November 1, 2024

Fabric of Democracy - Election Integrity Network, America PAC, Political Polling, and Subway

Election Integrity Network

If Donald Trump is somehow able to win the electoral college outright, squeaking out victories in important swing states like he did in 2016, various activist groups have spent the last four years fomenting plans for dismantling all the parts of the government they don’t like. They will enact the revenge against perceived enemies they’ve spent years metastasizing into a hatred so deep they don’t care who gets hurt in the process.

The problem if Trump loses, a different and overlapping set of fringe organizations will try to throw the country into chaos. You have the Constitutional Sheriffs, unaccountable local law enforcement officers who believe they have the right to become extrajudicial shock troops for Trump. You’ve also got the so-called Election Integrity Network, a bunch of conspiracy kooks knitted together by longtime GOP officials, with the implicit support of the Republican party.

Cleta Mitchell, a conservative lawyer and Trump loyalist, has spent years convening red-faced Zoom meetings with thousands of fellow travelers, concocting plans to subvert democracy. In a nutshell, their goal is to disenfranchise voters in swing states, sow doubts about the 2024 election, and, if it seems like they’re going to lose, inundate the courts with legal challenges.

This is not a fringe group - it coordinates closely with the RNC and other official organizations, and it is funded by many of the same megadonors pouring cash into Trump’s coffers:

Pillars of the conservative movement — groups funded by the megadonors Rebecca Dunn, Richard Uihlein, as well as the Bradley Impact Foundation and others — provided organizational and financial backing. The network was initially a project of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a group associated with Mark Meadows, a chief of staff in the Trump White House. Citizens for Renewing America, a related group founded by Russell T. Vought, a close Trump ally, also contributed money early on, according to public records.

Mitchell was one of John Eastman’s accomplices in efforts to steal the 2020 election, though unlike Eastman she has avoided indictment for her actions. Instead, she has woven the creeping tendrils of the MAGAverse together to create a propaganda machine designed to sow maximum doubt in election integrity.

The EIN is partially responsible - collaborating with right wing think tanks and policy shops like ALEC - for the spate of lawsuits across swing states challenging voting rules, many of which have, fortunately, failed. Her group pushed, with the help of GOP House members, for a national law requiring proof of citizenship to vote.

This change in tactic from blaming mail voting or Democratic election officials to blaming immigrants mirrors the Trump campaign’s closing pitch to the American public - the Others poisoning the blood and soil of the country must be expelled. Oh, and millions of them are also secretly voting, so we need to purge and intimidate anyone with a foreign-sounding name.

In addition to the anti-immigrant conspiracy theories disseminated via right wing news outlets like Gateway Pundit and The Federalist, EIN has installed a number of its adherents in local and county elections jobs, with the express intent of rejecting votes or overturning results. It is not clear how effective they will be, but every conflagration after election day, every kook election ‘official’ on Fox News yelling about fake votes sows doubt in the process.

How did we get here? The obvious answer is the many of the people now participating in the EIN escaped punishment for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election. It took three years for the federal government to indict Trump for election interference, without naming any of the former president’s many co-conspirators. A few months later the state of Georgia did charge a handful of them, though a GOP-friendly court system has allowed the case to drag on past the time where any plea deals would meaningfully disrupt the movement.

In the immediate aftermath of January 6, there appeared to be appetite among many Republicans to hold Trump and his allies accountable, but when Biden took office, Merrick Garland’s Justice Department was more interested in moving on and looking the other way. His cowardly dithering got us here, and we must now hope that the same ineffectual authorities can contain the fire they’ve left untended.

That said, there are a number of other checks against the EIN and their acolytes - Democrats hold key state offices in five key swing states, and Georgia’s secretary of state has committed to fighting the forces within his own party. And, perhaps most importantly, Dems run the government, which hopefully will not sit idly by if any insurrectionists try to recreate January 6th.

That said, there is another conspiratorial right wing legal body we have to worry about - the Supreme Court. It wouldn’t be the first time this century they could fuck with vote counts - three of them helped steal the 2000 election.

There is little the average citizen can do other than vote, because at this point running for your local election board could have life-threatening consequences. But if Harris wins, we must call upon her administration to punish, once and for all, the criminal elements who tried and continue to work to overthrow democracy. Nor can Republicans be allowed to hide behind their party affiliation, as long as they continue to aid and abet groups like the EIN. There need to be consequences, or this cycle will continue to play out until a Republican wins the White House, and our fears will become reality.

