Name: How Republicans Will Steal This Election
Uploaded: 2024-10-01T00:23:07.000Z
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We're still five weeks out from the election, but Trump and his cronies have already begun the fight to delegitimize the election results in the face of the growing reality that Trump very well might not win legitimately in November. Last time this happened in 2020, Trump's many soulless lawyers were quick on the job, filing over 60 lawsuits to try to challenge the election results after they came in and showed

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Trump was definitely a big giant loser. All the cases were thrown out, but his lawyers likely learned many lessons in those lawsuits. And this year, the ones who haven't been disbarred or criminally prosecuted aren't sitting on their hands until after the election results come in. No, no. These lawyers, while lacking anything human inside their flesh bags, are at the very least proactive. They've been hard at work, along with Trump himself, laying the groundwork for what may very well be an even greater battle to delegitimize our elections than they put up in 2020. Let's talk about all the ways they're laying the groundwork to dispute a defeat that hasn't happened yet. And at the end, I put together a fun little montage of all the crazy things Trump and

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Vance have said at rallies this week, because honestly, it's not even worth reporting on at this point, because it's not really news anymore for them to say asinine things at their rallies, but it sure is fun to watch. But first, the scary stuff. Let's dive in. Thank you to my partner on today's video, Warby Parker.

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Parker. Republican and conservative groups have filed nearly 90 lawsuits this year alone related to the election that has not happened yet. That's three times more lawsuits than were filed before election day in 2020. So like I said, they learned their lesson and are getting out ahead of election day to try to sow the seeds of doubt in our elections before they even happen. And polls show it's working. CNN recently found that a majority of Trump supporters in key battleground states like Michigan, Arizona and

Pennsylvania, say they're either not at all confident or just a little confident that the results of this year's election will be accurately counted a majority of Trump supporters.

And this should give you great pause as it is truly unprecedented that our elections should be this easily delegitimized given that free and fair elections have been the linchpin of what we consider a true democracy versus a failing one. And we have always been we being imperialist America, the force, at least in theory, fighting to give other nations that sweet, sweet taste of democracy through free and fair elections. Of course, usually when we claim to be doing that abroad, we're often instead toppling legitimately elected leaders in order to put in place dictators that serve our interests, but all the while saying what that could never happen here. Here, our elections are sacred. Well, not anymore, people. And by laying the groundwork now Trump and his lawyers are saying, things are already off. Look at all these examples. So when election day rolls around, they're able to say, look, things were fishy even before the election.

There's no way this was legitimate. Trump for his part has in addition to acting weirder and weirder on the campaign trail, amped up his lies about election fraud. Now that we're getting closer to election day, and he has no idea how to handle Harris's surge in the polls. CNN identified 12 different lies Trump has told in recent weeks that are setting the stage for stop the steal 2.0. These lies all paved the way for him to then turn around and say, see, what did I tell you? And point to his past lies to corroborate his current ones.

Those lies include that Harris can only win the election by cheating, setting the stage for him after he loses to say, see, she won. And it's because she cheated because as we already know, she only could have won by cheating. This is patently false and the polls show that she could legitimately win this one.

His other lies show the likely legal strategy that will also play out after the election. One is that it was unconstitutional for Democrats to replace Biden with Harris. I already had an episode explaining why that isn't true. That voting by non-citizens is a widespread problem in US elections, despite the fact that there is zero evidence to back up the claim and repeated studies, including by Republicans own Heritage

