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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — September 21, 2022

By September 21, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

Inside The Fight Over Whether Conspiracy Theorists Will Control America’s Elections 

  • Time: Conspiracy Theorists Want to Run America’s Elections. These Are the Candidates Standing in Their Way: [Adrian] Fontes is running for Arizona secretary of state, a typically anonymous role that oversees the tedious details of election administration: training poll workers, managing the statewide voter-registration database, verifying the accuracy of voting machines, and certifying election results. But in 2022, the job has taken on an outsize importance. Fontes’ opponent, Republican Mark Finchem, is an election denier: an avid promoter of former President Donald Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen through widespread voter fraud. He is one of many Republicans running to oversee America’s next elections while denying the legitimacy of the last one. If any of these candidates win, experts warn, they would possess a broad array of powers to undermine future elections if they don’t like the results. A rogue election official could attempt to prematurely stop the counting of ballots, pervert the Electoral College process, turn over the outcome of the election to partisan state legislators, or simply refuse to certify the result, all while publicly sowing doubt about the validity of the contest. It could present an existential test for American democracy. “If you can’t have trusted, neutral people running our elections, then you don’t really have free and fair elections,” says Lawrence Norden, senior director of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy institute. “Then we’re not a functioning democracy anymore.” Fontes is part of a loose brigade of unassuming public servants on the front lines of the fight to protect America’s election system from the Trump allies out to disrupt it. They’re paper pushers and bureaucrats, not inspiring orators or ingenious policymakers or even particularly good politicians. (If they were more charismatic, they might have picked a different line of work than election administration.) They are Democrats and Republicans, incumbents and challengers, running for offices as big as governor and as small as county clerk. Many have met only in passing, if at all. They have little in common except a collective purpose: each of them ran this year for an election-oversight position against an opponent who embraces Trump’s “Big Lie.” Fontes calls the group the “most odd mutual support organization in the world.” You could call them the Defenders: the people running to serve as the bulwark between the will of the voters and the conspiracy theorists willing to subvert it.
  • New Yorker: Behind the Campaign to Put Election Deniers in Charge of Elections: On November 4, 2020, the day after Trump’s defeat, the Guardian reported on a plan from a group of QAnon adherents to help elect maga-friendly secretary-of-state candidates across the country. Jim Marchant, who had served a single term in the Nevada legislature, had just been defeated in a bid for Congress—he later claimed, “I was a victim of voter fraud”—and was planning to run again in 2022. Around the same time, he met with a QAnon booster known as Juan O. Savin who, along with others, urged him to run, instead, for secretary of state. (Marchant did not respond to requests for comment; Savin could not be reached.) In May of last year, Marchant and Savin created the America First Secretary of State Coalition. It started with just five members, but has grown to include more than a dozen candidates for office in various states, including Hice, in Georgia, and Doug Mastriano, who is currently the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania. (In Pennsylvania, the governor selects the chief election official; according to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Mastriano currently trails the Democratic nominee, Josh Shapiro, by only about five points.) As Marchant told the QAnon-affiliated Patriot Double Down conference in Las Vegas, last October, “I knew right then that they had figured out . . . we need to take back the secretaries-of-state offices around the country.” He added, “Not only did they ask me to run, they asked me to put together a coalition of other like-minded secretary-of-state candidates. I got to work, Juan O. Savin helped, and we did, we formed a coalition.” According to the coalition’s Web site, its mission is to “promote and establish messaging that Secretary of State elections all across the country are a priority and are currently our most important elections because they are predominantly responsible for the election process in each state.” Marchant has said that the coalition is working “behind the scenes to try to fix 2020 like President Trump said.” On a podcast hosted by Steve Bannon, he said, “If we get just a few of the candidates that we have in our coalition, we save our country.” In June, Marchant won the Nevada Republican primary.

How Trump’s Election Lies Fueled A New Generation Of Right Wing Social Media Stars – And Why Some Of Those Stars Face Growing Legal Trouble 

