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Oh, yes, I am still riding my Kamala high, as it increasingly looks as if we have a remarkable political talent as our presidential nominee, and as it increasingly looks as if this talent will win. 

Of course, there is a long way to go. Donald Trump and his unscrupulous allies will bring their howitzers of racism and their carpet bombs of lies (this past weekend, he pulled out a whopper, saying that Harris had used AI to augment her crowd size); the media will feel compelled to tighten the race again by bringing Kamala down a few pegs or more (e.g., the recent Washington Post features articles on Tim Walz’s handling of the George Floyd protests and Harris’s old position on anti-fracking). Netanyahu will still kill as many Palestinians as it takes to keep him out of jail; and the billionaire class will do everything in its power to install a malleable dictator — no contradiction there — in the White House.

But you somehow get the feeling that Kamala has destiny on her side. We’ve been waiting for this. We just didn’t realize how many of our fellow Americans have been waiting for this too: a politics of joy, reason, sanity, unity, compassion, energy, and confidence — real confidence. Trump has been stomping around and snorting as all bullies do, acting as if his victory were a foregone conclusion, and the election was a mere formality. Kamala kicked sand in his eyes. Now he’s staggering, wondering what hit him.

But destiny or not, there is nevertheless this elephant in the vote-counting room: the determination of the Republicans to steal the election, the four-year plan to steal the election. 

Just this past week, we got a whole lot more evidence when the Georgia Elections Board, which is now majority Republican, passed a passel of rules that, among many other things, bestowed new powers on county boards of election, allowing them to delay vote counting, and imposed new restrictions on mail-in voting and ballot deposit boxes — all clearly designed either to impede Democratic voting or to cancel Democratic votes already cast. 

In Georgia and Arizona, local election boards have recently refused to certify election results. There will be much more to come in many more states to come, especially as Trump realizes that he faces another loss. It’s coming.

Keep Watch, Expect the Expected

I have warned, along with others, that this effort to steal not only endangers democracy; it kills it once and for all. But I also offered that we do not have to wait supinely as the Republicans commit election fraud. There are three basic things we can do to stop them — not only can do, but must do. When we fight, we win. True. But also true: When votes are counted fairly and accurately, we win.

So what do we do? First and foremost, we remain vigilant. It is extremely important that the steal-to-come is revealed, discussed, illuminated. This is partly, actually primarily, a job of the media, and there are a few stellar media folk who are doing so: most prominently Rolling Stone, but also Nicole Wallace and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC (Maddow devoted a stinging monologue to the threat last week). 

The steal cannot hit us by surprise. It should be fully expected. One might even say that Trump’s ongoing claims about massive voter fraud in 2020 set up his claims-to-come in 2024. He will almost certainly try to lure the media into a trap: If they dismissed his claims of voter fraud four years ago, why should they take seriously Democratic claims of voter fraud in 2024? The media might fall for this; most of them don’t seem too sharp, or too eager to take on Trump (see the end of this post). But we shouldn’t fall for it.

Vigilance means talking about the steal with your family, your friends, your neighbors, members of your local Democratic party — anyone you know who might be interested, and not just fellow Democrats. And encouraging them to talk about it too. 

Share information with them. Show them, using the links in this column, how the Republicans are embedding themselves in the election apparatus with the express purpose of handing the election to Trump. Sound alarms. Flash lights. Next to working to elect Harris and Walz, this should be the most important item on your election agenda.

Vigilance also means exposing election deniers who are posing as election officials. Find out who will be certifying the votes in your precinct and in your county. Ask the local Democratic office, since they should know. 

If there are election deniers in the process, call them out. Write letters to your local newspaper, identifying them. If there are meetings of election officials, find out when they are being held and attend them. Make sure that your family and friends and other Democrats attend them. As election attorney Marc Elias has said, these people live in your neighborhood. They can be shamed into doing the right thing, or pressured if they must. So shame them, pressure them.

Don’t let them steal this election.

Protect the Process (See Venezuela)

Second, take action. And here is where Venezuela can be instructive. America is not supposed to be a banana republic, though it often acts like one. America is not supposed to be in a state of terminal decline — as Venezuela is, ever since Hugo Chavez took power and his protégé Nicolás Maduro succeeded him — though Trump insists America is. America is not supposed to be riddled with election fraud, and it hasn’t been, until that possibility looms courtesy of the Republican Party, as it does now. In short, America is not supposed to be Venezuela.

