Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

An historic disaster is now unfolding in America. That might make you chuckle—after all, there've been plenty of those. But this time's different. From here, it appears that America's poised to enter the final stages of collapse. No going back, irreversible, game over level.

What do I mean by that? Just as I predicted, and we've been discussing, consider the following—which should make you shudder.
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‘This Is Grim,’ One Democratic Pollster Says"

Democracy Corps, a Democratic advisory group founded by Stan Greenberg and James Carville, surveyed 2,500 voters in presidential and senate battleground states as well as competitive House Districts.

In an email, Greenberg summarized the results: “This is grim.”

The study, Greenberg said, found that, collectively, voters in the Democratic base of “Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, LGBTQ+ community, Gen Z, millennials, unmarried and college women give Trump higher approval ratings than Biden.”

—NYT

Now, this isn't about petty politics. It's about, like I said, an history-altering mistake. Do you see what I see in those numbers? Why I say they should make you shudder? Trump's ahead even with the very groups he should never, ever, in any universe, not even remotely, be ahead with. The LGBTQ? Young people? Women in college? Are seemingly ready to...vote for fascism...for the very movement which wants to permanently shatter their basic rights and freedoms? What on planet earth is going on here?

Let's think about young people. Just 40% of them view capitalism positively. And yet they're poised to...vote for Trump. What on earth? Trump's the epitome of capitalism, after all, not even in a substantive sense, but in the sense of late capitalism's endless grift, corrosion, greed, and violence. How can it possibly be the case that the same social group who thinks capitalism's a fairly terrible thing is about to vote for Donald Trump?

But it only gets worse. Think of what it means that Trump's ahead with even the LGBTQ. How is that...again...even possible? We should all know by now what Trumpists think of anyone who's different in any way from the patriarchal norm—especially those who differ from it in terms of sexuality, gender, or self-expression of any kind. We should all know that Trump and his ilk aren't just not exactly friends to the LGBTQ, but some of the worst, bad-faith, burn-the-witch level regressive enemies they can have. And yet...even the LGBTQ are seemingly poised to vote for Donald Trump.

On one level, all this is "about the economy," and we've been discussing that lately. The majority of American households are "cash flow negative"—a statistic so dire that it practically screams The Fall of Rome in a banshee wail across the millennia. But even that's superficial, given the gravity of this situation.

Because all these social groups should know better. How is it possible as a minority, a young person, a college age woman, a member of the LGBTQ community, to be poised to vote for Trump? When I said "historic mistake"—I'm not kidding.

By now, we should all know what happens if Trump gets re-elected, and part of the startling message here is that it doesn't even have to be by way of a soft coup, hard coup, tricks, or even legislative tricks. No, it just appears to be happening outright, in plain sight, a kind of bizarre, delusional, willful march over the abyss. We should all know because Trump's not exactly hiding it–he's screaming it. There's a 1000 page plan to literally reshape every single government department and agency along theocratic—authoritarian-fascist lines. Read that sentence again. Meanwhile, Trump's literally echoing the language and narratives of history's worst demagogues now, speaking of "vermin," promising violent revenge and retribution.

We should all know. Especially those who are at the greatest risk from fascist-authoritarianism, like young people, minorities, and the LGBTQ. So what's going on here, exactly? A game of self-deceit? Willful ignorance? Sheer stubborn, ornery old-fashioned American stupidity? Some kind of collective delusion? How can this be...happening...to this surreal degree? It's one thing for people to "vote against their self interest," but young people, minorities, and the LGBTQ voting for fascism is another thing entirely—in a whole other universe of fatally WTF. Welcome to History's Pantheon of the Greatest Mistakes Ever Made.

Now, it's true that Biden's disappointed all these social groups, from foreign policy, to debt, through to clumsy messaging about the economy, right down to a lack of inspiration especially to young people, to an almost complete lack of hope that things will ever get better. Yet this isn't a way of pleading "but vote for the lesser evil!!" It's not an apologia. It's a set of observations about how societies get to the point of final collapse—young people, women in college, the LGBTQ, minorities...ready to vote for...the very fascism...that's going to turn right around and legislatively, socially, and existentially attack them? Like I said, hitting this stage of collapse, the madness of implosion, should make us all shudder.

