Republican voter intimidation tactics: A serious attack on democracy or not?

Old-fashioned voter intimidation

A few weeks ago, several sources reported that at least one red state was planning to use voter police to investigate election fraud. That didn’t seem like a problem. No one condones voter fraud, so investigating it seemed innocent. And since there is very little voter fraud to investigate not much would happen, maybe other than some featherbedding and power napping on the job. 

Then, a long time interlocutor strenuously argued that this was much worse. I was given a link and ordered to read an article written by Thom Hartmann for Salon. There is an interesting snippet of history about William Rehnquist, John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh. Here it is:

Republicans have been committing election fraud right out in the open since 1964 and covering it up by yelling about "voter fraud."

Remember the hours-long lines to vote we’ve seen on TV ever since the ’60s in minority neighborhoods? Those are no accident: They’re part of a larger election fraud program the GOP has used to suppress the vote for 60 years now.

This election year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is raising the stakes: He’s planning to put together a force of "election police" under his personal command to travel the state intimidating voters while pretending to look for "voter fraud."

DeSantis is asking the GOP-controlled legislature to allocate nearly $6 million to hire 52 people to “investigate, detect, apprehend, and arrest anyone for an alleged violation” of election laws. They would be stationed at unspecified “field offices throughout the state” and act on tips from “government officials or any other person.”

Meanwhile, the GOP in Texas is quietly recruiting 10,000 white volunteers “courageous” enough to go into Black and Hispanic polling places and confront people trying to vote. As Jessica Corbett reported for Common Dreams:

“Common Cause Texas on Thursday shared a leaked video of a Harris County GOP official discussing plans to 'build an army' of 10,000 election workers and poll watchers, including some who 'will have the confidence and courage' to go into Black and Brown communities to address alleged voter fraud that analyses show does not actually exist.”

These efforts to intimidate voters are part of a much larger Republican campaign of widespread and systemic election fraud that the party has been running since the days of Barry Goldwater. Democrats need to start calling it that.

Voter fraud, in other words, isn’t real. But election fraud is very much real and alive, and that’s exactly what DeSantis and the Texas GOP are proposing, right out in the open.

This has a long history, stretching back to the era when the Republican Party first began trying to cater to the white racist vote.

In 1964, Sen. Barry Goldwater — who was running for president on the Republican ticket — openly opposed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts that President Lyndon Johnson was then pushing through Congress.

These elections where only white people were allowed to vote in large numbers were fraudulent elections.

After all, isn't it a fraud to say that a “free and fair” election was held when, in fact, large numbers of people who were legally qualified and wanted to vote weren’t allowed their voice?

How can that not be a fraudulent election?

And back in 1964, Goldwater and the Republicans wanted to keep it that way.

But as the issue of voting rights was showing up on the nightly news and people were marching across the country for their right to vote, Republicans on Goldwater’s team realized they needed a justification for the status quo. 

So they came up with a story that they started selling in the 1964 election through op-eds, in speeches and on the news. This story was simple:

There was massive “voter fraud” going on, where mostly Black people are voting more than once in different polling places and doing so under different names, often, as Donald Trump recently said, “by the busload” after Sunday church services. In addition, the Republican story went, “illegal aliens” living in the United States were voting in the millions.

None of it was true, but it became the foundation of a nationwide voter suppression campaign that the GOP continues to promote to this day.

A campaign of actual “election fraud” based on the lie of “voter fraud.”

William Rehnquist, for example, was a 40-year-old Arizona lawyer and Republican activist in 1964, when his idol, Goldwater, ran against Johnson for president.

Rehnquist helped organize a program called Operation Eagle Eye in his state to challenge the vote of every Hispanic and Black voter and to dramatically slow down the voting lines in communities of color to discourage people who had to get back to work from waiting hours in line to vote.

As Democratic poll watcher Lito Pena observed at the time, Rehnquist showed up at a southern Phoenix polling place to do his part in Operation Eagle Eye:

“He knew the law and applied it with the precision of a swordsman,” Pena told a reporter. “He sat at the table at the Bethune School, a polling place brimming with black citizens, and quizzed voters ad nauseam about where they were from, how long they’d lived there — every question in the book. A passage of the Constitution was read and people … were ordered to interpret it to prove they had the language skills to vote.”

