Sep. 3, 2024: Murder in Rafah

UK suspends arms to Israel; The Durov affair; Brazil bans X

---

---

The Big Story

On Saturday afternoon, Israeli troops recovered the bodies of six hostages from a tunnel in Rafah, where the Biden administration had drawn its “red line” for Israel. All six had been shot multiple times at close range shortly before their bodies were discovered. Among the dead was U.S. citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin. 

Israeli security officials have said that Hamas executed the hostages due to concerns that a hostage rescued last week would reveal their location; other reports have suggested that Hamas guards detected an IDF rescue operation and shot the hostages in order to prevent their rescue. Hamas released video of the hostages’ “last messages” on Monday, portions of which have made it onto social media. The existence of such video raises the possibility that the executions were not, in fact, a panicked response to an IDF raid but rather a more deliberate form of psychological warfare. 

If they were, they have achieved at least something of their intended propaganda effect. Over the weekend, massive protests erupted in Israel to demand that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu conclude a cease-fire deal to bring the remaining hostages home. On Monday, Israel’s largest labor union, the Histadrut, called a general strike, later halted by court order on the grounds that it was “political.” The murders have also exacerbated tensions between Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, now the primary conduit for American influence in the Israeli government. A Sunday night security cabinet meeting reportedly devolved into a shouting match between Gallant, who urged Bibi to drop his demand for Israeli security control of the Philadelphi Corridor, and the prime minister and his allies, who argued that Israel softening its demands now would reward Hamas for the murder of the hostages. 

On the American side, the reaction has been predictably disgraceful. On Monday, Joe Biden—who must still for appearance’s sake look like he, and not some committee of Obama apparatchiks (Hochstein, McGurk, Blinken, etc.), is running U.S. foreign policy—returned from two weeks’ vacation to declare, in response to the murders, that Netanyahu was not doing enough to free the remaining hostages. Hamas, for one, was pleased with the statement: A senior official told Reuters that Biden’s comment represented “American recognition that Netanyahu was responsible for undermining efforts to reach a deal.” Bibi was less amused, and in a Monday speech all but told Biden, whom he did not name, to go fuck himself:

I was asked whether Israel is not—whether I am not—doing enough to [secure] the release of hostages. I want to set the record straight. On April 27, Secretary of State Blinken said that Israel had made an extraordinarily generous offer for a hostage deal. On May 31, Israel agreed to a U.S.-backed proposal. Hamas refused. On Aug. 16, Israel agreed to what the United States defined as a final bridging proposal. Hamas refused again. On Aug. 19, Secretary Blinken said again, Israel accepted the U.S. proposal, now Hamas must do the same. On Aug. 28—that’s five days ago—the deputy CIA director said that Israel shows seriousness in the negotiations, now Hamas must show the same seriousness. 

I want to ask you something: What has changed in the last five days? One thing. These murderers executed six of our hostages. They shot them in the back of the head. That’s what’s changed. And now after this, we’re asked to show seriousness? We’re asked to make concessions? What message does this send Hamas?

Netanyahu is of course correct. What he cannot say is that this is the Obama-Biden plan for the Middle East working precisely as intended. The American role vis-a-vis Israel is that of a blood merchant: We will help return your hostages alive, but only for a price. That price is submitting to your role as a U.S. province in a Middle East jointly administered by Washington and Tehran, as part of which you must learn to “share the neighborhood,” in Obama’s words—i.e., accept, as a gesture of good faith, Hamas’ survival as the de facto rulers of Gaza under American protection. The death of your hostages is regrettable, of course, but it only goes to show the need for you to come to terms. We would hate to see any more innocent Israelis come to harm. 

