Donald Trump’s tweets claiming that massive election fraud stole the popular vote from him are intended to undermine faith in basic democracy. But are they also laying the groundwork for concrete action by his administration? Greg Sargent suggests the tweets may signal a massive assault on voting:
“My concern is that this might be a signal that we will see an assault on voting rights,” Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told me today. “Claims of nonexistent voter fraud and noncitizen voting are precisely the kinds of baseless justifications that we’ve seen for the wave of laws in the past couple of years restricting voting access.”
That assault could take a number of forms:
1) The Department of Justice might decline to enforce remaining portions of the Voting Rights Act. [...]
2) The DOJ could aggressively pursue crackdowns on voter fraud to harmful effect. [...]
3) The Trump administration could push to nationalize voting restrictions. [...]
And there’s more!
We keep being told Trump’s tweets are all a distraction and we’re fools to pay much attention to them, but this is the president-elect communicating directly with us. We’d be fools not to consider what he might be signaling (beyond the fact that he’s unstable).