The United States is probably playing democracy this coming Tuesday at the polls. Or at least that’s what President Joe Biden thinks. In 2020, a few righteous men in charge of the elections in a handful of states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona – saved their victory ‘in extremis’. This Tuesday the followers of Donald Trump, who still deny his defeat, aspire to replace all of them and prepare a red carpet so that his beloved leader can return to the White House in 2024.
It will be the second round of what happened just two years ago, when the United States came close to a coup. Donald Trump, his lawyer Michael Cohen warned when he was honest before Congress, was not going to accept “a peaceful transition.” There are people who hear the call and others who record it. Brad Raffensperger did it on January 2, 2021. When the White House summoned him for a phone conversation with the president, the Georgia secretary of state could imagine the matter. Since he certified the state’s electoral results in favor of Joe Biden, the 68-year-old Republican official had received all kinds of pressure and threats from members of his own party, often messengers of Trump. The recording would be his life insurance.
It didn’t take long for him to need it. The next day Trump took a look at his Twitter account to accuse him of “not wanting or not being able to answer his questions” about the alleged electoral fraud that he claimed had been committed in Georgia. Instead of denying it, Raffensperger made public the conversation in which the president threatened him with “suffering a criminal investigation” if he did not “find” the 11,780 votes he needed to defeat Biden. “We can’t let that happen to you,” he can be heard saying. It was his voice, but also his style of cryptic phrases where he says without saying, like mob bosses.
That call changed the course of history. Raffensperger was not a hero of the opposition. The year before, the Democratic candidate for governor, Stacey Abrams, had accused him of eliminating 300,000 African-American voters from the census, and the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials had sued him for not having printed the instructions for voting by mail in Spanish. However, both in politics and in life there are lines that he was not willing to cross, even if his president and candidate asked him to.
The recording served as the basis for the second impeachment trial against Donald Trump and the criminal investigation that is still being carried out before a Georgia grand jury. Without it, it would not have been possible to prove that the president and his acolytes pressured election officials in four key states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, and Arizona—for nearly two months, all of them with results so tight that a slight twist could have given him the upper hand. victory he longed for. The same “hinge states” that every four years are key to deciding the presidency and that this coming Tuesday will decide who their new Secretaries of State are, a dark and bureaucratic position that supervises the electoral processes.
“Absolutely terrifying”
Maggie Toulouse de Oliver, who holds that position in New Mexico, received so many threats in 2020 that she had to move home that year and spend Christmas away to protect her family. “It was totally unprecedented and absolutely terrifying,” she said.
After losing each and every one of the 63 lawsuits he filed in six states, some at the hands of judges he himself appointed, Donald Trump had no choice but to convince his Vice President Mike Pence to challenge the results during the certification of the elections held by Congress on January 6, or launch their hordes against the Capitol. “Mike Pence failed us,” he tweeted that day as thousands of people swarmed like Vikings against lawmakers shouting “Hang Mike Pence!” If that insurrection failed, it was because the military leadership decided to send the National Guard to the rescue of the Capitol, against the passive message that came from the White House.
Since he left the mansion by helicopter on January 20, 2021, Donald Trump has not stopped plotting his return to power. A handful of men who put the truth before the party changed the course of history and stopped a slow-motion coup. For the next presidential elections in 2024, to which he “will probably have to appear so that the country can once again be safe, successful and glorious”, he has said, he will not encounter so much resistance. He has taken revenge on the ten disputed Republicans who voted against him in that ‘impeachment’ – only one has managed to beat the rival who put him in the primaries – and this Tuesday he plans to consolidate the purge. It is about deploying all the pawns on the board to check the king when the time comes.
In addition to the Lower House and a third of the Senate, 36 governors, 30 attorney generals, 27 secretaries of state, and some ten thousand minor positions are on ballots throughout the country. In other words, the positions that will oversee the presidential elections in 2024. A report by the Brookings Institution think tank has identified 345 deniers among them who have incorporated into their campaign what it calls “The Big Lie” that Trump was robbed of the elections. “If they are elected, they will have a lot to say about how elections are held in their states in the future,” he warns.
