From: slider@anashram.com

Pre-emptively branding as rigged an election you are likely to lose risks turning off GOP voters and undermining democracy

It was a pre-emptive strike against truth by some of the biggest names on
the American right wing.

Former president Donald Trump warned that the ballot would be “rigged”.
The Republican candidate Larry Elder predicted “shenanigans”. The conservative media star Tomi Lahren suggested that “voter fraud” was inevitable.

The attempt to sow distrust in California’s recall effort began well
before the Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, scored a crushing victory on Tuesday, thwarting Elder and other Republicans who hoped to replace him.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/19/trump-big-lie-california-recall-election-republicans

The barrage of mendacious claims echoed Trump’s “big lie” of a stolen presidential election and were equally baseless. But, crucially, they also demonstrated that undermining faith in election integrity has become
normalized as a strategy for many Republicans facing defeat at the ballot
box.

“We saw it in the November election; we saw it in the January 6th insurrection,” Sean Clegg, a Newsom aide, told reporters this week. “We do not have a Democratic and Republican party in this country. We have a democratic party and an anti-democratic party.”

He added: “They’re trying to throw battery acid on our constitution, on
our electoral norms, and it’s a preview of coming attractions. We’re going to see the same thing in 2022 and the same thing in 2024. And
unfortunately, it’s become the Trump playbook and they’re going to it. And they’re going back to it.”

Although Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly two-to-one in California,
party leaders had feared that Newsom could be vulnerable to a recall over
his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, including mask and vaccine
mandates.

Talk radio host Elder was the leading contender among 46 on the
replacement ballot – which also included the reality TV star and former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner – and would almost certainly have become governor
had the recall succeeded.

But as opinion polls showed Newsom in a commanding position, Republicans
pushed the circular argument that they could only lose if the vote was
rigged. Much of the Republican scaremongering focused on the wide use of mail-in ballots – even though an overwhelming majority of Californians
cast ballots by mail before the pandemic without irregularities.

Elder said he believed “there might very well be shenanigans, as there
were in the 2020 election”. A website affiliated with his campaign carried
a link to a “Stop CA Fraud” site where people could report suspicious voting activity or sign a petition demanding a special legislative session
to investigate. Some of the language was identical to a petition
circulated to help Trump’s effort to overturn last year’s presidential election.

Trump himself weighed in during the closing days of the campaign,
including a statement that asked rhetorically: “Does anybody really
believe the California Recall Election isn’t rigged?”

The unfounded allegations seeped into the rightwing media ecosystem.
Lahren, a host on the Fox Nation channel, opined: “The only thing that
will save Gavin Newsom is voter fraud, so as they say: stay woke. Pay
attention to the voter fraud going on in California because it’s going to have big consequences not only for that state but for upcoming elections.”

But the conspiracy theories were blunted by the scale of Newsom’s victory thanks to healthy turnout, support for his Covid-19 measures and a
sweeping rejection of Trump-style populism. In the end even Elder did not mention fraud when he addressed his supporters after losing, pleading: “Let’s be gracious in defeat.”

Trump, however, called it “totally rigged” and rightwing media was notably reluctant to acknowledge the outcome. In a Twitter thread Brian Stelter, CNN’s chief media correspondent, noted that the pro-Trump One America News Network (OANN) spent hours talking about the recall while dancing around
the fact that Newsom won.

“It’s just strange,” Stelter tweeted. “OAN is not alleging fraud but is totally ignoring the news.” Eventually, 12 hours after Newsom’s win had been widely projected, OANN briefly mentioned that the recall “secured
Gavin Newsom’s role as California’s governor”.

A tighter race could have turned uglier. Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, said: “It’s a damn good thing the California election wasn’t close at all because Larry Elder and Donald Trump and
every other Republican signalled that if the election were going to be
close, it was all going to be because of voter fraud.

“This is the Republican party playbook. It’s going to be hard to find, moving forward, any Republican candidate who loses and accepts the results
of his or her election. They’re all going to be a big sore loser like Trump.”

Walsh, who challenged Trump for the Republican presidential nomination
last year, added: “To be a viable Republican today, you have to lie or you have to deny the truth. You cannot say that Joe Biden won fair and square.
You cannot say that January 6th was an insurrection. You’ve got to be
careful saying the vaccines work.

“To be a Republican today, you’ve got to pretty much call into question every single election that you lose. This is Trump’s legacy and you’re going to see it again big time in 2024.”

But relentlessly trashing the electoral process could prove
counterproductive. Last year Republicans feared that Trump’s claims about widespread fraud due to an expansion of mail-in voting during the pandemic would persuade many Republicans to stay at home. His constant crying foul
in Georgia may have cost Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue their seats in a Senate runoff last January.

