Dozens of interviews with people deeply familiar or involved with the election process point to a clear consensus: Not only could Trump make a second attempt at overturning an election he loses, he and his allies are already laying the groundwork.

Archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/8e3Ri

  • SGGeorwell@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    WE KNOOOOWWWW. It’s the worst-kept secret in politics. People in other countries are aware. The birds are aware. It’s part and parcel of the experience of fascism. Never underestimate what pure evil is capable of doing.

      • InverseParallax@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Be ready, especially if you’re on the east coast.

        The rednecks are assuming they’re the only ones with balls and nobody else will stand up to them, like all bullies think.

        Prove them wrong.

      • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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        1 month ago

        at a personal level, contact the governor and ask them how you can be certain as a voter that trump won’t steal the election like he tried in 2020.

        let them know you’re paying attention.

          • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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            1 month ago

            I bet a few of them are.

            despite the fuckery, many policy decisions are changed by people calling in and emailing in and telling the elected officials that people are watching them and disagree with what they are doing.

            public opinion does make a difference, so on a personal level that’s what we can do.

      • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
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        1 month ago

        Save up so you can buy a bus/train/plane ticket to DC if they try shit. If they do what they’re signaling and the legislature fails us it’ll be down to mass civil disobedience to keep the country from fascism.

        I wish I had a better answer, but they’ve eroded so many of our institutions.

      • Carrolade@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Grassroots political activism and civic engagement. A sufficiently large victory would help discredit their methods going into the future. In the shorter term, our own legions of poll watchers will provide additional witnesses to offer witness testimony when things inevitably land in court.

  • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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    1 month ago

    Overturning a Kamala Harris victory would require an enormous amount of help from Republican power brokers in statehouses and Congress, some of whom spurned him four years ago.

    That won’t be a problem for them. Republicans spurn only until it’s to their personal advantage to un-spurn.

  • futatorius@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    He doesn’t control the federal government this time, so his chances are worse this time.

      • orcrist@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        Not exactly. Nobody controls them. They can do whatever they want, and they often do things that he likes.

        So think about the situation. The Supreme Court can try to rule in Trump’s favor, and depending on the details, that would essentially be a coup d’etat. If they try that and fail, they will probably have permanently ended their careers, and I think they would be risking their freedom. And they know it.

        It makes sense, right? You can’t easily run them through the court system because they outrank everyone, which makes extra judicial action more likely.

        So they could rule in favor of Trump, again depending on whatever hypothetical we’re considering, but I think they would only risk doing that in very narrow circumstances. They didn’t get where they are by sticking their neck out for others. They got it by taking bribes and being opportunistic sleaze bags, by putting themselves first.

  • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    The plan is pretty simple.

    1. Win PA, hold the red states. Trump Wins.

    2. If a red state falls, get it’s leadership to declare a Republican win anyway or refuse to send delegates to the Electoral College. This denies Harris EC votes.

    3. Number 2 may mean neither candidate gets 270 EC votes, in this case a joint session of Congress will decide the election. Unless a miracle happens this will be Trump because they vote by State delegation.

    4. If Harris wins PA and the Rust Belt, go to SCOTUS.

    5. If all else fails, go back to January 6th but with rhetoric meant to make the mob want to occupy the Capitol permanently.

    They’re already trying to get county clerks and election officials to do the job from the inside. Trump even honors them in person at his rallies. So buckle up for a year where election fraud goes big.

    • nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca
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      1 month ago

      Number 5 may be part of the plan but it won’t work this time. It only worked last time because Trump himself refused to increase security around the Capitol.

      • irotsoma@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Also because security mostly refused to use deadly force. Those security forces are mostly used to dealing with tourist issues, not criminals with guns. That may change if more hardened, militarized police forces are used.

    • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
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      29 days ago
      1. If all else fails, go back to January 6th

      I doubt the capitol police and national guard will be unprepared for that this time.

    • TheBlue22@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 month ago

      Occupy the capitol permanently? As if the military industrial complex doesn’t have special forces squads who specifically train to exterminate this kind of threat. The nanosecond it becomes serious again, shots will be fired into the insurrectionists until they either give up or stop breathing

  • Kalistia@sh.itjust.works
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    1 month ago

    I’m sorry, dear US-American friends because you have a great democracy but also at the same time one of the most flawed electoral systems of any democratic state in the world…

    • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      I’m so demoralized. What parts stand out as a “great democracy” to you still?

