In big states, tiny counties, Trump attacking voting rules
By NICHOLAS RICCARDI, JONATHAN DREW and SCOTT BAUER 41 minutes ago RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — When Donald Trump’s campaign took issue with a new rule on processing some votes in North Carolina, it didn’t just complain to the Board of Elections and file a lawsuit. It wrote to some of the state’s 100 local election offices with extraordinary guidance: Ignore that rule.
“The NC Republican Party advises you to not follow the procedures,” Heather Ford wrote in an email to county officials last week.
The email urging defiance was a small glimpse at the unusually aggressive, hyperlocal legal strategy the Trump campaign is activating as voting begins. Through threatening letters, lawsuits, viral videos and presidential misinformation, the campaign and its GOP allies are going to new lengths to contest election procedures county-by-county across battleground states.
That means piling new pressure on the often low-profile election officials on the frontline of the vote count, escalating micro-disputes over voting rules and seeking out trouble in their backyards.
The local approach already is producing a blizzard of voting-related complaints. Trump and his allies have then seized on the disputes, distorted them and used them to sow broad doubts of fairness and accuracy.
“It’s clearly based on an overall strategy to disrupt the election as much as possible,” said Barry Richard, who represented President George W. Bush’s campaign in the 2000 Florida recount. “You’re really seeing a broad-based, generalized strategy to suppress the vote by the Republican Party.”
“Since when is fairness a bad thing?” campaign spokeswoman Thea McDonald said in a statement.
But election experts and lawyers say the GOP efforts demonstrate a new willingness to fight and amplify relatively minor, even legally dubious issues.
The strategy was on display last week when Trump tweeted about nine “discarded” ballots in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. Then this week the hotspot was a Philadelphia fight over whether Trump campaign poll monitors could be allowed into newly opened satellite election offices.
Trump poll monitors requested entry, but city election offices said neither party’s observers had a legal right to access the buildings. Under state law, poll monitors can only observe live, in-person voting and not places where people can register, fill out early ballots and drop them off to be counted weeks later. The campaign sent observers to the sites and in one case they were turned away by a Republican on the city election commission. The campaign threatened to sue but has not done so.
Richard described this fight as largely “for public consumption.” Trump brought up the episode in Tuesday night’s debate, mentioning none of the legal subtleties. Instead, he held it up as a broad-brushed indictment of the reliability of the vote count.
“Today there was a big problem in Philadelphia,” Trump said at the debate. “You know why? Because bad things happen in Philadelphia, bad things.”
The next day, Trump’s son, Eric Trump, and other supporters tweeted a video apparently recorded by a member of the campaign as a Philadelphia election official expelled him from a city building. “Now they are throwing poll watchers out of City Hall in Philly!” Eric Trump wrote.
President Trump for months has cast doubt on the integrity of the U.S. voting system. His primary target has been mail ballots, which may be used by as many as half of all voters as people look to avoid crowded polling places. Trump has baselessly claimed they will lead to massive fraud.
Trump’s campaign is now pushing to ensure intense scrutiny on those mail-in ballots as they are returned. In North Carolina, where Black voters were sending in a disproportionate number of ballots with errors, the Board of Elections settled a lawsuit with a voting rights group making it easier for voters to fix errors.
The board’s two Republicans quit in protest and the GOP sued to block the settlement. North Carolina’s Democratic attorney general in court papers included a Trump campaign email to some local board of election members as an example of how he said the party was improperly undermining an official state directive.
Says Trump campaign spokeswoman McDonald: “County board members need guidance on how to proceed in the wake of these unelected Democrats’ attempt to radically rewrite the law 40 days out from Election Day.”
On Thursday, the state board of elections, which has a Democratic majority, told counties to halt using the new cure method pending the outcome of court hearings this week and next.
Regardless of the outcome of the litigation, voting rights specialists were stunned at the Trump campaign’s step.
“What we’re talking about is an effort to deliberately place these barriers in front of people. And many may be discouraged from trying to cure, or making it impossible for them to cure, a deficiency,” said Irving Joyner, a law professor at North Carolina Central University who’s not involved in the case.
North Carolina is not the only state that has seen upheavals to its election procedures even as ballots are being filled out. Many of the more than 200 lawsuits filed over voting issues are still lingering, an enormous question mark over the election as more and more states start early voting.
