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It might be tempting to brush off the president’s executive order as pointless political theater. But it’s not quite that simple.
This is a step towards him stealing the midterm elections later this year. The Constitution clearly leaves elections to the states not the Federal government.
Many Democrats are urban and don’t have vehicles to get to the polls, especially when there is bad weather or restricted polling stations. Many other people have to work and mail in voting is the only option for them. The military also votes by mail and is majority Democratic.
Having DHS compile a list of approved citizens is a step towards disenfranchisement of large sections of the country. Republicans want yo decide who is able to vote. This is how dictators get themselves re-elected in fascist countries.
Orange Hitler is stealing the election and our democracy right before our eyes. The clown had the hypocrisy to just vote by mail himself.
The end of the Viktor Orbán era may be in sight as a 45-year-old former ally called Péter Magyar opens up a big lead in polls.
Hungarians go to the polls on April 12th. Authoritarian Putin fanboy Viktor Orbán is hoping his Fidesz Party will get a new lease on power. But the opposition is more united than usual.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the longest-serving leader in the European Union and an ideologue-in-chief for the far right, is on the ropes with polls projecting he will lose parliamentary elections on April 12 to a former insider turned rival. Orbán and his Fidesz party have been in power since 2010 and in the view of critics they’ve turned Hungary into a corrupt pro-Russian authoritarian state undermining the EU, NATO and democracy over these past 16 years. “There is an increasing enthusiasm in the belief that the authoritarian period will be over,” said András Bozóki, a Hungarian political scientist at the Central European University in Vienna. “Opinion polls give reason for such optimism.” For liberal-minded Brussels, Orbán is a cartoon villain with his defiant vetoes of support for Ukraine, dislike of the LGBTQ community and migrants, rants against “globalized liberal elites,” trips to visit Russian President Vladimir Putin and alliance with U.S. President Donald Trump.
Of course Trump endorsed Orbán. But the value of Trump's endorsements this year has declined even faster than his approval ratings. Trump endorsed the losing GOP candidate in a special election last Tuesday in his home legislative district Florida HD-87. Democrat Emily Gregory flipped the district and now represents Mar-a-Lago.
Back to Hungary...
Polls show Orbán is on track to lose to Péter Magyar, a 45-year-old former Fidesz insider who’s turned into a nimble and charismatic opposition leader. He’s spent months campaigning throughout Hungary and fine-tuning his message. He accuses Orbán of impoverishing Hungary by running a “mafia regime” that’s in the Kremlin’s pocket. Magyar is promising to steer Hungary away from Moscow’s sphere and back toward the EU and NATO. At the same time, he vows to investigate the Fidesz government and root out corruption. On many domestic issues, though, Magyar is conservative and widely seen as “Orbán-lite.” Magyar’s pitch is resonating: A survey released Wednesday by Median, a respected polling firm, found Tisza ahead by 23% among decided voters, by far the biggest lead yet. Pundits say Tisza could even win a two-thirds majority, key to undoing constitutional changes and laws passed by Fidesz.
Orbán's attempts to steal the election make Trump look like an amateur.
In recent days, a string of news reports, often citing unnamed intelligence officials, have painted a picture of Orbán’s government working hand-in-glove with Russia. On March 6, VSquare, a Hungarian investigative news outlet, reported that a team of Russian military intelligence agents was deployed to interfere in the election. A few days later, the Financial Times reported that a Kremlin-linked operation sought to flood Hungarian social media with messages to boost Orbán’s sagging popularity. Last Saturday, the Washington Post issued a report citing EU security officials who accused Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó of routinely providing Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with details from top-level EU meetings. The newspaper quoted an official saying Szijjártó even called Lavrov during EU summits to provide “live reports” on internal discussions, effectively giving Moscow a “seat at the table.”
Orbán has been more successful at gerrymandering than Trump. So even though he is behind in the polls, he could still win a narrow victory. Orbán is pulling out all the stops to keep his corrupt mafia régime in office.
Despite the polls and momentum behind Magyar’s campaign, experts say the election may wind up being much closer than projected due to Fidesz’s gerrymandering and even possible vote rigging.
Of course the key to winning any election is voter turnout. If the opposition Tisza Party devotes its resources to getting potential supporters physically to the polls, it can overcome Orbán's corrupt advantage.
EDIT: Trump is sending JD Vance to Hungary ahead of the April 12th election. Perhaps MAGA feels that JD's ebullient charisma will sway voters there to stick with Orbán.
Vance due to visit Hungary on April 7-8 ahead of key election, say sources
Former NSA contractor says in interview ‘I knew it was secret … but I also knew that I had pledged service to the American people’
"Winner printed the document – labeled 'TOP SECRET' – that explained how...
"Russian military intelligence officials hacked at least one supplier of voting software and tried to break into more than 100 local election systems before the polls closed in 2016."
