Ever since Donald Trump took office in 2016, we’ve been reminded over and over that the preservation of our democracy depends on both political parties observing unwritten, unspoken norms of basic “good faith.” These norms are—often unconsciously—embedded into our system of government. The most important of these norms is the unspoken agreement that a loser of an election will respect the outcome and abide by the results. If that simple act of good faith is not adhered to, our democratic and constitutional system simply will not function the way it is designed to function. Instead, it is put at risk under the weight of its own implicit assumptions.
The Republican Party, under the influence of Donald Trump and his criminal mentality and in its zeal to retain power at all costs, has made the conscious decision to abandon those norms of good faith. That is the essence of the “Big Lie” and all that it represents: By conjuring up imagined accounts of voter fraud as a justification for ignoring those established, implicit norms of basic fairness and decency, Republicans have laid the groundwork for disrupting and finally destroying the free and fair elections that are the core of our democratic system.
The headline to this story isn’t hyperbole. It’s just one important piece of the Republicans’ current plan to skew elections from this point forward, including the 2022 midterms, in their favor. The other major pieces involve creating a “paper trail” of perceived instances of MAGA-reported “fraud” at polling places, with GOP lawyer operatives working in boiler rooms faithfully recording these fantasy “reports” of fraud on Election Day. This, in turn, creates a ready body of “evidence” for them to justify reversing election results to complicit GOP officials up the food chain, including their election-denying secretaries of state who are tasked with certifying elections.
As set forth in a video report published on Tuesday, prepared by video journalist Johnny Harris and New York Times editorial board member and columnist Michelle Cottle, these GOP tactics, although legal, are a calculated effort to abuse and circumvent democratic governance by consciously abandoning the very idea of acting in “good faith.”
The video, titled “Inside the Completely Legal G.O.P. Plot to Destroy American Democracy,” is below. All Democrats should watch this video in its entirety. But since many of us have busy schedules, I’ve edited up to what I consider the most pertinent segment:
YouTube Video
The initial six to seven minutes of the report address GOP voter suppression efforts most on this site are familiar with, so I won’t reiterate them here. Both Harris and Cottle generally conclude that while those efforts are sinister and destructive enough in their broad-brush application of racism, the end results of such suppression efforts have been mixed to some degree thus far, with voter turnout even increasing in some areas as a response to the suppression efforts. They could have spent much more time on this complex subject, but they probably felt their audience’s attention span would wander.
It is the remainder of the video that will tell you something about which you probably aren’t aware. According to Harris’ and Cottle’s reporting, the GOP national strategy to delegitimize the election process involves four basic stages: recruiting, training, challenging, and overturning. All of these efforts focus on the hidden structural hierarchy—the “plumbing,” as the authors call it—that decides our elections, from local precinct captains to judges of elections and all the way up to the secretary of state.
The first step, recruitment, has already been largely accomplished. The authors cite ProPublica’s reporting, which found 8,500 new Republican sign-ups for “low-level” precinct positions since the 2020 elections in 41 of the 65 counties contacted for their survey. There was no comparable surge—indeed, no surge at all—among Democrats.
What that means for Democratic election volunteers, poll watchers, and poll workers is that you are likely to encounter far more Republicans at your polling places than you are accustomed to. But these are not the same Republicans you may have rubbed elbows with in years past: Many are, for the most part, hardcore MAGA election denialists. And they are there for one purpose: to challenge any voter who doesn’t “look” right to them, prepare a “challenge” report in the precinct’s logbook, and report to the GOP operative in his boiler room. You can use your imagination regarding the specific types of voters they intend to challenge, but as Steve Bannon hyperbolically declares in a segment quoted by the authors, they will have free, legal rein to “challenge every ballot,” because there is no law that can stop them from doing so.
The authors also cite a PowerPoint presentation from the RNC, which produced some of the GOP’s “training” manuals for such precinct workers, describing how to make such challenges:
The intent of this, as Harris and Cottle point out, is to create a paper trail for “every piece of fraud they think they see.” The Times authors also cite reporting by Politico in which tapes of Republican strategy sessions were obtained. In one of the tapes, Matthew Seifried, a Republican “election integrity director” for the state of Michigan, describes recruiting an “army” of lawyers who the Times report indicates will be staffing these “hotlines” or “boiler rooms,” collecting a trove of manufactured evidence that will be used to justify challenges to elections that Republicans lose, but which they believe can be overturned by sympathetic state officials.
