The Scheme

Red Lights are Flashing Outside This Party

Feeling pretty good? We got our brat summer after all. Cool Kamala laughing, dancing, Trumpworld reeling, inceldom erupting in the kind of chaos one normally only sees after spraying Raid into a wasp nest. 

Uber-wierdos Jesse Watters and JD Vance and Donny Jr are lashing out, barely coherent, desperate, exposed. Is there anything to compare with the joy of hurting the tender feelings of the toxic autocratic male? 

Best of all, the Prince of Lies himself now looks exactly what he is, old addled creepy, and in a panic, threatening his own devoted minions, men who wrote Project 2025, the 900 page roadmap to Republic of Gilead dictatorship that has become the equivalent of a red letter F for Fascist chained around his neck. 

I like a good party as much as anyone (“pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra” - elements of brat, according to Charli xcx - that together are pretty much my essence). So, I really hate to be the Nervous Nelly directing your attention to the sound of sirens and the flash of red lights just down the street. 

But direct you I must, to some alarming signs of what’s ahead. 

Recently, journalists have been revealing often obscure activities underway in red states that portend an operation to steal the 2024 election. 

MAGAs are simply refusing to certify the popular vote. The plan apparently is to send in Trump electors in December, no matter what the voters want.

Last month, the AP collected incidents from Michigan, Georgia and Arizona, in which Trump-affiliated officials refused to certify, or sued to stop certification, of results they didn’t like. 

Another ominous report published in Rolling Stone documents at least 15 instances since November 2020 in which local Republican officials in eight states refused to certify election results, “a typically routine matter that has become anything but” in the wake of Trump’s Big Lie. In one example, investigative journalist Justin Glawe recounted how,  in a Georgia election, a MAGA official demanded a hand recount, then when the recount failed to change the results, simply walked out of the room “and got in his truck” (of course) to deny the certification process a quorum. 

He was eventually coaxed back in and lost. 

But Glawe found: 

Across the country — in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania — Republican officials have refused to certify or delayed certification of results for the election of local, state, and national candidates, over debunked claims that mail-in ballots aren’t secure, conspiracies about voting machines, claims of unsecured ballot drop boxes, and myriad other claims rooted in election denier beliefs. 

He concluded: “If local election officials nationwide decide en masse to refuse to certify election results this year, it could slow the certification of statewide tallies crucial to determining the next president — and create chaos.”

In 2022, Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform Act, which aimed to close some of the loopholes the Trump coup plotters were trying to exploit with respect to certifying the 2020 presidential election. The ECRA, however, doesn’t appear to be ironclad protection against the kind of chicanery that exploits arcane and hyper-local systems.. 

Wendy Weiser, a vice president at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, which tracks threats to democracy, told Glawe that the various incidents look like harbingers of a concerted 2024 plot: “Part of the strategy is to create chaos and to create a false basis for trying to find some way to challenge the outcome” of the November election. “The chaos that ensues when something like that happens simultaneously across the country creates its own problem.”

The fact that this plot is well-financed, and has been ramped up since Big Lie 2020 should be no surprise to anyone - especially not the national Democrats and the Biden Justice Department, which both seem to be doing very little at this point to investigate or stop it. 

Voter suppression is a long game financed by big right wing donors for years, and involving many groups including the Heritage Foundation (home of Project 2025) and its advocacy arm, Heritage Action for America. Heritage leaders have been brazen about drafting and promoting legislation that imposes strict voting regulations, and, perhaps more ominous, crafting back-channels to red state election officials. 

In 2021, a leaked document revealed the Heritage political arm had a two-year, $24 million strategy to block Democratic efforts to expand voting rights and to promote restrictive laws in Republican-controlled states. The plan, obtained by the watchdog group Documented, proposed a two-pronged approach that would work to block moves by Democrats in Congress to bolster voting rights while at the same time pressing Republican-controlled states to impose restrictions on access to the ballot box. It said: “Where Democrats hold power, we must defend against bad policy. Where conservatives and our allies are in power, we must advance changes that protect the lawful votes of Americans.” 

Their strategy since the Big Lie has also included holding secret meetings with Republican state election officials, excluding Democratic counterparts. In 2021, for example, Heritage Action’s former executive director Jessica Anderson was recorded boasting about the organization's role in crafting and promoting voter suppression laws across the country. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them,” she told a group of big donors in Arizona, in audio Mother Jones obtained, “or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe. … Iowa is the first state that we got to work in, and we did it quickly and we did it quietly. We worked quietly with the Iowa state legislature. We got the best practices to them. We helped draft the bills. We made sure activists were calling the state legislators, getting support, showing up at their public hearings, giving testimony…Little fanfare. Honestly, nobody even noticed. My team looked at each other and we’re like, ‘It can’t be that easy.’”

