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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — November 7, 2022

By November 7, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

Tomorrow’s Midterm Election Poses A Fresh Threat To American Democracy After Two Years Of Attacks 

  • Washington Post: Midterms Pose Fresh Test For American Democracy After Two Years Under Fire: Local governments have erected barriers and called in police reinforcements to protect buildings where votes will be counted. Election officials have prepared rapid social media responses to false claims of ballot fraud. And a human rights group typically focused on fragile democracies abroad has turned its attention to the United States, asking candidates to pledge to respect the results. Two years after Donald Trump tried to overturn a presidential election, Tuesday’s midterms will test American democracy once more, with voters uncertain whether they can believe in the process, Republican election deniers poised to take positions of power, and the mechanics of voting itself under intense scrutiny.

Election Night Could Take Days Or Weeks To Resolve Helping Fuel False Claims Of Fraud 

  • Semafor: Election Night Could Take Weeks To Resolve — And That Has People Worried: When will we know the full results of the 2022 election? Sometime in December. Who’s nervous about that? Republicans, who worry that the other side is up to something, and Democrats, who fear January 6th-style conspiracies will fill the interim. “I’m concerned,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told Semafor at a campaign stop here on Wednesday. “When you look at places like Pennsylvania that say it could take days to count the results, that does not inspire confidence.” Cruz was in west Michigan to campaign with John Gibbs, a congressional candidate who’d questioned the “mathematically impossible” results two years ago. Then and now, news outlets and state elections officials warned that close elections might take days or weeks to count for predictable reasons. Baseless conspiracy theories about late-night “vote dumps,” rigged voting machines, and numbers manipulated by news agencies have changed the way many Republicans vote, even when they expect to win. That means different batches of votes, cast different ways and counted at separate times, have wide partisan gaps. The same paranoia also raises the stakes of an extended counting period, providing more time for propaganda to take hold and extremists to organize.
  • Washington Post: Election Officials Fear Counting Delays Will Help Fuel Claims Of Fraud: Officials in a handful of closely contested states are warning that the winners of tight races may not be known on election night, raising the possibility of a delay that former president Donald Trump and his allies could exploit to cast doubt on the integrity of Tuesday’s midterm vote. In Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin, officials have in recent days preemptively called for patience, acknowledging that some of the factors that bogged down the process in 2020 remain unresolved two years later. In some cases, partisan disagreements blocked fixes, and Trump’s own advice to voters on how to cast ballots may contribute to a longer wait. Although the reasons for the delays vary from state to state, officials have been united in urging the public not to draw conclusions just because the count appears to be proceeding slowly.

