Red Mosquito

tragabigzanda wrote:My hat's off to any conservative who runs against the cult of Trump right now. Principled conservatives are in extremely short supply these days. But yeah, he definitely needed to drop out.

Six months before a presidential election in which turnout could matter more than persuasion, the Republican Party, the Trump campaign and conservative activists are mounting an aggressive national effort to shape who gets to vote in November — and whose ballots are counted.

Its premise is that a Republican victory in November is imperiled by widespread voter fraud, a baseless charge embraced by President Trump, but repeatedly debunked by research. Democrats and voting rights advocates say the driving factor is politics, not fraud — especially since Mr. Trump’s narrow win in 2016 underscored the potentially crucial value of depressing turnout by Democrats, particularly minorities.

The Republican program, which has gained steam in recent weeks, envisions recruiting up to 50,000 volunteers in 15 key states to monitor polling places and challenge ballots and voters deemed suspicious. That is part of a $20 million plan that also allots millions to challenge lawsuits by Democrats and voting-rights advocates seeking to loosen state restrictions on balloting. The party and its allies also intend to use advertising, the internet and President Trump’s command of the airwaves to cast Democrats as agents of election theft.

“It’s utter nonsense. This has been shown over and over,” said Kenneth R. Mayer, an elections expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The continued insistence that there are material levels of intentional voter fraud is itself a form of fraud.”

Democrats also point to a meeting in February attended by conservative political luminaries and at least one national Republican Party official, sponsored by the Center for National Policy, a group of conservative power brokers. The topic was voter fraud and “ballot security” operations, particularly in inner cities and areas with Native American populations, according to The Intercept, which published excerpts from a recording of the meeting.

One group represented at that meeting, Texas-based True the Vote, is recruiting military veterans to become poll monitors. The group, an offshoot of a Houston Tea Party branch, was scrutinized by local prosecutors after its first poll-monitoring effort in 2012 sparked complaints of voter intimidation.

The group’s founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, told the gathering that Democrats could inundate the polls with phony votes. “The swarming tactics of a radicalized socialist mind-set,” she warned, “is a dangerous thing to behold.” The group did not respond to a request for comment.

McParadigm wrote:

(Michigan is sending people applications for absentee ballots, in accordance with a proposal voters passed by 67%. Iowa, Nebraska, Georgia, and two or three other states that are either not battlegrounds or not tight races in places that are a part of his necessary path to victory are doing the same...he has no complaints there)