Foundation, have failed to turn up evidence of widespread fraud through non-citizen voting. Another lie he's peddling is that the US Postal Service has openly admitted their own operation is a poorly run mess. Despite the fact that this never happened, which lays the groundwork for claiming that mail-in ballots were lost or tampered with. He's also claimed that election officials use early voting to commit fraud by taking the votes that have been mailed in and tampering with them. A lot of his lies center around early voting and mail in voting because during the 2020 election, a lot of Democrats voted by mail because you know, there was a raging pandemic. And whether or not you believed it was real largely depended on your political affiliation. So for Democrats, the idea of staying home was more attractive. That also meant that if you are dumb and can't understand things very good, as you watch the election results come in, in 2020, a lot of states had last minute surges in Democratic votes because the mail-in ballots were still being counted. And instead of looking at all the facts and the most reasonable explanations, Trump, his followers and the conspiracy theorists on the internet saw that and said, my God, they've been tampered with. There's no way. What? How? And so to keep the elaborate lie alive, even now that people are more likely to vote in person because the pandemic has subsided, Trump has had to continue to peddle the lie that mail-in voting somehow opens the door to greater fraud, despite the fact that there is zero evidence that that is the case. But Trump's lies, though a key ingredient in the overall movement to overthrow the election results if he doesn't win in November, are just part of the overall Republican strategy. The other part is lawsuits, lots and lots of lawsuits, and their strategy is clear simply by looking at where these lawsuits are being filed.

They are concentrated in key swing states, the ones we talked about last week. And not only that, but in key counties in key swing states where the race is likely to be determined because thanks to our outdated Electoral College system, a system that no other country uses to determine their leader, most other democracies have come up with much better solutions in the 250 years since the guys who wrote our Constitution came up with this brilliant f***ing system. Thanks to the Electoral

College, we have to be thinking about Butler County, which, frankly, what's happening in a random county in

Pennsylvania should be none of my f***ing business. But no, we have to pay attention to that now. Because the winner take all system where a state gives all electors to whichever candidate wins the most means that many states pretty predictably vote one way or the other, or have too few electors to matter. So swing states become the focus. But even within the swing states, most counties vote pretty predictably. So it's down to, as one meme recently put it, the 20,000 dumbest people in Pennsylvania to determine the outcome of the race that affects 330 million people, plus, you know, the entire world. Like, I'm sorry, but if you think that this is what the founders wanted, that's an insult to the founders, because that means that they were f***ing stupid.

But it doesn't have to be like this. Nebraska and Maine dole out their electors proportionate to who wins. And in Maine, who wins is determined by runoff elections. That was all done at the state level. More proof that if you want more than two parties to have a shot at national elections, voting for

Jill f***ing Stein this year is not the way to do it. Organize at the state level to get non winner take all voting systems put in place and to push to apportion electors based on voting percentages. That's how you make elections more fair, not voting for Jill Stein. Oh my god, I'm gonna flip this table.

But I digress. We already talked about how in Georgia, they passed a rule saying the ballots all have to be counted by hand there. Yikes. In Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, the

Republican Party is trying to also force local officials to count ballots by hand. As I've already said, this is a stupid plan because it will take days, weeks or even months to accurately count. Humans are bad at accurately counting. It just opens the door to discrepancies due to human error, which election deniers can then point to as proof of fraud, when in reality, it's simply proof of how stupid these Republicans are. And we literally already have practices in place that involve hand counting a random selection of ballots after initial results are reported to confirm that the machine tallies are accurate. It's not as if prior to 2020, our elections were run willy nilly on big giant machines and election officials everywhere were like, gee, mister must be right because the big God computer told us so. So these measures are unnecessarily complicating the election process, which will give more opportunities for people to abuse the system and claim fraud is afoot. Not that they aren't already doing that. The Republican National Committee filed a case in Nevada this month that incorrectly claims 4000 non citizens voted in Nevada in 2020. It's a claim that's already been debunked, but that doesn't matter to the

RNC lawyers who are willing to put their law licenses on the line to file frivolous lawsuits based on nothing, which is against the ethics code we are bound to buy our licenses to follow and could be grounds for removal. But the fact that Rudy