But Venezuela is especially relevant after its recent election. Heading into that election, it was assumed that the opposition party — whose candidate was an aged diplomat, Edmundo González, because the real opposition leader, fiery Maria Corina Machado, had been forbidden from running — would win if the election were fair. González lost.

Or to put it more bluntly: the election was stolen from him. As The New York Times reported, there were numerous instances of voter intimidation: 15 men in black jackets blocking access to a voting center in Caracas; a woman hit by a bullet fired from one of a group of men on motorcycles while she waited to vote at a polling station; 50 armed police officers and national guardsmen surrounding a polling station in Cumaná; a vote monitor bodily removed in Carupano; voting stations suddenly changed on the morning of the election, leaving 17,000 voters stranded; other polling stations kept open so Maduro supporters could vote; refusal by polling officials to release paper tallies, as required by law. (Maduro said the Supreme Tribunal, which is as much in his pocket as our Supreme Court is in Trump’s, would verify the vote.) And that was just on Election Day.

Expect similar episodes here, especially in minority precincts, especially in red states.

Foreign monitors immediately disputed the Venezuelan results, which had Maduro winning with a little over half the vote. This was ridiculous, and everyone knew it. Secretary of State Antony Blinken recognized González as the victor, as did the European Union, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, and Costa Rica. An independent vote-monitoring mission organized by the Carter Center called the vote a “serious breach of electoral principles,” which Maduro refuted by saying, in Trumpian fashion, that the Carter Center didn’t take Trump’s protests of voter fraud seriously. For all that, Maduro, unfortunately, remains in power.

In America, thankfully, the federal government is not in Republicans’ hands, as the Venezuelan government is in Maduro’s hands, though many of our courts, including the Supreme Court, are in the hands of the Republican election deniers. By the same token, there is no external force to challenge Trump’s steal attempt, as America and the EU and other nations challenged Maduro’s. Ordinarily, the opposition would grouse, Maduro would declare victory anyway, opposition leaders would be jailed, and life would go on. “Venezuela has a truth,” Maduro said in two-hour speech, sounding very Trumpian, “and I came here to defend the truth.”

But not this time. This time the opposition in Venezuela was prepared for fraud, and that is my point here.  According to The Washington Post, the opposition formed a “network of thousands of volunteers, trained and accredited by the government, to watch the polls and collect the actas” — which are physical tally sheets of votes. As the Post reported, “They set up 133 locations, with high-definition scanners and Starlink internet access, where volunteers gathered, digitized and uploaded the documents.” 

To evade the government, the opposition took the actas, placed them in cardboard boxes, and hid them throughout the country. When Maduro’s goons prevented opposition poll watchers from observing the vote count, which is to be expected here with MAGAites intimidating both voters and poll watchers, hundreds of opposition supporters, according to the Post, surrounded the voting centers and refused to leave until they were given access to the actas. The Post verified the opposition’s actas, which are coded, against actas of the voting machines. Meanwhile, the Associated Press and AltaVista, an internal group linked to the opposition, had poll watchers photograph tally sheets from 971 voting centers. All came to the same conclusion: that González had beaten Maduro overwhelmingly, roughly 67 percent to 31 percent. Exit polling by Edison Research also found Maduro losing, 65 percent to 31 percent. Maduro blamed a cyberattack. Those poll watchers, one opposition leader told the Post, “saved this election.”

That is how you stop a steal.

Don’t Cede the Field: Guide to Mobilization

So we need tens of thousands of poll watchers to keep an eye on the MAGAites. We need an effective system to verify votes, rather than leave verification to election deniers. We need a system to alert and rally Democrats when Republicans refuse to let those poll watchers observe either the count or the certification of those votes. We need hundreds of Democrats to be prepared to surround voting centers when Republicans attempt to steal.

If Venezuelans can do it, so can we. We should be asking our local Democratic organizations if they have such a system in place. If not, we should demand that they do, and offer to assist to create one. And we should be volunteering to poll watch — each and every one of us.

Attorneys have a special obligation to stop the steal. Elias and others are at the ready to file lawsuits in counties and states where local election officials refuse to certify votes, which is against the law nearly everywhere. (I repeat: certification is a ministerial process; election officials cannot change votes, except now in Georgia, where they have just been given that right.) 

