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appalachiablue

(40,994 posts)
Tue Aug 3, 2021, 08:31 PM Aug 2021

Elections Expert Rich Hasen: 'I'm Scared Sh*tless' About Republican Plans To Subvert Elections



Daily Kos, Aug. 3, 2021.

The ongoing farce of Arizona's "fraudit" of 2020 ballots in Maricopa County, Arizona, is largely treated as a joke because the people behind it are prone to spouting such out-of-this-world conspiracy theories. But many smart people, people like Rick Hasen—legal scholar and expert in legislation, election law, and campaign finance; current chancellor's professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine School of Law; and the guy behind Election Law Blog—aren't laughing. "I'm scared shitless," he told investigative journalist Jane Mayer for The New Yorker. The audit combined with a spate of new election laws stemming from the kind of theories underpinning this action go beyond anything we've seen out the extreme right before. "It's not just about voter suppression," he told Mayer. "What I'm really worried about is election subversion. Election officials are being put in place who will mess with the count."

This is happening, as Mayer exposes, through the efforts of longstanding conservative groups, groups that have posed as mainstream Republican organizations. It's funded by those groups and "fed by sophisticated, well-funded national organizations whose boards of directors include some of the country’s wealthiest and highest-profile conservatives," Mayer writes. Groups like the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the Federalist Society—all groups that the left has known for decades are extremist, but which mainstream Republicans are happy with which to associate. It's all the dark money groups that started whispering "voter fraud" in the George W. Bush administration, building up to the point of the Big Lie, which if they can get it well enough established in state legislatures—like Arizona's and Georgia's—they can take control of elections.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, has been following all of this, and told Mayer that from his perspective there is a "flotilla of front groups" that has moved from the kind of normal anti-regulatory, anti-abortion movement and has now "more or less shifted to work on the voter-suppression thing.” They are, as Mayer puts it, "tampering with the guardrails of democracy." They've all teamed up to start pushing new voting restrictions in the states, but this new movement we're seeing in Arizona and Georgia to move beyond restrictions into controlling who is doing the election administration and counting the votes—that's what has Hasen scared "shitless."

He's not alone. Former Republican Ralph Neas, once executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, explained how this is working:
The Maricopa County audit exposes exactly what the Big Lie is all about. If they come up with an analysis that discredits the 2020 election results in Arizona, it will be replicated in other states, furthering more chaos. That will enable new legislation. Millions of Americans could be disenfranchised, helping Donald Trump to be elected again in 2024. That's the bottom line. Maricopa County is the prism through which to view everything. It's not so much about 2020—it's about 2022 and 2024. This is a coördinated national effort to distort not just what happened in 2020 but to regain the House of Representatives and the Presidency...

Read More,
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/8/3/2043650/-Elections-expert-Rich-Hasen-I-m-scared-shitless-about-Republican-plans-to-subvert-elections
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Elections Expert Rich Hasen: 'I'm Scared Sh*tless' About Republican Plans To Subvert Elections (Original Post) appalachiablue Aug 2021 OP
ditto elleng Aug 2021 #1
Certification of elections & more as noted. appalachiablue Aug 2021 #3
I'm pretty sure we all are ... Fullduplexxx Aug 2021 #2
k&r for visibility alwaysinasnit Aug 2021 #4
A number of attorneys who volunteer in voter protection efforts are worried LetMyPeopleVote Aug 2021 #5
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