Giuliani just lost his law license in DC should be evidence enough for you that it is actually criminally difficult to get someone disbarred. So these lawyers know that while they'll likely receive a reprimand from the judge with whom they file these frivolous lawsuits, there won't be any real penalties beyond a slap on the wrist. And because like I said, they are soulless ghouls inside a fleshy earthly prison with no heart or soul to speak of, that's fine by them. Because the thing with all of this big lie stop the steal garbage is that conservative lawyers know that it is impossible to prove a negative to prove that something is not happening. It's playing whack a mole with conspiracy theorists, they can come up with a new theory as to how the election was rigged, then Democrats and leftists and anyone left with a couple brain cells to rub together have to all then run around in circles finding evidence to prove that something didn't happen, which generally is not very convincing evidence because quite necessarily, the evidence to prove something didn't happen is literally nothing. We looked and we found nothing over and over and over again. Meanwhile, conspiracy theorists can point at tiny things that seem like discrepancy, and then the human brain does the rest of the work because we love finding patterns and recognizing familiar things where they do not exist. Like when you look at a cloud and see a bunny, I see how you got there, but those are actually water droplets floating in the sky.

But a five year old will think no, no, there's literally a bunny in the sky because I see it. And then trying to prove to a five year old that there is no bunny in the sky is impossible because how could you know maybe there's a literal bunny in the sky over Hong Kong? How could you prove that that's never ever happened that there would be a bunny in the sky? That's what we're dealing with here, except instead of innocent five year olds who are dumb because they haven't had time to get smart yet, you're dealing with like 45 year olds who should know better but somehow don't either because our educational system failed them, or they're willfully ignorant of how the world works.

So when some random person on the internet says here's a list of half a million dead illegal immigrants who voted in 2020, and it's just an Excel spreadsheet they made up, those same 45 year olds don't do the basic work of stopping to think, huh, where did this Excel sheet come from? And do I trust the source? Instead, that becomes definitive evidence of fraud that people have to then prove isn't true. And once someone believes a conspiracy, especially when a whole group of people believe, studies show it becomes nearly impossible to convince anyone otherwise. And so you have an insurrection at the Capitol, and a shocking percentage of the voting public who think Trump is still legitimately the actual

President of the United States, in which case shouldn't he not run this year? I mean, he's had his eight years. But anyway, that doesn't matter. Because ultimately, these people don't actually care about laws and rules. On principle, they care about the laws and rules that serve them and are ready to throw away the rest of it at the expense of stability, safety, and our very democracy. And the real end goal of these lawsuits because I'm not going to go through all 90 of them, though, if you want to, you can go to democracy docket.com slash cases, where they're keeping track of all of them. Here's a short sampling Michigan absentee ballot processing guidance challenge, Ohio Dropbox limitations challenge, Alabama naturalized citizen voter purge challenge, Pennsylvania absentee ballot return policy challenge, Tennessee

Congressional and State Senate redistricting challenge just keeps going there 85 pages on the website, you can go check it out. The ultimate aim of all these cases is to remove as many people from voter rolls as possible, especially Democrats.

The lawsuits seek purges of voter rolls challenge executive orders that have expanded ballot access, give election officials the right to refuse to certify the election results like the rules passed recently in Georgia, and they're attempting to create stricter laws around voting by mail, which Trump has called cheating, despite the fact that Republican organizers are still trying to get as many Republicans signed up to vote by mail as possible. The RNC sued in Nevada and Mississippi to overturn election rules there that allow mail in ballots to be counted as long as they are sent before polls close. Both cases were fully dismissed, but the RNC is appealing and the cases could find themselves before the Supreme Court, which we can't trust to do much legitimate legal work these days at all. A number of Trump aligned groups outside the RNC are also pitching in including America First Legal run by Stephen

Miller, America First Policy Institute and United Sovereign

Americans. Together they filed tons of lawsuits including in

Georgia, Arizona, Texas, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In

Wisconsin, the America First Policy Institute is defending the town of Thorn Apple population 774 people after the town was sued by the DOJ because they have banned voting machines. The DOJ says it violates accessibility requirements and election experts say it will disrupt the vote count. But the Institute says it's good for democracy that these 774 people and what truly can be described as the absolute middle of nowhere when you zoom in on a map there aren't even roads that these people have the right to throw off the entire election because they're afraid of technology and election experts, Democrats and Republicans alike are saying pretty conclusively that these lawsuits all of these are destined to fail some because they're based on complete fabrications and the lawyers filing them should be disciplined for the level of frivolity, but some because the lawsuits have been filed too late too close to the election.