The best way to understand this, I think, is through the nearest analog. These days, the prevailing mood in Britain—when it's not sheer despair—is what's come to be called "Bregret." Regret over Brexit, which utterly shattered Britain's future. If the choice were made again today, having understood how ruinous the consequences were to be, Brexit would be solidly rejected by Brits, who are now suffering, and going to suffer for a very long time to come.

So. Nations make mistakes. Nations make Big, Historic, Terrible Mistakes. And then nations regret those mistakes. That's a little inaccurate. It's truer to say: those groups who were at the most risk from the grave effects of radical, irreversible, totalizing choices, and never should have made them, come to regret them intensely and severely. That, without a doubt, is where more or less everyone who votes Trump is going to be, apart from the die-hard MAGA fringe—but especially young people, minorities, the LGBTQ, women, those at the most risk from the fallout of what's to come.

If Trump ascends back into the Presidency—and it's beginning to look inevitable, just as I predicted, and we've been discussing—it's going to be a colossal mistake. A history altering one. Let's talk a little bit about what'll happen, the bitter seeds of regret which are being sown today.

The economy? It's going to go south, incredibly fast. That's because global funds, investors, other nations, are hardly likely to trust...Donald Trump...with the debts America owes them. Cue a sovereign debt crisis—but the Republicans and Trump don't care about that, so America'd probably fail to repay its debts, which would trigger a global financial crisis that'd make 2010 look like a walk in the park. Sounds abstract, but within months that'd trickle down to the average person, turning today's cost of living crisis into something far, far worse, as unemployment spiked, incomes fell further, and interest rates not to mention prices soared.

But even that's barely the beginning. Prices are surging now because of climate change. For example, India stopped exporting grains last summer. That's a long run trend which most are already struggling with. Trump, though, wouldn't just give up on fighting climate change—he'd embrace the old industrial economy with a vengeance, and that'd accelerate all these climate risks now exploding through the system. See how insurers just pulled out of Florida and California? Now imagine a world where the fight against climate change is a memory. Good luck with any sort of vaguely not-implosive economy in that world.

Then there are the social consequences. The best way to understand those is with the most obvious example. Caesar and Rome. What happened in Rome, exactly? Impoverished, humiliated, the average Roman turned to populists, abandoned and neglected by the Senate, which came from an "aristocracy," or in modern terms, elites, or just more simply, the mega-rich. Figures like Caesar seized upon the people's feelings of rage and trauma, struggling for bread while patricians built huge palaces—and used it to gain a new source of power: popularity. Famously, of course, Caesar crossed the Rubicon, to "get things done," the Senate ossified, paralyzed, bickering, useless, to the people's roaring approval–and on that day, Rome began to fall.

That's all ancient history. Or is it? There's no going back from another Trump era. That would be the end of American democracy as we know it. It's not true to say we don't know what would happen next—sure we do: this is a figure who already led a soft coup, and then a hard coup, attempted to overturn an election, and impose martial law. There's very little doubt that democracy would be over—and that isn't just in the sense of "elections," it's in the deeper sense of "freedoms and rights." Who'd have them? How many would exist? Already, women face severely curtailed rights of expression, association, movement, speech, post-Roe—now imagine how far that could go for all those at-risk social groups, and how fast.

But even that fails to do justice to it all. You see, for all its faults and flaws, America's still the world's only real remaining power. For it to no longer be a democracy—even in the limited sense of the word it's always been—would be a shockwave echoing through history. Perhaps not at Roman levels, because of course Rome lasted longer—but in our time, our age, our context, with just the same magnitude. To see democracy fall in this historic way would almost surely be a sign that something like a dark age is now rising.