Reality Winner did years in prison not for slander or lying, nope, we see that liars get to stay in congress and have news channels, in the USA lying is never a crime unless you're under oath...slander or libel is a tort (i.e. grounds for a lawsuit) but never a jailable offense.
Reality Winner was imprisoned for years because she told the truth, that Trump and Russia hacked election machines and forged the vote total for the 2016 election, it wasn't just some bad facebook memes via cambridge analytica, they literally stole the votes needed, Trump was asking for that help again in 2020 but did not receive it
Again, for the record, Dubya stole his election via a stacked supreme court. Trump also stole his election via his friends in the KGB.
They don’t even try to hide it any more. They know they can do it with impunity after 2020.
As the Senate considers President Donald Trump's stringent anti-voter fraud measure, legal experts say Kansas's offers a troubling case stud
I’ve been gratified to see that the threat to the 2024 election...
Josh Marshall at TPM:
I’ve been gratified to see that the threat to the 2024 election and really all elections that come after it is beginning to seep into the mainstream or prestige political dialog. You may have seen Robert Kagan’s essay in the Post or this one in Politico or other pieces that have appeared in the last week or more. These don’t tell us a lot that we don’t know. But especially pieces like Kagan’s place the critical conversation in one of those prestige venues that exist outside the limits of “both sides” analysis. Maybe the foundations of our democracy are under active threat and we see it all happening right in front of us. Maybe it’s not a general issue. Maybe it’s the radicalization of one political party increasingly taking aim at the foundational rules and agreements that make civic life possible in this country.
I thought it was worth laying out just what we’re talking about in specific terms. The general problem is that a radicalized GOP simply no longer accepts the idea that elections apply to them. Or rather, elections they don’t win can’t be legitimate, by definition.
But there are specific paths that get you to acting on that belief. So let’s discuss them.
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A core path has to do with the intricacies or shortcomings of our political system itself. We don’t need to worry that the New York State legislature is going to throw out the results of a presidential election or that that is going to happen in Idaho or South Carolina. This makes sense. Because the same electorate is voting for president and electing the legislatures. They’re almost certainly going to the same party. So how does this even become a problem where the legislature overrules the wishes of the same electorate that elected the legislature?
Where things get dicier is when a state government is controlled by one party and the state goes to the presidential candidate of the other party. In theory this might happen in any purple state. But the real issue is where you have gerrymandered state legislatures that are reliably controlled by the GOP and statewide electorates that sometimes vote for the Democratic candidate. In some cases it’s gerrymandering. In other cases it’s the urban/rural split. Usually it’s both. But the key is that statewide votes and legislative majorities are in conflict.
This has spawned a number of proposed laws around the country which, in essence, allow the state legislature to review the results of a presidential election and throw it out if they decide it’s not legitimate. In other words, they’ve created a legal framework to steal the election from their own state’s voters.
Things get more complicated when governors get involved. By definition governors are elected by the same statewide electorates that elect presidents. This was a key issue in 2020. In five of the key states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Arizona) Republicans controlled the legislatures. But in the three northern states Democrats had elected the governors. Arizona had a Republican governor but a Democratic secretary of state, who runs the elections. This is why Trump was so uniquely focused on Georgia. It was the one state with a close result where Republicans controlled everything. Everyone in a position of power was subject to the career-destroying bullying Trump can bring to bear on Republicans.
This angle on stealing an election is also why conservative judges have recently become so enamored of a highly strained constitutional interpretation which holds that state legislatures are the ultimate judges of state elections – even beyond the strictures of the state’s constitution. For example, perhaps the state constitution says some of the power goes to the secretary of state or the governor or simply prohibits the legislature from tossing out the results of an election. But Justice Alito says that the federal constitution overrules all that and allows the state legislature total power to do anything it wants.
This legislative power grab models is we might call the election rigging nuclear option. But there’s a more mundane and prosaic path.
[...]
The biggest other factor animating all of this is something much more amorphous but likely more significant. Our friend Rick Hasen has been talking about it a lot recently. The essence of Big Lie activism is to discredit civic democracy and lay the groundwork for its overthrow. It is based on the core conviction that elections which Republicans do not win by definition cannot be legitimate. But there’s a more immediate and concrete aim. The people who steal the 2024 election will mostly know they’re stealing the election. They will do it because they’ve created a path of logic that justifies doing so. One of the key ways Rick sees this happening is in the marinading intensity of what we might grandiloquently call ‘Big Lie discourse’. If you stew people long enough in the claim that the Democrats stole the 2020 election they’ll feel justified in stealing it for themselves in 2024 because that’s just fair play. You’re just evening the score.
It’s the essence of GOP grievance politics aimed squarely at the forehead of civic democracy.