Bibi, whatever his flaws, has refused to be bullied into signing this national suicide pact. That has made him a target for Washington and its local clients in the Israeli elite, for whom no tragedy is too solemn not to serve as a pretext for a renewed effort at color revolution. Bibi is at fault for the deaths of the hostages? Sure, why not. It is no more or less irrational than the claims that Bibi alone was responsible for “cultivating” or “propping up” Hamas, or that Oct. 7 happened because of his West Bank policy, or that he is prolonging an “unwinnable” war to ensure his “political survival.” The details change, but the American position, echoed by its Israeli clients, is remarkably consistent: Bibi must go. If Iran nuked Tel Aviv tomorrow, we’d be hearing the same. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Armin Rosen on the transformation of American elections

---

The Rest

→On Monday, fresh off the news that six Israeli citizens had been murdered in cold blood, the new Labour government of the United Kingdom suspended some of its arms sales to Israel. U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy—a particularly crude local mouthpiece for the U.S. Democratic Party, who once called Donald Trump a “neo-Nazi sympathizing sociopath”—said Monday that the suspension, which will affect 30 of 350 export licenses, including some components for military aircraft, was based on a legal review that found a “clear risk” that the weapons would be used to violate international law. As with France’s arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, we find it hard to believe that the United Kingdom, which in geopolitical terms is a U.S. province, would decide to rebuke Israel so publicly without tacit U.S. approval. 

→Speaking of Durov, the French government charged the Telegram CEO last week with “complicity” in a range of crimes including “managing an online platform to enable illegal transactions by an organized group” and “distribution of child sex abuse material.” Durov faces up to 10 years in prison, and cannot leave France pending his trial. 

But the Durov case is a strange one. According to a report in Politico, French authorities began moving to arrest Durov after Telegram failed to respond to a judicial request to identify a user accused of producing and distributing child pornography on the platform. Curiously, however, given the potentially momentous global implications of the criminal prosecution of a platform owner for the content hosted on his platform, the United States has remained silent on Durov’s arrest, with neither the U.S. Embassy in France nor U.S. Ambassador Denise Bauer making any public comment. Government figures in Russia and critics in the United States have alleged that Durov was in fact targeted by the United States, using France as a proxy, over his perceived ties to the Kremlin and refusal to give Western intelligence services a backdoor into Telegram, which is used by the Russian military for secure battlefield communications. And Tablet’s geopolitical analyst speculated to us that Durov’s arrest could be a play by French President Emmanuel Macron to dig up links between the Kremlin and the French left.

We won’t pretend to have the real story behind all this cloak-and-dagger. We would note, however, that several Democratic Party proxies have stepped forward in the past week to praise Durov’s arrest and to suggest similar measures for other noncompliant tech founders. On Tuesday, ProPublica, an opposition research shop for the Democratic Party, published an “exposé” on how Telegram had become the “center of gravity” for white supremacist and “accelerationist” domestic terrorists, while former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich published an op-ed in The Guardian arguing that “regulators around the world” should “threaten [X CEO Elon] Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X,” citing the Durov arrest as a hopeful first step.

→Also while we were gone, the Brazilian government of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, a client and ally of the Obama-Biden Democratic Party, banned X and threatened nearly $9,000 in daily fines for any Brazilians using a virtual private network to access the social media platform. The ban was issued last week by Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, and upheld Monday by a five-justice panel. Nominally, the reason for the ban was that X no longer had any physical presence in Brazil—Musk having closed X’s Brazilian office in August after Moraes threatened to arrest X’s lawyers over the company’s refusal to comply with censorship requests. But the ban merely caps a monthslong fight between Musk and Moraes prompted by the latter’s demands for X to censor “misinformation” and “election denial” and ban “anti-democratic” accounts, including those of prominent conservative pundits and sitting Brazilian lawmakers. In the text of his judicial order banning X, Moraes explicitly stated that his action was meant to protect the 2024 Brazilian election from being influenced by “misinformation”:

The illicit conduct of TWITTER INTERNATIONAL UNLIMITED COMPANY and X BRASIL, through the statements of its main foreign shareholder ELON MUSK, clearly intends to continue to encourage the posting of extremist, hateful and anti-democratic speeches, and to try to subtract them of control jurisdictional [sic], with real danger, including, of negatively influencing the electorate in 2024, with massive misinformation, with the aim of unbalancing the electoral result, based on hate campaigns in the digital age, to favor extremist populist groups. 