So how should we interpret all this? Is Trump's return inevitable, which is the way it feels, to many, now? Nothing in history's inevitable. But forces matter. And the forces America faces—which it created for itself—are like hurricanes. Decades of poor choices, based on crackpot economics, have left the average American literally impoverished—remember, the majority are "cashflow negative." Meanwhile, America failed to create a modern social contract, with expansive public goods, or "safety nets." American life is brutal, Darwinian, dog-eat-dog, no room for mercy, and so norms of rivalry and adversariality and endless competition gave way to open hostility, and then to hate. Elites, meanwhile, repeat the line: "but the economy's booming!," and it is—but only for them, because they've looted it.

All these forces almost invoke a Trump-like figure. In much the same way that Rome's decades of underinvestment in public goods, and overinvestment in war and conquest, looting by elites, rampant inequality, led to falling living standards, which sparked populist rage. Caesar, in other words, was the man chosen by history to fulfill the destiny of demagogue. But it was Rome who authored that destiny herself, through her mistakes.

Trump's the man chosen by history to fulfill the destiny of demagogue, too, and in the same way, it's mistake upon mistake, folly upon folly, which authored that destiny. If it hadn't been Caesar—who knows, perhaps it would've been Mark Antony, or someone unknown to us today yet, because the need for a demagogue was there, thanks to these grand forces of destiny and history. In the same, Trump's ascent to power is about a role waiting to be filled.

So is that "inevitability"? Even in Rome, perhaps the Senate could have gotten its act together. Or perhaps people could have come to their senses. Who knows? Ifs and buts don't write history. There's only one certainty when it comes to history, which is that we should learn from it. Ancient, modern, and even recent. That's why it's so troubling when we see that even young people, the LGBTQ, and minorities are poised to vote for Trump: they've already forgotten what happened last time. Inevitability—such as it is—is made of self-deceit. The fetters of willful ignorance. Chains of folly.

It's hard to say just why something so surreal could even happen, in the end, despite all the theories and ideas I've thrown at you, from history to economics to politics. Why would...young people...the LGBTQ...minorities...vote for fascism? Why would you set fire to your own house? Why would you choose your own subjugation? Take your own rights and freedoms away? Give the worst sorts power over you, which they're sure to abuse, because they openly plan it already?

All we can say, really, is that when we see such things happen, a nation is at the glittering precipice of the final stages of collapse.

This, my friends, is what ruin really is.

What prompts people in those demographics to answer the poll questions that way?

What poll reports Biden getting the support you mention?

I understand that polls are often inaccurate, but why are people saying they support Trump if they really support Biden?

Personally, I've given misleading responses to telephone "push polls" when they are being conducted by Republican-friendly organizations.

I've been polled a couple of times since 2005. But I don't answer the landline any more, or my cell if it doesn't recognise the number. I think polls are moving into horoscope territory.

But then they all cite a poll that they think supports their opinion about something.

Show me polls that show “Trump leading Biden among Blacks, Latinos and LGBTQ “ .

I really don’t understand why you insist on making such a stink out of them.

The ONLY poll I care about is the one that people will answer in the voting booths and on mail in ballots in November.

You call attention to the polls.

The reason I “go ballistic” (I almost feel like you’re calling me an angry black man) is because a few people, like you, keep trying to say that we should be worried about the bullshit polls.

Stop pointing to the polls (or as you so artfully remind me, just pointing to the people who are pointing to the polls) and I’ll stop “going ballistic”, and calling the polls and your posts about the polls bullshit.

And who has said ANYTHING RESEMBLING “I feel like we’re going to coast to an easy victory “?

Some Democratic strategists take negative polls as a wake up call, and maybe it's unwise to just assume that our candidate is going to coast to victory on a the back of a weak coalition which unpredictably changes in response to news events.

I think polls are moving into horoscope territory.

More Ouija board, maybe?

It was a strawman.

Where do you get this horseshit way of arguing?

