state takeover
new 1/20
see local takeover (school bd, election officials)
also related to overriding of local regs?
last update after 1870 disasters?
an 6 22
Pennsylvania state legislator Russ Diamond had a problem. Joe Biden carried the commonwealth by 80,000 votes, thereby securing its 20 electors. According to a newly released trove of emails, Diamond and fellow Republican state legislators wanted instead to send electors dedicated to Donald Trump. They just needed the right excuse.
If that sounds outrageous, that’s because it is.
At first, it seemed allegations of electoral fraud might do the trick. Trump and his lawyers blanketed the airwaves with outlandish claims about fraud at the polls. But when the Trump legal team made their case to the Pennsylvania legislature, their efforts struck Diamond as unconvincing and frankly incompetent. If there was no fraud, how could they justify overriding the will of the voters?
Luckily for Diamond, an obscure conservative law professor had recently said in testimony that state legislatures didn’t need evidence of fraud to disregard the will of the people. It was enough, Professor John Eastman said, that the legislature objected to the rules under which the election was conducted. [SCOTT PERRY NOW?] After watching Eastman’s testimony, Diamond decided Eastman was just the man to help him write a resolution purporting to nullify the will of his state’s voters.
“Honestly, the Trump legal team was not exactly stellar at PA's hearing, failed to provide the affidavits of their witnesses, and made a glaring error by purporting that more ballots had been returned than mailed out,” Diamond admitted in an email to Eastman. “It is for this reason that I latched onto your comments that actual fraud is irrelevant when the election itself is unlawful.”
Diamond sent Eastman a draft resolution predicated on Eastman’s crackpot theory that the US Constitution gives state legislatures the unchecked power to disenfranchise their own voters after the fact if legislators don’t like the results of an election.
Eastman praised Diamond’s efforts but urged his protegé to go still further and actually name Trump electors in the resolution, as opposed to simply announcing their intent to do so.
“One big question, though. Do you want to only go half way, and require another resolution to actually choose a slate of electors? Or should you do it all in one resolution?,” Eastman wrote. “I don't know the dynamic of your Legislature, so can't answer that. But my intuition is that it would be better to do what you need to do in one fell swoop.”
The Pennsylvania Secretary of State and the courts had made some tweaks to facilitate voting during the pandemic. Republicans challenged these changes in court and lost. But Eastman promised that these changes could give the Pennsylvania legislature the excuse it needed to throw out the election, even without any evidence of fraud.
Eastman argued that it would be more politically palatable if the legislature could claim that the new rules cost Trump the election and they as legislators were simply righting that wrong by nullifying the election and replacing Biden’s electors with Trump’s.
Knowing that the mail-in vote favored Biden, Eastman suggested that the legislature pass a resolution arbitrarily declaring a certain percentage of perfectly legal mail-in ballots to be illegal based on a convoluted formula Eastman made up.
That way, Eastman said, the legislature could claim Trump won. “That would help provide some cover,” he asserted. (In fact, Trump would still have lost under Eastman’s metric, but that’s beside the point.)
Ultimately, Pennsylvania state legislators did not pass a resolution openly nullifying the results of their state’s election and naming alternative electors. Instead, at the urging of Trump’s legal team, Pennsylvania Republicans secretly named a slate of pseudo-electors, as did Republicans in six other states that Biden won.
The threat of an Eastman gambit has not passed.
If anything, it has gotten worse.
Republicans who take Eastman’s arguments seriously are gaining ground in state legislatures and key election administration posts.
The GOP may retake the House and Senate this year, which could put GOP legislators in charge of certifying the next presidential election.
A bolder state legislature could still attempt the Eastman gambit in 2024. A GOP-controlled Congress might agree to count the illegitimate electors chosen by politicians, instead of those chosen by the people.
That is why Congress must reform the Electoral Count Actto specify that if there are two slates of electors claiming to represent a state, Congress must only count electors courts have affirmed as legitimate.
https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/qanon-followers/
no lnx twt
QAnon followers are focused on 'a new project' in swing states
Meaghan Ellis February 11, 2022
QAnon enthusiasts, who believe former President Donald Trump represents some form of new world order, are now focusing on a different plot in hopes of regaining control of the White House.
According to The Guardian, QAnon advocates have turned their attention toward Secretary of State election races in various swing states.So, why do these races have the attention of QAnon followers? They believe these particular races could be the key to ensuring there is not a repeat of the 2020 presidential election. In many swing states, Republican election officials refused to assist Trump in overturning the presidential election.
Now, QAnon believers and far-right extremists are adamant about putting people in place who align with Trump's beliefs. Alex Kaplan, a senior researcher at Media Matters for America who has studied the evolution of conspiracy theories, explained how QAnon's actions could create more problems in the very near future.
“This is the way that QAnon could trigger a constitutional crisis,” said Kaplan. “QAnon is linked to an effort to recruit and elect candidates to positions directly controlling election administrations, and given their ties to harming democracy, that is very concerning.”
Per The Guardian, QAnon's agenda and their strategic plot to control the outcome of elections was detailed by former Republican lawmaker and Trump loyalist, Jim Marchant who is currently running to become a high-ranking election official in Nevada. Marchant revealed the moment he was propositioned by QAnon advocates and QAnon influencer Juan Savin about running for Secretary of State. It was at that moment when he realized those particular election races could be a key to controlling elections.
“I knew right then that they had figured out that we need to take back the secretary of state offices around the country. Not only did they ask me to run, they asked me to put together a coalition of other like-minded secretary of state candidates. I got to work, Juan O Savin helped, and we formed a coalition.”
Savin has also spoken out about the QAnon agenda. In January, Savin also shared details about the supposed "project" the movement had in place. Marchant explained, “We have a project that we are doing helping candidates across the country that we started here in Nevada that has prospered pretty well, with a number of Trump endorsements."
On Sunday, Savin also weighed in on “the secretary of state stuff”, as he boasted that “across the country we are gaining strength rapidly to get back into this game in an effective way. A lot of those offices that they thought they held and weren’t going to matter, we are going to flip those.”...
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aha: there is no left incubator (some scattered organizer training? by unions?) but school bd trad 1st rung
diane ravitz // MI emergency manager: in tx one fail school gets district taken over --> charters?
https://www.c-span.org/video/?468918-1/slaying-goliath
broad gave yale 100m to tke over failed org;
refs takeover bk, outside dark$ local sch bd, 1st rung of pol ladder.
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https://theconversation.com/the-made-up-crisis-behind-the-state-takeover-of-houstons-public-schools-128346
school bd pipeline for ppl of color into politics, TX abbott
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see larger cat state takeover. eg
https://theconversation.com/the-made-up-crisis-behind-the-state-takeover-of-houstons-public-schools-128346
schoolbd pipeline for ppl of color into politics, TX