By Joe Miller
This Week: Trump and His Allies Are Already Working To Undermine Midterm Election Results
Over the past week, Trump and his allies have continued laying the groundwork to hold our elections hostage, doggedly executing the Election Denier Playbook. They have been working to ban and delegitimize certain voting methods, refusing to commit to election results if they lose, and discrediting state and local election administrators. Now, as early voting begins, Trump Republicans are rallying their supporters to harass and intimidate voters at the polls.
In Arizona, voters reported multiple other instances of possible voter intimidation over the weekend after spotting armed individuals wearing tactical gear in trucks with concealed license plates outside several ballot drop box sites in east Maricopa County. A local voting rights advocacy group is seeking a temporary restraining order against a MAGA group linked to the voter intimidation incidents and the Department of Justice and FBI have identified the state as one of the top locations for threats against election officials and poll workers. With early voting underway, state election officials are increasingly worried about bands of MAGA poll observers, hunting for so-called fraud, harassing and intimidating voters after referring a report of voter intimidation to the DOJ last week.
In Pennsylvania, former President Donald Trump is planning to challenge the 2022 election results by alleging unproven voter fraud in Philadelphia — just as he did in 2020 — according to a leaked memo from a meeting at Trump Tower in September. Pennsylvania officials have recently seen a spike in interest about internal election administration amid a rising wave of harassment and threats directed at poll workers and officials.
In Georgia, the Jan. 6 Select Committee is now aiding Fulton County special prosecutors in their grand jury investigation over 2020 election interference by Trump and his allies, sharing evidence from sworn testimony given by Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows (who will also be testifying separately to the grand jury) and an array of Georgia-based witnesses including Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Trump aide Pat Cipollone and former Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler, who has lately been working to recruit election skeptics as poll workers in Georgia, both testified to the grand jury in Atlanta last week. In other news from Fulton County, a federal appeals court once again ordered South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham to testify after the November election – though Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas quickly ordered a temporary stay on the decision pending an emergency appeal from Senator Graham, who continues to claim that his testimony would “create chaos.”
Elsewhere, election deniers are working to undermine the will of voters with less than two weeks until Election Day:
In Michigan, a group of election conspiracists led by Trump-era National Security Advisor Michael Flynn have begun distributing checklists for infiltrating election offices at trainings for Michigan poll challengers, instructing them to set up hidden cameras to capture license plate numbers and “show up armed” after dark. A new poll revealed that two-thirds of registered voters fear that extremists will carry out acts of violence after the election if they are unhappy with the outcome.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) has now launched 73 election lawsuits in 20 states ahead of the midterms, vastly outpacing the rate of litigation in 2020.
In Nevada, Nye County will move forward with plans to hand-count all ballots cast in the November election after the state Supreme Court ruled partly in favor of a lawsuit spearheaded by the ACLU, directing the MAGA county clerk to refrain from livestreaming the hand-count process and will require all poll observers to certify that they will not prematurely release any information about the vote count.
And finally, in Arizona, Cochise County supervisors voted to hand-count all ballots cast in the November election, ignoring warnings from county attorneys that the proposal would violate state election law. With early voting already underway, the move is all-but-certain to provoke legal action.