OF ALL THE STRANGE, conspiratorial, and potentially dangerous theories Donald Trump and his allies came up with in the days after the 2020 election, this was the strangest, the most conspiratorial, the most potentially dangerous. Millions of electronic ballots for Trump had been “deleted,” and hundreds of thousands more had been “switched” to Joe Biden, Trump and his cronies in media, political, and legal circles insisted — thanks to software designed at the behest of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez to rig foreign elections. Never mind that Chavez had been dead since 2013. Never mind that even Fox News’ researchers said the claims about Dominion Voting Systems were “100 percent false.”

Fox ultimately paid Dominion $787 million after its hosts ignored the network’s research department and spread lies about the firm. But the consequences his allies have faced for pushing lies about the 2020 election have not diminished the former president’s appetite for conspiracy theories. If anything, they have only stoked it.

Since then, Trump has fixated on new bogeymen. Lately, he has found one in a mundane nonprofit designed to spot the very voter fraud Team Trump professes to hate. Until recently, 33 states and the District of Columbia — a mixture of solidly Republican, Democratic, and battleground states — used data from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) to spot voting irregularities and to identify and reach voters who haven’t yet registered, a group that numbered 4.4 million people in 2022. ERIC has been employed in this way since 2012, without incident or controversy. But in Trump’s imagination, ERIC is the engine for election rigging.

Last March, on his social media platform, Trump fumed that Republican governors should “immediately pull out of ERIC,” and falsely labeled it a “terrible Voter Registration System that ‘pumps the rolls’ for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up.” Over the past year, Trump has remained fixated on ERIC, sources who speak to him say. He’s gone so far as to wonder aloud what can be done in the future to make it “illegal” nationwide — while key allies have begun a largely under-the-radar effort to market a replacement system. One person close to him has dubbed ERIC Trump’s “new Dominion.”

Just like Dominion — or, should we say, just like the Dominion in Trumpland’s fever projections — ERIC is part of a larger architecture of voter fraud, one that has to be ripped out and replaced with a MAGA alternative before America goes to the polls in November. “Stop the Steal” die-hards are vying for spots in the 2024 campaign legal team. MAGA attorneys are challenging laws that make it easier to vote in Democratic strongholds. Trump’s allies continue to question the integrity of the vote, even if polls show him slightly ahead. Because there can be no question about the final tally, in the Trump inner circle’s view. There is only an election that ensures the right result: Trump’s restoration to the White House.

You’ve probably never even heard of ERIC — until now, you’d have no reason to. So here’s a brief primer: ERIC was created in 2012 by the nonpartisan Pew Charitable Trusts. It started with seven original member states with a goal of helping modernize their outdated, often paper-record-based voter-registration data — and offers trustworthy information to clean up voter rolls of deceased or ineligible voters. States are then able to securely share specific information about voters, like the last four digits of a Social Security number or a driver’s license number, to eliminate any confusion about who a voter is and whether they’re eligible to register.

John Merrill, Alabama’s Republican secretary of state, was a fan. Having access to a pool of specific information about who’s eligible to vote — and who’s not — seemed like a gift. But when he traveled a couple of years ago to Washington, D.C., where renowned conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell was hosting a private, four-hour meeting for secretaries of state, he found himself in a lonely minority of ERIC supporters.

At that meeting, Mitchell made herself clear: She wanted these secretaries of state to pull out of ERIC. It was being used unfairly “to promote more Democrat registrations,” Mitchell complained, according to Merrill’s recollection. What’s more, ERIC was actually created and funded by George Soros, the billionaire liberal donor and ultimate bête noire among GOP politicians and right-wing media. “Basically, what they wanted to talk about was why we needed to get rid of ERIC,” Merrill tells Rolling Stone.

This was, to Merrill’s ears, odd. He knew Mitchell was a Trump ally; she served as a Trump 2020 campaign attorney and sat in on the infamous January 2021 phone call in which the former president demanded that the Georgia secretary of state “find” him 11,780 votes to overturn the state’s election. Merrill was a Trump man himself. But this Soros stuff was bizarre. Merrill adds, “Not from Cleta Mitchell or anyone have I ever seen any empirical data that would support the position that George Soros is involved in or related to or had any influence at all in the creation or in the administration of the ERIC system.”