It bears repeating that these “reports” from the local precinct level are being prepared by MAGA election denialists specifically recruited for that purpose, not by people who are at all interested in full and fair elections. In Democratic precincts these planned tactics will have the practical effect of lengthening the time it takes to vote, creating long lines of frustrated voters while simultaneously creating a paper trail for the GOP’s bogus fraud assertions.
The remainder of the report addresses the prevalence of these same type of election denialists and MAGA fanatics currently running for secretary of state in places like Arizona, Wyoming, and Nevada, and cites the incident in Otero county where an all-Republican election board recently refused to certify the results of an election based on the “gut feeling” of a county commissioner that there had been fraud involved (there was none). The commissioner, a Trump fanatic named Couy Griffin, has since been banned from public office for his participation in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
The authors’ point is that Griffin is not an anomaly; there are Trump-supporting election denialists either now installed or running for offices throughout the country, all of them eager to overturn an election upon the GOP’s demand. Importantly, and as the authors point out, the primary motivation of all of these Republicans is not to preserve the integrity of our electoral system but to exact revenge for what they perceive as the “stolen” 2020 election.
A word of caution: Just because these people are out there doesn’t necessarily mean all of them will be in voters’ faces on Nov. 8. It is one thing to profess your allegiance to the Trump cult from the safety of your online perch, saying you’re prepared to do whatever Bannon thinks is necessary. It’s quite another to face the daunting and intimidating task of actually physically challenging a voter based only on your misguided delusions, paranoia, and racist impulses.
But the only remedy for this, as Cottle stresses at the end of the video, is for more Democrats to volunteer to counter these people who apparently plan to be as obtrusive and thuggish as possible. Many more Democrats are needed to staff the polls in every precinct and volunteer to monitor the ballot-counting process, both at the polls themselves and to safeguard against the forthcoming GOP challenges to provisional and mail-in ballots. And many more Democrats need to run for these often neglected but crucial positions in the hierarchy of our election system.
None of this ought to surprise anyone. It's how a political party with unpopular ideas; a shrinking, racist and paranoid voter base; and an amoral leader like Donald Trump would be expected to behave. They have no interest in democracy and no interest in serving the needs of the American people. The only thing they want is power, and this is what they've come up with to try to hold onto power. We cant say we weren't warned.
(Xaxnar reported on the Times video on Wednesday as well. It deserves as much as exposure as we can give it.)
The Republican Party, under the influence of Donald Trump and his criminal mentality and in its zeal to retain power at all costs, has made the conscious decision to abandon those norms of good faith. That is the essence of the “Big Lie” and all that it represents: By conjuring up imagined accounts of voter fraud as a justification for ignoring those established, implicit norms of basic fairness and decency, Republicans have laid the groundwork for disrupting and finally destroying the free and fair elections that are the core of our democratic system.
The headline to this story isn’t hyperbole. It’s just one important piece of the Republicans’ current plan to skew elections from this point forward, including the 2022 midterms, in their favor. The other major pieces involve creating a “paper trail” of perceived instances of MAGA-reported “fraud” at polling places, with GOP lawyer operatives working in boiler rooms faithfully recording these fantasy “reports” of fraud on Election Day. This, in turn, creates a ready body of “evidence” for them to justify reversing election results to complicit GOP officials up the food chain, including their election-denying secretaries of state who are tasked with certifying elections.
As set forth in a video report published on Tuesday, prepared by video journalist Johnny Harris and New York Times editorial board member and columnist Michelle Cottle, these GOP tactics, although legal, are a calculated effort to abuse and circumvent democratic governance by consciously abandoning the very idea of acting in “good faith.”
The video, titled “Inside the Completely Legal G.O.P. Plot to Destroy American Democracy,” is below. All Democrats should watch this video in its entirety. But since many of us have busy schedules, I’ve edited up to what I consider the most pertinent segment:
YouTube Video
The initial six to seven minutes of the report address GOP voter suppression efforts most on this site are familiar with, so I won’t reiterate them here. Both Harris and Cottle generally conclude that while those efforts are sinister and destructive enough in their broad-brush application of racism, the end results of such suppression efforts have been mixed to some degree thus far, with voter turnout even increasing in some areas as a response to the suppression efforts. They could have spent much more time on this complex subject, but they probably felt their audience’s attention span would wander.
