Reuters has an update on the influx of Republican Party-backed "election observers" looking for evidence of all that invisible election fraud their treason-backing party leaders keep bellowing about, and it's mostly more of the same. We learned earlier about Republican election training sessions that featured GOP partisans brazenly recommending ways to violate election laws by, for example, smuggling in smartphones or other recording devices.
Essentially there's a two-pronged approach. There's a Republican effort to recruit poll watchers in roughly the traditional way, albeit many more of them, and there's a cooperative effort by foaming Republican conspiracy cranks to put their fellow foaming conspiracy cranks into election offices so that they can ... foam. Where one ends and the other begins is muddy. For example, Reuters notes that seditious sack of crap Mark Meadows is the "senior partner" of the Conservative Partnership Institute acting as funder for rabid election hoax promoter Cleta Mitchell's alleged election "integrity" group, and that seditious sack of crap Donald Trump's Save America PAC handed over $1 million last year to assist those efforts.
So it's the most connected people in the Republican Party who are funding the most aggressive sedition-promoting election hoaxers in the party, as national pundits sit around wondering how much of the party's conspiracy promotion can be tied to Legitimate Republican Party Figures.
Uh, all of it, Charlie. That's the damn point. This stuff is all being funded by the same deep pockets that fund the anti-immigration hoaxes and the white nationalist hoaxes and the demands that elderly Americans choose between lifesaving medication and being able to eat tomorrow. From the "Tea Party" to the so-called detective searching a workman's truck at gunpoint because he's convinced the local air conditioner repair guy is smuggling fake ballots for China to the contents of Tucker Carlson's Neo-Nazi Funtime Revue, this is all on television because some specific team of longtime Republican backers decided that they would pay money to sure it happened.
Anyhow, Reuters has a few examples of how Republican "election monitoring" is going that really speak to the quality of monitors being shoved into our elections process.
There was the group praying for "evil to descend" on elections workers doing a recount of ballots in Colorado's July primaries after four(!) Republican candidates insisted that other Republicans had Done Fraud; no, we're not sure what's up with that. Was this a general appeal for God to send a plague of frogs down to interrupt the vote count? Maybe the frogs would jam the equipment, rendering further vote-counting impossible? Couldn't tell you.
But the one sure thing about top Republican shriekers shrieking out conspiracy theories about "stolen" elections is that the Americans who will respond the most to such talk will be other conspiracy theorists. The whole point of spreading such hoaxes is to attract the most gullible brickheads in the country, and here they are.
"During early voting in Arizona's Pima County, an election observer was told to put away binoculars; another was caught looking at private voter data, and another was asked to stop making comments about 'fraudulent elections,'" reports Reuters. Great. Outstanding. So we've got a muttering weirdo, a person intentionally looking to violate some election laws themselves, and somebody who, uh, brought binoculars to "observe" the voting.
Did this person confuse election observation with birdwatching? The point of the binoculars was what, now?
Oh, look at that voter's ballot. What lovely plumage! It's rare to see that pattern this far south, I hope somebody gets a picture.
Yeah, we know what the binoculars were for. Somebody was looking to peep at how certain people voted. No doubt to decide whether it was a ballot that should be considered "suspicious" by Republican Party standards.
This one, however, is a stumper.
"In Nevada's Washoe County, people with night vision goggles stood outside the registrar's building and aimed their cameras at election workers counting votes on primary night in June, two Washoe County officials told Reuters."
What. The Actual. Strawberries. People with night vision goggles were trying to "observe" the vote count? Night vision goggles?
What the hell did they imagine "vote counting" to be, as they staked out the local registrar's office? Did they show up in their tactical vote counting pants? What did they drive up in, a Humvee camouflaged under an assortment of hanging chads? What is even going on with that?
Whatever Vote Team Six was up to, they were probably disappointed to learn that the vote counting went on in a fully lit building, thus rendering their night vision goggles pointless. But recording election officials as they counted votes, now that's a bit more dodgy. And none of it speaks to the perpetrators being anything less than AHEM a few crudités short of a party platter, or however you want to phrase that. Yeesh.
So that's how things stand, a few weeks before the November elections. Republicans have been steadily funding a movement of weird American conspiracy cranks that don't understand the first thing about how not to violate election laws but who consider themselves crack detectives who will uncover an alleged worldwide conspiracy to violate them via satellites and space lasers. It's probably going better than expected, in most election offices, but that doesn't mean it'll stay that way on the big day.
And the same Republican groups will be claiming "fraud" is responsible for any result they don't particularly like, whether or not their night-vision-goggles-wearing, binoculars-using, smartphone-smuggling election monitors find it or not, so we can expect this to get worse before it gets better.
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