  • Washington Post: Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ Fueled A New Generation Of Social Media Influencers: The 2020 election and its turbulent aftermath fueled a powerful generation of online influencers, a Washington Post data analysis has found, producing sky-high follower counts for an array of conservatives who echoed Trump’s false claims of election fraud, known as the “big lie.” Some doubled or tripled their audiences on Twitter, while others saw even larger gains — catapulting, like Becker, from relative obscurity to online fame. These accounts amassed followers despite vows by Big Tech companies to police election disinformation, The Post found. And they have gone on to use their powerful megaphones to shape the national debate on other subjects, injecting fresh waves of distortion into such culture-war topics as transgender rights and critical race theory. “Once they’ve gained a level of influence, they can continue to leverage that influence going forward,” said Kate Starbird, a leading expert on disinformation at the University of Washington. “Manipulation becomes embedded in the network.”
  • NPR: Prominent Election Deniers Are Facing Growing Legal Trouble:  Konnech, a small Michigan company that makes election logistics software, says a “smear campaign” whipped up by the controversial group True the Vote has led to death threats and forced the company’s CEO to leave home in fear for his and his family’s lives. The company believes a driving force behind the threats is xenophobia; Konnech’s CEO immigrated to the U.S. from China in the 1980s and became an American citizen in 1997. […] Just a few weeks after accusations against the company first surfaced, Konnech turned to the federal courts and filed a lawsuit. Konnech was “not going to take any chances and felt very strongly that it needed to act and act quickly,” said Jon Goldberg, a company spokesperson. Konnech, which makes scheduling software for poll workers, joined a growing number of election officials and companies that have used defamation law to try to fight back against election-related conspiracies. Dominion Voting Systems, as well as another election technology company, Smartmatic, have filed multiple lawsuits against media outlets and prominent Trump-world figures that spread allegedly defamatory claims about them in the 2020 election. Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss, the latter of whom testified in front of the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, have also filed lawsuits alleging that they were defamed by election conspiracy theories and subjected to “vitriol, threats, and harassment.” A Pennsylvania postal service employee also took legal action, and alleged that he was falsely accused of manipulating vote-by-mail ballots in the 2020 election. Conspiracy theories about the 2020 election have continued to spread, but there’s some indication that these lawsuits have pushed such claims farther from the mainstream of conservative media and toward the fringes, with some on the self-publishing digital newsletter platform Substack.

Battles Persist Over How States Can Count Mail In Votes, Likely Leading To A Slow Count Again In November 2022 

  • Associated Press: Mail Ballot Fight Persists In Key States, Sure To Slow Count: Former President Donald Trump and his allies seized on the drawn-out vote processing and counting in Pennsylvania during the 2020 election to fuel his false claims that fraud cost him victory in the battleground state — and election officials worry that a replay could be on the horizon in November’s crucial Senate and governor’s races. And it’s not just Pennsylvania. Michigan and Wisconsin are other crucial swing states that allow no-excuse mail-in ballots but give local election offices no time before Election Day to process them. Election workers’ inability to do that work ahead of time means many of the mailed ballots may not get counted on Election Day, delaying results in tight races and leaving a gaping hole for misinformation and lies to flood the public space.

January 6 Committee Chair Confirms Sept. 28 Hearing Is Likely To Be The Final Public Hearing 

  • ABC: House Jan. 6 Committee Chairman Confirms Date For The Likely Final Hearing: The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot on Capitol Hill will hold another hearing next week, the group’s chairman said Tuesday, suggesting that it could be the last time they convene publicly. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., told reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday that the committee will hold its final hearing on Sept. 28 at 1 p.m. ET. “I can say that unless something else develops, this hearing at this point is the final hearing. But it’s not in stone because things happen,” Thompson said. He added that the committee hearing will feature “substantial footage” of the riot and “significant witness testimony” that hasn’t previously been released, but he declined to divulge any details or the topic.

In The States 

ARIZONA:  GOP Candidate For AZ Secretary Of State Campaigned With A Sandy Hook Truther

  • Daily Beast: AZ Secretary of State Candidate Mark Finchem Campaigned With Sandy Hook Truther: Like many high-profile candidates for office before him, Mark Finchem—the Republican nominee for Arizona secretary of state—headed to California for a fundraiser last weekend. Unlike basically any other high-profile candidate for office, Finchem had his fundraiser co-hosted by a self-identified “truther” who adheres to the QAnon conspiracy theory and has spent years propagating baseless lies like the Sandy Hook shooting being a staged “false flag” and Sept. 11 being an “inside job.” On Sunday night, Finchem traveled to Newport Beach—a bastion of Trump-tinged red in otherwise deep blue Southern California—for a fundraiser headlined by two fixtures of the far-right event circuit: Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn. The political world is well acquainted with those two ex-Trump advisers and their long records of incendiary statements and views. Less widely known, however, are those of the Newport Beach event’s co-host, Nicole Nogrady. An ex-actor turned photographer and massage therapist, Nogrady was listed on the public advertisement for the Finchem fundraiser—promoted on his official campaign Twitter account—as a co-host, an honor that typically signals a meaningful level of personal involvement with a campaign. To her social media followers, Nogrady has shared QAnon content and broadcast her support for a number of fringe conspiracy theories. Just last week, Nogrady commemorated the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks by claiming on social media that they were staged. “The same people who orchestrated the event have been working hard behind the scenes to create their desired ‘One World Gov’t’ and have made us divided more than EVER before,” she said, calling 9/11 “the day the Deep State took thousands of lives.”

