Trump is supercharging a vote-suppression strategy pioneered by Roger Stone decades ago. His legal stunts won’t work if Joe Biden resoundingly defeats him. But if the election is close, expect litigation until the bitter end.
Long before Roger Stone was convicted, sentenced, and spared from prison for his many lies to Congress on behalf of Donald Trump, he built a name helping Republicans suppress the votes of their opponents by claiming, without evidence, that they were cheaters. In 1981, Stone led an effort in New Jersey to have armed vigilantesmonitor polling locations in Black and Latino communities, all in the name of so-called ballot security and voter-fraud prevention. What was prevented instead was actual voting: The operation was so egregious, the Republican National Committee ended up getting sued in federal court and slapped with a consent decree that, for nearly 40 years, prohibited similar dirty tricks to intimidate voters.
The old is new again. No longer bound by judicial orders after a judge lifted the consent decree in 2018, Republicans are now free to resume poll-watching and much more, this time led by a ringmaster with a megaphone far louder than Stone’s: a president who’s loudly claiming that the election will be rigged against him, and that the only way to unrig it is if he wins—or refuses to lose—no matter the cost to the nation. One advocate with Fair Fight, the voting-rights group formed by former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams, has called this the “burn-it-down strategy.”
In Trump’s mind, burning it all down means many things. It means delegitimizing mail-in voting, which many states have expanded out of necessity during the COVID-19 pandemic. It means making baseless claims of widespread fraud, which undermines confidence in the process and may lead to people staying home. And it means signaling to goon squads that support Trump to watch the polls “very carefully” on November 3, as Trump suggested during his first debate with Joe Biden. Independent of the election results, the president has also raised doubts about the peaceful transfer of power and telegraphed that he’d declare himself the winner prematurely, which election officials are warning against but Trump allies are encouraging. Continue reading.