MAGA election subversion detailed in Jack Smith filing is even worse now: voting experts

04 October 2024

In a 165-page legal brief unsealed by Judge Tanya Chutkan in early October, special counsel Jack Smith lays out a comprehensive, detailed and in-depth argument for moving forward with his federal election interference case against 2024 GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump. The document, according to former FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann, MSNBC's Lisa Rubin and other legal experts, makes a compelling argument that Trump lost the 2020 election to now-President Joe Biden and violated federal laws by trying to remain in the White House anyway.

In an article published by CNN on October 4, journalists Sara Murray, Tierney Sneed, Devan Cole and Zachary Cohen report that many election officials fear Trump and his allies will resort to the same tactics described in Smith's brief if he loses to Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in November.

"In battleground states across the country," the reporters explain, "Republicans have worked aggressively to raise concerns about noncitizen voting — which experts say is rare in federal elections — to contest thousands of voters' registrations and to challenge the once-mundane process of certifying results. They've filed an avalanche of pre-election lawsuits in swing states. And they've kept up a drumbeat of dubious claims about voting, along with the lie that the election was stolen in 2020."

Sean Morales-Doyle, director for the voting rights program at New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice, is worried that MAGA election deniers are better prepared in 2024 than they were in 2020.

Morales-Doyle told CNN, "There are a number of parallels in the strategy we are seeing develop to what we saw in 2020. The election deniers playbook — the plan to subvert the outcome of the election — is more coordinated, it's more planned out, it's much more well-funded and sophisticated than it was in 2020."

Similarly, Hannah Fried, executive director of the group All Voting is Local, told CNN, "The attacks on voter eligibility, lies about immigrants and voting, also attacks on methods of voting. These are about laying groundwork for challenging results."

The CNN reporters also note fears of violence surrounding the 2024 election, pointing out that Smith has detailed the violence that followed Trump's loss in 2020.

Former Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, a Republican who is now Pennsylvania commonwealth secretary under Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, oversaw the vote counting in Philly four years ago. And he received death threats when Trump lost Pennsylvania.

Schmidt told CNN, "There were people from other states who put guns in their car and drove to our tabulation center — because of all the misinformation that they had been exposed to."

Read CNN's full report at this link.

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