remove partisan pressures from the vote counting process by doing things such as changing the requirements for those seeking to run for state secretary of state to make the office less political.

    [R]esponsibility for securing democracy does not lie only with Congress or state officials. In a functioning democracy, it is ultimately up to voters to decide who will govern, and the country’s democratic system is still working.

  3. The Washington Post reports, “Where Republican election deniers are on the ballot near you”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2022/election-deniers-running-for-office-elections-2022/?itid=sf_politics_article_list

    Election deniers will be on the ballot in 48 of 50 states and make up more than half of all Republicans running for congressional and state offices in the midterm elections. Nearly 300 Republicans seeking those offices this November have denied the outcome of the last presidential election, according to a Washington Post analysis.

    Many will win. More than 170 election deniers are running in districts or states where Republicans are expected to win, according to Cook Political Report race ratings and Partisan Voter Index. Dozens more are in competitive races.

    Arizona: Kari Lake – governor, Mark Finchem – secretary of state, Abe Hamadeh – attorney general, David Schweikert – CD1, Eli Crane – CD 2, Jeffrey Zink – CD3, Key Cooper -CD4, Andy Biggs – CD5, uis Pozzolo – CD7, Debbie Lesko – CD 8, Pu Gosar, CD9, Blake Masters – Senate.

  4. The Republican vice chair of the January 6 Committee, “Rep. Liz Cheney says Arizona GOP candidates threaten democracy”, https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-russia-ukraine-arizona-democracy-donald-trump-11dd0dcc28af5c3429e1dbfa218f7849

    Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney on Wednesday said the Republican candidates for Arizona governor and secretary of state pose a huge risk for democracy because both say they will refuse to certify election results if they don’t like the results.

    Cheney, a prominent critic of former President Donald Trump and one of just 10 U.S. House Republicans who voted to impeach him after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, made the comments at an event organized by the McCain Institute at Arizona State University.

    Cheney also leveled broadsides as what she said was a growing “Putin wing” of the Republican Party who want America to withdraw from the world stage and refuse to defend freedom in other countries.

    She has spent a lot of time thinking about Arizona and the upcoming elections here.

    “In Arizona today you have a candidate for governor in Kari Lake, you have a candidate for Secretary of State in Mark Finchem, both of whom have said — this isn’t a surprise, it’s not a secret — they both said that they will only honor the results of an election if they agree with it,” Cheney told the audience filled with ASU students.

    She said both looked at Trump’s 2020 loss in Arizona, and both know that it was carried out following state law, and that there were counts, recounts, audits and court challenges that all went against Trump.

    “They’ve looked at all of that, the law, the facts and the rulings, the courts, and they’ve said it doesn’t matter to them,” Cheney said. “And if you care about democracy, and you care about the survival of our republic, then you need to understand, we all have to understand, that we cannot give people power who have told us that they will not honor elections.”

    Cheney, who is vice chair of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress and was trounced in Wyoming’s Republican primary as a result of her refusal to back Trump, spoke of what she believes is a wider threat to the nation from a Republican Party that is now fully in Trump’s control.

    “The first thing that we have to understand is that we’ve never been where we are,” Cheney said. “We’ve never been in a phase, a place where we’re facing this kind of a threat. And that’s because we’re facing a threat from a former president who is attempting to unravel the Republic.”

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