The Wisconsin GOP apparently took a lesson from the miserable failure of Arizona Republicans’ sham election “audit” that cost $9 million and discredited them instead of the election.
They’re conducting their efforts to discredit Wisconsin’s election process secretly behind closed doors.
It’s every bit as nefarious. CNN says they’re “targeting local officials and casting doubt on the election’s outcome — without offering any evidence of wrongdoing” — which has been the standard-issue GOP playbook since Trump’s defeat. (Read story here.)
They’re even threatening to jail Democratic mayors for refusing to submit to questioning out of public view. (The mayors say they will answer questions in a public setting.)
Parenthetically, they’re also misusing taxpayer money. Besides spending $700,000 of state funds on what is clearly a private partisan effort to smear honest election officials, “Wisconsin taxpayers paid to send Michael Gableman, who is leading the review, to South Dakota for a forum hosted by MyPillow CEO and election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell,” a reformed crack addict and certifiable nutcase. Lindell’s “forum” was the Big Lie equivalent of a UFO convention.
But the Wisconsin GOP’s witch hunt, while laughable, isn’t funny. It’s the sort of thing that incites angry mobs to violence. “Democrats being targeted by Gableman say his bizarre actions are aimed at identifying villains for Republicans to target and casting doubt on the 2020 election outcome even if he is unable to produce any evidence of wrongdoing,” CNN reported. That’s not what honest people do.
CNN added, “Democrats say the Wisconsin review is yet another effort to justify Trump’s lies about widespread fraud costing him the 2020 election,” which is so obvious it doesn’t need to be said. And Gableman, of course, is neither impartial nor an investigator; he’s a spokesman for Trump’s Big Lie (watch video here).
At least one Wisconsin GOP state senator realizes her party’s efforts to foment grassroots distrust of elections could backfire. “If they don’t have confidence in the electoral process, they’re not going to come out and vote and, and primarily it’s going to harm Republicans,” she said.
But does that even matter to a party whose leading lights openly talk about civil war, a military coup, and throwing out the popular vote? The GOP has made a deliberate decision to discredit elections. What does this mean? A logical interpretation is they’re priming their followers to accept the idea of a violent overthrow of our government to pave the way for rightwing dictatorship. I don’t know for sure that’s what they’re up to, but that’s what I would do if I were a Hitler or Mussolini.
Photo: GOP operative Michael Gableman