The MAGA voter intimidation game
If you can’t beat ‘em, intimidate ‘em. According to Frank Figliuzzi, the FBI’s former counterintelligence director, MAGA extremist groups are calling for a physical presence at polling places during the 2024 presidential election. “The mobilisation has already occurred,” Figliuzzi says. “The spectre of people who are violent in nature and have violent agendas, and often come armed with long guns, is becoming a very real possibility.”
Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Boogaloos Boys, QAnon and so-called militia groups have put out a clarion call for a physical presence at polling places in November. The ostensible goal is “election security,” that is, the prevention of voter fraud. The real goal is to discourage, intimidate and otherwise prevent Democrats and others from voting for the reelection of Joe Biden. Their principal targets are polling places in blue inner cities and precincts where minorities vote in battleground states.
This kind of activity is, of course, not only highly illegal, it’s unconstitutional. But such laws can and will be broken in places where enforcement is poor or nonexistent. Local police sympathetic to the goals of such extremist groups might interpret violations of the law generously in their favour, or simply look the other way when a crime is committed.
Meanwhile GOP state legislators are working to overturn specific laws conceived to prevent such voter interference. For example, Nevada has a statute making it a felony for any person to “use or threaten or attempt to use any force, intimidation, coercion, violence, restraint or undue influence with the intent to interfere with the performance of the duties of any elections official relating to an election; or retaliate against any elections official for performing duties relating to an election.” The Nevada GOP has sued to overturn this law.
USA Today recently reported that “Republicans say they will mobilize more than 100,000 people in battleground states to ensure ‘transparency and fairness’ in the 2024 election, an announcement criticized by some as risking potential voter intimidation.” Apparently Republicans think, conveniently, that “transparency and fairness” are only at risk in battleground states. Their efforts are specifically targeted there — and nowhere else.
These dirty tricks are being employed together with efforts to have Democrats struck off the voter rolls. Only a fool or a MAGA Republican — but I repeat myself — would see this for anything but what it is. It is an unequivocal attempt to rig the 2024 election in favour of Donald Trump and other Republicans running in 2024.
The real question is, can they pull it off? To a certain extent they already have. The usual Republican dirty tricks have been in force for decades now. For example, gerrymandering was considered by many Democrats to be one of the biggest obstacles they encountered in the 2018 midterm election. The 2018 Blue Wave was not as large as it would have been had true representative government been the order of the day. But armed creeps at the polling place is another order of magnitude of cheating altogether.
What can be done about this? Democrats must turn out to vote in record numbers in order to overwhelm Republican efforts to cheat. The very fact that they are trying to take away our right to vote ought to galvanise action and inspire even greater effort.
So don’t go to the polls alone. Drag along as many friends as you can. And make sure you let it be known at every opportunity that Republicans are the real riggers of elections, and they have every intention to try it this time. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.