Reuters reported that the America First Legal Foundation, a nonprofit right-wing litigation group, is advancing a legal theory that would allow judges to throw out election results over “failures or irregularities” by local officials.
TEDDY WILSON; reportbywilson@outlook.com
Wilson is a journalist, researcher, and consultant on the U.S. radical right.
Wilson told the Institute for Public Accuracy: This legal theory from America First Legal Foundation is “just one piece of a larger strategic playbook that the far right has been employing and laying the groundwork to undermine the coming election. When you look back at January 6th, and what happened in 2021, one of the things that is not discussed enough is what led up to it. There were plenty of people who participated in January 6 who were there and didn’t have connections to the far right and who weren’t activists in a big way. But that [event] was the culmination of a year’s worth of planning. We’re seeing a lot of the same things leading into the election.
“The difference is that now the far right has learned from their failures. They have begun to put people in the right places to be more successful this time: state elected officials, including secretaries of state; local officials from the Republican Party apparatus; county chairmen; precinct chairmen; people involved in the mechanics of elections, oftentimes county clerks.
“Meanwhile, organizations like the America First Legal Foundation are coming up with fringe legal theories to undermine the election results, but it is unclear how much of that is going to stick. Famously, Trump filed dozens of lawsuits to overturn the election results and they were basically all thrown out. It’s hard to know how much these theories will stick––but then we also have the idea of so-called independent legislature theory: the idea that state lawmakers can decide who wins elections. If they think there’s been fraud in the election, the lawmakers can overrule whatever the popular vote is and vote their own electorate to Congress. That only gained some traction in Pennsylvania in 2020, but there is also the possibility that the independent state legislature theory will be pursued more heavily in this upcoming election.
“Steve Bannon had this idea of ‘flooding the zone [with shit]’ to force the opposition to fight multiple battles on multiple fronts. If they throw everything out there, maybe some of it will get overturned, but it’s a way to ensure some policy victories and overwhelm Democrats and progressives… Right now, there are all sorts of threats that are percolating. They are not necessarily part of some coordinated effort, but they all work in tandem to undermine the safety and security of the upcoming election.”