→That brings up our Quote of the Day: 

Each of us, whether we work at a tech company or consume social media, whether we are a parent, a legislator, an advertiser on one of these platforms, now’s the time to pick a side. We have a choice right now. Do we allow our democracy to wither, or do we make it better? That’s the choice we face, and it is a choice worth embracing.

That’s Barack Obama, in a 2022 speech at Stanford titled “Challenges to Democracy in the Digital Information Realm.” In the speech, Obama said that tech companies must “find the right combination of regulation and industry standards”—praising the European Digital Services Act, which bans “hate speech” and requires platforms to mitigate against “disinformation”—to “make democracy stronger,” principally by addressing the “often dangerous relationship between social media, nationalism, [and] domestic hate groups.” And if that conflicts with the U.S. Constitution? Not to worry: We can always come up with new “patches” to fix the “bugs” in our “software.”

→The right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) won a state election in Thuringia and finished a close second in Saxony in regional elections on Sunday, marking the first time that a German party to the right of the Christian Democratic Union has won any election since the end of World War II. In Thuringia, the AfD, campaigning on opposition to immigration, Germany’s support for the Ukrainian war effort, and the German establishment’s costly climate policies, won with 32.8% of the vote—first place, but not enough to form a governing majority. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, of the Social Democratic Party, has called on “all democratic parties … to form stable governments without right-wing extremists,” i.e., a grand coalition of a weakened center to shut the AfD out of power, regardless of electoral results. In doing so, he is effectively calling for more of the failed solution that, as Jeremy Stern argued in Tablet in March, has led greater and greater numbers of Germans to vote for the AfD as the only way to register their protest against the policies of the country’s establishment. 

---

TODAY IN TABLET: 

Bracing Themselves to Go Back to School, by The Tablet Editors

After enduring a year of protests, encampments, and turmoil, college students return to campus uncertain what the year to come will hold

---

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

---

Broken Ballots

There has been a stealth revolution in American voting laws and practices since 2016. Is mistrust being built into our system?

by Armin Rosen

*Due to Substack’s length constraints, we are publishing an excerpt of Armin’s feature. The full article can be found here.

Democracy, unlike other forms of government, has to win the people’s trust in order to survive. Representative government will prove brittle, hypocritical, and unattractive unless the popular will translates into some observable impact on how society is governed. The system must prove to the citizens that voting is a real and meaningful exercise of political agency, superior to more coercive or chaotic alternatives.

In 2021, I covered the national parliamentary elections in Somaliland, an unrecognized breakaway republic that seceded from Somalia in 1991 at the beginning of that country’s endless civil war. Rival nondemocracies surround Somaliland, a poor and isolated place whose politics are heavily clan-based. Overly enterprising journalists, as well as advocates of reunification with Somalia, are vulnerable to harassment and worse. There is little for a parachuting writer to do in Hargeisa, the dusty, exhaust-choked desert capital, beyond working, sitting in traffic jams, or drinking coffee.

But the country has achieved something astonishing: Even with an ambiguous diplomatic status that mostly blocks its access to the global economy, Somaliland is the only somewhat stable, free, and boring place for hundreds of miles in every direction. In the early 1990s, with much of the rest of the region at war, the Somalilanders founded a political system that clan leaders, former rebels, and the average citizen could all accept, and that no outside forces have ever successfully captured or manipulated.

By the early 2020s, the political system, and the country in general, were established enough to hold semiregular national elections without a looming threat of rapid internal collapse if the vote went poorly. Still, the organizers of that 2021 election grasped that a nationwide vote threatened to introduce a dangerous element of expectation that, if left unsatisfied, would inflame existing clan divisions and sink the internal credibility of Somaliland’s democratic project. In contrast, a well-executed election could win the country years of additional social peace and put off any future slide into chaos or subjecthood.

