First, Trump may be better prepared. Mitchell, a close Trump ally, has spent the last few years building up a network of activists focused on local boards of elections. And the Republican National Committee’s election litigation team is now being led by Christina Bobb, an election denier who is now facing criminal charges for her efforts to overturn the 2020 race. The RNC claims it is recruiting an army of 100,000 poll observers who could provide significant disruption during voting and counting.

“I think we saw efforts by Republicans in 2020 that were pretty ham-handed,” said Marc Elias, a top Democratic voting rights lawyer. “I worry that there will be both legal and extralegal efforts by Republicans to keep ballots from being counted.”

But more significantly, the idea that the 2020 election was stolen has moved from the fringes to being a pillar of the Republican party. A January poll from PRRI found that 66% of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen. “The most important thing we have to do is protect the vote. You have to keep your eyes open because these people want to cheat and they do cheat, and, frankly, it’s the only thing they do well,” Trump said in a prerecorded video that played all four nights during the Republican national convention in July.

The belief in stolen elections, Elias said, was “no longer the provenance of crazy people like Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell. This is no longer the province of people who thought that there were bamboo filaments in paper or mythical sea creatures involved in the election with Venezuelan dictators.

  • snekerpimp@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    There are now officially two Americas: the one grounded in actual, factual reality, and one so deluded by propaganda and hate that reality is no longer in their grasp. How do you counter act this? How do you stop Don Quixote from fighting the evil windmills?

    • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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      4 months ago

      investing more in education sure wouldnt hurt, getting money OUT of politics, basically all the things a social compact is for.

      congress has to legislate responsibly or bear responsibility for flushing the states dowm the shitter.

      Get term limits going.

      Illegalize gerrymandering.

      Vote Harris.

      there are lots of things to do, and the best thing for the average American to do is vote and donate time if they have it.

      or you could become an activist lawyer. or movement lawyer.

      there are lots of important things to do, but Congress bears the responsibility to get most of this done and has chosen not to for decades becuase It’s way easier to profit off their positions of privilege.

      there’s lots of things to do.

      do what you can.

      • AA5B@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        But education funding is mostly local - many states wouldn’t even accept free money to feed kids with no strings attached

        Gerrymandering is probably a judicial issue.

    • Routhinator@startrek.website
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      4 months ago

      Two very important steps to start with:

      1. Corporations are not people. They should not be able to lobby, donate funds, or be a scapegoat for their executives in a lawsuit.

      2. Restore truth in print laws, which were removed thanks to corporations being considered as people and allowed advertisers to lobby this legislation be removed under the guise of it hurting their buisness.

      Then you’ve got a chance of stopping this shit. But these two legislative changes can be attributed to as the first to steps on the horrible path our democracies have taken to their ultimate enshitification where they have taken the power from the people and put it in the hands of the wealthy.

    • the_fuzz@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      I find it funny that all the replies to this comment are things like, “get money out of politics” or “increase spending on education.” In other words, things that require legislative action.

      So all we need to fix our broken system is for that broken system to work correctly. Got it.