It turns out, as Republican political leaders have learned, that the Supreme Court’s shadow docket ruling last month allowing states to use a federal database aimed at tracking down the immigration status of potential voters seeking certain benefits is not going to have a significant effect on next month’s congressional elections. Federal law provides for a three-month “quiet period” before elections in which, as the New York Times puts it, major changes to states’ voter rolls cannot be made.
So here comes the GOP’s Plan B, which still depends on election deniers who have been voted into office in states with contested Senate seats that could decide the fate of Trump’s last two years in office.
I was told that the targets, in terms of putting election deniers to work, are now limited to five states where a few thousand votes could make the difference in the political makeup of the Senate: Ohio, Texas, Alaska, Iowa, and Kansas. The election counting machinery in each state is now in the control of elected Republican voting officials who are Trump supporters. In two other states, Georgia and North Carolina, Republican candidates are in trouble and Democratic candidates are comfortably ahead in polling.
“If the election is close,” one insider explained to me, “you would only have to disqualify as few as seven thousand voters” in primarily Democratic precincts “to change the outcome.” One thought now, I was told, is to call on election deniers in the toss-up states to find ways to use existing federal data, verified or not, to challenge thousands of votes in key Democratic precincts. (Trump said yesterday that he would not rule out invoking the Insurrection Act around the midterms, if he deems it necessary. Let us call that Plan C.)