With these high stakes in mind, the electoral commission allowed for no early or absentee voting in 2021—polls were open for 12 hours on one single day. The government also banned private vehicles in major cities during polling hours. This was officially done out of concern over terrorism, but it also conveniently prevented out-of-control outbreaks of partisan activism, and quashed fraud schemes that involved ferrying the same voters between multiple polling sites. Such a fraud would have been difficult to pull off even without the vehicle ban: In order to participate in the election, Somalilanders had to obtain an identification card from the electoral commission months in advance of the vote. The commission took each new voter’s iris print.

If the average American ever thinks about the Horn of Africa, they likely imagine it as one of those interchangeably poor and faraway places that is many decades behind advanced Western countries like our own. Yet in California, New York, Pennsylvania, and Nevada, it is now possible to vote in person without any form of identification. In Michigan, you can vote without a photo ID, as long as you sign an affidavit saying you don’t have one. Unlike Somalilanders, most Americans no longer have to physically show up at a polling place to vote. Instead they have the choice of filling out and submitting their ballots beyond the observation of election officials, which means there is no assurance that the people in whose names ballots are cast actually signed—or saw—their ballots, voted free of duress or the promise of some benefit, or are even still alive.

In the 2020 election, more than two-thirds of voters exercised their franchise by mail or before election day—meaning that election day itself was a mass civic formality, rather than the deciding event of a long campaign. The same is likely to be true this year. At least 20 states now open the voting more than three weeks before the campaign ends. Fifty days before an election, Pennsylvania begins holding “in-person absentee” voting, where a ballot can be filled out and submitted in a location that does not have poll watchers present or any of the privacy safeguards of a normal polling station. Thirty-six states, including every 2024 swing state in the presidential election, now either have all-mail elections in which a ballot is automatically sent to every registered voter, or no-excuse absentee voting in which any voter can ask to vote by mail for any reason. In a number of states, including Arizona, a voter only has to register as an absentee once in order to receive a ballot in the mail in every subsequent election. According to the National Vote at Home Institute, the eight states with all-mail elections automatically send out at least 77 million ballots each cycle.

The “standards” for the freeness and fairness of a given election are inevitably local. There are no globally accepted rules for how an election needs to work, or specific points of procedure that automatically legitimate the result. “In India, there are 600 million people voting, and often the election officials have to travel for days to get to a particular place where people are voting. What constitutes fairness in that?,” wonders Carl Gershman, the longtime former director of the bipartisan National Endowment for Democracy, which continues to help monitor elections around the world. “Ultimately, a lot of that depends on the particular circumstances, and if the election is accepted as fair by people and if the electoral commission is really independent.”

Perhaps Somalilanders will one day grow so confident in their democracy that they will have elections as enlightened as ours, with inconsistent ID checks, no requirement to prove residency or citizenship, and a nationwide phaseout of in-person voting in favor of absentee ballots which can either be mailed in or else simply dropped off at unmonitored collection boxes. But balloting in prosperous mature democracies often looks nothing like our emerging new system. It looks more like Somaliland.

When I asked Larry Diamond, a Stanford sociologist and founding editor of the Journal of Democracy, which of the world’s democratic systems was the highest-functioning, he offered Taiwan as a candidate. Taiwan has no absentee voting—which, Diamond notes, probably disproportionately affects parties in favor of closer relations with mainland China, which has a large Taiwanese expat population. There is a strict ID check and no early voting. “The polls open at 8 a.m. People line up; they cast their votes in very simple ways, on paper ballots … they deposit them in a translucent box. At 4 p.m. the polls close; the electoral officials empty the ballot box and start counting the ballots.” Officials then record the results of each vote on a white-board in front of monitors from the various political parties. “By 8 p.m. all of the results from the precincts have been conveyed and aggregated and the central election commission announces the results at 8:30. The loser steps out before the cameras at party headquarters and concedes defeat, then the winner comes out and makes an acceptance speech, and by 9:30 everybody’s home in bed.”