Rehnquist was richly rewarded for his activism; he quickly rose through the GOP ranks to being appointed by President Nixon, in 1972, to the U.S. Supreme Court. He was elevated in 1986 by President Reagan to chief justice, a position he used to stop the Florida State Supreme Court-mandated vote recount in 2000, handing the White House to George W. Bush.

(Interestingly, two then-little-known lawyers who worked with the Bush legal team to argue before Rehnquist that the Florida recount should be stopped were John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh. Bush rewarded Roberts by putting him on the court as chief justice when Rehnquist died. Roberts was also the tie-breaking vote to allow Ohio to continue its voter purges in 2017, and wrote the 5–4 decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013.)

Rehnquist’s Arizona arm of Operation Eagle Eye was one of hundreds of such formal and informal Republican voter suppression operations that exploded across the United States that year. As The New York Times noted on Oct. 30, 1964:

Republican officials have begun a massive campaign to prevent vote fraud in the election next Tuesday, a move that has caused Democrats to cry “fraud.”

The Republican plan, Operation Eagle Eye, is designed, according to party officials, to prevent Democrats from “stealing” the 1964 election. Republicans charge that the election was stolen in 1960.

The Democratic National Chairman, John M. Bailey, has criticized the Republican plan as “a program of voter intimidation.” He has sent a protest to all 50 state Governors and has alerted Democratic party officials throughout the country to be on their guard.

"There is no doubt in my mind," Mr. Bailey wrote the state chairmen yesterday, "that this program is a serious threat to democracy as well as to a Democratic victory on Nov. 3rd."

Republican positions both then and now are not generally popular. Who’d vote, after all, for more tax cuts for billionaires, more pollution, banking deregulation, gutting Medicare, privatizing Social Security, shipping jobs overseas, keeping drug prices high and preventing workers from forming unions?

The GOP’s sweet spot, however, is scaring white people about “crime” by minorities, particularly African Americans and Hispanics. Which is why Donald Trump told Congress that “3 to 5 million fraudulent” votes were cast in the 2016 election for Hillary Clinton. 

And when they can’t clamp down enough on ID laws or close enough polling places in Black neighborhoods, they fall back on “election police,” the 2022 version of Operation Eagle Eye.

As the conservative Town Hall site notes about the election just held in Virginia that saw that state’s governor’s office flip to a Republican:

Not only did the RNC indeed have “a robust poll watching operation,” involving 50 election integrity trainings with over 3,200 attendees, but such an operation produced results. In the 37 [many minority] target Virginia counties, poll watchers covered 100 percent of polling locations, the November memo confirmed.

This is one dimension of a much larger nationwide campaign of Republican voter suppression election fraud, using the phony excuse of trying to stop “voter fraud.”

They’ve already started, in numerous states, seizing control of election systems in minority neighborhoods, aggressively purging voter lists, outlawing mail-in voting or making it far more difficult, and closing polling places by the hundreds.

This year, and particularly in 2024, they’re reviving Operation Eagle Eye to have armed militia volunteers and "election police" confront people in their own neighborhoods on Election Day, all in a craven attempt to discourage minority voting.

Now that neither the Supreme Court nor Congress is willing to stop them, we must, like Paul Revere, awaken the American people to this long-term strategy that’s worked so well for the GOP since 1964, usually producing widespread disenfranchisement and hours-long lines to vote in minority neighborhoods.

The struggle for democracy in our republic is far from over, and the next battlefield will be the election this November. Republicans are doubling down on every tool they’ve ever used to suppress the vote.

I don’t know how many voters were intimidated into not voting by GOP intimidation tactics in 2020 or in 1964. I am pretty sure (~97% confident) that Republican Party elites intended to suppress non-Republican voters[1], but how effective was it? In close races, just a few intimidated voters and suppressed votes can flip an election. 

