WHO COUNTS THE VOTES MATTERS

“I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this: who will count the votes, and how.” - Josef Stalin

According to recent polls, 71% of Republicans believe Joseph R. Biden was not properly elected President of the United States in 2020.

Another poll reveals that 60% of voters are concerned about the 2022 election, regarding how the election is run and the votes will be tallied.

There are exactly five Republicans running for major offices in 2022 who have declared when specifically asked that they will accept the outcome of the vote, regardless of who wins or loses.

Kari Lake, running for Governor of Arizona, refused to say whether she would accept the result if she lost the vote.

Big Lie supporters are the overwhelming majority of Republicans who have volunteered to be poll workers or precinct committee members nationwide, ever since Steve Bannon first floated the idea of making certain the election went “the right way” on his War Room podcast.

We are about to witness the biggest shitshow regarding voting and elections in the nation’s history as all these people turn elections into chaos and thereby threaten the basic foundation stone of our democratic constitutional republic.

A good example of how things are going to go can be seen with the preparations for voting in Nevada., where the election supervisors in ten of the state’s 17 counties have already quit, been forced out or announced their departures. Lower-level election workers have quit in the face of consistent abuse. The state’s elections staff has lost eight of its 12 employees.

The (Republican) Secretary of State, who vigorously defends the integrity of the 2020 election, is term-limited; the GOP nominee to replace her, Jim Marchant, is the leader of a national group of election deniers running for office. Marchant is on record saying that if he and his fellow candidates are elected, “we’re going to fix the whole country, and President Trump is going to be president again.” Marchant is currently in the lead according to the most recent polling.

In Washoe County, home to Reno, the state’s second largest population center, an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist led a harassment campaign against the County Registrar of Voters, accusing her of treason and addiction; she quit in fear for her family’s safety.

In her absence, the county recently mailed a sample ballot to voters with a missing contest, a missing candidate, a contest that didn’t belong on the ballot, and a misspelling.

In Storey County, the County Clerk resigned earlier this year; the replacement was Jim Hindle, Vice Chairman of the Nevada GOP and one of the fake electors put forth by the Nevada Republican Party as part of Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Officials expect the eventual losers of perhaps a dozen contests across the state, to contest the results. They are bracing for the possibility that conspiracy-minded county commissioners might refuse to certify the results, as several threatened in 2020.

This raises the possibility that the state legislature could step in and throw out the results in any contested state election, from Assembly up to Governor, and install the candidate of their choice; it’s something that is allowed under Nevada law.

Several Nevada counties are in the process of sabotaging their vote-counting procedures.

Marchant traveled the state this past spring, making presentations with false allegations of voting machine fraud; as a result, at least four counties have taken steps to abandon voting machines and run elections by paper ballot and hand counting, a process certain to delay results and introduce more errors.

The worst possible situation is Nye County, just west of Clark County and Las Vegas, with its county seat in Pahrump, The county is home to the Nevada National Security Site, which includes the famous Area 51. The Area 51 Alien Center in Amargosa offers alien dolls and T-shirts, an alien autopsy ice freezer and alien fortuneteller. A flatbed trailer on Pahrump’s main drag, across from Phantom Fireworks, displays 10 extraterrestrials in green, silver and black, some pointing upward.

Marchant brought “experts” to Nye last March to warn that their Dominion voting machines were “insecurable” and “uncertifiable,” citing nefarious “forces” that are trying to “hide” something. Unable to provide evidence of fraud, he argued that nobody could prove the negative, that the machines “haven’t been altered or manipulated.”

At that meeting, Sandra “Sam” Merlino, the Nye County Clerk for the past 20 years, assured the County Commission that “there are a lot of checks and balances in place” and that “the machine counts have never been off in the many recounts I’ve done” by hand. Regardless, the commission voted to move toward getting rid of the machines. Merlino announced her retirement.

The commission appointed Mark Kampf, who has touted various election conspiracies and is now seeking election on the same ballot he is administering. His attempt to shift to paper balloting with both a hand count and machine count is in chaos. He recently submitted a draft 18-page election plan to the state that he is still revising.

His hand-counting procedure is labyrinthian: “For the races with a mismatch in vote totals, the Vote Tallier completes the header for the Recount tally sheet and records the vote for each race on the Batch Tally Sheet using hash marks in batches of five,” goes a typical line from his draft procedures. “When all three Vote Talliers match, all three Vote Talliers will sign all three Batch Tally Sheets (and if applicable the Recount Tally Sheets).”

Ginny Okawa, a Nye County volunteer poll worker and chair of the local chapter of the progressive group Indivisible, has said she expects “a circus” when voting starts because of insufficient training and personnel.

Did I mention that early voting starts tomorrow, Saturday, in Nevada?

The American Civil Liberties Union has sued Nye County, which has made constant election revisions to avoid running afoul of state laws. As of the latest, those with disabilities will be allowed to use voting machines; the country will run a machine tabulation in addition to its hand count; voters will be provided various methods to fix mismatched signatures; talliers will be sworn not to release early vote counts before Election Day.

Hannah Fried, leader of the voting rights group All Voting Is Local, sees what’s happening in Nevada as part of a nationwide effort to create chaos in our election system in service of undermining election results. Fried said that the push for paper balloting, because it will extend the vote-counting time and thereby potentially undermine confidence in the process, “is a tinderbox.”

It’s not just Nevada.

Georgia has had mass challenges to voter registrations.

Florida has a new police force that has engaged in voter intimidation, and was officially rebuked judicially when the judge threw out the first case the new unit brought on Friday.

Michigan is battling rogue election workers, many of whom have declared they will not accept Democratic victories.

In Arizona, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs has referred three instances of voter intimidation and harassment at mail-in drop boxes by Republicans to the State Attorney General’s office. The fact he is a leading election denier does not leave one hopeful of effective enforcement

With poor training and supervision for inexperienced partisan poll workers and errors inherent in hand counting, the resulting doubts about the validity of the outcome is a dagger pointed at the most fundamental event the American system depends on.

Destroying faith in elections is Step One in the Authoritarian’s Handbook.

17 days, ladies and gents, 17 days.

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