That’s about the opposite of how America’s most recent presidential election went.

In 2020, two ostensibly unpredictable and incredibly rare events caused most of the country to break with past experience, wisdom, and practice to create what is effectively a new voting system. Under the pressure of the COVID pandemic, and within the broader context of the supposed civic emergency of Donald Trump’s potential reelection, states across the country rapidly shifted to wide-scale, mail-based voting—changes that often turned out to be permanent once the pandemic ended and Trump was out of office. “We’ve thrown in a lot of liberalization in our absentee system that it wasn’t really built for,” says John Fortier, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former director of the Bipartisan Policy Center.

The 2020 vote brought abrupt changes to an electoral system that was already losing credibility. As of 2023, 36% of Americans, including 9% of Democrats, thought that Joe Biden’s election was illegitimate, a slight increase from 2021. Between the 48% who once held Vladimir Putin in some way responsible for Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral victory, the 20% who believed that Barack Obama lied about being an American citizen, the 28% who were not confident that the 2004 election produced an accurate result—perhaps because of concerns over alleged voting irregularities in Ohio, which led 32 Democratic members of Congress to oppose certification of George W. Bush’s electoral college victory over John Kerry on Jan. 6, 2005—and the nearly 40% who disagreed with the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore, it’s possible a solid majority of 21st-century Americans have thought that the outcome of a recent presidential election was a lie.

Whatever happens in November, one-third to one-half of the country is likely to doubt the integrity of the vote. Whether these people are Democrats or Republicans, it will be foolhardy to dismiss them as disinformation-addled cranks. A democracy exists in the minds of its citizens, in the intangible shared belief that the political compact accurately reflects some measurable quantity of the popular will. But the new American voting system is practically calibrated to produce mistrust, and to create broad segments of public opinion that believe the whole thing is fake—regardless of who wins.

***

In 2005, a bipartisan commission led by Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker made various recommendations for improving America’s elections. The still relatively recent 2000 presidential contest had ended in a minor constitutional crisis, with the Supreme Court handing the race to George W. Bush by ordering a stop to a recount of confusingly designed ballots in Florida. The 2000 mess revealed numerous flaws in the country’s election administration, but the commission did not recommend scrapping the basic methods of voting that most Americans were used to. Nor did they suggest loosening restrictions on who could vote and how.

The report called for a national voter registration database, as well as “a uniform system of voter identification based on the ‘REAL ID card.’” The dangers of absentee voting were of particular concern to Carter and Baker. “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud,” the report concluded, noting that “citizens who vote at home, at the workplace, or in church are more susceptible to pressure, overt and subtle, or to intimidation” compared to in-person voters, and that “vote buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.”

Mainstream media broadly echoed the conclusions of the Carter-Baker report, which continued to be common wisdom a decade later—especially when it came to absentee balloting. “Votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth,” The New York Times reported in a now-impossible straight news piece in 2012. “The flaws of absentee voting raise questions about the most elementary promises of democracy,” the article continued, taking it for granted that these flaws were real and worth worrying about. Even the “experts” were concerned: “Voting by mail is now common enough and problematic enough that election experts say there have been multiple elections in which no one can say with confidence which candidate was the deserved winner.”

In a country with an accelerating, bipartisan record of distrust in its elections, it would make sense for political leaders and election authorities to revisit the core principles of sound election management. A fair sampling of these principles is helpfully preserved in reports from the Carter Center, the Atlanta-based election monitoring organization formed by the former president known for pursuing good works around the globe. Although it mostly works in foreign countries, the Carter Center has also observed a number of votes in the United States, specifically ones held by Native American communities electing new tribal chiefs. All of the voters in these elections were American citizens, people who judged the integrity of their own communal tally against general American notions of how the machinery of democracy is supposed to work.