GOP Ramps Up Poll Watching Efforts, Lawsuits, And Voter Intimidation 

  • New York Times: G.O.P. Begins Ballot Watching Push Ahead Of Election Day: The questions began soon after the doors opened to the public at a sprawling elections office inside a warehouse, and they kept coming until the sky was dark and a cold wind was blowing outside. Hundreds of thousands of ballots for Clark County, which encompasses Las Vegas, are processed, sorted and counted here, against a backdrop of mountains and desert. Because elections in America are more fraught than ever, the scrutiny of ballot counting now starts well before Election Day, and the legal challenges have already begun. The Republican Party and allied groups, many seized by Donald J. Trump’s falsehoods about fraud in elections, are training monitors around the country to spot what they see as irregularities at absentee ballot counting centers. The monitors are told to take copious notes, which could be useful for potential court challenges, raising the prospect of a replay in state and local elections of Mr. Trump’s attempt to use the courts to overturn his loss two years ago.
  • Washington Post: Republicans Sue To Disqualify Thousands Of Mail Ballots In Swing States: Republican officials and candidates in at least three battleground states are pushing to disqualify thousands of mail ballots after urging their own supporters to vote on Election Day, in what critics are calling a concerted attempt at partisan voter suppression. In Pennsylvania, the state Supreme Court has agreed with the Republican National Committee that election officials should not count ballots on which the voter neglected to put a date on the outer envelope — even in cases when the ballots arrive before Election Day. Thousands of ballots have been set aside as a result, enough to swing a close race. In Michigan, Kristina Karamo, the Republican nominee for secretary of state, sued the top election official in Detroit last month, seeking to toss absentee ballots not cast in person with an ID, even though that runs contrary to state requirements. When asked in a recent court hearing, Karamo’s lawyer declined to say why the suit targets Detroit, a heavily Democratic, majority-Black city, and not the entire state. And in Wisconsin, Republicans won a court ruling that will prevent some mail ballots from being counted when the required witness address is not complete.
  • CNN: Law Enforcement Ratchets Up Presence In Voting Process As Some Sheriffs Push Election Conspiracy Theories: Early voters dropping off ballots in Berks County, Pennsylvania, are confronted by a sight surprising for elections in the United States:  A pair of uniformed sheriff’s deputies armed with guns and tasers guarding the ballot box.  Directed by local election officials to question voters before letting them deposit their ballots, the deputies guarding the drop boxes underscore the growing schism in this country over the debunked claims that the 2020 election was marred by rampant vote fraud.   To some in Berks County, the deputies are only trying to ensure a fair and clean election. Others say their presence and direct questioning risks intimidating voters and stoking baseless conspiracy theories. Having deputies at drop boxes “can obviously be very intimidating in the moment to those voters,” said Mary McCord, executive director of the nonpartisan Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University Law Center. But it also “sends this broader message that our elections aren’t secure, that there’s widespread fraud … and what’s really abhorrent about this is, it’s based on a lie, it’s based on disinformation.”  The scene playing out in Berks County may be one of the more visible examples of law-enforcement intervention in the 2022 voting process. But there are others, and many of those efforts are tied to a fringe group of elected sheriffs influenced by former President Donald Trump’s repeatedly disproven claims of vote fraud. Those sheriffs have been telling their constituents they plan to police the midterm elections – even though that is normally the duty of election officials.
  • The Guardian: ‘We’re Watching You’: Incidents Of Voter Intimidation Rise As Midterm Elections Near: In suburban Mesa, Arizona, people staked out an outdoor ballot drop box, taking photos and videos of voters dropping off ballots. Some wore tactical gear or camouflage. Some were visibly armed. Others videotaped voters and election workers at a ballot drop box and central tabulation office in downtown Phoenix. They set up lawn chairs and camped out to keep watch through a fence which had been added around the facility for safety after 2020 election protests. Some voters claim the observers approached or followed them in their vehicles. Other observers hung back, watching and filming from at least 75ft from the drop boxes. In total, the Arizona secretary of state has received more than a dozen complaints from voters about intimidation from drop box watchers, many of which have been forwarded to the US Department of Justice and the Arizona attorney general as of late October, as well as a threat sent to the secretary of state herself. A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order on 1 November to limit the watchers’ activities. These activities have led to calls from Maricopa county officials to “decrease the temperature” of heated rhetoric and actions in advance of Tuesday’s midterm elections. But though Arizona has become a hotbed for these tactics, it is also a sign of the mounting national threats to security that voters are facing as the 8 November elections near – part of an orchestrated countrywide strategy pushed by rightwing groups who believe baseless conspiracy theories that the 2020 presidential election was rife with fraud and irregularities.

Fears Of Political Violence Are Widespread 

  • Washington Post: A Wide Majority Of Americans Are Concerned About Politically Motivated Violence:  A wide and bipartisan majority of Americans worry there is increased danger of politically motivated violence in the United States, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll. Nearly 9 in 10 Americans (88 percent) are concerned that political divisions have intensified to the point that there’s an increased risk of politically motivated violence in the United States, including over 6 in 10 who are “very concerned.”
  • NBC: A Spiral Of Violence And Fear Is Creating Angst For Many Voters Ahead Of The Midterm Elections: Armed men in masks and tactical gear have shown up at secure ballot drop boxes. Candidates of both parties have been physically attacked, election workers intimidated. And threats against members of Congress are up tenfold. For many voters, a vicious spiral of violence and fear is creating angst, paranoia and an overwhelming sense of dread that the nation is on the eve of destruction, according to a growing body of public opinion research. Democrats worry that the GOP is bent on seizing power regardless of the outcome of elections — a concern rooted in former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 race he lost. Polls show a large portion of Republicans fear democracy is in peril because they believe that elections are rigged against them.
  • Time: The United Stats of Political Violence: Across the U.S., there has been a surge of harassment, attacks, and violent threats targeting civic and public officials and their families. America is a nation shaped by violent acts and founded on principles that protect free speech, even when it is ugly or incendiary. Yet the specter of politically motivated violence today has become alarmingly pervasive, and the fear it engenders is upending the political landscape, according to more than two-dozen interviews with analysts and public officials. For the past year, TIME has tracked violent threats, harassment, and attacks targeting public officials and their families. News reports, public records, and interviews with experts and officials at all levels of government paint a portrait of a nation whose most basic institutions—election offices, city councils, municipal health departments, school boards, even public-library systems—are being hollowed out by relentless intimidation.