So Merrill spoke up. ERIC was an incredibly valuable tool in protecting and administering free and fair American elections, Merrill told the room. He proposed an “information audit” to determine whether any partisan third parties had been involved in the nonprofit, whether it had adhered to its bylaws, and whether it had used its budget appropriately.

“They were very cool to my position,” Merrill says.

That meeting was just one part of what has become a sustained pressure campaign against ERIC, which has risen to the highest levels of the Republican Party, that involves angry demands from the former president, conspiracy theories in far-right media, and GOP secretaries of state too willing to give into them; nine Republican-led states have left ERIC in the past two years.

Trump-aligned activists’ efforts to discredit the system and strong-arm states into withdrawing opens up the possibility that departing state members — including a number of key 2024 battleground states — could face chaos on Election Day and afterward.

“Their voter lists are likely to be significantly less accurate,” David Becker, a co-founder and former executive director of ERIC, says of the states that have left ERIC. Becker resigned from the organization in 2023 following a right-wing pressure campaign against him. “There will be old records on the voter lists of people who are no longer eligible in the state that will fuel false claims of potential voter fraud. And there will be inaccurate records [of those] who are eligible in the state who moved within the state that they will likely not catch.”

That’s a huge problem. “Faulty voter files create long lines on Election Day, delays in getting mail-in ballots, an increase in provisional ballots, and delays in determining a winner,” Becker says. “The bigger potential damage here is that election losers — people who have lost an election or perceive themselves to be about to lose an election — will have more time and more space to create false narratives about an election being stolen.

“The more problems at the polls, the more lines, the more provisional ballots, the longer it takes to count overall ballots and get an unofficial winner, those all feed into the potential for chaos and even incitement to violence by election losers.”

In other words, the 2024 election could see the same maelstrom following 2020.

THE SPRAWLING CONSERVATIVE QUEST against ERIC appears to have begun in earnest in the swamps of conspiracy-theory media. In January 2022, the pro-Trump blog Gateway Pundit published a three-part series accusing ERIC of being a secret plot by Soros to create a “left-wing voter registration drive disguised as voter-roll clean up.”

It’s a far cry from the boring but necessary work ERIC actually does. In addition to checking for outdated voter information, it produces reports on citizens who are eligible to vote but unregistered. Once every two years, ERIC requires its participating states to conduct outreach to those eligible but unregistered potential voters and offer them information on how they can register to vote — often via postcards.

Some Republican officials, including Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who withdrew his state last year, have objected to that requirement, writing that “members should not be forced” to conduct such outreach if they don’t believe it’s “necessary or relevant.” But it’s hardly the stuff of florid conspiracy theories spun by the Gateway Pundit.

When the site ran its series on ERIC, 33 states were members of the nonprofit. But after, Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin announced he would suspend the state’s participation in ERIC following concerns from the public about “potential questionable funding sources” and “possibly partisan actors” accessing ERIC data. As the right-wing conspiracy meme gained steam, eight other Republican-led states, including critical 2024 ones such as Virginia, Ohio, and Florida, followed suit, leading ERIC membership to plummet to 24 states and the District of Columbia today.

“I’m disappointed that some of my fellow secretaries of state would surrender to the conspiracy theories,” says Adrian Fontes, the Democratic secretary of state in Arizona. “If they care about voter-file accuracy and integrity, ERIC is the only tool available to make that a reality.”

Pennsylvania’s Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt says, “The perversity with a lot of this is that the arguments against ERIC are allegedly coming from a place of interest in election integrity, when in reality, ERIC is quite possibly the most valuable, useful tool that we have to strengthen election integrity.” A Republican who considers himself a hawk on election-integrity issues, Schmidt served as Philadelphia city commissioner and helped investigate instances of voter fraud that led to federal prosecutions.