The Carter Center’s report on a 2011 Cherokee election now serves as a record of what people of goodwill considered commonly accepted American democratic standards to be a little over a decade ago. For starters, Carter Center monitors considered any private collection of ballots, something that is now legal in several large and politically consequential states, to be inherently suspect. “Often, candidates were collecting absentee ballots for voters and returning them to the CNEC [the tribal electoral commission] or the post office to facilitate the process for voters. Such actions are not desirable when ensuring that all ballots are properly handled, received, and counted during an election.” The report notes that “absentee voting removes some of the safeguards that are inherent in controlled, in-person voting environments … the casting of absentee ballots occurs in a largely unregulated environment, outside of the oversight of the CNEC or poll workers. This increases the potential for manipulation.” The 2011 Cherokee election monitored by the Carter Center had at least one huge safeguard compared to most of the rest of the country: All absentee ballots had to be notarized, something that only Missouri and Oklahoma still require.

Like Carter and Baker, the Carter Center monitors treated it as an obviously good idea that voters had to convincingly prove who they were in order to vote. “The election law of the Cherokee Nation requires that poll workers identify voters before they cast their ballot. Such a requirement is in accordance with internationally recognized best practice.” If anything, the tribe wasn’t strict enough in its identification practices, with the report noting there were cases where a poll worker didn’t ask for an ID if they personally knew a given voter. “To ensure consistent application, it would be beneficial if the Tribal Council limited the variety of ways voters can identify themselves—perhaps limiting it to tribal membership card and/or driver’s license, for instance.” In Virginia and a number of other states, a copy of a utility bill or bank statement—documents that any person can obtain—now counts as a valid form of ID at the polls.

An all-mail system in which third parties are often in possession of someone else’s ballots, or where ballot-collecting partisan operatives might frequently be present when ballots are being filled out, is tough to square with the Carter Center’s guidelines, which haven’t actually changed much since that Cherokee election. But U.S. elections aren’t judged by former, commonsense standards for how to hold a credible vote. They’re judged according to the standards of 2020, the nation’s new baseline for sound democratic procedure.

In the last election cycle, which culminated in November of 2020, long-running partisan conflicts about “voter suppression” (Democrats seeking to loosen voting rules) and “ballot security” (Republicans seeking to maintain or tighten voting rules) were supercharged by two black swan-type events that happened to coincide with each other.

The first was the Democratic Party’s decision to treat Donald Trump not as a despicable outcome of the country’s normal democratic process but as a dictator-in-waiting who had stolen the presidency with help from the Kremlin and now wanted to end democracy. These claims succeeded in generating a permanent mentality of existential political warfare among the party faithful, who included most of the country’s elite and institutional leaders. This emergency was in turn used to justify any number of extrademocratic theories and measures—from the promulgation of hallucinatory conspiracies with the help of law enforcement and the intelligence community, to overt attempts to control and censor the news—on the grounds that such excesses were needed to save democracy from itself.

The coincidence of a “turning point” election with the public health panic caused by COVID-19 created a situation in which “exceptions” to existing laws seemed normal and natural enough that a large part of the population welcomed them, or at least treated them as the one-time cost of holding a national election during a plague year. Even Republicans tolerated these changes. The incumbent party was caught off guard by a well-organized and well-funded effort among Democratic lawyers and NGOs to overhaul voting procedures in key states. Donald Trump would later make a host of evidence-free claims about rigged voting machines and other plots by which the election was purportedly “stolen.” Democrats might have shifted the rules of the election in their favor, but they did it through legal means and without Trump and his campaign team mounting any real attempt to oppose them.

The changes to voting laws that happened across the country in 2020 were not simply fear-driven or well-meaning responses to a global pandemic. Rather, COVID and the resulting panic became an opportunity for partisan activists and lawyers to rapidly accelerate changes to American voting practices that were already high up on their agendas. In 2018 and 2019 alone Utah, New Jersey, New York, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Hawaii introduced either full vote-by-mail or no-excuse absentee voting.

