How to win an election without being elected

“My biggest risk is that we don’t win lawsuits,” Trump told the Politico reporter he’d invited. He was referring to the series of lawsuits filed by his campaign and the Republican National Committee that fight the expansion of mail-in voting and seek to limit access to the ballot box in November. “We have many lawsuits going all over,” he said. “And if we don’t win those lawsuits, I think — I think it puts the election at risk.”

  Rolling Stone

Because - as you know I have said many, many times - they can't win if they don't cheat.

In February, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee announced that they would spend $10 million on voting-related lawsuits in 2020 — a figure that has since doubled to $20 million. The RNC has so far filed lawsuits in more than a dozen states, including the battlegrounds of Colorado, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida. These suits are a mix of offense and defense: Some attempt to block litigation brought by Democratic groups to expand mail-in voting in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Others seek to invalidate state-level policies by saying that expanding access to mail-in ballots invites fraud.

[...]

In Pennsylvania, for instance, the RNC is suing the state government and election boards in all 67 counties to ban the use of secure drop boxes for submitting take-home ballots and to eliminate the requirement that poll watchers can only serve in the county where they live. In Florida, Republicans have sued to block efforts that would make the state pay for postage on mail-in ballots, would change state law so that any mail-in ballot postmarked by the date of the election (as opposed to received by Election Day) will be counted, and would allow paid organizers to gather and submit completed absentee ballots.

It’s a sign of how aggressive and deep-pocketed the GOP legal strategy is that the party is waging legal battles in states that Trump has no chance of winning. In May, the RNC and two other groups sued California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, over a newly announced plan to mail absentee ballots to all eligible voters in the nation’s most populous state.

[...]

The funders of the RNC’s 2020 legal war chest are a who’s who of plutocrats and industry titans for whom a $100,000 check to the president is pocket change. [...] “It’s no surprise to see that the list of wealthy people bankrolling the RNC’s attack on voting rights includes some of the biggest benefactors of the Trump administration’s economic policy,” says Morris Pearl, chair of Patriotic Millionaires. “They don’t want to protect our elections — they want to protect their positions of privilege.”

The Trump campaign has a deep-pocketed ally in its attack on mail-in voting: the Honest Elections Project. Funded by undisclosed dark money and linked to Leonard Leo, the conservative activist who helped put Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court and steered more than $250 million for conservative judicial causes between 2014 and 2017, the organization says on its website that voter suppression is a “myth.” The group has run ads that warn against “risky new methods” like mail-in ballots. [...] The group has hired the same law firm spearheading the RNC’s massive litigation campaign, Consovoy McCarthy, to pressure election officials in battleground states to purge their voting rolls, threatening to sue them if they don’t comply.

[...]

Before COVID-19, five states, led by Democrats and Republicans alike, conducted their elections entirely by mail — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, and Utah — and 29 more states plus D.C. permitted “no excuse” absentee voting, meaning voters can request absentee ballots without having to provide any reason why.

[...]

But suddenly Republican elected officials, from Trump on down to local lawmakers, are blocking efforts to make it easier to vote by mail. Consider Iowa. In response to the pandemic, Secretary of State Paul Pate, a Republican, extended early voting and sent an absentee ballot application to every voter. Turnout in the state’s June primary elections surged and the vast majority of people voted absentee. Iowa Republican legislators responded by hastily passing a law to limit the secretary of state’s emergency authority.

[...]

As of this writing, more than 135,000 Americans are dead from the virus, more than 3 million have gotten infected, and the economy has tipped into Great Depression territory. With Trump at the helm, the U.S. government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has ranked as one of the worst anywhere in the world.

By midsummer, the president’s approval ratings had sunk to the high 30s. [...] The possibility of Trump going down in flames, Hindenburg-style, and bringing the rest of the Republican ticket with him had even Fox News speculating on whether he might drop out of the race before the election.

That won't happen because of a mere low approval rating. He can still win by cheating and suppressing the vote.