Social Media Could Become A Free For All Of Conspiracy Theories And Misinformation In The Days After The Election 

  • New York Times: Russia Reactivates Its Trolls and Bots Ahead of Tuesday’s Midterms:  The user on Gab who identifies as Nora Berka resurfaced in August after a yearlong silence on the social media platform, reposting a handful of messages with sharply conservative political themes before writing a stream of original vitriol. The posts mostly denigrated President Biden and other prominent Democrats, sometimes obscenely. They also lamented the use of taxpayer dollars to support Ukraine in its war against invading Russian forces, depicting Ukraine’s president as a caricature straight out of Russian propaganda. The fusion of political concerns was no coincidence. The account was previously linked to the same secretive Russian agency that interfered in the 2016 presidential election and again in 2020, the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, according to the cybersecurity group Recorded Future. It is part of what the group and other researchers have identified as a new, though more narrowly targeted, Russian effort ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections. The goal, as before, is to stoke anger among conservative voters and to undermine trust in the American electoral system. This time, it also appears intended to undermine the Biden administration’s extensive military assistance to Ukraine.
  • NBC: Days Before The Midterms, Twitter Lays Off Employees Who Fight Misinformation: Mass layoffs at Twitter on Friday battered the teams primarily responsible for keeping the platform free of misinformation, potentially hobbling the company’s capabilities four days before the end of voting in Tuesday’s midterm elections, one current and six former Twitter employees familiar with the cuts told NBC News, five of whom had been recently laid off.  Two former Twitter employees and one current employee warned the layoffs could bring chaos around the elections, as they hit especially hard on teams responsible for the curation of trending topics and for the engineering side of “user health,” which works on content moderation and site integrity. The seven people asked to withhold their names out of worry over professional retribution and because they weren’t authorized to speak for the company.
  • Washington Post: This Year, GOP Election Deniers Got A Free Pass From Twitter And Facebook:  For years, Facebook and Twitter have pledged to fight falsehoods that could confuse users about America’s electoral system by tagging questionable posts with accurate information about voting and removing rule-breaking misinformation. But this electoral cycle, at least 26 candidates have posted inaccurate election claims since April, but the platforms have done virtually nothing to refute them, according to a Washington Post review of the companies’ misinformation labeling practices. That’s in contrast to the 2020 election cycle, when Facebook and Twitter collectively added labels to scores of election-related posts from Donald Trump that pointed readers to authoritative information about the electoral process or alerted readers that the information was misleading. Facebook labeled at least 506 Trump posts between Jan. 1, 2020, and Jan. 6, 2021, according to a study from the left-leaning Media Matters for America, and Twitter also added labels to Trump’s tweets questioning the validity of the election or voting process.