Even before this, in a sweeping move toward increasing the federal government’s control over elections, the outgoing Obama administration declared in January of 2017 that election systems were “critical national infrastructure,” joining a list that included banking and sewage systems and giving the Department of Homeland Security broad new oversight responsibilities. For reasons that remain unclear, the Trump administration didn’t reverse the decision, though it could have.

***

Not that long ago, Americans were used to voting in a physical space where no partisan activism of any kind was legally permitted, maybe an elementary school lunchroom or a library. A voter would receive a single ballot from an election official which they would fill out in a private booth before personally hand delivering that ballot to a second election official. Even before the pandemic, a constellation of nonprofit groups had been pushing for the rapid phaseout of that paradigm, with the result that 75% of Americans now live in states where voting in person is optional.

The target of these efforts was the American democratic system as it was formerly organized. “Democracy is a design problem,” goes the sinister catchphrase of the Center for Civic Design—an ostensibly nonpartisan nonprofit founded in 2013 by an Obama administration alumnus and funded by multiple left-of-center donors that advocates for voting by mail and advises election officials on procedure and voter outreach. Before the 2020 election, The Voter Participation Center convened focus groups to strategize about how to grow the mail-in vote and sent out 15 million targeted ballot applications in swing states. The organization’s CEO, Tom Lopach, is the longtime former director of the Committee for a Democratic Majority and a former national finance chair for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

The National Vote at Home Institute, whose board includes Oregon’s former Democratic secretary of state, an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Maryland governor, a former top-20 donor to Hillary Clinton’s super PAC, and the director of legislative affairs for a U.S. Postal Service letter carriers union, is another barely disguised partisan actor seeking to radically “reform” the American voting system. The institute conducts tax-exempt, nationwide advocacy for a full shift away from voting in person on election day. Amber McReynolds, director of the institute since 2018, reportedly consulted with election officials in Georgia and Michigan prior to the 2020 vote. President Joe Biden nominated McReynolds to the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors in 2021, and the Senate confirmed her nomination in a largely party-line vote.

In 2020, these groups treated the COVID pandemic as a historic chance to affect what a 2021 Time magazine article called “practically a revolution in how people vote.” California, the District of Columbia, Nevada, and Vermont switched to all-mail voting in 2020; Virginia implemented no-excuse absentee voting, while Maryland started mailing absentee ballot applications to all voters. States expanded the time after election day when an absentee ballot could arrive by mail and still be counted—from three to 17 days in California, from zero to three days in Massachusetts, and from zero to seven days in Nevada. Meanwhile, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Ohio all introduced the use of unsupervised public drop boxes for absentee ballots—in Pennsylvania’s case, the change was the result of a state Supreme Court decision rather than an act of the legislature. Nevada legalized third-party absentee ballot collection, while a number of other states relaxed their existing rules.

On election night in 2020, the stealth voting revolution produced a rollout of results that was unlike anything Americans had ever seen before. When voters went to bed, Donald Trump led in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin. Five days later, it was clear Joe Biden had prevailed, thanks to a 44,000-vote margin in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin. For the first time in American history, one candidate’s lead in multiple states disappeared over the course of a nearly weeklong vote count, producing an inevitable sense of vertigo and anger among the losers.

Additional novel events proliferated within the vacuum of this unprecedented reversal. There are scant chain of custody records for over 18,000 absentee ballots deposited in 37 drop boxes in Georgia’s Fulton County, the Atlanta jurisdiction largely responsible for Biden’s 11,000-vote victory in the state. Video evidence emerged that on election night, vote tabulation at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena continued hours after county officials said it had ended, meaning that ballots were being counted out of the view of observers from either presidential campaign. Georgia went from rejecting 13,600 absentee ballots during the 2016 election, or 6.2% of the 213,000 returned, to 3,152 out of 1.3 million cast in 2020, suggesting that new, covertly introduced standards were now being applied. There are more and less innocent explanations for all of this—for instance after the 2016 vote, Georgia introduced a “ballot curing” process to allow voters to correct absentee ballots that were undated, failed the signature match, or were submitted outside of a required secrecy envelope, thus lowering the rejection rate. But it is also possible that the state’s more populous counties greatly relaxed their rules for which ballots they would accept, with partisan election officials making these critical decisions.