But the theories about ERIC began to spread. It became such “a big thing,” says Merrill, the former Alabama secretary of state, that he worried “certain allies” who “do not have [Trump’s] best interests at heart” would try to sway the former president into waging war on ERIC.

Merrill says he’s had several conversations with Trump over the past year to make it clear he’s steadfastly pro-ERIC. During these brief talks, including a 30-minute breakfast at Mar-a-Lago, Merrill told Trump to call him any time if he wanted to understand the benefits of ERIC — why its conservative critics were dead wrong.

It didn’t work: Though, Merrill says, the former president politely listened to his defense of ERIC, Trump has yet to take him up on his offer. In fact, in the time since that breakfast, according to other sources close to Trump, the ex-president went in the opposite direction and only fell deeper into the ERIC-hating lore. At different points this summer, Trump vented about ERIC to some of his lawyers and campaign staff, simply referring to it as a “really bad” system created “by George Soros” that needs to be “taken out.” (A rep for Soros’ Open Society Foundations has said it “never funded” ERIC. A spokesman for Trump did not provide comment for this story.)

The former president was removed from the White House, he believes, because his allies were weak — not like Trump, who has called for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” to nullify the 2020 election results. Trump has spent the past three years moaning to friends at his clubs, to conservative lawmakers, and to political advisers that Democrats will try to “cheat” again, and that the GOP must do “everything” it can to make sure liberals are “stopped,” according to four people familiar with this matter.

One key component: making sure his government-in-waiting is stocked with people truly “tough” on supposed Democratic “rigging” in elections.

“The [former] president has pushed for us to hit the Democrats on all sides on the [upcoming] election,” says a person close to Trump who has spoken to him about this matter multiple times.

Back in early 2021, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi proved to be one of his more potent enemies, pushing through an impeachment of Trump for his role in inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, on the other hand, was a dependable Trump ally, rounding up dozens of colleagues to sign onto the Trump-backed Supreme Court brief seeking to toss out the election and echoing Trump’s lies about voting machines rigging vote tallies. Pelosi was gone soon thereafter. And in October 2023, MAGA Republicans elected one of their own to the position: Johnson.

Not long afterward, Trump said he was pleased, because “[Mike is] good on elections,” according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.

Ahead of the 2022 midterms, there was a large-scale attempt to place as many MAGA-friendly election deniers in as many key positions as possible — particularly in secretary of state posts that could profoundly affect the 2024 outcome. That plan was dashed when the Democratic Party overperformed at the polls, forestalling a predicted GOP “red wave.”

But with Johnson’s rise, the leadership for congressional Republicans has only become more drenched in right-wing election denial. And think tanks and party bigwigs are providing a blueprint for what comes next. Project 2025, a policy conglomerate run out of the influential Heritage Foundation, is providing plans for how a reelected Trump could revamp the Department of Justice and other independent bodies into little more than personal attack dogs to sic on his political enemies.

Plus, there are strategies in place for Nov. 5, 2024. Major party organs like the Republican National Committee are launching programs to recruit and deploy tens of thousands of GOP poll watchers and “election integrity directors” to battlegrounds in order to — in the words of Trump ally and RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel — “hold Democrats accountable for bad laws that make voting less secure.” And in a December speech in Iowa, Trump asked supporters to “go into” Democratic cities like Philadelphia, Detroit, and Atlanta so they can “guard the vote.”

Then there are mail-in ballots. They proved crucial for Biden’s 2020 victory, and Trump has repeatedly called them a “scam.” So over the past three years, MAGA Republicans in a number of states have passed bills attempting to restrict voting access, particularly around mail-in ballots. In private, Trump has made it obvious in his conversations with political aides and conservative grassroots leaders that he only views mailed-in ballots as wholly legitimate if they’re sent in by his supporters.

Finally, Trump needs lawyers he can trust, especially now that attorneys who helped his efforts to overturn the 2020 election have struck plea deals and cooperated with prosecutors in Georgia’s Fulton County election-interference case. “A better, smarter legal team than last time” is how a person close to Trump put it.

