Tim Stevenson, a community organizer with Post Oil Solutions, is author of Resilience and Resistance: Building Sustainable Communities for a Post Oil Age (Green Writers Press) and Transformative Activism: A Values Revolution in Everyday Life in a Time of Societal Collapse (Apocryphile Press). Contact him at [email protected].
ATHENS-The fix is in. (Or at least it's being attempted!)
Speaking before a group of Christians on July 26, Donald Trump told them to "get out and vote. Just this time. You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It'll be fixed, it'll be fine. [...] In four years, you don't have to vote again, we'll have it fixed so good you're not going to have to vote."
Would fascism by any other name smell less democratic?
This bizarre pronouncement followed the equally weird statements Trump has been making before audiences during recent months: "I don't need your votes." "We got plenty of votes." "We got all the votes we need. We got more votes than any one has ever had." "Don't worry about voting."
When was the last time you heard a candidate running for any elected office telling his followers not to bother voting for him?
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MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow nailed the obvious.
"[Trump] doesn't think he needs to win the vote to win the election, he doesn't think he needs to win the election in order to take power. He thinks something other than votes is going to determine whether or not he gets back in the White House," Maddow said on her July 30 broadcast.
Referring to the Republicans, Maddow said, "They're not planning on the vote being counted as normal. […] Trump is repeatedly saying the vote will not matter."
That is because, according to Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias, "we are going to see mass refusals to certify the election in November," due significantly to the fact that pro-Trump election conspiracists are currently working as county election officials in several swing states.
Writing in its July 29 issue, Rolling Stone revealed that "In the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, [we] identified nearly 70 pro-Trump election conspiracists currently working as county election officials who have questioned the validity of elections or delayed or refused to certify results."
"Examination of thousands of posts from hundreds of election officials shows unapologetic belief in Trump's lies, support for political violence, themes of Christian nationalism, and controversial race-based views," the article reported.
Lizzie Ulmer, a senior vice president at the States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan organization advancing free, fair, and secure elections, told Rolling Stone that "election conspiracists are at work at every level working to call November's results into question, but are especially focused on certification."
"From the influence of calling for hand counts of ballots, to the pressure to not certify an election ... it's all connected to this broader effort to change the rules, so that, if needed, election deniers can change the results of an election," she continued.
According to Elias, Republicans "are counting on the fact that if they don't certify in several small counties, you cannot certify these statewide results." That is why their emphasis is not on winning votes but certification.
Republicans are also busy laying the groundwork for Stolen Election Redux should Trump lose by accusing the Biden administration now of engaging in a conspiracy to use federal power to influence the presidential election.
Any loss would necessarily be a function not of vote-counting but vote manipulation. As Trump said in a recent rally in North Carolina, "Our primary focus is not to get out the vote. It's to make sure they don't cheat, because we have all the votes you need."
Though offering zero evidence for such a claim, Mike Howell, executive director of the Oversight Project at the Heritage Foundation, stated "there's a 0% chance of a free and fair election."
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All of this is by way of creating a permission structure to refuse to certify the results of the election in which Trump loses.
Since the House of Representatives is the ultimate arbiter of whether or not to certify electors, the current Republican majority could legally refuse to certify the Electoral College votes of enough states, because of alleged irregularities, so that the minimum of 270 isn't achieved.
Under the 12th Amendment, that scenario would throw the election to the House of Representatives, where each state has one vote.
While a majority of Americans live in a state run by Democrats, 26 state delegations are GOP-controlled, meaning that a majority of the House could legally vote for Trump as president. (Thom Hartmann writes in greater detail about how this could work at bit.ly/771-hartmann.)
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The foregoing is but a brief summary of how a minority of the electorate is attempting to accomplish an authoritarian coup of our democracy and establish a minoritarian autocracy over the larger body politic.
The potential for such a coup has existed throughout our history, nurtured in a culture of incipient fascism that has grown and thrived in the contaminated soil of white, male supremacy.
Through racialized prejudice and misogyny, this culture infuses today's growing fascism to the point where:
-It has captured one of the two major political parties in the country with a convicted felon as its presidential candidate
-It controls a number of state legislatures and governorships that use the "Big Lie" - that the 2020 election was stolen - to advance voter suppression laws and install MAGA partisans to oversee the voting process
-It has become a lethal force in our judicial system, as epitomized by recent decisions of the Supreme Court: overthrowing abortion rights and, with them, a woman's right to control her own body, as well as granting the president presumptive immunity from prosecution while carrying out their (undefined) official duties.
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So what can we do to repel this assault on our democracy?
Join phone banking and postcarding groups, especially those focused on key battleground states, so that the Harris-Walz popular vote tally will be too overwhelming to challenge.
Inform people about Project 2025: once most Americans learn about this fascist plan, they are turned off to the Republicans, especially the undecided and independent voter.
And work like hell to get out the vote.
This Voices Viewpoint was submitted to The Commons.
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