PENNSYLVANIA: Trump Allies Sue To Block Use Of Ballot Dropboxes In Key County 

  • WHYY: Residents, Former Trump Administration Officials Sue Chester County Over Ballot Drop Box Monitoring: No one has cast a vote in the 2022 general election, but lawsuits are already coming in. Four Chester County residents — James Romine, Daryl Campbell, Sandra Bowman, and William Borton — have asked the Chester County Court of Common Pleas to prohibit the county from using drop boxes to receive mail and absentee ballots unless the boxes are physically monitored to ensure that people deliver only their own ballot. The group of residents also wants the court to prohibit the county from accepting and counting any ballots delivered by someone other than the voter. Included in the legal complaint are screenshots from surveillance footage of an unmanned ballot drop box in West Chester purporting to show more than 300 people delivering more than just one ballot for the 2022 primary election in May. […] The residents filed the complaint with the help of Wayne-based conservative firm Zimolong Law and Washington D.C.-based America First Legal Foundation, which was founded by Stephen Miller, former President Donald Trump’s senior adviser. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff serves on its board of directors.

What Experts Are Saying

David Becker, elections expert, and Major Garrett, chief Washington correspondent for CBS News: “We must confront and extinguish election-denying cynicism. We must commit ourselves to casting and counting votes without fear or favor. We must do as generations did before—believe in democracy as we believe in ourselves. The great cleaving could be closer than we think. Our next civil war is stalking us. We can stop it. We must stop it. Or we, as an ideal and as a spirit will, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, surely perish from this earth.” The Bulwark: How the Second Civil War Could Start

Barbara McQuade, former US Attorney: “Judge Dearie asks ‘What business is it of the court’ to decide whether a document is classified.  At last, someone is applying the law! Classification is a core function of the executive branch, not the judiciary. If gov says it is classified, it is classified.” Tweet 

More than 200 political scientists in an open letter to Congress: “As the 2020 redistricting process comes to a close, it is clear that our winner-take-all system — where each U.S. House district is represented by a single person — is fundamentally broken. We call on Congress to adopt inclusive, multi-member districts with competitive and responsive proportional representation.” Copy of letter | New York Times overview 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections

Axios: Liz Cheney’s role in electoral count bill fuels GOP distrust

CNN: DHS rejects plan to protect election officials from harassment as midterms loom

NBC: Veterans group presses state and local prosecutors to go after far-right Patriot Front

New York Times: Donors Worry About a Cash Crunch for Voter Registration Groups

New York Times: The ‘Cost’ of Voting in America: A Look at Where It’s Easiest and Hardest

Politico: Most Republicans Support Declaring the United States a Christian Nation

Politico: House Dems’ latest pre-election push: Stopping another Jan. 6

January 6 And The 2020 Election

Daily Beast: Bret Baier Wanted Fox to Rescind Arizona Call, ‘Put It Back’ in Trump’s ‘Column’

The Hill: Cheney: Pence ‘was essentially the president for most of’ Jan. 6

NBC: Members of far-right group America First charged in connection with Jan. 6 riot

Washington Post: ‘Unchecked’ book excerpt: Inside McConnell’s decision not to convict Trump

WUSA: ‘This is not a whodunnit case’ | Video of mob chasing Officer Goodman to take center stage at Iowa man’s trial

Other Trump Investigations 

New York Times: Special Master Expresses Skepticism of Declassification Claims by Trump’s Lawyers

Washington Post: GOP attorneys general back Trump in court fight over Mar-a-Lago documents

Opinion

New York Times (Johnny Harris and Michelle Cottle): Inside the Completely Legal G.O.P. Plot to Destroy American Democracy

Washington Post (Jennifer Rubin): Cheney is right: Not holding Trump accountable will be our downfall

Washington Post (Greg Sargent): Trump’s lawyers just gave away the game, exposing his Achilles’ heel

In The States 

Washington Post (Analysis): Following Trump, a former state supreme court judge becomes a revolutionary