In Arizona, where in 2020 the Democratic Secretary of State, Kattie Hobs, carried out an audit under pressure from the Republican Senate “more designed to validate conspiracy theories than to count the votes”, the polls give as a winner by a single point to Mark Finchen, a Trump supporter who not only denies Biden’s victory but believes he should be “decertified” and vows to oppose future Democratic victories he deems “fraudulent.”
He will be joined on the GOP ticket by gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, another Trump denier who is even rumored to be his presidential partner, and Blake Masters, who has just outscored incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly, a famously married ex-astronaut. with Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head by a deranged in 2011.
Nobody could say that Masters is not a good minion, but the boss is looking for stalwarts. On his website, he defines himself as a “Christian, husband, father, gun owner, and businessman.” He is, he boasts, “the real Arizona MAGA candidate,” with the border fence in the background, and the Make America Great Again Trump hat. “I continue to believe that if we had had a free and fair election, President Trump would be sitting in the Oval Office today,” he said in his televised debate with Senator Kelly. Only, under pressure from the moderator, he admitted that he had not personally seen evidence that the vote count was wrong.
Trump’s call
As soon as he left the set, he received a disturbing call from Donald Trump to congratulate him on his performance. And some advice: “If you want to cross the finish line you have to be stronger at that point, there are many complaints about this, learn from Kari,” he advised, referring to the quintessential denier who aspires to governor of Arizona. “If they ask her ‘How is your family?’, she replies, ‘The elections were stolen and rigged.'” The call appears in the documentary recorded by Fox presenter Tucker Carlson, a far-right television star who offers his megaphone to Trump so that no one misses the message that he won the elections twice and will win them again if he wins. presents.
In Michigan, its candidate, Kristina Karamo, accuses the current Democratic Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson, of being financed by “authoritarianisms” that try to “corrupt the electoral systems of the key electoral states in order to control the United States.” And in Nevada, the Trump candidate for secretary of state, Jim Marchant, asks at his rallies if “is there anyone who really believes that Joe Biden was legitimately elected?” And no, of course, no one raises their hand. The ‘Big Lie’ has shaken confidence in American democracy, which has its most critical appointment this Tuesday.
Armed men with cameras outside a polling station in Arizona. /
Armed vigilantes at the polls in four states
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The masked men are armed to the teeth, wear tactical combat gear and have their license plates covered. In any other country on the American continent they would have been paramilitaries, but in the American states of Arizona, Nevada, Michigan or Pennsylvania they call themselves “urn mailbox guards”.
They are posted a short distance from where voters arrive to drop off their ballots in advance, in accordance with state law. They point their rifles at them, watch what they do closely and take photos of their license plates to verify their identity. “All video and photography of possible vote fraud will be posted online, along with photos of prosecutors, sheriffs, and other authorities who fail to investigate or file charges for election fraud,” the letter threatens. received by the Democratic Party in Arizona, and signed by an anonymous group called ‘Ben Sent Us’ (Ben sent us). There is still more: “We will find your houses, your profiles on social networks and your photos to also post them on the internet,” threatens another group called ‘Indivisible Tucson Action Alliance’.
Thanks to a conspiracy documentary called ‘2,000 Mules,’ all Trump fans are convinced that 2,000 ‘mules’ filled ballot boxes across the country with bogus votes for Joe Biden. Like the Democrats, they are concerned about the future of democracy in America. Only they believe they have to take up arms to defend it. They are the same groups that patrol the border to prevent the “invasion” of immigrants, those that stock the basement with food and weapons to defend themselves in case the federal government or the UN come for them, and those that fed their hosts the hordes that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 to defend Trump’s supposed victory.
at 84 meters
Judge Michael Liburdi, appointed by the former president, decided that they are protected by the first constitutional amendment, but the Justice Department has warned that freedom of expression does not allow voters to be intimidated. With that support, a district judge has forced them to stay 84 meters from those mailboxes. From there they photograph the license plates and notify the “constitutional sheriffs”, who have joined their cause. Democracy is at stake, they all say.
Topics
Donald Trump, White House, UN, Senate, Twitter, United States, Georgia, La Frontera, La Victoria, Nevada (USA), Nevada, US Elections 2020
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