The MAGA Movement is Trying to Undermine Elections in Swing States
Election deniers want to run our elections
In the United States, each state has its own Secretary of State. But rather than managing the non-existent foreign affairs of the state, this official is the primary clerk for each state and is responsible for managing its official records and certifying their accuracy. This includes election records.
They are responsible for certifying election results and attesting to their accuracy and are required to do so by law per procedures established by each state legislature. Failing to do this completely upends the fundamental process of determining the rightful winner of an election, not just at the state level, but also at the federal level. Remember that it is ultimately each state’s responsibility to certify electors for the presidency and elections for the U.S. House and Senate.
If you wanted to dispute the validity of presidential electors, as former president Trump and his legal team did in the aftermath of the 2020 election, then installing loyalists as secretaries of state would be a useful strategy. A trump card, if you will.
And so the legal, political, and activist arms of the MAGA movement backing the former president’s prospective 2024 presidential bid have their sights on corrupting the election apparatus of each state by installing loyal apparatchiks in key positions. This includes the secretaries of state, but also county supervisors, state and local election boards, and even volunteer poll workers and watchers.
It’s difficult to determine the exact moment these various administrative offices became targets of an organized effort to manipulate elections. The most obvious place is the pressure and possibly illegal cajoling by not only the former president but also his various hangers-on and of course pressure from armed protestors, online threats, and attempts at intimidation.
What stands out is the January 2nd call by Donald Trump to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to pressure him to “find” the 11,780 votes that would have reversed the incumbent’s loss in the state. Raffensperger, a lifelong conservative, rebuffed the former President, explaining that Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud in Georgia were untrue. Raffensperger was subsequently branded a Republican in Name Only (RINO) in the upside-down MAGA world, where the failure to betray your oath of office for the cause of fighting leftists seeking to “destroy the country” is tantamount to treason.
Unfortunately for them, when you kick out the foundations of a building, it tends to fall back on top of everyone.
After committing his heresay, Raffensberger was challenged by Trump acolyte Representative Jody Hice. As a member of Congress, Hice had made a sufficient demonstration of her loyalty by signing on to two attempts to overturn the 2020 election. The first was joining other Republicans, including some state attorney generals, in filing a Supreme Court brief urging the court to reject results in Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. The second attempt was voting with his colleagues on January 6th to sustain an objection to the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in those states. This even after a mob of rioters attacking cops with Trump flags had stormed the capitol.
Mr. Hice promised that he would attempt to retroactively decertify the presidential election in Georgia if elected. Raffensperger defeated Hice to win the nomination, by a margin of nearly twenty percent, with help from swing voters and out-of-state money, most notably from the pro-democracy Republican Accountability PAC.
Outside of official attempts to install MAGA loyalists in election offices, various levels of threats and intimidation have been deployed against local officials. One of the most despicable cases of intimidation was that of a volunteer poll worker in Georgia, Shaye Moss. Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, were targeted and harassed relentlessly after Rudy Giuliani, who was advising Trump on how to overturn the results of the 2020 election, used video footage of the pair working during the election count to push lies about the results.
Giuliani falsely claimed that Moss and her mother were passing USB drives “like vials of heroin or cocaine” during ballot counting operations in Fulton County, Georgia. The result of the subsequent online harassment, threats, and relentless stalking was that an election volunteer could not live in her home for 2 months, was forced to move multiple times, and did not even feel comfortable introducing herself by name. That this was the result of specific targeting by the single most powerful human being on earth is downright disturbing.
How does this process work? There is an informal network of aligned groups across physical and cyberspace that operate in near unison when the former president identifies a target. In this instance, the video of Giuliani making his claims circulated online. Ms Freeman’s son received threatening, racially-charged phone calls on a phone that once belonged to his mother. Online messages and death threats were constant, and they even received unwanted knocks on their doors. The president himself mentioned Ms. Freeman’s name specifically 18 different times in the phone call with Raffensburger.
The message is clear: one must toe the MAGA line, or else. Not only does this force the more malleable into line, but it also drives out good, honorable people from these positions, to be replaced by people willing to sacrifice their honor to the cause. One example of a casualty of this battle against election deniers is Rusty Bowers, a rock-solid conservative and Arizona speaker of the house who lost his primary to a MAGA loyalist. You can read his story at the link below.
Ousted Republican reflects on Trump, democracy and America: 'The place has lost its mind'
As for the plan to transform the position of secretary of state into an extension of the party apparatus, it began before Trump’s January 2nd call and is still ongoing. 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 claimed to be a “victim of voter fraud” and intended to run again in 2022. Then he met with a group of QAnon boosters, including an organizer known online as Juan Savin, who convinced him to run for secretary of state instead.
