As early voting begins across the country, Big Lie fanatics find themselves living the purest form of their paradoxical existence. How do you pretend you believe in a one-citizen, one-vote democracy while trying as hard as possible to stop citizens from voting for things you don’t want them to vote for? It’s tough being a part of such a large project. The logical flaws inherent in the Big Lie position are made sensical to believers only through the GOP’s fascist tactics. When you have governors like Ron DeSantis using law enforcement to intimidate citizens away from voting, it makes Regular Joe Fascist feel a lot more secure in his own anti-democracy positions.
On Thursday, just one week after early voting began in Arizona, state officials called on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate a possible case of voter intimidation at a Maricopa County drop box. According to Reuters, a group of people “followed a voter” as the voter went to drop off their ballot at the official early voting dropbox at the Juvenile Justice Court drop box in Mesa.
To clarify, that is the whole story. A voter was dropping a ballot off at a drop box for ballots. A “group of people” found this suspicious. Those people, not the voter, were reported to Maricopa County officials and are currently under investigation for possible voter intimidation.
CNN asked GOP Big Lie brigade member Kari Lake about the “incident.” Lake, siding with those now under investigation, told CNN, “I haven’t heard anything about it. It just shows you how concerned people are, though. People are so concerned about the integrity of our election, and this is another reason, Kate, this is another reason we have to restore integrity.”
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Lake is the same woman who has refused to commit to accepting the results of the election she is running in. While the organization Clean Elections USA has not been specifically implicated in this request, they have been filmed “poll watching,” and conspiracy theorist Melody Jennings, who began the group, is all in on watching ballot boxes.
To understand how far off into the hinterlands of the mind Ms. Jennings is, she was spouting nonsense mythology about election ballot “mules,” on various podcasts over the past few weeks and months. The concept of “mules” comes out of the thoroughly debunked claims made by convicted criminal Dinesh D’Souza in his bogus documentary 2,000 Mules, wherein he claims that “non-profits” hired “mules” to stash and then slowly deliver thousands of fraudulent votes in swing states in order to create a victory for Joe Biden over Donald Trump in the 2020 election. D’Souza’s video doc is also where Jennings’ hard-to-follow and entirely fabricated “evidence” of “geo-tracking” buzzwordery comes from. She’s a charlatan grabbing at words that sound like science from another charlatan’s thesaurus. In Jennings’ defense, the disgraced former President of the United States also promoted the same documentary as well as Tucker Carlson, and she’s clearly a follower.
Here are some of these “Clean Elections USA” folks, doing similarly dubious “poll watching,” and being super-cagey about what they are exactly doing.
That’s some hardcore conviction! “I’m not able to comment.” And “I’m not supposed to talk to anybody,” all sounds very strong! Strangely, they seem to feel very intimidated when the camera is leveled on them. Weird!
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Public Policy Polling's Tom Jensen joins us on The Downballot to explain how his firm weights polls to reflect the likely electorate; why Democratic leads in most surveys this year should be treated as smaller than they appear because undecided voters lean heavily anti-Biden; and the surprisingly potent impact abortion has had on moving the needle with voters despite our deep polarization.
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