In parts of Pennsylvania, it was impossible for the losing side to know how judgment calls about counting or not counting ballots were made, or by whom: Election officials barred Republican observers from the convention center where absentee ballots were processed on election night in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro accused pro-Trump activists of “voter intimidation” for publishing videos of individuals delivering large numbers of completed absentee ballots to drop boxes in the city, an activity that remains illegal under state law (in Pennsylvania it is permitted to mail someone else’s ballot, but not to deposit someone else’s ballot in a drop box). The state then broke with its usual procedure by counting absentee ballots whose outer envelope lacked a handwritten date. Over the five days after election day, Trump’s 70,000-vote lead became an 80,000-vote defeat.

Some of these events were strange enough to merit the attention of sober and serious people, at least temporarily: For instance, the Pennsylvania state Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that undated absentee ballots would not be counted in that year’s election. But much of the time, anyone who points out the various oddities of the 2020 election is now accused of election denial, or a total divorce from reality.

Donald Trump destroyed any real opportunity for a dispassionate look at the 2020 vote, and it is revealing how unserious even the Trump campaign was in handling the overall issue of election doubt in 2020. The incumbent made an increasingly cartoonish Rudy Giuliani the face of his postelection fight, frequently spoke and acted in ways that undermined his own lawyers’ efforts in Pennsylvania and Georgia, spread conspiracy theories about hacked voting machines, and then convinced a hard core of his followers that it was possible to stop the certification of the Electoral College on Jan. 6, 2021, leading to a riot at the U.S. Capitol. Trump himself discredited even the most reasonable questions about the administration of the winnable election he’d blown.

Trump likely wanted to obscure the factual record out of shame at having legitimately lost under 2020 rules, however ad hoc or unfair those rules might have been. Trump’s inability to counter the voting revolution, or to optimize around it, was a failure of gamesmanship born from his own strategic choices. Many of Trump’s most egregious postelection actions make sense only as reflexive psychological reactions to this failure. Trump behaved as if he had been cheated, and he also behaved as if he knew he had actually lost.

***

In 2023, the Carter Center released an updated edition of its over 300-page manual of electoral best practices. “State practice sources discourage proxy voting but emphasize that if allowed, it must be strictly regulated to protect secrecy of the vote,” says the manual, which also warns against “family and group voting,” a phenomenon that third-party ballot collection enables and arguably encourages. Meanwhile, “resources should be provided for the conduct of an electoral process that is free from interference from any other electoral stakeholders.” In 2020, Mark Zuckerberg alone spent an estimated $350 million to fund public election administration in conjunction with the Democratic Party’s targeting of key states where it hoped to increase the anti-Trump vote. During the 2022 cycle, the Zuckerberg-supported Center for Technology and Civic Life sent another $80 million to county and municipal election offices.

What is striking about the manual is how vastly its guidelines differ from what Americans are now being told to accept as normal. For example, in states including California, Nevada, and New York, it is now legal to possess an unlimited number of absentee ballots without having to explain why you have them or how you got them. Collecting absentee ballots on other people’s behalf—a practice that critics refer to as “ballot harvesting”—is now broadly permitted, even in states where, before COVID, it was defined as a serious crime.

Relatively few of the 2020 voting reforms—ostensibly instituted because of COVID—were reversed when the pandemic emergency ended. Developments like the Pennsylvania ruling to throw out undated absentee ballots in the 2022 election, or Nevada’s reduction of the number of days late an absentee ballot could be from seven to four, proved exceptional. In many places, the rules governing absentee voting actually loosened even more after 2020. America’s voting revolution is accelerating.

Read the rest here.