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‘It’s going to be an army’: Tapes reveal GOP plan to contest elections

Discussion in 'Too Hot for Swamp Gas' started by philnotfil, Jun 2, 2022.

  1. philnotfil

    philnotfil GC Hall of Fame

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    If they can't win the hearts and minds, then they will settle for keeping the votes from counting.

    ‘It’s going to be an army’: Tapes reveal GOP plan to contest elections

    Video recordings of Republican Party operatives meeting with grassroots activists provide an inside look at a multi-pronged strategy to target and potentially overturn votes in Democratic precincts: Install trained recruits as regular poll workers and put them in direct contact with party attorneys.

    The plan, as outlined by a Republican National Committee staffer in Michigan, includes utilizing rules designed to provide political balance among poll workers to install party-trained volunteers prepared to challenge voters at Democratic-majority polling places, developing a website to connect those workers to local lawyers and establishing a network of party-friendly district attorneys who could intervene to block vote counts at certain precincts.

    “Being a poll worker, you just have so many more rights and things you can do to stop something than [as] a poll challenger,” said Matthew Seifried, the RNC’s election integrity director for Michigan, stressing the importance of obtaining official designations as poll workers in a meeting with GOP activists in Wayne County last Nov. 6. It is one of a series of recordings of GOP meetings between summer of 2021 and May of this year obtained by POLITICO.
     
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  2. sierragator

    sierragator GC Hall of Fame

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    How very American of them. I seriously hope they leave me the eff alone when I go to vote.
     
  3. tampagtr

    tampagtr VIP Member

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    This nation is beyond salvage in the short term
     
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  4. tegator80

    tegator80 GC Hall of Fame

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    You know what they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
     
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  5. PITBOSS

    PITBOSS GC Hall of Fame

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    The problem is once you break a democracy it’s almost impossible to get it back. Trump will go down as the catalyst for its demise.
     
    Last edited: Jun 3, 2022
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  6. Trickster

    Trickster VIP Member

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    Lord knows what that means.
     
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  7. WarDamnGator

    WarDamnGator GC Hall of Fame

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    I think it's a reference to the GOP wanting to replicate how Russia is run.
     
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  8. BLING

    BLING GC Hall of Fame

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    These people are un-American scoundrels. Hopefully if there are any shenanigans, the response against them will be so overwhelming they’ll have no choice but to scatter like roaches. It doesn’t seem likely they would have the numbers to carry this out, by definition they do not… and that’s what upsets them. But it’s still concerning that all the GOP plans seem intent on undermining the democratic process.
     
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  9. jjgator55

    jjgator55 GC Hall of Fame

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    Some republicans might yearn for authoritarian rule like in Russia, but I can’t ever see that happening. The problem they would have is there are too many guns and as secure as they feel, and no matter how much security they have, their lives would be in constant danger from assassination. It would then be the republicans who would ban guns out of necessity. Only in a KGB fantasy do I ever see that happening.
     
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  10. slocala

    slocala VIP Member

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    Good. If both sides have nothing to hide, this will be a boring job for these poll workers.
     
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  11. Trickster

    Trickster VIP Member

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  12. ursidman

    ursidman VIP Member

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    If there's nothing to hide, what do you figure the odds are that something will be contrived?
     
  13. CaptUSMCNole

    CaptUSMCNole Premium Member

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    NCR
    Do you think that Democrats do not do similar training with their poll watchers and election lawyers?
     
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  14. gator_lawyer

    gator_lawyer VIP Member

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    Frankly, it's really not out of touch with how racist conservatives have acted in this country for much of its history.
     
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  15. ursidman

    ursidman VIP Member

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    I do think D's train their poll watchers. I have not seen it a mission to get so many highly partisan D's into command, decision making positions controlling the vote itself. Traditionally these people have been less than highly partisan.
     
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  16. Gatoragman

    Gatoragman GC Hall of Fame

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    Of course you haven't seen it!!!!
    Doesn't mean it isn't happening!
     
  17. ursidman

    ursidman VIP Member

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    Also haven’t seen a Skunkape so…..
     
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  18. CaptUSMCNole

    CaptUSMCNole Premium Member

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    When the Romeny Campaign announced their Project Ocra, which was supposed to allow the campaign to know who voted and who did not on a district by district basis, it was criticized as some scary thing Republicans were doing. It ended up failing spectacularly. Do you know who else tried to do the same thing in another POTUS election? The Obama '08 campaign. It also failed them and they switched in '12 to a system that micro-targeted voters and tracked their get out the vote efforts.

    Typically, Republican are about one to two elections cycles behind Democrats when it comes to a lot of these things.
     
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  19. Trickster

    Trickster VIP Member

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    They have certainly always been adamantly opposed to any and all efforts to improve the lot of previously enslaved peoples, always finding one excuse or another for the inexcusable.
     
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  20. mrhansduck

    mrhansduck GC Hall of Fame

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    I wasn't aware of this - if true - from the article.

    ***

    A focus on Michigan

    A central theater for the party’s “election integrity” organizing, Michigan is among a number of battleground states where party loyalists are being groomed to serve as inspectors in the next presidential election. Seifried estimated the RNC is committing $35 million to election integrity efforts nationwide, similar to what it spent in the last cycle in battleground state efforts. He is one of 16 state directors.


    For decades, the RNC was barred from so-called “ballot security” measures after it settled an early 1980s case in which it was accused of voter suppression in violation of the Voting Rights Act, including sending armed police officers off duty to polling places in minority areas. In 2018, a federal judge allowed that consent decree to expire.


    “The 2020 election would have been the first year that the RNC could have done anything with election integrity,” said Seifried in the tapes.
     
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