In The States 

ARIZONA: Fear And Threats Dominate Final Days Of Arizona Election Campaign 

  • Reuters: ‘kill Them’: Arizona Election Workers Face Midterm Threats: Election workers in Arizona’s most fiercely contested county faced more than 100 violent threats and intimidating communications in the run-up to Tuesday’s midterms, most of them based on election conspiracy theories promoted by former President Donald Trump and his allies. The harassment in Maricopa County included menacing emails and social media posts, threats to circulate personal information online and photographing employees arriving at work, according to nearly 1,600 pages of documents obtained by Reuters through a public records request for security records and correspondence related to threats and harassments against election workers.
  • New York Times: ‘We’re Afraid’: Town That Inspired Debunked Voter Fraud Film Braces For Election Day: It was a jumpy, 20-second video clip that touched off a firestorm: During a local primary election two years ago, the former mayor of this farm town of San Luis, Ariz., was filmed handling another voter’s ballot. She appeared to make a few marks, and then sealed it and handed a small stack of ballots to another woman to turn in. That moment outside a polling place in August 2020 thrust this town along the southern border into the center of stolen-election conspiracy theories, as the unlikely inspiration for the debunked voter fraud film “2,000 Mules.” Activists peddling misinformation and supported by former President Donald J. Trump descended on San Luis. The Republican attorney general of Arizona opened an investigation into voting, which is still ongoing. The former mayor, Guillermina Fuentes, was sentenced to 30 days in jail and two years probation for ballot abuse — or what the attorney general called “ballot harvesting” — a felony under Arizona law. Ms. Fuentes is one of four women in San Luis who have now been charged with illegally collecting ballots during the primaries, including the second woman who appears on the video. But there have been no charges of widespread voter fraud in San Luis linked to the presidential election. Liberal voting-rights groups and many San Luis residents say that investigators, prosecutors and election-denying activists have intimidated voters and falsely tied their community to conspiracy theories about rampant, nationwide election fraud. The film “2,000 Mules,” endorsed by Mr. Trump, has helped to keep those claims alive, and is often cited by election-denying candidates across the country.

MINNESOTA:  Election Deniers Are Training Some Election Judges 

  • Minnesota Public Radio: Election Deniers In Minnesota Are Training Some Election Judges: The email from the head of the “Olmsted County Election Integrity” group inviting Jim Anderson to an online training session for election judges looked official. Anderson had served as a judge before, and the email seemed like part of the normal process to prepare him for the 2022 election. But as he joined the Zoom call, it was clear to him there was nothing normal about the training — and it definitely was not from Olmsted County, which is in charge of training election judges. “They said, well, ‘You know our real president isn’t in office,’” he recalled. “That’s about the time I hit ‘end.’” Another email from Olmsted County Election Integrity arrived about a week later, this time urging Anderson to rename his smartphone to masquerade as the Wi-Fi network of the polling place where he’d be stationed on Election Day.  The goal, it said, was to capture data being sent over that network and expose an imagined security vulnerability.  The emailer also asked him to photograph vote counting machines and various documents and forward it all to the group’s leader. Anderson notified city election officials, worried the group was encouraging election judges to break the law.  Anderson didn’t know that Rochester police were already investigating two members of the group who served as election judges in the August primary. The city, which hires election workers, hasn’t scheduled those poll workers for Election Day as they await the results of those investigations.  However, the group’s attempts to influence the behavior of election judges and persuade them to commit possibly unlawful acts has alarmed state and local officials. Dozens of people who’ve raised doubts about elections to Minnesota County boards over the last year appear on rosters of election judges compiled by APM Reports, an investigative reporting group and sister organization of MPR News.

NORTH CAROLINA:  Voter Intimidation And Threats Reported 

  • Reuters: North Carolina Reports Possible Voter Intimidation, Threats Ahead Of Midterm Elections: North Carolina officials have registered 14 instances of potential intimidation or interference with voters and election workers in the run-up to Tuesday’s U.S. midterm elections, according to records provided to Reuters on Friday. The alleged incidents come as grassroots poll observers, many recruited by prominent Republican Party figures and activists, fan out in the lead-up to Tuesday’s vote, a trend that has worried experts and officials.