So judges aren't going to make changes to for example, vote by mail requirements because those ballots are already printed and in some cases sent out. But luckily for our soulless ghoul lawyers that doesn't matter either because while the hope is that as many people as possible will get kicked off voter rolls at the last minute or otherwise be barred from voting. The true end goal is simply sowing chaos and doubt so that after the election happens, the real work of questioning the results can begin. They can say look, we tried to file a lawsuit about illegals voting. And now look at these results. Look at this fake Excel spreadsheet we made up. Look at this conspiracy theory that 20 people believe clearly something's afoot. And we tried to warn you we tried to stop it. This all just confirms what we already knew. This is another tactic we've seen a lot from Republicans and conservatives in recent years, it would be sneaky and clever if it weren't so obvious and stupid.

Conservatives from Supreme Court justices on down like to do things say things or introduce bills out of the blue or as an aside to something else, as a means of creating precedent or history to point back to a year or two later and say see, people have been saying this for forever. See, this isn't just some made up. Someone said this before, ignoring the fact that when they said it before it was stupid and made up then to the starkest example of this is the Supreme Court where conservative nutjobs Alito and Thomas have been emboldened to write stupid in their opinions since 2016, based on no history or precedent, and often just as an aside or something not directly related to the case at hand, so that they or lower court judges can then point to it as precedent at some future date.

It's made up fabricated history that the other justices have already pointed out as fundamentally flawed because judges aren't supposed to just make up precedent out of thin air so that they themselves can then follow that precedent a couple years later. It's the same thing that Trump does. He lies about something enough that it becomes common knowledge, and then he can in the future just point to his past lies as proof that he's telling the truth. It's maddening because it's so stupid, and yet people keep falling for it. The same is happening with these election lawsuits. They're making up now putting it in official court records. And even though those court records will also include judges responding to the lawsuits with the legalese equivalent of what the fuck, that part can be ignored later. And these same lawyers and

Republican operatives will be able to say, Look, look at this official court record. Look, we filed lawsuits warning about this. Look at what we said months ago in these official court filings. And case after frivolous case will reinforce the narrative that dead illegals are voting or whatever in our elections. And because they've been taken out of Looney Tunes conspiracy theory internet forums, and then sanitized with legalese, and then legitimized with an official court filing, they all of a sudden become legitimate evidence in the big fight against imaginary voter fraud. And this is a tactic the

RNC is betting on. Instead of taking their funds and using them to actually do the organizing work of getting people registered and door knocking and phone banking, they've outsourced that work to other organizations and are meanwhile throwing all their money at litigating the election that hasn't even happened yet, because they know they can't win why bother trying to get out the vote when the vote will show them they're all a bunch of losers. The winning strategy for the Republicans is to make sure as many people as possible don't believe the results no matter what. And while a lot of the focus has been on Trump's lies and the frivolous lawsuits,

Democrats aren't sitting idly by either. The Harris campaign has said it has hundreds of lawyers and thousands of volunteers, largely playing more defense than offense at this point, that are intervening in these cases. The team recently filed a lawsuit in Georgia against the state election board, which we've talked about in the past on this show. The election board has met outside regular meeting times improperly without other members present and without giving proper public notice in an attempt to pass insane new rules meant to curb voting access and give election officials outsized power. The lawsuit accuses them of improper meetings and of passing rules that are beyond their authority. The DNC also responded to a case filed by Stephen Miller's America First Legal in Arizona.