Another person with knowledge of this matter says that the ex-president has already fielded meetings and phone calls from conservative lawyers who are, in the source’s characterization, preemptively “auditioning” for roles on such a legal team, should one be formed next year.

As recently as this summer, Trump had talked to right-leaning legal counselors about the feasibility of laying the groundwork for various post-election “audits” of mailed ballots — inspired partly by a shambolic Arizona audit following the 2020 election — in parts of the United States that have historical track records of so-called problems, two sources present for these casual discussions recall.

There are few people more central to Trump’s plans than Cleta Mitchell, the lawyer pushing the secretaries of state to pull out of ERIC at that D.C. meeting. As recently as September, Trump privately praised Mitchell’s work, saying she is going to be “very important” for the next election and beyond.

Once a member of the old-school Republican mainstream, Mitchell has become the most ardent of election deniers. Along with participating in Trump’s 2021 call with Raffensperger, she stunned a Fox News host on-air in November 2020 when she challenged the election results days after the network had already called the election for Biden.

That embrace of Trump dogma has given her staying power in the former president’s network of influential allies. But, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation, it irks some of Trump’s top attorneys working on his various criminal cases — many of which grew out of schemes to overturn the 2020 election. “Cleta is too militant, even for me,” one such lawyer says.

Mitchell sent a lengthy email in response to our reporting, which included insisting that ERIC “is a way to accomplish one of the left’s objectives, and to do so at taxpayer expense: register more people” to vote, “not removing bad registrations.” Mitchell offered up a number of her recurring criticisms of ERIC, Soros, and ERIC co-founder Becker, and noted: “I am proud of the work that we are doing and have been doing for the past three years and, yes, I think that what we are doing to try to restore the rule of law in elections is very important.” She also accused Rolling Stone of participating in “attacks” on “election integrity” activists, and also “me specifically.”

CONFUSION HAS FOLLOWED in the states Mitchell has persuaded to pull out from ERIC. Former member states have found themselves suddenly deprived of accurate voter-registration data and have scrambled to try to re-create a version of ERIC through side agreements with their neighbors still in the network, says Schmidt, the Pennsylvania secretary. He’s seen some states frantically search to find the most rudimentary public voter-registration data. “All you need is $20 and the ability to use Excel to do the analysis they’re doing,” he says.

But absent the kind of very specific personal information that’s only available through ERIC, “the data is going to be garbage and potentially result in voters being disenfranchised,” according to Schmidt. “You cannot just use, for example, name and birthday to go about taking steps to remove a voter,” he says. “That will result in a terrific number of false matches.”

The argument is more than theoretical. In 2005, Kansas developed the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program. Much like ERIC, the network pledged to help states improve the accuracy of the data underlying their voter rolls by allowing member states to share registration information.

But Crosscheck relied heavily on using registrants’ names and birthdays to check for potentially duplicate registrations, leading to high rates of false positives. In one academic study of Crosscheck data, researchers found that the program wrongly flagged 99 percent of registrations. In 2019, Kansas agreed to settle a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and shut down Crosscheck following a data breach that exposed personal information of voters shared by the program.

With the demise of Crosscheck, and as larger, conservative-led states have walked away from ERIC, pro-Trump activists like Mitchell have promoted a new tool, dubbed the EagleAI Network, for states that have left the nonprofit.

Mitchell has a number of ties to EagleAI, as the investigative watchdog Documented first detailed, including helping the group with strategic planning, legal advice, and hosting demonstrations of the software for her Election Integrity Network nonprofit.

EagleAI’s developers hinted at their ambition for the software in an August article for Just the News, a pro-Trump outlet. In the article and company documents published with the piece, the company said it wanted the software to be “the solution across the nation for use at all levels of Voter Roll validation, maintenance, and review.” In an email to Rolling Stone, Richards said that “while EagleAI could replace ERIC, doing so is not its mission.”