In May of last year, Marchant and Savin created the America First Secretary of State Coalition. From its website, the coalition’s mission is to “promote and establish messaging that Secretary of State elections all across the country are a priority . . . . because they are predominantly responsible for the election process in each state.” It started with just five members, but now includes over a dozen candidates in various states, including Hice, in Georgia, and Doug Mastriano, who is currently the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania, a state where the governor appoints the secretary of state. Marchant says the coalition is working “behind the scenes to try to fix 2020 like President Trump said.” In June, Marchant won the Nevada Republican primary for secretary of state.
Mark Finchem, who is serving his fourth term in the Arizona House of Representatives, and is the coalition’s candidate for secretary of state there, is the poster child for the threat of this effort to actual election integrity and the rule of law. Finchem, a former member of the right-wing militia group Oath Keepers, helped advance a false slate of pro-Trump presidential electors in 2020, and has said “we would have won” if he had been secretary of state. In January, he co-sponsored a bill in the Arizona House that would give the Republican-controlled state legislature the power to reject the results of an election. He won the Republican nomination for secretary of state in August.
Going back to the Nevada races, Marchant also established the Conservatives for Election Integrity (CFEI) PAC to fund MAGA candidates across the state for offices that have an impact on election administration. According to the PAC’s most recent contribution report, its largest donors are a real-estate company owned by Matthew Brimhall, who was a corporate officer of the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, and the America Project, a MAGA-aligned non-profit founded by former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne and retired general Michael Flynn. Boris Epshteyn, a former Trump adviser who aided the effort to replace legitimate slates of electors with MAGA supporters, runs a consulting group that has received funds from the PAC.
How a former Trump lawyer is helping election deniers oversee elections - CREW | Citizens for…
Marchant is also being supported by Robert Beadles, a cryptocurrency investor who recently moved to Nevada from California and began spending money to implement a “precinct strategy” to replace local G.O.P. officials. Last year, Beadles went on Steve Bannon’s podcast and indicated that his strategy was a peaceful purge of “RINOS” and “bringing in America Firsters.” Earlier this year, Beadles funded attack ads against Bob Lucey, a moderate Republican commissioner in Washoe County, Nevada. In June, Lucey lost his primary to a MAGA-aligned candidate. In a show of loyalty to Mr. Trump, this summer, nearly two years after Trump lost the election, the Washoe County GOP voted to reject their 2020 election results.
Even before Marchant won the secretary of state nomination, he wanted to change how elections are run in Nevada. During his primary campaign, he pushed local election officials to abandon computerized voting systems in favor of paper ballots and hand counting. Seven of the state’s seventeen counties have considered switching to paper ballots, even though it has been shown that counting ballots manually is prone to mistakes and takes much longer. In Nye County, where some thirty thousand ballots are expected to be cast in the midterms, the Republican county clerk who opposed the change resigned, and the county commissioners appointed Mark Kampf, a Marchant supporter who questioned the outcome of the 2020 election.
As more Nevada counties began to consider eliminating computerized voting equipment, the current Nevada secretary of state, Barbara Cegavske, issued an order standardizing hand-counting of ballots. Kampf expressed concern over “several portions” of the regulation when it was proposed, including one that would require election clerks to report any outside contractors. This was likely done as an attempt to prevent incidents like in Arizona, where a group called “Cyber Ninjas” was enlisted to essentially hack into voting machines obtained from Maricopa Country to conduct an “audit”. The country subsequently announced it would need to replace its voting machines since it wasn’t clear how the Cyber Ninjas might have compromised the machines.
Nevada Republicans vote to censure SOS Cegavske over voter fraud allegations
Jim Marchant said as much, by promising to bring in volunteers from the ‘election integrity’ movement in Nevada as necessary to complete hand counts to help. Kampf urged the secretary of state to not adopt these regulations. Regardless of what happens in this particular confrontation, it’s clear that there is an ongoing political conflict between those who want to preserve the purely administrative role of election offices and those who see them as another target in an ongoing zero-sum partisan war.
The inherent premise of democracy that the people get to choose their leaders holds its undoing. What if the people vote for candidates that want to abandon democracy? The America First Secretary of State Coalition is giving voters the choice to install candidates with no allegiance to the will of the people or the peaceful transfer of power. If they are successful in even one state, it risks throwing our entire system of government into chaos.
There will be a downward spiral of reprisals between two political factions that have lost all trust in themselves and in the power of our institutions to mediate our political disputes. What comes after is the raw power struggle between factions seeking to dominate each other by any means. It’s a battle everyone will lose and no one can win, and we must make every effort to prevent that outcome. And if we can’t, which seems increasingly likely, we must focus on building new systems to restore the principles of democracy as the foundation of our government.