Videos here and here indicate that since the 1950s, Republicans have tried to intimidate non-Republican voters. For context, 2020 was the first presidential election in 40 years where the Republican National Committee (RNC) was allowed to do “poll watching” without court supervision. The Democratic Party sued the RNC and courts ordered court monitoring of RNC poll watching activity for 40 years because the Republicans were trying to intimidate voters.  

Footnote: 

1. For example, Republicans target polls where non-Republican voters dominate. Their only concern is non-Republican voters, who allegedly commit massive voter fraud. According to Republican elites, Republican voters don’t commit voter fraud, and thus they do not need to be monitored.

Armed Trump supporter arrested at polling place in 2020 

COMPLETE THE FOLLOWING SENTENCE:

 WHEN LIFE HANDS YOU...........

WE all know the most common one, right?

Though, to be honest, that is kinda lame, better would be:

OR:

SO, complete the sentence:

When life hands you.................

Make it whatever you want and have some fun with this one.

(When life hands you partisan politics, post a goofy thread to take everyone's mind of off politics)

How authoritarianism, distrust and bigotry poison societies

The short answer is that, among other bad things, authoritarianism, distrust and bigotry poison societies when at least a significant, persistent minority of society comes to accept them and plays on those emotions and fears to suck other people into their pit of rage and hate. That is especially true when political, religious and business leaders either condone the poison by their silence  and moral cowardice, or actively endorse it by their rhetoric and/or behavior.

The New York Times writes on the growing poison in India. This is about radical right Hindus poisoning society against Muslims. The NYT writes:

HARIDWAR, India — The police officer arrived at the Hindu temple here with a warning to the monks: Don’t repeat your hate speech.

Ten days earlier, before a packed audience and thousands watching online, the monks had called for violence against the country’s minority Muslims. Their speeches, in one of India’s holiest cities, promoted a genocidal campaign to “kill two million of them” and urged an ethnic cleansing of the kind that targeted Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

Once considered fringe, extremist elements are increasingly taking their militant message into the mainstream, stirring up communal hate in a push to reshape India’s constitutionally protected secular republic into a Hindu state. Activists and analysts say their agenda is being enabled, even normalized, by political leaders and law enforcement officials who offer tacit endorsements by not directly addressing such divisive issues.

After the monks’ call to arms went viral, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his top leaders remained silent, except for a vice president with a largely ceremonial role who warned that “inciting people against each other is a crime against the nation” without making a specific reference to Haridwar. Junior members of Mr. Modi’s party attended the event, and the monks have often posted pictures with senior leaders.

“You have persons giving hate speech, actually calling for genocide of an entire group, and we find reluctance of the authorities to book these people,” Rohinton Fali Nariman, a recently retired Indian Supreme Court judge, said in a public lecture. “Unfortunately, the other higher echelons of the ruling party are not only being silent on hate speech, but almost endorsing it.”

In the face of silence, a spokesperson for a group that supports Prime Minister Narendra Modi's party downplayed and pushed back on criticism of Modi’s silence asking, “Does the prime minister or home minister need to address every small, trivial issue? The accused have already been arrested. The secular groups will always highlight such incidents, but not when Hindus, Hindu gods and goddesses are under attack.”

Small, trivial issues. That is how the political elites in India see hate and bigotry. That attitude is how secular democracies fall to authoritarianism, religious intolerance and discrimination.

The NYT comments that right-wing messages are spreading rapidly through social media and fears that a small incident, e.g., a Muslim man alleged to have seduced a Hindu woman, could incite significant incidents of violence.

The NYT commented on Modi: “After he rose to the country’s highest office in 2014 on a message of economic growth, there was hope that Mr. Modi could rein in the fury. Instead, he has often reverted to a Hindu-first agenda that inflames communal divides.”

Question: Does any of that feel unpleasantly familiar, and if so, what causes that unpleasant feeling? 

Manipulated video fact checking is coming of age

CONTEXT

A Washington Post article, How an out-of-context Jen Psaki clip led to days of Fox coverage, discussed a video that Fox intentionally manipulated to foment its standard menu of divisive deceit, lies, outrage and crackpottery among Fox viewers. 

