Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV

You know what the Trump campaign and Republicans have been out there doing as Trump’s poll numbers have continued to slide over the last two weeks? Rather than trying to broaden their coalition by reaching out to young voters and undecideds, Trump has launched yet another divisive attack down the same old racist warpath. There is little historical evidence that this strategy will do anything other than cost him votes on the margins with the independent and suburban voters Trump needs to secure a lead over Vice President Kamala Harris and possibly extend it.

Why is Trump not only seeking to rile up his base voters with racism, but trying out a new theme, that he’s got so much support that he “doesn’t need any more votes?”

Could it be that Trump really thinks that he doesn’t need to win in November in terms of getting more votes than Kamala Harris at the polls?

That’s what Rolling Stone posited in an article posted earlier this week on what looks like a conspiracy among Republican election officials in battleground states to steal the election in November on election day. The strategy is to have enough lower-level election officials refuse to certify the votes that there will be, in Rolling Stone’s words, “a giant mess on election day.” The magazine identified at least 70 election deniers in key counties in swing states and noted that already, “Republicans have refused to certify election results at least 25 times since Trump lost the 2020 election.”

The Republican officials found by Rolling Stone share the conviction that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” by Joe Biden and Democrats through “fraud.” Rolling Stone found “hundreds of posts” online by election officials in battleground states “expressing belief in lies about the 2020 election and skepticism about November.” You will notice the key word in the above sentence: belief. There wasn’t any evidence of fraud in those hundreds of posts by election officials, because there is none.

That does not stop them, however. The Republican plan is not to wait until the election is over, as they did in 2020, to begin filing lawsuits in states and counties they lost. This time, the Republicans intend to cause the lawsuits by refusing to certify vote counts in battleground states, in effect, throwing a huge wrench in the gears of the election system that would be producing a victory for Kamala Harris. That’s why Trump thinks he doesn’t need the votes: because he has a system in place that will refuse to certify the votes for Harris when election day is over.

Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias told Rolling Stone, “I think we are going to see mass refusals to certify the election.” Republicans are planning to disrupt the election in big counties in battleground states, but also “they are counting on the fact that if they don’t certify in several small counties, you cannot certify these statewide results.”

See what the plan is? It’s kind of like a preemptive strike before the certification of the election next January 6 by the Congress. Republicans are planning to stop the certification of enough votes in battleground states that it will get in the way of the formal casting of electoral ballots in December, and that will disrupt the certification of electoral ballots in January. 

As we all know, if the Congress does not certify enough electoral ballots on January 6 to declare a winner of the election—that would be Kamala Harris in the fever dreams of Republicans—the election will be “thrown into the House” as the saying goes, where a vote will be taken for who wins the election. Despite receiving a gross majority of the popular vote, and an obvious majority of electoral votes if they were properly certified, the election would be decided by the House using a voting formula whereby each state delegation of representatives votes en bloc to choose the winner of the election, rather than each representative voting individually.

Even if Democrats are able to elect enough members of the House that they hold the majority, that won’t matter. What will matter is that more House state delegations are controlled by Republicans, and in that form of voting, Republicans will have enough power to win in the House and certify Trump as the winner. The election for Vice President would be held by the Senate, with individual senators voting, rather than en bloc by state.

If that comes to pass, and Democrats control the Senate, that means the Senate could elect a Democrat as Vice President while the House elects Trump.

That appears to be the Trump plan for this election. He is telling his “beautiful Christians” and the rest of his base that he doesn’t need their votes “this time,” because he thinks he’s got the election, in his words, “fixed.”

But does he? If election-denying Republican officials refuse to certify the votes in battleground states, lawsuits will be filed in every county and statewide by Democrats to force the certification of the elections. Here’s where it gets dicey. Rolling Stone reports that certification of elections by officials has been considered “a ministerial task, one required by state and local law.” The Trump campaign, according to Rolling Stone, is planning on asserting that the election officials they control will be empowered to “hear fraud allegations—and refuse the count of their local votes.”

Unless, of course, lawsuits filed by Democrats are able to force the certification of the vote in counties that Kamala Harris wins. There’s the rub. Republicans conspiring online to effectuate this plan who are quoted in the Rolling Stone story repeatedly refer to the 2020 election, which they allege was “stolen by fraud,” as a guide. Here is one quote from an election official in a Michigan county: “Wow!! I can’t wait till after the Next big election… We’ll get to find out more Biden corruption.” An election commissioner in Pennsylvania wrote online of the 2020 election, “Anyone in this country with an ounce of common sense knows the left cheated to some extent.” 

The problem with both of those statements is that there was no “Biden corruption” found in 2020 in any state, and in the 60 lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign to overturn the 2020 election, not a single example of cheating was found by a single court.

