Donald Trump’s campaign strategist for his 2016 election win says: “I believe we will have a national emergency declared by late August,” ahead of the Congressional midterm elections due on November 3. “You will have enough evidence by mid-August to show that we have a massive problem” of election fraud, he tells me in an interview. Trump’s televised address to the nation on Thursday last week was the beginning of the process, he says.

The president declassified documents, which he claimed show “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure” revealed by the 2020 election.

These had been hidden, even from him, by a “deep state” conspiracy of US intelligence services, he posited.

Trump demanded that the Congress pass a bill called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, Act. The bill stipulates that all voters produce a passport or birth certificate to be eligible to vote. Democrats denounce it as an effort at mass disenfranchisement. The Brennan Centre for Justice at New York University estimates that it could block 21 million Americans from the ballot box.

Under the US Constitution, it’s the states, not the federal government, that run elections. The SAVE Act would force state governments to hand voter roll information to Washington.

Trump sent his Homeland Security Secretary, Markwayne Mullin, out the following morning to issue a threat to state officials: they could face prison time unless they followed the administration’s orders to remove non-citizens from rolls.

        • HazardousBanjo@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          3 months ago

          All they need to do is send them to key “swing” cities.

          You won’t see ICE taking voting boxes and machines in vehemently blue areas. You’ll see them in contested areas that make the real difference.

          The people need to organize to resist this. We can’t count on the Dems in office to adequately do it.

        • tburkhol@slrpnk.net
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          3 months ago

          Doesn’t have to do them all. Democrats are super concentrated relative to Republicans. Here in Georgia, if ICE would shut down just Fulton county, they’d shift the state-wide margin by close to 10 percentage points, and that’s just 40 polling sites.

          • Zron@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            3 months ago

            “Your honor, there were armed and masked men impersonating law enforcement and intimidating people at a polling place. I believed it was my patriotic duty to defend my community from what must have been terrorists.”

            • artyom@piefed.social
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              edit-2
              3 months ago

              Judge: “Don’t care. Guilty. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, go directly to jail”

              Too many people think our justice system cares at all about circumstances.