The case claimed based on quote unquote, data from other states and based on opinion polling, literally their proof is polls where people say that they feel like in their opinion, this is true, that Arizona's voter rolls are filled with non citizens. In response, the DNC argued that the case was filed too soon to the election and violates a federal law that bars officials from removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election. The timing is clearly suspect. Aside from the fact that the DNC and Democrats are throwing many legal teams behind this fight, two other things should hopefully alleviate some of your anxiety about the likely fight to overturn this election. The first is that none of the lawsuits after the 2020 election were successful. And most of the ongoing litigation currently is facing an uphill battle if it hasn't already been lost. For example, in Arizona, the

Maricopa County recorder asked the state Supreme Court to deny ballots for nearly 100,000 voters who were identified as not having provided sufficient proof of citizenship in order to vote. The Supreme Court in that state shut it down saying we are unwilling on these facts to disenfranchise voters in mass from participating in state contests. Doing so is not authorized by state law and would violate principles of due process. The due process being that you should be given some sort of notice before your rights are taken away. The second thing that should give you hope is this. The reality is that if Harris wins by a solid enough margin in November, no amount of lawsuits could undo that win. For example, in 2020,

Republicans tried to have mail-in ballots thrown out in

Pennsylvania over some election rules there. That case was appealed up to the Supreme Court and the court declined to hear the case. So the mail-in ballots weren't thrown out. But even if they had been, there were about 10,000 votes that would have been thrown out. Trump lost Pennsylvania that year by more than 80,000 votes. So while Republicans have a lot of boots on the ground ready to file every lawsuit imaginable in the wake of the election, and already gumming up the process with lawsuits now, that doesn't mean that they could undo a decisive victory with lawsuits alone. The way this could get ugly is in a scenario like the 2000 election, which came down to some 500 ballots in a random county in Florida and was left for the Supreme Court to decide. And given the fact that polls are showing a neck and neck race still, that's not entirely off the table. So you gotta vote. That's what's on the line this

November. Yes, both sides are bad. I'm also horrified that my tax dollars are going to fund a genocide. Meanwhile, we can't even support the people in our actual country who are dying in floods. Though to be fair, a lot of those people are ready to vote in a president who would literally do away with the

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and defund FEMA and will probably learn nothing from this. But they should be helped nonetheless. And instead, the name of our country is on bombs tearing children limb from limb. That is happening under the Biden presidency, and Kamala hasn't made any impressive promises that convinced me she would make any changes to that policy. So yes, both sides are bad. But two things can be true at the same time. Both sides are bad. And one side will, if you can believe it, end up making things even worse, both here and abroad. Voting in November is the beginning of a conversation meant to hold politicians who work for us accountable and push for the change we want to see. I sure would rather be having that conversation with Kamala Harris than with Donald Trump. Those are our only two choices. Voting third party is not the right option here. I made an episode about that. You should watch that next. So please vote in November and double check your voter registration because states are literally purging their voter rolls ahead of this election. So make sure you're registered ahead of the election. Go to vote.gov for more information. Special thanks to members on Patreon who support this podcast, go to patreon.com slash lead it to join. Extra special shout out to my multi platinum patrons T

Latranger Lucas, Joshua Coles, Thomas Johnson, Anthony Giles,

Tay and Brett Piontek. Your generosity makes this channel what it is. So thank you. And here's the promised montage of crazy Trump and Vance have said this week to show us out. Thanks so much for watching. Have a good day. Bye bye.

Oh, there's a fly. Oh, I wonder where the fly came from. See, two years ago, I wouldn't have had a fly up here. You're changing rapidly. But we can't take it any longer. Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way.

 She was born that way. And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country. I could have been sunbathing on the beach. You have never seen a body so beautiful, much better than much better than sleepy Joe. We have to let the police do their job. And if they have to be extraordinarily rough, you know, you had one day like one real rough, nasty day, one rough hour. And I mean, real rough. The word will get out and it will end immediately.