But ever since Donald Trump debuted his fascist Big Lie, it’s not just partisan gerrymandering, good old racist voter suppression, and Russia If You’re Listening. They’re looking to plug their election-fraud-conspiracy-theory-believing idiots into every level of power over elections, and they’re ready to throw shit in the gears of each and every result they don’t like, to create chaos, and to eliminate Americans’ trust in elections. That way, maybe GOP-controlled legislatures will end up deciding the results, like they were unwilling to do last time around.
Steve Bannon has been talking about this forever. It’s his “precinct strategy.” ProPublica reported extensively on it back in March, when Donald Trump gave the strategy his rubber stamp.
Now, in Politico, Heidi Przybyla has tapes of RNC staffers and lawyers blabbing their mouths about the plan, tapes that constitute evidence that this scheme to overturn American democracy is now official GOP strategy. Politico Playbook summarizes the main prongs of the plan:
They don’t want to fight within the system to steal elections. They want to be the system.
One of the people on the tapes is Matthew Seifried, the RNC’s “elections integrity director” (LOL) in Michigan.
“It’s going to be an army,” he said. Instead of having sweet little old ladies at your polling place that you can trust to get your vote counted, they want those workers to be stealth GOP operatives, who can challenge your vote or just create chaos if it looks like too much democracy is happening. They want them to have a hotline and live chats with party lawyers, so they can report back immediately if things look weird to them. We’ll let you fill in the blanks on what might look weird to white Republican volunteer pool workers.