To underscore how dire the danger of a steal is, the American Bar Association, hardly a radical organization, has formed a Task Force to Protect Democracy, under the leadership of former federal Judge J. Michael Luttig, an anti-Trump conservative, and Jeh Johnson, secretary of homeland security under Obama. The task force is conducting what it calls a “listening tour” to discuss the threats to our electoral system. If you are able, attend a session. 

Another of its activities is the formation of “rapid response teams,” both nationally and locally, to “provide real-time public responses to emerging or potential threats to American democracy, to free and fair elections, and to the rule of law as they arise on both national and local levels during the lead up to the counting of electoral college votes on January 6, 2025.” If you are an attorney, volunteer.

Even ordinary citizens may determine if their states have laws to protect election workers, which, after the 2020 debacle, are absolutely essential for a fair election. Election workers have been and will be threatened and intimidated and harassed by MAGA. 

It is no coincidence that the turnover in election officials has reached an all-time high these past four years, with 36 percent leaving after 2020, and 39 percent of officials being newly installed in 2024. Not incidentally, the greatest turnover, 46 percent, is in the most populous communities —  which is to say, Democratic communities — according to a UCLA study of election workers. All four of the election offices in Georgia’s most populous counties have changed hands since 2020. 

This is exactly what Trump wants: to sow electoral chaos (the Times has a story that underlines this very point). 

Similarly, one should determine whether his or her state has severe penalties for election interference. If not, one should be asking his or her local representatives why not. Trump assumes his minions will escape unscathed, as he has. We must prove him wrong.

Pile On, Hard

But there may finally be another way to stop the impending steal — perhaps the most effective way. Trump has convinced the vast majority of Republicans — 66 percent in a January PRRI poll — that the 2020 election was stolen from him. As Elias put it: 

[Election denial is] no longer the provenance of crazy people like Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell [Trump’s election attorneys in 2020]. This is no longer the province of people who thought that there were bamboo filaments in paper or mythical sea creatures involved in the election with Venezuelan dictators. It has become now the standard position of the Republican Party.

This is, no doubt, largely confirmation bias. They believe the election was stolen because they cannot believe their malicious god could possibly have lost to decent Joe Biden. But it is also because they have come to believe in Trump’s much-vaunted omnipotence: He couldn’t possibly have lost because he is Donald Trump, for god’s sake! And that is certainly one of the primary mechanisms that will be operative this November, should Trump lose, as I suspect he will. Gods don’t lose. In Trump’s own parlance, losers lose.

But what we are seeing now is Trump shrinking before our very eyes. He doesn’t seem so big with Kamala and Tim poking fun at his expense and mocking him. With their crowds so far exceeding his that he needs to concoct bizarre theories about why they seem so large. With the polls rapidly moving away from him. With the enthusiasm that Harris has generated far greater and more jubilant than the angry, snarling vituperation of his campaign. With the entire country erupting with ebullience in a way that it hasn’t since Barack Obama’s first campaign. 

The bully is suddenly a deranged coward. The emperor is naked as well as fat and bald. He and his supporters are suddenly hysterical. They are at wit’s end, assuming they had any wits to begin with.

It is one thing to engineer a steal when you seem to be invincible, at least in the eyes of your own supporters. It is another thing to steal an election when you seem weak and vulnerable and a loser. Harris has found Trump’s Achilles’ heel, if Achilles had been an imbecile rather than just a sulking sore loser. Biden built Trump up — so did I — as the greatest threat to democracy in the history of the nation, which he most surely is. But Harris dressed him down as another grumpy, infantile, male fantasist who dreams he is Adolf Hitler. 

Biden’s vision never caught on, I think in large part because, at his age and with his infirmities, he didn’t come across like democracy’s defender, but also because, as I wrote several weeks back, democracy doesn’t matter so much to Americans anymore. Harris’s vision has caught on because it always lurked just beneath Trump’s orange surface: He was always just a façade. Our fears, however real, were the air pumping up this otherwise empty balloon.

So here’s the last thing we can do: Keep gibing him. Don’t let him get under your skin. Think of him as a clown, not a curse. Feel assured that he will lose. Make it seem that he can’t steal the election because he is so clearly a fraud. And if we can do that — as well as parry his attempts to corrupt the system — his loss might just become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And there would be nothing this angry little man could do about it.

Reprinted, with permission, from Neal Gabler’s Substack, Farewell, America.

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