The Fox rage, hate, lies & deceit machine fires up with the professional liars 

at Fox whipping up baseless self-righteous moral outrage

This is the out of context quote that Fox attributed to Psaki and then pounded on for days:

“You know, I think it speaks to if you look at Fox on a daily basis. I mean, do you remember the four boxes that you had that we had on all the TVs, right, which is on my TV right now? So right now, just to give you a sense of CNN, Pentagon, as many as eighty-five hundred U.S. troops on heightened alert. Okay, true. Same on MSNBC. CNBC is doing their own thing about the market. And then on Fox, is Jeanine Pirro talking about soft-on-crime consequences? I mean, what? What does that even mean? Right? So there’s an alternate universe on some coverage. What’s scary about it is a lot of people watch that.” — White House press secretary Jen Psaki, in a viral video tweet, posted by @HouseRepublicans on Jan. 31

This is what Psaki said with content that Fox omitted included:

JON LOVETT (Pod Save America podcast): So I want to talk about the kinds of questions he gets kind of questions you get. I watched your briefing today and I have to come back to this Doocy cat. So here’s my question. He always puts out a gotcha question. Like today, he basically asked two. One was, does President Biden think parents should be under the boot of nameless bureaucrats when it comes to their children’s education? And the other was, does President Biden think crime is good? You do not fall for any of this bait. To your credit, though, I think someone much worse at your job would also not fall for these questions. Are you worried that he’s not adjusting, that there’s not a new strategy to try to catch you in some kind of a gotcha question?

JEN PSAKI: You know, I am not here to work for Peter Doocy or Fox, but I will say that, you know, if you look at how it’s portrayed and how my answers are portrayed, even when I say no, we don’t think crime is good, and here’s all the things we’ve done, including the thing that makes, I think, makes Republicans crazy. Just anecdotally by the hate tweets I get on Twitter when I say this is that they’ve voted against funding for local cops programs because the American Rescue Plan, also that Biden has supported $300 billion more in funding. And at the same time, he also thinks we need police reform. It’s like they don’t know what to do with that. But every time we say that, it makes them crazy. You know, I think it speaks to if you look at Fox on a daily basis. I mean, do you remember the four boxes that you had that we had on all the TVs, right, which is on my TV right now? So right now, just to give you a sense of CNN, Pentagon, as many as eighty-five hundred U.S. troops on heightened alert. Okay, true. Same on MSNBC. CNBC is doing their own thing about the market. And then on Fox, is Jeanine Pirro talking about soft on crime consequences? I mean, what? What does that even mean? Right? So there’s an alternate universe on some coverage. What’s scary about it is a lot of people watch that and they think that the president isn’t doing anything to address people’s safety in New York, and that couldn’t be further from the truth or other places. 

What Fox quoted is in bold italic, and what Fox omitted is regular text. Note that Fox omitted most of what was needed to understand the context of Psaki’s comments, i.de., it was intentional deceit in service to irrational emotional manipulation.

The omitted comments make clear that Psaki wasn’t randomly criticizing Fox News. Instead she was responding to a question about an exchange between her and Fox News reporter Peter Doocy during a Jan. 24 White House briefing. Psaki argued that Republicans paint a distorted portrait of the Biden administration’s efforts to support police. Fox cut that point out. Fox also cut a sentence off to remove Psaki’s claim that Biden was not addressing public safety “couldn’t be further from the truth.”

According to the WaPo article, when Psaki tried to correct the record for Fox, Fox ignored her:

Psaki’s edited comments quickly picked up steam, despite her offering clarifying remarks to Fox News’ Jacqui Heinrich on Jan. 31, and releasing a transcript with the missing context highlighted later that same day. Psaki’s efforts did little to dissuade the negative coverage. For its part, the House Republican Twitter account was unrepentant — doubling down with this response.

House Republicans doubled down and responded this lie with after being told they were liars:

Psaki Mocks The “Consequences” Of “Soft-On-Crime” Democrat Policies
As violent crime continues to surge across America, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki mocks Americans discussing the “consequences” of Democrats' “soft-on-crime” policies.