Republicans have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review a ruling in South Carolina on how to handle errors in mail ballots and a judgment in Pennsylvania allowing the count of some ballots arriving after Election Day. In the Pennsylvania case, the Supreme Court is also being asked to rule on a state law that requires poll watchers to live in the county where they are monitoring. It’s become a major obstacle to Republican plans to send out some 50,000 poll watchers in battlegrounds... https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-pennsylvania-lawsuits-elections-politics-31fd62b679a43387369cde91c10aa553
But the GOP’s scrutiny of local elections offices isn’t always over complex legal issues. In Wisconsin, Republicans warned the city of Madison against holding a “Democracy in the Park” event, sending a cease and desist letter late last week warning it could be a venue for illegal collection of ballots in the liberal bastion. The event went ahead anyway, and city officials say about 10,000 participated.
On Wednesday, there was a new warning to Milwaukee and its sports teams. It covered not only players but mascots such as the Brewers’ famed racing sausages as enticements for people to vote.
“It seems kind of silly to be worried about racing sausages, but the larger point is the law is pretty clear,” GOP state party Chairman Andrew Hitt told The Associated Press by phone on Wednesday.
Wisconsin state elections officials have already warned the Trump campaign off once after it sent a survey to local elections offices asking for details on procedures. Such surveys can help find issues to be litigated — but they also are a way for campaigns to make connections with local election officials who will help determine their success. The Trump campaign noted that such surveys are standard and also sent by Democrats.
Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine who has been a frequent critic of Trump’s approach to voting, said there’s a difference between campaigns talking to election offices and trying to pressure them.
“To know the rules of the game you’re going to play under, it’s different than trying to work the refs,” Hasen said. “All of this conduct is so beyond the pale — it’s hard to put in context because there’s been nothing like it in modern American campaigns.”
European fascism was popular because, for those not persecuted, it was a welfare state
"Washington, Trump, and Cults of Personality "The apocalyptic myth that helps explain evangelical support for Trump ""Is this fascism? No. Could it become fascism? Yes"
INSERT: Okay, here you go... First a video of Il Donny on the balcony:
March 30, 2017This article is more than 2 years old.
An analogy is haunting the United States—the analogy of fascism. It is virtually impossible (outside certain parts of the Right-wing itself) to try to understand the resurgent Right without hearing it described as—or compared with—20th-century interwar fascism. Like fascism, the resurgent Right is irrational, close-minded, violent, and racist. So goes the analogy, and there’s truth to it. But fascism did not become powerful simply by appealing to citizens’ darkest instincts. Fascism also, crucially, spoke to the social and psychological needs of citizens to be protected from the ravages of capitalism at a time when other political actors were offering little help.
The origins of fascism lay in a promise to protect people.
[In that sense sorta like communism. In more than one significant way appeals of the far- right and the far-left have much in common. In a sense there is a marriage of sorts.]
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a rush of globalization destroyed communities, professions, and cultural norms while generating a wave of immigration. Right-wing nationalist movements promising to protect people from the pernicious influence of foreigners and markets arose, and frightened, disoriented, and displaced people responded. These early fascist movements disrupted political life in some countries, but they percolated along at a relatively low simmer until the Second World War.
The First World War had devastated Europe, killing 16 million people, maiming another 20 million, crushing economies, and sowing turmoil. In Italy, for example, the postwar period saw high inflation and unemployment, as well as strikes, factory occupations, land seizures, and other forms of social unrest and violence. The Liberal Italian governments of the postwar era failed to adequately address these problems. The Liberals’ constituencies—businessmen, landowners, members of the middle class—abandoned them. The country’s two largest opposition parties—the socialist PSI and the Catholic PPI—also offered little effective redress to these basic social problems.
Benito Mussolini and his National Fascist Party (PNF) stepped into the breach, taking advantage of the failure or ineffectiveness of existing institutions, parties, and elites, and offering a mixture of “national” and “social” policies. Fascists promised to foster national unity, prioritize the interests of the nation above those of any particular group, and promote Italy’s stature internationally. The fascists also appealed to Italians’ desire for social security, solidarity, and protection from capitalist crises. They promised therefore to restore order, protect private property, and promote prosperity but also shield society from economic downturns and disruption. Fascists stressed that wealth entailed responsibilities as well as privileges, and should be administered for the benefits of the nation.
These appeals enabled the fascists to garner support from almost all socioeconomic groups. Italy was a young country (formed in the 1860s), plagued by deep regional and social divisions. By claiming to serve the best interests of the entire national community, it was in fact the fascists who became Italy’s first true “people’s party.”