America PAC

A positive sign of a well-run political campaign is a large army of volunteers willing to get out and knock doors on behalf of your candidate. The opposite of that is, well, this:

In Michigan, canvassers and paid door knockers for the former president, contracted by a firm associated with America PAC, have been subjected to poor working conditions: A number of them have been driven around in the back of a seatless U-Haul van, according to video obtained by WIRED, and threatened that their lodging at a local motel wouldn’t be paid for if they didn’t meet canvassing quotas. One door knocker alleges that they didn’t even know they were signing up for anything having to do with Musk or Trump.

It is not good when there aren’t enough interested volunteers in a state the size of Michigan and your PAC has to contract with companies like Blitz Canvassing who can only bus scabs in from out of state, drive them around in the back of a van, and threaten to make them homeless if they don’t hit unrealistic daily quotas. Then again, this sounds an awful lot like working conditions at a Tesla factory, which makes sense because Elon Musk has personally funded America PAC to the tune of over a hundred million dollars.

Elsewhere in deceptively-named PAC behavior, Elon has been giving away $1 million dollars a day to random people who sign his purposely vague ‘pledge’ to support the First and Second Amendments, which is pretty clearly illegal. He’s now being sued by Philly DA Larry Krasner’s office, who attempted to haul Musk in front of a local judge for an emergency hearing to get him to stop running an illegal lottery just days before the election. Musk’s lawyers have put it on hold pending a request to have it kicked up to federal court, where their delaying tactics and piles of money can ensure nothing meaningful happens.

On Elon’s propaganda network, in addition to the ‘verified’ @America account Elon uses to spread election conspiracies and disinformation, other users are leveraging bot farms to spread lies for money.

Outside Musk’s Nazi cesspit, a front group impersonating a left-leaning org has run hundreds of Facebook ads targeting swing state voters with made-up policies they attribute to Harris and her campaign. Despite the ‘rules’ Facebook has put in place for political advertising, the ads remain live even after journalists called attention to them.

Musk is a symptom of a broader problem, one we talk a lot about here, which is that tech platforms have either been coopted by or outright taken over by right wing oligarchs who find the prospect of an authoritarian government more attractive than even modest antitrust or regulatory enforcement actions from Democratic administrations. Despite Zuckerberg’s glow up and image rehabilitation tour, the billionaire has made it clear he is done ‘apologizing’, and happily cozied up to the Trump campaign when given the opportunity.

Elon’s PAC has been flagrantly breaking election and finance laws from day one, up to and including literal bribery. His ‘canvassing’ activities may involve human trafficking. And he is using the platform he bought and populated with Nazis and fascists to spread disinformation and make open threats against both a sitting Vice President and democracy itself.

Again, depressingly, the only thing any of us can do is vote and hope that someone, at some level(s) of government, decides that one loud, fascist billionaire should not be able to subvert our country’s elections with his money and influence. Even if Musk has wasted a couple hundred million dollars and humiliated himself on the national stage, it will not be the last we hear of him unless he is held to account.

Political Polling

With an important - perhaps the most important - national election coming up in a week, many of us who have already voted or made a plan to vote have little to do other than sit around and stress about the outcome. One piece of data we have to make ourselves feel either better or worse are polling averages.

Many cynical people - myself included - look at the media’s breathless coverage of the election as a close race and wonder whether perhaps they aren’t working to fulfill their own preferred narrative. After all, a close race means more readers for their politics pages. Surely, a disgraced former president, a convicted felon holding Nazi rallies can’t be within touching distance of the presidency. Right?

Even if we were to take every non-partisan poll at face value, there is significant data to indicate they could be wrong. Some of that comes down to weighting, the thing pollsters must do to ensure a sample of a thousand random Americans is representative of the one hundred and fifty million who will cast ballots this year.

Here is the one of the more clear-headed explanations of the difficulties of weighting a poll I’ve read this cycle, which illustrates how minor, well-meaning changes by a pollster can dramatically skew the results:

Here’s what happens if I make these 1,718 respondents match the demographics of the 2016, 2020, and 2022 electorates in terms of sex, age, race, education, and region.

The margin for Harris increases in every case. Mainly, this is because the sample is evenly split on gender – compared to the 2020 electorate, which was 53% female – and 34% of the electorate has a high school degree or less (compared to the 29% in 2020). Given differences in vote choice by age and gender, adjusting the sample to match past electorates has the effect of increasing the margin for Harris.