No deception, just your words.

You should probably just sit this one out and “have a margarita.”pic.twitter.com/oRXyuPeEh0

— House Republicans (@HouseGOP) February 1, 2022

Fact checkers construct a taxonomy for manipulated video propaganda

That article referred to the manipulated video clip as an example of video propaganda in a category that the WaPo fact checkers call “isolated,” and gave a link to what they meant by isolated.

That link led to a WaPo article, SEEING ISN’T BELIEVING: The Fact Checker’s guide to manipulated video. The article started with this:

The Fox video was an example of the “isolation” propaganda technique

Here are the three genera and six species of manipulated videos defined by WaPo’s fact checkers. An example of each of the six kinds of propagandized video is included in the article.

Genus: Missing context

Species 1: Misrepresentation: Presenting unaltered video in an inaccurate manner misrepresents the footage and misleads the viewer. Using incorrect dates or locations are examples of subverting context. 

Species 2: Isolation: Sharing a brief clip from a longer video creates a false narrative that does not reflect the event as it occurred. Point-of-view videos also belong in this category when they promote only one angle of a story. This is what the liars at Fox and lying House Republic and did to Psaki.

Genus: Deceptive editing

Species 1: Omission: Editing out large portions from a video and presenting it as a complete narrative, despite missing key elements, is a technique used to skew reality.

Species 2: Splicing: Editing together disparate videos fundamentally alters the story that is being told.

Genus: Malicious Transformation

Species 1: Doctoring: Altering the frames of a video — cropping, changing speed, using Photoshop, dubbing audio, or adding or deleting visual information — can deceive the viewer.

Species 2: Fabrication: Using Artificial Intelligence to create high-quality fake images simulates audio and convincingly swaps out background images. Deepfakes and other synthetic media fall into this category. 

Regarding the latest GOP attack on Democracy

“Intolerance is almost inevitably accompanied by a natural and true inability to comprehend or make allowance for opposite points of view. .... We find here with significant uniformity what one psychologist has called ‘logic-proof compartments.’ The logic-proof compartment has always been with us. .... The public and the press, or for that matter, the public and any force that modifies public opinion, interact. . . . . The truth is that while it appears to be forming public opinion on fundamental matters, the press is often conforming to it. .... Proof that the public and the institutions that make public opinion interact is shown in instances in which books were stifled because of popular disapproval at one time and then brought forward by popular demand at a later time when public opinion had altered. Religious and very early scientific works are among such books.” -- Edward Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, 1923

An article in the New York Times today, G.O.P. Declares Jan. 6 Attack ‘Legitimate Political Discourse’[1], is solid evidence of how autocratic and anti-democratic the GOP has become. The NYT writes:

The Republican Party on Friday officially declared the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and events that led to it “legitimate political discourse,” and rebuked two lawmakers in the party who have been most outspoken in condemning the deadly riot and the role of Donald J. Trump in spreading the election lies that fueled it.

The Republican National Committee’s voice vote to censure Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois at its winter meeting in Salt Lake City culminated more than a year of vacillation, which started with party leaders condemning the Capitol attack and Mr. Trump’s conduct, then shifted to downplaying and denying it.

On Friday, the party went further in a resolution slamming Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger for taking part in the House investigation of the assault, saying they were participating in “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”  

“Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger crossed a line,” Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman, said in a statement. “They chose to join Nancy Pelosi in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse that had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol.”  

.... It was the latest and most forceful effort by the Republican Party to minimize what happened and the broader attempt by Mr. Trump and his allies to invalidate the results of the 2020 election. In approving it and opting to punish two of its own, Republicans seemed to embrace a position that many of them have only hinted at: that the assault and the actions that preceded it were acceptable.

It came days after Mr. Trump suggested that, if re-elected in 2024, he would consider pardons for those convicted in the Jan. 6 attack and for the first time described his goal that day as subverting the election results, saying in a statement that Vice President Mike Pence “could have overturned the election.” (emphasis added)

For conservatives, what is there to worry about? The GOP leadership justifies the 1/6 coup attempt as legitimate discourse and the ex-president would pardon the 1/6 insurrectionists because they did nothing wrong. That is why most rank and file Republicans are unconcerned.  