It is the remainder of the video that will tell you something about which you probably aren’t aware. According to Harris’ and Cottle’s reporting, the GOP national strategy to delegitimize the election process involves four basic stages: recruiting, training, challenging, and overturning. All of these efforts focus on the hidden structural hierarchy—the “plumbing,” as the authors call it—that decides our elections, from local precinct captains to judges of elections and all the way up to the secretary of state.
The first step, recruitment, has already been largely accomplished. The authors cite ProPublica’s reporting, which found 8,500 new Republican sign-ups for “low-level” precinct positions since the 2020 elections in 41 of the 65 counties contacted for their survey. There was no comparable surge—indeed, no surge at all—among Democrats.
What that means for Democratic election volunteers, poll watchers, and poll workers is that you are likely to encounter far more Republicans at your polling places than you are accustomed to. But these are not the same Republicans you may have rubbed elbows with in years past: Many are, for the most part, hardcore MAGA election denialists. And they are there for one purpose: to challenge any voter who doesn’t “look” right to them, prepare a “challenge” report in the precinct’s logbook, and report to the GOP operative in his boiler room. You can use your imagination regarding the specific types of voters they intend to challenge, but as Steve Bannon hyperbolically declares in a segment quoted by the authors, they will have free, legal rein to “challenge every ballot,” because there is no law that can stop them from doing so.
The authors also cite a PowerPoint presentation from the RNC, which produced some of the GOP’s “training” manuals for such precinct workers, describing how to make such challenges:
The intent of this, as Harris and Cottle point out, is to create a paper trail for “every piece of fraud they think they see.” The Times authors also cite reporting by Politico in which tapes of Republican strategy sessions were obtained. In one of the tapes, Matthew Seifried, a Republican “election integrity director” for the state of Michigan, describes recruiting an “army” of lawyers who the Times report indicates will be staffing these “hotlines” or “boiler rooms,” collecting a trove of manufactured evidence that will be used to justify challenges to elections that Republicans lose, but which they believe can be overturned by sympathetic state officials.
It bears repeating that these “reports” from the local precinct level are being prepared by MAGA election denialists specifically recruited for that purpose, not by people who are at all interested in full and fair elections. In Democratic precincts these planned tactics will have the practical effect of lengthening the time it takes to vote, creating long lines of frustrated voters while simultaneously creating a paper trail for the GOP’s bogus fraud assertions.
The remainder of the report addresses the prevalence of these same type of election denialists and MAGA fanatics currently running for secretary of state in places like Arizona, Wyoming, and Nevada, and cites the incident in Otero county where an all-Republican election board recently refused to certify the results of an election based on the “gut feeling” of a county commissioner that there had been fraud involved (there was none). The commissioner, a Trump fanatic named Couy Griffin, has since been banned from public office for his participation in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
The authors’ point is that Griffin is not an anomaly; there are Trump-supporting election denialists either now installed or running for offices throughout the country, all of them eager to overturn an election upon the GOP’s demand. Importantly, and as the authors point out, the primary motivation of all of these Republicans is not to preserve the integrity of our electoral system but to exact revenge for what they perceive as the “stolen” 2020 election.
A word of caution: Just because these people are out there doesn’t necessarily mean all of them will be in voters’ faces on Nov. 8. It is one thing to profess your allegiance to the Trump cult from the safety of your online perch, saying you’re prepared to do whatever Bannon thinks is necessary. It’s quite another to face the daunting and intimidating task of actually physically challenging a voter based only on your misguided delusions, paranoia, and racist impulses.
But the only remedy for this, as Cottle stresses at the end of the video, is for more Democrats to volunteer to counter these people who apparently plan to be as obtrusive and thuggish as possible. Many more Democrats are needed to staff the polls in every precinct and volunteer to monitor the ballot-counting process, both at the polls themselves and to safeguard against the forthcoming GOP challenges to provisional and mail-in ballots. And many more Democrats need to run for these often neglected but crucial positions in the hierarchy of our election system.
None of this ought to surprise anyone. It's how a political party with unpopular ideas; a shrinking, racist and paranoid voter base; and an amoral leader like Donald Trump would be expected to behave. They have no interest in democracy and no interest in serving the needs of the American people. The only thing they want is power, and this is what they've come up with to try to hold onto power. We cant say we weren't warned.
(Xaxnar reported on the Times video on Wednesday as well. It deserves as much as exposure as we can give it.)