PENNSYLVANIA:  Challenges To Vote Counting And Certification Expected In Several Pennsylvania Counties 

  • Philadelphia Inquirer: How Disputes Over Vote Certification Could Play Out In Pennsylvania Counties:  When polls close at 8 p.m. on Election Day, a nearly three-week process to finalize and certify results will begin, a period in which candidates could lodge objections to certain votes and spark protracted legal fights that would draw out a normally routine process. Such disputes have grown more likely because of continued rhetoric from the right alleging voter fraud, and after some county boards of election resisted certifying all votes from their primary elections. GOP gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano, a state senator from Franklin County, led the charge to question election results in 2020. He sought to overturn former President Donald Trump’s loss in Pennsylvania that year, and has repeatedly suggested there will be fraud in this year’s contest. He has not said whether he will accept this year’s results. Meanwhile,Trump held a September meeting in Trump Tower with Pennsylvania elected officials and election activists, as reported by Rolling Stone. Trump expressed concern there would be fraud in the U.S. Senate race, particularly in Philadelphia, and was preparing to launch a media campaign and legal crusade should his preferred candidate be behind in the count on election night. Many fair elections advocates in Pennsylvania anticipate challenges in this year’s contests, and say results certification and the handling of undated mail-in ballots are particular issues to watch.
  • WITF: A Western Pa. Group Is Among Those Preparing To Challenge Midterm Election Results:  A recent political rally in Bloomsburg was a lot like any other this election season.  Conservative activists and their followers had gathered to pump themselves up for the coming midterms. A stage adorned with patriotic decorations served as the focal point; six-foot-long banners plastered with words like “We the People,” “Freedom” and “Liberty” were tacked up. Video taken from the rally shows a woman wearing a white T-shirt and ball cap being introduced and taking the stage. Before she starts her speech, she surveys the crowd: “Does anybody in this room think that Donald J. Trump was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election in Pennsylvania?” asks Toni Shuppe.  The crowd roared in agreement – even though mandated county and state-administered audits determined Joe Biden won that year’s contest by 80,000 votes. Multiple experts of both parties and even two Trump-appointed federal judges all concluded the election system that produced that result was fair and secure. Shuppe is a mother of three who co-founded Audit the Vote PA, a group that describes itself on its website as “non-partisan” and “advocating for our right to a free and fair election” in Pennsylvania.  She and her co-founder Karen Taylor also insist “something went awry in 2020,” despite evidence to the contrary. A banner message scrawled across the top of Audit the Vote’s site urges visitors to help them “Expose the Fraud” – though there is no evidence Pennsylvania’s election system allows for widespread ballot fraud or malfeasance. Many of its claims have been refuted by the Department of State. […] Audit the Vote’s county-by-county strategy goes hand-in-hand with the efforts of national conservative figures like Steve Bannon, a Trump White House strategist who is facing a jail sentence for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the January 6 committee. “We need our people in the counting rooms,” Bannon told viewers of his War Room program last month. You need to be around the green table, right? And you need to be relentless. Polite, nice, fair…but an immovable object.” Audit the Vote says it’s helping to move that part of Bannon’s election strategy forward here in Pa.

WISCONSIN: Republicans Sue To Block Counting Of Military Ballots 

  • Washington Post: Lawsuit Seeks To Block Counting Of Military Ballots In Wisconsin: A Wisconsin lawmaker who has been a frequent promoter of false election claims is suing to prevent the immediate counting of military ballots in her state after she received three ballots under fake names. The lawsuit, filed on Friday, was brought by a veterans group and three individuals, including Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R), the chairwoman of the State Assembly’s elections committee. Last week, Brandtjen received three military ballots under fictitious names that were allegedly sent to her by Kimberly Zapata, a Milwaukee election official. Election officials have criticized Brandtjen for spreading false claims about the system, and Zapata later told prosecutors she was trying to alert Brandtjen about an actual weakness in the state’s voting system that should be addressed. Days later Zapata was fired and charged with a felony and three misdemeanors. Unlike most states, Wisconsin allows military members to cast ballots without registering to vote or providing proof of residency. Military ballots make up a tiny fraction of votes in Wisconsin — about 1,400 so far for Tuesday’s election. Brandtjen and the others are using the incident to argue that military ballots should not be counted unless election officials can show they complied with a state law requiring them to maintain lists of all eligible military voters.