After news of its vote got out, the RNC realized how bad it looked. The leadership then tried to deflect from the stark reality that the GOP is autocratic and anti-democratic. Party leaders feebly said that calling the 1/6 coup attempt legitimate discourse did not apply to the people who tried to overthrow the government on 1/6. Well, if the actual rioters did nothing wrong, then the people who planned the 1/6 event must have done something bad. Of course, that won't do for the GOP because it will never discipline its elites, not even for trying to overthrow the government. 

So, what the hell was the RNC even talking about? The answer is simple and frightening: It does not matter what the RNC was referring to or whether it makes any sense or not. What counts in tribal politics is the leadership says something, even if it is sheer nonsense. The rank and file need something to cling to, even if it is clearly and directly contradicted by evidence and/or sound reasoning.

Because of ruthless propaganda like this, most conservatives in America today (~95% ?) see no cause for concern about Republican attacks on democracy, elections, the rule of law or civil liberties. In their minds, the cause for worry about such things is the Democrats. The Dems are democracy attacking socialist tyrants, kleptocrats, thugs and liars, not the GOP. According to the GOP leadership's deceit, lies and slanders, Republicans are the ones valiantly and righteously defending what is good and decent, contrary evidence be damned. 

In fact, decades of ruthless GOP propaganda has been teaching, among other anti-democratic things, (i) distrust of democracy, experts, truth, a free press, and (ii) intolerance and fear of political opposition and dissenting opinions.[1] That distrust and intolerance has created in the minds of most rank and file conservatives a huge logic-proof compartment[2] about what the GOP actually stands for and why and how it relies so heavily on deceit, lies and social division. 

Building those logic-proof compartments via decades of propaganda makes the GOP leadership's current claim ring true. In those trapped minds, the 1/6 coup attempt really was innocent and legitimate political discourse. Contrary evidence just does not matter.

Footnotes: 

1. Dissenting opinions in the GOP leadership are RINO hunted out. Experts bearing inconvenient news, e.g., climate science experts, public health experts, etc., are dismissed as liars, with every honest mistake being irrefutable evidence of a massive socialist conspiracy and/or lies. 

2. The logic-proof compartment here constitutes mostly sacrosanct political beliefs and tribal loyalty that contrary evidence cannot reach. Belief that the 1/6 coup attempt was not a serious attack on democracy or that the ex-president did anything wrong are two of those beliefs.

The Political Animal

Aristotle insists that man is either a political animal (the natural state) or an outcast like a “bird which flies alone” (4thC BC)

 In his Politics, Aristotle believed man was a "political animal" because he is a social creature with the power of speech and moral reasoning:

Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either above humanity, or below it; he is the ‘Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one,’ whom Homera denounces—the outcast who is a lover of war; he may be compared to a bird which flies alone.

Aristotle’s statement that man is a “political animal” can be taken in a number of ways. One reading is to say that man is naturally sociable (the Pufendorf-Grotius line) and that they are naturally drawn to various political associations in order to satisfy their social needs. Another reading, which sees the word “political” in a less charitable light, might state that, since politics is based upon violence and threats of violence, the phrase emphasises the “animal” side of human nature rather than its rational and cooperative side. Those who turn their back on the violence inherent in politics, in Aristotle’s view, also turn their back on society - they declare themselves to be outlaws, without a “tribe”, and without a heart. His likening them to a “bird which flies alone” reminds me of the Rudyard Kipling story in The Just So Stories (1902) about “The Cat who walked by Himself”, because he of all the wild animals refused to be domesticated by human beings. Of course, there is also Robert Frost’s poem “The Road not Taken” (1920) with the line about choosing “the one less traveled by”. Is this such a bad thing?

https://oll.libertyfund.org/quote/aristotle-insists-that-man-is-either-a-political-animal-the-natural-state-or-an-outcast-like-a-bird-which-flies-alone-4thc-bc