After months of priming his cultists for claims of Democratic election fraud, Donald Trump and Republicans are preparing to deploy their army of lawyers to challenge the votes of as many voters as necessary to potentially change the outcome of the election.
“As soon as that election is over,” Trump told reporters last weekend, “we’re going in with our lawyers.”
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In fact, both Republicans and Democrats have organized hundreds of lawyers to fight the legal battles Trump has been previewing rhetorically at his rallies and elsewhere. Meanwhile, state Republicans have been actively working to keep votes in Democratic strongholds from even being counted.
In Texas' Harris County, home to Houston and a huge Democratic voting population, Republicans have already brought legal challenges to the validity of some 127,000 votes cast at drive-thru sites. The GOP legal argument has been so weak that the state Supreme Court rejected it, a right-wing federal judge rejected it, a three-judge appeals court panel rejected their emergency appeal, and Republicans are now petitioning for a full-panel review of the rejection by the Fifth Circuit Court appeals panel. Solid.
Republicans are also hard at work in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Nevada trying expand access for their election observers so they can challenge the validity of absentee votes one ballot at a time as they are being processed, according to The New York Times.
But that's just chump change compared to what they will try if the election is close enough for Trump to contest. And Trump, already feeling rebuffed by some legal decisions, has begun stoking unrest in the event that the judiciary fails to save him. After the Supreme Court on Monday let a ruling stand allowing extra time for Pennsylvania to count mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day, Trump decried the decision and called for action.
"The Supreme Court decision on voting in Pennsylvania is a VERY dangerous one," he warned in a tweet. "It will allow rampant and unchecked cheating and will undermine our entire systems of laws. It will also induce violence in the streets."
There's no cheating, but Trump is certainly agitating for violence and chaos in the streets of Pennsylvania—the state that could ultimately decide the election. On Tuesday, Trump told reporters traveling with him that he was “very concerned” about the Keystone State, adding that “bad things” happen in Philadelphia. If by “bad things,” Trump means masses of Philly residents casting votes against him, then yep, they’re happening.
In the meantime, the lengths that Republicans are prepared to go to in order to try to alter the outcome of this election is simply astounding.
“This is the most blatant, open attempt at mass disenfranchisement of voters that I’ve ever witnessed,” said Dale Ho, the director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.
It's almost as if Republicans don't believe in democracy anymore now that their policies are being roundly repudiated by nearly two-thirds of the electorate.