That is not a good record for the Trump campaign or anyone else to be depending on. Recall that there were multiple judges, either elected or appointed as Republicans, who found no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election. An election commissioner in Nevada, according to Rolling Stone, “shared an article in which disgraced Trump lawyer Sidney Powell (falsely) claimed that Trump’s legal team had found evidence of voter fraud that could overturn the election results in multiple states.”

I’m glad that election commissioner in Nevada brought up the name of Sidney “The Kraken” Powell. She pleaded guilty last October to charges under Georgia’s racketeering law to having conspired to interfere with Georgia election officials carrying out the performance of their duties. So, there’s that. It is a crime, at least in Georgia, and probably in other battleground states, to attempt to prevent election officials from carrying out their duties to count and certify election results.

Multiple lawsuits Powell filed in the battleground states of Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, and Wisconsin were found without merit or “sloppily” filed and were dismissed. In Michigan a judge found that a lawsuit filed in 2020 by Powell and several other lawyers was “a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process” that had been filed with the purpose of undermining the confidence of the public in the election process.

The judge sanctioned Powell and the other lawyers and ordered them to pay attorney’s fees and court costs to the state of Michigan. Powell appealed the ruling, and when she lost the appeal, filed multiple attempts to get the 6^th Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider its ruling, but this year, dropped her appeal and agreed to pay the $152,000 she owed to the State of Michigan.

The lawsuits filed by Powell and others in 2020 relied on affidavits submitted by witnesses who alleged various claims of fraud. In the Georgia case, Powell submitted an affidavit by a QAnon believer who read an online user guide for Dominion Voting Systems which led him to believe that fraud may have been committed. He provided no evidence of fraud. Neither did people who submitted similar affidavits. Judges dismissed case after case because the so-called “evidence” consisted of affidavits that made outlandish claims that could not be proven with actual evidence.

The problem with Republican plans to use election-denying officials to hold up the certification of results in battleground states is this: elections are unique in that they produce their own evidence in the form of votes. The votes are counted, and the vote counts become another level of evidence. In state after state in 2020, Republicans filed for recounts which were carried out. None of those recounts produced reversals of the outcomes of elections. In Arizona, there were three recounts of the vote in Maricopa County (Phoenix), including the independent recount funded by some big Republican money—the infamous “bamboo fibers” recount. That one resulted in 300 more votes for Biden than he had been credited with on election day or in the other two recounts.

The thing about Donald Trump is that he has believed all his life that he can control outcomes using corruption. He tried to squirm out of bankruptcies, out of debts, out of allegations of sexual abuse, even out of the rape lawsuit filed by E. Jean Carroll by corruptly lying and getting others to lie for him. He was successful repeatedly right up to the 2020 election. When recounts failed, he called for more recounts, and he lost them, too. When Republicans filed lawsuits alleging fraud, they came up with no evidence of fraud, so the lawsuits failed. 

What Trump has decided to do this time is to get better at it. He is using better lawyers, and he has used the last four years to place Republicans in key election posts at county levels in battleground states, paid-in-full MAGA election deniers who will follow orders passed down to them from the top. As Rolling Stone showed, they’re so confident of their plan, they’re even talking about it in right-wing forums online. 

But the one thing their plans can’t do is erase evidence. The evidence in elections is votes. Once votes are cast, they become the evidence that a candidate has won or lost. What Republicans have done in their plan to use election officials to steal the November election is take step after step toward being forced to go into court to face lawsuits filed by Democrats. Their plan is in effect a funnel-shaped process of elimination. They will start with a result they can’t stomach—that Kamala Harris got more votes than Trump, and then they will refuse reason and logic and evidence until they eliminate their options right down to having to prove a negative. 

The Trump plan to “prove” the negative, that Harris did not win, is like getting the QAnon Shaman in court and requiring him to produce evidence the son of President Kennedy, John F. Kennedy Jr., who died in a plane crash 25 years ago, is alive and well because Donald Trump, or someone has brought him back from the dead. 

Republicans who denied the results of the 2020 election sought over and over to “prove” that the election had been stolen. There was even the infamous Oval Office meeting with Trump attended by the equally infamous “Kraken,” disgraced former national security adviser Gen. Mike Flynn, and (for some unknown reason) former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne. The three urged Trump to have the Department of Justice or even the Army seize voting machines so they could “prove” that Dominion Voting Systems had stolen the election. 

Dominion has since won a massive verdict against Fox News for defamation for lying that their machines had been used to falsify election results. Rudy Giuliani, an election denier who made similar allegations, still faces a suit by Dominion that he is bound to lose. So does Newsmax, which also faces a $1.6 billion defamation suit. 

The problem in all these suits against Dominion is that no evidence of fraud by Dominion exists. Simply saying that something is so does not make it so.  

Republicans may believe that something is real, but as happened with the lawsuits they filed in 2020 alleging voting fraud, including fraud by Dominion, they won’t be able to show it. Their problem is that the law does not allow belief as evidence.

Trump’s “beautiful Christians” are going to have to pray really, really hard to overcome that one.