The good news is, white nationalists’ threats to try to suppress and intimidate voters on Election Day are probably mostly bluster. The bad news is, even the bluster is bad for democracy and civil society, and if a tiny fraction of what they’re planning actually materializes, it could be disastrous. These people are the absolute worst. We’re talking armed “poll-watchers,” hidden cameras in polling places, fake exit polls, and:
“We also have some teams going in to the ghettos in Philly with 40s and weed to give out to the local residents, which we think will lead to more of them staying home. We have had success with this in the past,” wrote the representative of TheRightStuff.biz, who said four teams of two employed this tactic in Detroit during the Democratic primary in an effort to help Bernie Sanders. POLITICO could not independently verify his claims.
Can you imagine if the tables were turned? If ACORN had been like “we’re going into the rural areas with moonshine and meth to give out to the local residents, which we think will lead to more of them staying home”? But the scariest effort may actually be the “exit poll” coming from longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone:
The Republican operative — less concerned with fraud committed by voters than with vote-rigging by elections officials —is organizing a volunteer exit-polling operation that he hopes will reach 7,000 precincts he sees as prone to rigging because of the voting methods employed and their one-party control. Stone said the precincts targeted included 2,000 in Philadelphia as well as some Republican-controlled areas in Ohio, though he declined to specify where. “If I told you I would be warning the [Republican Gov. John] Kasich machine,” he said.
Stone said he planned to present his findings to Trump and that he would consider any deviation of more than 2 percent between his exit polls and the posted precinct totals to be suspicious, citing the State Department’s standard for monitoring foreign elections.
“If the results differ from our crappily done, biased, amateur efforts, clearly it will be evidence of vote-rigging.” But no matter how obvious a Dumpster fire the “polling” efforts are, there’s a big pool of Trump voters out there primed to see the election as rigged and any results they don’t like as illegitimate, and Stone is looking to hand them “evidence” to hang that conviction on. If you thought birtherism was terrible as a way to delegitimize a presidency, wait for the years of howling resentment and rage that could accompany this one, with a presidential nominee actively stoking it.
The only answer possible here is a win so big it can only be denied by the most committed dead-enders, and a president and Congress who act decisively to move the country forward.
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