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      We were kinda early to this whole deal. Most of y’all learned from us. And at least we aren’t doing whatever the hell England is with their House of Lords bs

    • Kalistia@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      By great, I meant that it is indeed the second largest democracy in the world and that, imperfect as it may be, it is functional… But that last statement will soon be put to the test I’m afraid.

    • orcrist@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      What are you even talking about? What great democracy? Of course there are various positive and negative things the country has done over the decades, but applauding the Electoral College system isn’t something most people would agree with.

  • orcrist@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    This kind of article is kinda baitclick because it ignores the elephant in the room… If Trump is running a coup d’etat, what will people in power do? Will they sit there, like they did in 2000? If he’s audacious enough, they won’t. For example, if SCOTUS tries to decide the election (like they did in 2000), I think we would see complete collapse on many levels in many ways.

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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      1 month ago

      Yeah I’d wager that if trump again organizes a “peace for honest elections” protest, national guard will indeed be used against American citizens, just now how he imagined it

  • Yareckt@lemmynsfw.com
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    1 month ago

    Don’t you guys have secret services who have decades of experiencre in overthrowing governments and absuing Institutions abroad? I would think that while the democrats are in charge they would be able to ask those guys what needs to be done to stop this power grab.

    • orcrist@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      It should go without saying that top military leaders and top spy agency leaders have considered what they might do under various circumstances.

      Obviously it would depend on the details and we have no idea, but if Trump tries to brazenly push a coup, and it looks like it might be successful, you can imagine someone at the CIA considering whether they should fix the situation.

      It’s a strange situation because we can only blindly speculate, but when people are trying to tell us that the sky is falling, it’s important to keep in mind that when you get to a coup d’etat, regular reasoning goes out the window. At some point, again depending on the details, it just doesn’t matter what the Supreme Court says.

  • randon31415@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    In the event of a electoral system collapse, the BIOS of government is “who would the military support?”

    Harris wins enough states to get to 270 and then (Some electoral votes get sent wrong/don’t get sent and congress/SCOTUS rules Trump the winner), Harris asked the military “who do you support?” and it might be Trump is put in jail by the military before he can be sworn in. Sets a bad “president”, but if you throw out the rules to win, expect the other side to do the same.

    • Skydancer@pawb.social
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      1 month ago

      Except that the Dems are consistently unwilling to play hardball. The generals would have to make the decision to intervene without being asked for that scenario to play out. I don’t know much about sentiment in the upper (or even lower) ranks of the US military, but that seems unlikely.

      Even then, there’s a significant chance Harris refuses to be put in power by military intervention, or the generals believe she would remove them and instruct her attorney general to prosecute them. So military intervention, if successful, would at best mean new (military supervised) elections.

  • Siegfried@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Very real? So americans don’t fight for anything and they will fight to put this grandpa in the whitehouse? Nah

  • shoulderoforion@fedia.io
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    1 month ago

    I dunno if we’ve gotta worry about that, because every day, it’s looking more and more like Trump is going to win outright, again. No idea how, with all the experience and years to plan for this, we’re going to let this fucking cunt finally kill our Democracy. My faith in the United States is completely shattered.

    • djsoren19@yiffit.net
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      1 month ago

      I mean the clear and obvious answer is that the Democratic Party didn’t plan for shit. Their plan was running Biden again with their only platform being “We’re Not Trump.” In the years since January 6th, they’ve done nothing to safeguard our democracy, while Republicans have fervently planned for a coup.

      • LucidNightmare@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        This seems like a plan to me, but I guess I’m just brainwashed by the blue MAGA.

        Also, when the courts are stacked with ReDUMBlican dick suckers, the only real avenue we have is to win another election to keep on bringing these issues to the people who are, somehow, still “on the fence”. The traitors are a lost cause.

        Can’t really get any meaningful repercussions from those traitors when their “king” cunt keeps calling them “beautiful” and having his cohorts in the courts throw out any meaningful punishments…

    • InverseParallax@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      The electoral college almost guarantees him a win, it was specifically designed to ensure the slave states always kept power, which is why when they finally lost in 1861, the first thing they did was flip the table.

      We really needed to let those states leave, would have been the best thing to ever happen to this country, the trash take themselves out.

        • InverseParallax@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          I think reconstruction would have gone a lot faster if we’d handed the plantation owners to their slaves and walked away.

          They’ve been inciting racial violence for political ends ever since.

    • comrade19@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Yeah half of you guys are fucked, but you should come to Australia it’s only a boring level of corruption here. We read up on us politics to see what dumb stuff they’re up to for fun