This highlights the problem with any form of weighting - what if, instead of women showing up at historical rates, a bunch of white men did instead? We’ve got little evidence to indicate that is the case, sure, but anything can happen. Remember 2016?

Likewise, if we apply different voter characteristic models to the data, Harris’s lead shrinks to an uncomfortably thin margin:

A pollster using Gallup’s party identification model would come up with dramatically different results than an interpretation of the 2020 vote results. So many variables!

Further confounding the problem of polling is the tiny sample sizes polling firms have to work with:

Even the well-respected New York Times/Siena College poll gets around a 1 percent response rate, Bailey points out. In many ways, people who respond to polls are the odd ones out, and this self-selection can significantly bias the results in unknowable but profound ways.

“The game’s over. Once you have a 1 percent response rate, you don’t have a random sample,” Bailey says.

In 2016, pollsters underweighted education, creating a blind spot for non-college white men to hand Trump the election by a narrow margin. In 2020, they overweighted education, and overestimated Biden’s eventual margin of victory. So now pollsters are weighting respondents’ answers to who they voted for (recall-vote weighting), which may inflate Trump’s support. Problem is, we won’t know until Wednesday, and even if pollsters correct their mistakes this cycle, it could skew the polls in a different direction next time.

In truly the most on-brand callout for this newsletter, experts point the finger at the years Americans spent inundated with spam and scam calls to explain why only one in a hundred people answers a pollster’s calls. By allowing the scammers to hammer our phones, we’ve made it nearly impossible to get a representative sample of American political sentiment.

So, with a few short days left, do yourself a favor and ignore the polls. All they can do at this point is further confuse things.

Subway

It’s been too long since we talked about a consumer food lawsuit, hasn’t it? A New York woman is suing Subway, claiming its ‘steak & cheese’ sandwich contains far less meat than shown in television advertisements:

In reality, according to several photos in the complaint, the fast-food chain's sandwiches are far more bread than filling.

The lawsuit seeks class status to defend the rights of the presumably large number of New Yorkers who’ve been shorted by the sandwich chain. And, listen, using ‘several photos’ to claim false or misleading advertising is a bit of a stretch, but one assumes the plaintiff’s lawyers are hoping to find evidence of a company-wide conspiracy during discovery.

Though, according to the lawyer in question, who’s filed ‘similar lawsuits in the same court’ against McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Taco Bell (all dismissed), it is actually an effort to hold fast food chains accountable for their ad materials:

The Subway case represents "an egregious example of the type of advertising we're trying to stop," Tollison's lawyer Anthony Russo said in an interview.

I do not appreciate being made to feel as if I need to defend fast food companies, but my instinct is that American consumer protection laws, such that they exist, would be enforceable if companies insisted there was a certain, measurable amount of meat in a sandwich (i.e. a ‘quarter pounder’), which could then be disproved with science. Though I may be wrong about this as well, since Subway spent four years defending itself against accusations its subs weren’t a foot long, and won.

These cases all boil down to holding companies accountable for their claims, and many of them are silly and frivolous, but at least they are fun to talk about while the rest of our national discourse revolves around, well, you know.

Short Cons

WaPo - “Not a single Republican lawmaker voted for the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. Since then, many of them have voted to repeal its clean energy provisions and criticized the law as a waste of taxpayer money. But red districts have emerged as the climate law’s biggest winners.”

American Prospect - “The heavy dependence of U.S. military and space systems on Musk did not begin with Trump. It goes back to the Obama and Bush presidencies, and you can characterize it as one part the hollowing out and quasi-privatization of NASA, and one part the growing concentration of the aerospace industry.”

WSJ - “New X users with interests in topics such as crafts, sports and cooking are being blanketed with political content and fed a steady diet of posts that lean toward Donald Trump and that sow doubt about the integrity of the Nov. 5 election, a Wall Street Journal analysis found.”

ARS Technica - “AT&T improperly obtained money from a government-run broadband discount program by submitting duplicate requests and by claiming subsidies for thousands of subscribers who weren't using AT&T's service. AT&T obtained funding based on false certifications it made under penalty of perjury.”

Reuters - “Live Nation Entertainment and its subsidiary Ticketmaster have failed to persuade a U.S. appeals court to block a proposed class action accusing them of charging artificially high ticket prices.”

AP - “But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a dozen software engineers, developers and academic researchers.”

American Prospect - “This time, Hurricane Helene tore through the Southeast, flooding Baxter’s North Cove facility in Marion, North Carolina, its largest in the U.S. for the production of IV solutions like saline and dextrose.”

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