Every certain number of years, we hear the refrain “this election may be the most important in our lifetime.” While not every election can be the most important, it is certainly true that as voting rights are increasingly under threat and as partisan gerrymandering locks in a system where politicians can choose their voters rather than the other way around, it seems like participating in each election is becoming more and more critical.
Only a few years ago, when Donald Trump began turning his frenzied followers against the basic tenets of decency and respect, the few who warned that he and his enablers wouldn’t stop until democracy was destroyed were mostly dismissed as being overly paranoid. But who would have guessed that by the fall of 2022, the Republican Party would have been usurped entirely by a contemptible throng of charlatans, grifters, and authoritarians whose lust for power and control are equaled only by their disdain for anyone unlike them?
The stakes in this election are high: Voters will decide whether abortion will be criminalized across the nation, whether we will take the urgent action needed to save a planet in peril from a raging climate crisis, whether we will have access to Social Security and Medicare, whether our children will be protected from gun violence at their schools, or anywhere else for that matter, and whether they will even have the right to an education, reading any book that they darn well please.
The forces aligned to deny us these fundamental rights and freedoms are doing everything in their power to prevent people from voting on November 8, with the Big Lie excuse that the previous presidential election was stolen. To do this, they’re engaging in Orwellian-sounding strategies, using words like “election integrity,” while spending tens of millions of dollars in dark money.
Democratic elections lawyer Marc Elias called them a “constellation of anti-voting groups,” and they are some of the same players who invented the Big Lie to overthrow our democracy on January 6, 2021: Mark Meadows, Cleta Mitchell, John Eastman, Bill Barr, Leonard Leo, and others. Their partner in this nefarious voter suppression scheme is, unsurprisingly, the Republican National Committee (RNC).
Mitchell, for example, the lawyer who sat in on the infamous phone call in January 2021, in which Trump attempted to strong-arm Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger into committing election fraud, now works with an organization called the Conservative Partnership Institute, or CPI, run by Meadows and former Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint. CPI is targeting eight swing states for a “permanent election infrastructure” composed of Big Lie conspiracy theorists that the group is inserting into local elections as poll workers and poll watchers, and in other key positions in state and county offices. Their other goal, according to the investigative journalism project Documented, is to badger local election officials, question voting systems, and cause mayhem by objecting to things they don't fully understand.
CPI’s “Election Integrity Network,” run by Mitchell, has held numerous “summits” in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin, in which conspiracy theorists are “trained” on the inner workings of local elections and various rightwing schemes. One participant in a recent Pennsylvania training described the group’s efforts as setting “thousands of little brush fires all over the state.”
CPI’s “Election Integrity Network” has held numerous “summits” numerous states in which conspiracy theorists are “trained” on the inner workings of local elections and various rightwing schemes.
The RNC has its own parallel strategy to place “election integrity” directors and lawyers in multiple states. In mid-September, RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel claimed the committee had already recruited 45,000 poll watchers and workers across the country, a difficult claim to verify given that McDaniel distributes a steady stream of disinformation and propaganda every day on social media.
As part of these multi-state workshops, CPI has distributed what it calls a “Citizens Guide to Building an Election Integrity Infrastructure.” In Pennsylvania, to cite one example, that document inspired a local group called Audit the Vote PA to distribute a similar document titled “Election Integrity Task Force Outline.” Audit the Vote PA is run by a Big Lie promoter named Toni Shuppe, who earlier this year, according to The New York Times, circulated a petition claiming a citizen’s right “to throw off such government that intends to keep the truth behind the 2020 election hidden.”
Audit the Vote PA’s outline is a laundry list of tasks that spell out how the group’s followers can go about local elections. It includes action items ranging from working to block early voting and ballot drop boxes by attending election board meetings and pressuring local officials, to doing a “deep dive” into voting machines to find and expose their “vulnerabilities.”
Scott Seeborg, co-director of states at the voting rights advocacy group , tells The Progressive that a “big part of the Cleta Mitchell playbook, which seems to be where a lot of this is coming from, involves getting folks who believe in this [election fraud] garbage to be in the most granular possible position in our precincts.”
Perhaps the most troubling detail of the Audit the Vote PA document, which was published in July by the daily LNP in Lancaster, is its plan to target senior centers and other long-term care facilities. The document says the group is seeking people to “research all the nursing homes/skilled care/assisted living facilities in the entire county” in order to compile a list and “do recon on each administrator in each facility to find out whether that person might be a [Democrat] or [Republican].” Next on the to-do list is to “educate” long-term care facility residents to “make them their own best whistleblower.”
Voting rights and disability rights advocates are justifiably outraged. “They’re criminalizing Grandma,” Seeborg says. “It’s ugly, it’s cynical, and it’s downright un-American. And I don’t say that lightly.”
“I don’t think they understand that people in long-term care facilities have the right to have staff assistance to vote,” Peri Jude Radecic, chief executive officer of Disability Rights Pennsylvania, tells The Progressive. “People with disabilities in general have the right to have somebody assist them to vote. That’s not fraud, that’s a legal right that people have under numerous .”
In response, Disability Rights Pennsylvania and other organizations are contacting nursing home administrators and staff, social workers, and unions to warn them of Audit the Vote PA’s efforts and to educate them about the Constitutional rights of the people who live in long-term care centers, Radecic says.
Similar appalling tactics are being employed in other states as well, as part of a tsunami of anti-voting litigation coordinated by these same groups and meant to overwhelm elections officials, drain resources, disenfranchise voters, set dangerous precedents, and cause widespread consternation and voter apathy.
In late August, a federal court in Wisconsin struck down guidance by the Wisconsin Elections Commission that required absentee ballots to be physically returned by the person who filled them out, which plaintiffs in a recent lawsuit said violated three federal laws: the Voting Rights Act, the Rehabilitation Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act, according to Democracy Docket, Elias’s media group that tracks anti-voting litigation across the country. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, as of September 9, the center was tracking ninety-seven active lawsuits related to voting in twenty-six states and Washington, D.C. Elias said there are 130 such cases.
For Susan Gobreski, board director for government policy at the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania, voting and elections shouldn’t be a game of “gotcha.” Rather, “it should be, ‘Is this a valid vote? Do we have every reason to believe this vote was cast in conformity to the law and that it’s a legitimate vote?’ And when that’s the case, that vote should count,” she tells The Progressive. “But now we’re entering into an age when they’re really just trying to strike votes.”
The good news is that people opposed to this ongoing voter sabotage are fighting back just as hard. Radecic says all types of advocacy groups are getting together in Pennsylvania to form a pro-voting coalition. Grobeski says that in addition to making sure good policy is in place, groups like the League of Women Voters are making sure there are systems in place to engage with people who believe in democracy and to get them involved as judges of elections, poll workers, and poll watchers, and fulfilling other tasks like registering people to vote.
“It’s really important that we’re not just sitting here being reactive,” says Seeborg, but rather “building this infrastructure to be able to meet this threat where it is, and counter it with folks who have the richness of character and passion in their heart, and give a shit about democracy.”
“The job is to do whatever the job is,” Gobreski adds, “and right now, the job is to fight like hell.”