EagleAI claims that “hundreds of individuals and county election offices in 23 states have shown “interest” in using it. In December, the company gained its first government user in Georgia’s Republican-dominated Columbia County, though the state’s own director of elections, Blake Evans, said in a statement earlier this year that the EagleAI presentations he has seen are “confused and seem to steer counties towards unlawful list-maintenance activities.”

Schmidt, Pennsylvania’s top election official, is critical of software like EagleAI. “The data sets that they’re looking to use, such as property-tax records, should not be used to generate a list of voters who are ineligible” to vote, according to Schmidt, because plenty of eligible voters don’t always appear on them. “There’s any number of spouses who do not show up on property–tax records. No one who rents an apartment will show up on property-tax records.”

The software, he says, is “utterly unreliable” as a replacement for ERIC and would likely result in “a terrific number of challenges to voters who are registered and eligible,” as well as litigation against states or counties who use it for those purposes.

Richards tells Rolling Stone that property-tax records are only “a small part of the property data that EagleAI uses.” “To say that EagleAI data is ‘utterly unreliable’ is to also say that ERIC data is unreliable — we use the same primary sources,” he says. Richards acknowledges that “EagleAI does not have the Personal Protected Information that ERIC has,” like drivers-license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. But, he claims, “this does not make EagleAI less accurate.”

EagleAI also markets its platform for use not just by state and county election officials, but by ordinary citizens to spot “potential problem registrations for review and/or election challenges.” Conservative groups have already sponsored training sessions for activists to use the software, according to Documented.

Even aside from its potential use in government, some fear activists could use software like EagleAI to flood election officials with needless challenges to voters’ eligibility. “EagleAI presents a few concerns,” explains Andrew Garber, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice’s voting-rights and elections program. “One of them being that it seems to be a tool made to generate mass challenges.”

Garber says tools like EagleAI that can facilitate mass voter-eligibility challenges are “concerning” because of the effect they could have on election administration. “The people who run our elections have a lot to do. And when they get hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of challenges at the same time, they often have to investigate and come to determinations on those, which takes them away from their other really important work.” He adds that such tools can also “spread disinformation by giving the appearance that there’s something wrong with the voter rolls when, in fact, there isn’t.”

Richards dismisses such concerns, saying any challenges would “be due to the fact that there are a high number of problem registrations,” rather than anything to do with his software. He says EagleAI “will make county election officials more efficient” at handling challenges “because it makes finding evidentiary documentation more efficient and accurate.” He calls allegations that EagleAI could facilitate disinformation “laughable.” In her email to Rolling Stone, Mitchell defended EagleAI, claiming, “EagleAI as an alternative to ERIC simply means that it is a tool that will do what ERIC claims to do but doesn’t.”

IF TRUMP AND HIS LIEUTENANTS get their way, it’s possible that the failed efforts of 2020 and 2021 (culminating with the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol) could be remembered as a mere dress rehearsal for whatever happens next — particularly if the presidential election is close.

The hollowing out of ERIC has started while EagleAI begins to take root. The speaker of the House is no longer just someone who will tolerate and back Trump’s 2020 election lies, but is now a man who once took the lead on Capitol Hill in trying to nullify that election outcome. And no one and no organization in the Republican Party that truly matters is pushing back on Trump’s authoritarianism; they’re adapting to it even when they aren’t excitedly throwing their arms around it.

In January 2023, Merrill stepped down as Alabama’s secretary of state, two years after admitting to “an inappropriate relationship” that upended his political career. His successor, Wes Allen, worked fast to do what Merrill would not. “Secretary of State Wes Allen has officially withdrawn from the Electronic Registration Information Center as his first official act in office,” a press release triumphantly announced.

Still, as Merrill decries MAGA elites’ assault on ERIC as a destructive endeavor, he nevertheless maintains common cause with even the most zealous of anti-ERIC conservatives. They all want to see Trump restored to the Oval Office, come January 2025.

I'm not going to change the content of my posts to avoid your disagreeing with me.

With all this pre-Christmas hustle and bustle in the world at the moment, it's refreshing to follow this interesting conversation.