Drexel Heard, a Democratic strategist based in Los Angeles, said of the California recall: “You’ve got Republican strategists here now complaining the language the Republicans had been using, and certainly Donald Trump
had been using, might have had an effect in suppressing Republican turnout
in certain areas. Orange county, which was red in the last election, voted
no on this recall.”

He added: “It’s almost like self-sabotaging. The more that they keep talking about election rigging, it’s not going to affect Democrats, it’s going to affect their voters, because why would their voters want to go
out if they believe that their vote is not going to count? What Democrats
have said is that we want everybody to vote, no matter whether it’s
Democrat or Republican.”

Trump’s allies have more insidious lines of attack, however. Although
state officials, judges and the then attorney general, William Barr, found
no significant flaws in the 2020 election, some of the Republicans who
sought to overturn it are now vying for positions of power over the way
future elections are run in swing states.

With Trump’s backing, they are running to become secretaries of state – a position that can be vital in deciding questions such as which names get removed from voter rolls, who receives a mail-in ballot and which
technology is used to certify results.

Among them is Mark Finchem, who this week gained Trump’s endorsement for Arizona secretary of state. He has pushed QAnon conspiracy theories and attended the 6 January rally that culminated in a deadly insurrection at
the US Capitol. Trump praised Finchem for his “incredibly powerful stance
on the massive Voter Fraud that took place in the 2020 Presidential
Election Scam”.

And on Thursday the 45th president threw his weight behind Matthew DePerno
for attorney general of Michigan, stating that he “has been on the front lines pursuing fair and accurate elections, as he relentlessly fights to
reveal the truth about the Nov. 3rd Presidential Election Scam”.

The “big lie” is also manifest in a farcical “audit” of the 2020 election
in Arizona that is expected to deliver so-called findings this month. Republicans in Pennsylvania plan to hold hearings as part of an
investigation into the poll, while the state senate in Texas has passed a
bill enabling party officials to request reviews of election results.

Observers fear that this new Republican orthodoxy can only gnaw away at
the foundations of democracy. Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “It’s going to be here for a long time now. It’s a shame because we may lose a good number of Americans from civic belief in the constitution and
the electoral process regardless of who wins.

“I think that’s happening: it’s 20 to 30% of the electorate, almost all Republican. That’s not good and then when Democrats lose close races, you’ll find some number of Democrats who now think this is acceptable, so it’s a very damaging and corrosive pattern that’s now accelerating.”

Jacobs added: “Remember Democrats were saying similar things in 2016: a smaller number and the losing candidate quickly stepped forward and acknowledged the loss so it didn’t go as far as what Trump and Republicans have done. Nonetheless, there is this corrosive and worrisome pattern
right across the parties of challenging the very foundation of American democracy, which is that elections decide.”

### - the republicans really are on a backfoot now and as such are clearly desperate to undermine the whole electoral system as a tactical means to
level the playing field, which is a very difficult thing to accomplish
when you're outnumbered by at least 2 to 1 heh...

and imho there's ONLY one solution to it, one that NOBODY can ultimately deny/denounce:

a 'foolproof' voting system!

coz that's the ONLY way to settle ALL these false voter claims once and
for all innit :)

so spend a few billions on THAT america! it'll be well worth it in the end
to have (and to finally see) a REAL democracy at work heh ;)

perforce this would be pure bad news for the repubs who'll always fight
such a thing - who thus fight 'against' there ever being an effective
democracy IN america - an ultimately untenable and completely
unsustainable stance to adopt now it's all out in the open!

and 'my' interest in all this is? (coz i can already hear chris yawning
heh) i.e., since the massive change to politics in south africa, one that
imho is then bound to spread to all OTHER nations too as an upgrade in political thinking/awareness, have always wondered what 'form' a similar
change would then take in the first world?

in s,africa for instance, the right-wing 'merged' with the left rather
than disappear altogether thus forming a completely new party and
political approach, one that ultimately saved s.africa's ass from total annihilation! (which is the bit we're all interested in too! coz lol no
one 'wants' to be annihilated!)

for us in the first world though, 'surviving' that change is gonna be the difficult bit, coz it was literally ONLY when push came to shove that
s.africa got its shit together and changed direction?

iow: it was ONLY when they were literally on the very BRINK of disaster
(with fingers literally hovering over the big red nuclear button) did they finally sober up and find another solution, one that they would have never
even considered before??

they literally DID the unthinkable! (so much so we can't even 'imagine'
summat like that happening here heh)

and ONLY because of THAT they.... survived!

so what am taking 'from' all that is that it ain't gonna be easy for us
either, right?

that things are obviously gonna get pretty desperate, perhaps even quite hopeless!

and only THEN will we change!

'IF' we change that is heh, coz we might not!

in which case it's goodnite fuckin' vienna!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJeWySiuq1I

WILL we make it?? maybe, maybe not! its completely uncertain!

so place yer bets :)

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)