Trump and his Republican enablers are putting voter suppression front and center — fear-mongering about voting by mail, escalating their Election Day poll watching and so-called ballot-security operations, and blocking funding to prepare the country for a pandemic-era election. “The president views vote-by-mail as a threat to his election,” a lawyer for the Trump campaign recently told 60 Minutes. Attorney General William Barr told Fox News that vote-by-mail “absolutely opens the floodgates to fraud.”

[...]

“It’s going to be a much bigger program, much more aggressive program, a better funded program,” said [Justin Clark, a senior lawyer on the Trump 2020 campaign]. The president, he assured the group, “believes in it, and he will do whatever it takes to make sure it’s successful.”

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To be clear, rampant voter fraud is a myth, a fantasy dreamed up by those who need a pretext to make it harder for certain people to exercise their right to vote. Instances of in-person and mail-in voter fraud are extremely rare, according to decades of data and academic research. The conservative Heritage Foundation — whose co-founder Paul Weyrich once told a group of evangelical leaders that “I don’t want everybody to vote” because “our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down” — is one of the loudest proponents of the voter-fraud myth. Yet according to Heritage’s own research, in the past 20 years, 0.00006 percent of all mail-in ballots cast were fraudulent.

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Trump officials argue that Democrats are using COVID-19 as an “excuse and pretext” to rush through drastic changes like universal vote-by-mail that are intended to benefit their candidates and that would inject more uncertainty into our elections.

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[In a 1982 consent decree between the Democratic and Republican parties, the National Ballot Security Task Force, a massive voter-suppression project funded and carried out by the Republican National Committee and the New Jersey Republican Party,] agreed to stop harassing and intimidating voters of color, including by deputizing off-duty law-enforcement officers and equipping those officers with guns or badges. Over the next three decades, Democrats marshaled enough evidence of ongoing Republican voter suppression to maintain the consent decree until 2018, when a federal judge lifted the order.

The 2020 presidential election will be the first in nearly 40 years when the RNC isn’t bound by the terms of the 1982 decree.

[...]

In California, where 72 percent of voters mailed in their ballots in the most recent primary, the transition won’t be as hard. But Pennsylvania, where the percentage of mail-in ballots is in the single digits, faces a daunting task. Coughlin, the Arizona consultant, says it took years and many elections for Arizona to master the use of widely adopted mail-in voting. Underfunded election operations are a perennial issue, but with state budgets facing dramatic cutbacks due to COVID-19, the funding shortfall could be worse than ever.

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Civil-rights groups have asked Congress to approve $4 billion as soon as possible for election funding. (So far, Trump has signed off on just $400 million, one-tenth of the recommended amount, and local officials have already spent most of that initial money.) House Democrats included that funding in a coronavirus relief bill, the HEROES Act, but Senate Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, blocked the bill and Trump called it “dead on arrival.”

And don't forget the underfunded post office issue.*

It’s possible that voter suppression isn’t the only goal — it’s also about creating chaos and confusion before, on, and after Election Day. Perhaps Trump’s assault on voting in our pandemic election year isn’t a “strategy” at all but rather a kamikaze mission aimed at the heart of American democracy.

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By beating the drum about “massive fraud and abuse” and spreading misinformation about the integrity of the election, Trump could be laying the groundwork to challenge or outright deny the results. And if the RNC were to follow his lead and file lawsuits challenging the vote count, we could wind up in dangerously uncharted territory for American democracy.

*

Postal workers and their allies in Congress are vowing to fight back after the new head of the U.S. Postal Service — a major donor to President Donald Trump and the Republican Party — moved this week to impose sweeping changes to the popular government agency as it faces a financial crisis manufactured by lawmakers and exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Washington Post reported late Tuesday that Postmaster General (PMG) Louis DeJoy, who took charge last month, issued memos announcing “major operational changes” to the USPS “that could slow down mail delivery, warning employees the agency would not survive unless it made ‘difficult’ changes to cut costs.”

“Analysts say the documents present a stark reimagining of the USPS that could chase away customers — especially if the White House gets the steep package rate increases it wants — and put the already beleaguered agency in deeper financial peril as private-sector competitors embark on hiring sprees to build out their own delivery networks,” the Post noted.

  Truthout

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.