It can’t be that easy. Can it? 

Well, yes. Especially when foxes are already inside the henhouses and sheepdogs are either snoozing too busy gnawing on other red meat. 

Hans von Spakovsky is a longtime senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He currently heads the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative, which has received grants from the dark money donor Bradley Foundation.

Stuttgart-born Hans is the man you have never heard of who has devoted a decades-long career in Washington to suppressing the vote, and coming up with schemes to manipulate democracy in order to keep a white and rich minority clan in control. Hans gets credit for creating the myth of rampant American voter fraud. 

“Before 2000, there were some rumblings about Democratic voter fraud, but it really wasn’t part of the main discourse,” Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine, told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer. “But thanks to von Spakovsky and the flame-fanning of a few others, the myth that Democratic voter fraud is common, and that it helps Democrats win elections, has become part of the Republican orthodoxy.” 

W nominated him into the Federal Election Commission, where he served for a year before Obama was elected. He then scurried back into the right wing shadows as a legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, where he has for the last decade and a half carried on with his life’s work - suppressing the vote and discrediting American elections. 

He ramped up this activity in support of Trump as early as 2016. When he lost the popular vote by nearly three million ballots, Trump insisted that he had actually won it, tossing off a lie about rampant fraud in California. Von Spakovsky published an essay at Heritage arguing that there was no way to disprove that allegation, because “we have an election system that’s based on the honor system.”

Since 2020, Heritage Foundation and Von Spakovsky have sought ways to trample democracy through a combination of assaults. They encourage distrust in elections with a voter fraud database that has in fact not amassed significant data; they push for stricter voting regulations, and last, but very much not least, they hold secret meetings around the country with state elections officials in what appears to be a concerted effort to prepare for litigation. 

Documented obtained one Von Spakovsky email responding to a query about a 2023 event he was hosting, from a Texas official. In it, Von Spakovsky replied: “There is no livestream. This is not a public event. It is a private, confidential meeting of the secretaries. I would rather you not send out a press release about it.”

Discretion is the soul of valor.

I would rather you not send out a press release about it.

That seems to be the new Trump tactic, too. 

All year, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts has been crowing about Project 2025 — at least until yesterday when the Trump campaign ominously promised “it will not end well” for anyone trying to tie Trump to Project 2025. Director Paul Dans resigned right away, but Kevin Roberts announced the project will continue vetting potential Trump loyalists to replace federal civil servants. (The fact that JD Vance wrote a foreword to an upcoming Roberts book complicates Trump’s efforts to shed the P25 stigma.)

In February, Roberts referred to the importance of secrecy when he told Hungarian brute Seb Gorka that: “There are parts of the Plan that we will not share with the Left. Executive orders, the rules and regulations. Just like a good football team we don’t want to tip off our playbook to the Left.”

The “plan” is a real threat to whatever momentum Kamala Harris can provoke among young and new voters. But Democrats don’t seem to be talking about this. Post-Kamala euphoria is all about GOTV - get out the vote. But it won’t really matter how many people vote if the plan is for red state legislators in the states and in Congress to ignore them and steal the election.

Lawyer Marc Elias led the fight against the coup in the courts in 2020, winning some 60 cases in which Trumpers put forth fabricated or insufficient election fraud evidence. Elias is still active, overseeing Democracy Docket, which tracks election irregularities and MAGA threats, and takes them to court. 

But Elias and the Biden White House had fallen into bickering, reported by Axios  as messaging disagreements and struggles for power between Elias and the lawyer-husband of Biden’s top advisor Anita Dunn. The Biden team reportedly wanted a more conciliatory, low key fight over the electoral issue, as opposed to Elias, who was seen to be too public with his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers.

The country is - it’s not paranoia to say this - crawling with elves of evil. A battalion of TrumpWorld strategists have been studying electoral maps and know, down to the precinct, which swing state localities are vulnerable. Their lawyers are ready to exploit obscure local and state laws. MAGA election officials are in place in all the nooks and crannies, prepared to simply walk away and not certify any result not to their liking. 

This party is a lot of fun, and it looks like it will get even wilder as Trumpworld implodes on its own weirdness. But there is Big Money and a lot of fanatic energy behind the second coming of the Big Lie. 

We should all be hoping that somewhere in the Kamala Harris for President party, an attentive, caffeinated, never-sleeping legion of lawyers is eyes open, sober and prepared.