I mainly spent 5 months on this story, 4 of them just about full time, simply diving into court docket information and authorities paperwork and sp
I mainly spent 5 months on this story, 4 of them just about full time, simply diving into court docket information and authorities paperwork and speaking to folks — and speaking and speaking and speaking.
What most stunned me was the continuity of the gamers and the breadth of the trouble to show that voter fraud is so widespread that it’s a risk to the material of the democracy when it merely just isn’t. In every single place I regarded, there was somebody who was concerned in another, earlier effort concerned in pushing this voter-fraud thought to achieve partisan benefit, from the pre-Trump period.
However then there may be the extent to which Trump jumped on the bandwagon and directed the complete sources of the federal authorities to get behind the trouble — touching the Departments of Justice and Homeland Safety, the Postal Service and even, it will appear, the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention. My eyes popped out of my head once I discovered that the C.D.C. had quietly dropped its clear endorsement of mail-in ballots in the summertime.
As you describe it, the never-completed recount in Florida in 2000 — when supporters of George W. Bush led the so-called Brooks Brothers riot, serving to to stop a variety of ballots in Miami-Dade County from ever being counted — was a sort of turning level within the fashionable period of voter-fraud politics. What did that incident present to Republican operatives, by way of what is likely to be attainable with regards to utilizing fraud claims as a political instrument?
I’d at all times been fascinated with the Brooks Brothers riot, how a bunch of Republican operatives in pleated khakis stormed the Miami-Dade counting room and truly managed to cease canvassers from tallying votes that had not been registered — votes that will have, on steadiness, gone to Al Gore over Bush.
As I began reporting this story, I went again to the previous clips and video and seen what they had been chanting: “Cease the fraud.” They had been successfully arguing that the counting board, which had moved to a extra personal room to do its work, was hiding as a result of it was committing fraud. There was no proof in anyway to assist the cost. It was made up. The board stopped counting and didn’t decide it again up earlier than the Supreme Court docket weighed in and Bush was named the winner (his margin was 537 votes).
A variety of elements had been concerned in Bush’s win. However the Brooks Brothers riot had an vital lesson in it — you are able to do lots within the title of fraud in a chaotic, contested-election scenario, which we could very nicely be headed for this 12 months; it will possibly very nicely assist decide the end result of an election.