10/7/2020 - Republican election thievery: what can we do?
Friends,
I'm not sure how many of you saw yesterday's tweetstorm, but many of us reading the tea leaves of Trump and the Republican's odd behavior are deeply concerned about a "stolen election." What does this mean exactly? It means that Trump and Republican leadership conjure up enough concern over voter fraud that state votes are invalidated and the State Legislatures determine which candidate should receive the state's electoral votes. With the exception of Maine and Nebraska, the winner of the popular vote has been tethered to awarding all of a state's electoral votes since 1876. This is a 145 year old norm, not mandated by law, so you can be sure that Trump and his sycophants will try to use this approach to steal the election. And it is also important to note that the State Legislatures in all key swing states are Republican-controlled. Not good.
And we know that the Republicans have already been laying the groundwork for this in the State chambers, and Trump's single-minded focus on getting Amy Coney Barrett seated reinforces the fact that he hopes litigation over this gambit will make its way to the Supreme Court, where the Republicans will soon hold a 6-3 advantage. This also explains the patently false claims about fraud associated with mail-in ballots and their intensity; anything Trump and his stooges can do to weaken the public's faith in the vote increases the likelihood that State Legislatures will get involved and seek to ignore the popular vote, even if the result is a Biden win.
Daniel Squadron has a really good video explainer here, and I've attached a piece from Future Now that goes a little deeper on how this all works. The bottom line is that we need to operate on the assumption that norms are meaningless and that anything but a landslide win will result in a chain reaction of lies, obfuscation and tactics undermining of our democracy in order to protect Trump from losing and, therefore, from facing the consequences of a lifetime of lies, crimes and deceptions.
There are two ways we can avoid this eventuality:
(1) win in such a landslide that the courts are unwilling to take up a Trump claim of cheating and election tampering.
(2) flip the Florida and Pennsylvania State Legislatures in order to take Trump and the Republican's gambit off the table by breaking their State majority.
So what can you do?
Give to Future Now Giving Circles in FL and PA which I'm providing here:
FL: Rising Tide &/or DWC Civics Circle
PA: Ring the Bell &/or Keystone Blue
And please stand by to see if we need to raise any emergency funds to mount legal challenges and/or grass-roots initiatives to protect the sanctity of the vote.
As always, thanks for listening. We're all in this thing together and we have to RUN THROUGH THE FINISH LINE.
In solidarity,
Roger