What Experts Are Saying

Norman Eisen, a political law expert who advised the White House on election law when he served as President Barack Obama’s ethics czar, and Taylor Redd, a researcher focusing on national elections: “Major victories in two separate voting rights cases this week stunted efforts to harass early voters in Arizona and overwhelm election offices in Michigan with frivolous challenges…These victories can provide some peace of mind to voters in Arizona, Michigan and across the nation. They show that – just as they did with challenges during our last election – courts will enforce the law to protect voting rights and the election system…All the same, election denial and voter intimidation efforts are well-organized across the United States. It is critically important to continue to monitor legal developments leading up to the midterm election to preserve a tradition all Americans should be proud of: free, fair, secure and accurate elections.” CNN Op-Ed

Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket: “I wish I could say that we have seen the worst — armed watchers at drop boxes and tens of thousands of frivolous challenges to remove lawful voters from the rolls in states like Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. I fear we have not. The election is still days away. And the counting and certification process will take weeks, if not longer. At each stage, voters and election officials will not only have to contend with overworked staff, aggressive campaigns and a skeptical media, but also with election vigilantes whose only goal is sow doubt in the outcome while threatening the process.The cost of election vigilantism to our democracy is incalculable.” Democracy Docket 

Joyce Vance, former US attorney: “Even after January 6, [Stewart] Rhodes continued to push for interference with the peaceful transfer of power. Prosecutors offered testimony from Jason Alpers, who had unspecified connections to Trump’s inner circle, and who Rhodes asked to pass on a message urging Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to remain in power. Alpers decided to take the message to the FBI instead of Trump. This is powerful evidence that suggests Rhodes and his group were focused on doing precisely what the government is required to prove here: that the defendants made an agreement to engage in sedition. The statute has different options that prosecutors can choose among for what “sedition” involves. In the indictment, DOJ alleged that the defendants agreed to use force to prevent, hinder or delay the execution of a law—specifically, the constitutional and statutory provisions surrounding the transfer of power after a presidential election.” Civil Discourse 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections

Axios: Trump team eyes Nov. 14 announcement

Axios: McDaniel: Republicans will accept midterm results after process plays out

The Guardian: ‘He was chosen’: the rightwing Christian roadshow spreading the gospel of Trump

HuffPost: GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw: Election Deniers Admit It’s A Lie Behind Closed Doors

New York Times: On Social Media, Hunting for Voter Fraud Becomes a Game

New York Times: Republican Secretaries of State Walk a Minefield of Election Lies

New Yorker: The Political Attack on the Native American Vote

USA Today: Protectors of democracy: Why these 27 races may be the most critical in midterm elections

Washington Post: In existential midterm races, Christian prophets become GOP surrogates

Washington Post: Twitter layoffs gutted election information teams days before midterms

Washington Post (Analysis): How Republicans have prevented mail ballots from being counted earlier

January 6 And The 2020 Election

Associated Press: On stand in 1/6 trial, Oath Keepers boss says he’s a patriot

Politico: Subpoena deadline slips for Trump Jan. 6 documents as talks continue 

Opinion

Washington Post (Greg Sargent): Why isn’t Trumpism hurting the GOP? Some Democrats see vexing answers.

Political Violence

CNN: Kari Lake’s campaign headquarters receives ‘suspicious’ mail containing white powder

New York Times: How Republicans Fed a Misinformation Loop About the Pelosi Attack

In The States 

Arizona Republic: In court, opponents of Cochise County hand count raise legal concerns as backers seek to allay fears

Atlanta Journal Constituion: Over 1,000 absentee ballots never mailed to Cobb County voters

The Guardian: Race for Nevada’s secretary of state seat could determine next presidential election

NBC: Laxalt’s fiery closing pitch illustrates Nevada GOP’s pro-Trump transformation

New Lines Magazine: The Paranoid Style in Nevada Politics

New York Times: Democrats express concern about threats and violence in the Pennsylvania county where Trump is holding his rally.

Politico: A potential bright spot for Dems in Indiana

South Dakota Searchlight: Tripp County first SD county in two decades to hand count election ballots

Washington Post: Republicans sued to restrict this drop box. Meet the voters using it.

Washington Post: Michigan sheriff faces records lawsuit over True the Vote contacts

Washington Post: Arizona Republicans encourage early voting after warning against it

Washington Post: Liz Cheney endorses Democrat Abigail Spanberger in high-stakes Va. race