GOP prepares to subvert 2024 election

by Tom Maertens

May 26, 2021

There were 16 alleged cases of vote fraud in 2020, out of 160 million votes cast; the Republican response is to promote the big lie about vote fraud and propose 361 new voter suppression laws in 47 states.

They are also demanding endless recounts, even in states that have already recounted votes twice, part of their continuing program to undermine confidence in our electoral system.

As Alex Waldman wrote in the Washington Post, “Though Trump may be fading, that combination of stupidity and malevolence is still the signature quality” of his party.

Their goal is to cripple and corrupt the U.S. electoral system so that Trump could lose in 2024 and still become president.

Chauncey DeVega, writing in Salon, labels the Republican Party and the right-wing movement “expert and prodigious liars,” their main strategy to gain power. They are following the example of Trump, who told 30,573 lies while in office, according to the Washington Post database, and is under criminal investigation in at least three jurisdictions.

According to DeVega, “today’s Republican Party is almost fully a neo-fascist political organization and personality cult centered around Donald Trump.”

Among the standard tactics from the neo-fascist playbook is to blame liberal groups, like Black Lives Matter and antifa, for right-wing violence, such as occurred during the Jan. 6 insurrection. Over 400 people have been arrested, virtually all are right-wing extremists.

As the Guardian reported, “A new database of nearly 900 politically motivated attacks and plots in the United States since 1994 includes just one attack staged by an anti-fascist that led to fatalities. In that case, the single person killed was the perpetrator. Over the same time period, American white supremacists and other rightwing extremists have carried out attacks that left at least 329 victims dead, according to the database.”

Republicans are blocking any investigation of the insurrection because they know that Trump and his supporters, not antifa, organized it. For the record, this is the same GOP that conducted eight investigations and held 33 hearings on Hillary Clinton and Benghazi, which was not a threat to democracy.

In 2017, a 20-year-old neo-Nazi deliberately drove his car into a crowd of people counterprotesting the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. He injured scores of people and killed a woman named Heather Heyer.

In 2020, Ari Weil of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, tracked “72 incidents of cars driving into protesters across 52 different cities,” over the span of just over a month. In addition, cops in New York, Boston, and Detroit did the same, and even bragged about it on social media.

Republicans are also legalizing terrorist tactics against protesters: a bill in Florida shields drivers from civil liability if they injure or kill protesters on Florida roads. Five other states introduced similar “hit and kill” bills. So far, a total of 81 anti-protest bills have been filed in 34 states this year, according to the New York Times.

Such tactics are promoted by Fox News and other right-wing outlets, prompting the “Foxitis” legal defense by a Jan. 6 defendant whose lawyer claimed that a steady diet of misinformation from Fox caused a mental health syndrome for his client — which Luke O’Neil of the Guardian labeled “Fox News brain cancer … like a shared psychotic disorder.”

Strangely, one of Trump’s lawyers, Sidney Powell, argued in court that no reasonable person would believe her wild assertions; similarly, Fox lawyers defended Tucker Carlson in court against slander charges by saying that he was engaged in “exaggeration” and “non-linear commentary.”

Another element of the GOP’s plan to steal the election is to transfer election certification responsibilities from officials like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who inconveniently refused to “find” the votes needed to flip the last election, to Republican-controlled legislatures.

Arizona and Georgia are setting the stage for 2024 electoral fraud with bills that would allow legislatures to override the popular vote and choose the electors.

In addition, Arizona Republicans have authorized another “audit” of the ballots, after two audits showed no fraud.

The contractor they selected is a vocal supporter of Trump whose source of funds is unknown. The firm took control of Arizona’s voting machines without required surveillance, which means, as Arizona’s secretary of state said, the machines can’t be trusted anymore and will have to be replaced.

Republicans are also continuing to purge voter lists and gerrymander voting districts to disenfranchise minority voters.

This is not the Republican Party I worked for in the Senate and the White House.

Tom Maertens served as White House NSC director under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.