After coming to power, the Italian fascists created recreational circles, student and youth groups, and sports and excursion activities. These organizations all furthered the fascists’ goals of fostering a truly national community. The desire to strengthen (a fascist) national identity also compelled the regime to extraordinary cultural measures. They promoted striking public architecture, art exhibitions, and film and radio productions. The regime intervened extensively in the economy. As one fascist put it: “There cannot be any single economic interests which are above the general economic interests of the state, no individual, economic initiatives which do not fall under the supervision and regulation of the state, no relationships of the various classes of the nation which are not the concern of the state.” Such policies kept fascism popular until the late 1930s, when Mussolini threw his lot in with Hitler. It was only the country’s involvement in the Second World War, and the Italian regime’s turn to a more overtly “racialist” understanding of fascism, that began to make Italian fascism unpopular.
Italian fascism differed from its German counterpart in important ways. Most notably, perhaps, anti-Semitism and racism were more innate in the German version. But Italian and German fascism also shared important similarities. Like Italy, Germany was a “new” nation (formed in 1871) plagued by deep divisions. After the First World War, Germany had found itself saddled with punitive peace terms. During the 1920s, it experienced violent uprisings, political assassinations, foreign invasion, and a notorious Great Inflation. Then the Great Depression hit, causing immense suffering in Germany. The response of the government, and other political actors, however, must also be remembered. For different reasons, both the era’s conservative governments and their socialist opponents primarily favored austerity as a response to the crisis. Thus came a golden opportunity for fascism.
[Donald Trump Is Ramping Up as a Public Menace It's not just that he's rambling incoherently on the phone with Fox News hosts. He is also fueling a dangerous political environment. [...] The president, who set some dynamite under economic stimulus negotiations on Wednesday—declaring them over through Election Day and seemingly eager to take the blame—has now signaled he wants to make a deal with that same Nancy Pelosi. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=158811762
One of Trump's (any tyrant's) favorite self-promotion tactics is to create a crisis, then to take measures so as to be seen to be solving that self-created crisis himself.]
Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) promised to serve the entire German people, but the German fascist vision of “the people” did not include Jews and other “undesirables.” They promised to create a “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft) that would overcome the country’s divisions. The fascists also pledged to fight the Depression and contrasted its activism on behalf of the people’s welfare with the meekness and austerity of the government and the socialists. By the 1932 elections, these appeals to protect the German people helped the Nazis become the largest political party, and the one with the broadest socioeconomic base.
When Hitler became chancellor in Jan. 1933, the Nazis quickly began work-creation and infrastructure programs. They exhorted business to take on workers, and doled out credit. Germany’s economy rebounded and unemployment figures improved dramatically: German unemployment fell from almost six million in early 1933 to 2.4 million by the end of 1934; by 1938, Germany essentially enjoyed full employment. By the end of the 1930s, the government was controlling decisions about economic production, investment, wages, and prices. Public spending was growing spectacularly.
Nazi Germany remained capitalist. But it had also undertaken state intervention in the economy unprecedented in capitalist societies. The Nazis also supported an extensive welfare state (of course, for “ethnically pure” Germans). It included free higher education, family and child support, pensions, health insurance, and an array of publicly supported entertainment and vacation options. All spheres of life, economy included, had to be subordinated to the “national interest” (Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz), and the fascist commitment to foster social equality and mobility. Radical meritocratic reforms are not usually thought of as signature Nazi measures, but, as Hitler once noted, the Third Reich has “opened the way for every qualified individual—whatever his origins—to reach the top if he is qualified, dynamic, industrious, and resolute.”
Largely for these reasons, up till 1939, most Germans’ experience with the Nazi regime was probably positive. The Nazis had seemingly conquered the Depression and restored economic and political stability. As long as they could prove their ethnic “purity” and stayed away from overt shows of disloyalty, Germans typically experienced National Socialism not as a tyranny and terror, but as a regime of social reform and warmth.
There can be no question that violence and racism were essential traits of fascism. But for most Italians, Germans and other European fascists, the appeal was based not on racism—much less ethnic cleansing—but on the fascists’ ability to respond effectively to crises of capitalism when other political actors were not. Fascists insisted that states could and should control capitalism, that the state should and could promote social welfare, and that national communities needed to be cultivated. The fascist solution ultimately was, of course, worse than the problem. In response to the horror of fascism, in part, New Deal Democrats in the United States, and social democratic parties in Europe, also moved to re-negotiate the social contract. They promised citizens that they would control capitalism and provide social welfare policies and undertake other measures to strengthen national solidarity—but without the loss of freedom and democracy that fascism entailed.
The lesson for the present is clear: you can’t beat something with nothing. If other political actors don’t come up with more compelling solutions to the problems of capitalism, the popular appeal of the resurgent Right-wing will continue. And then the analogy with fascism and democratic collapse of the interwar years might prove even more relevant than it is now.
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