The New York Times details plans of right-wing voting conspiracy groups to stake out every single ballot drop box in the country in the upcoming mid-term election, because they’re certain that they will uncover massive fraud.
Local “stakeouts” are being promoted on various social media sites, including Craigslist, Telegram, Twitter, Gab and of course, Truth Social, where conspiracy theories go to die. “All-night patriot tailgate parties for EVERY DROP BOX IN AMERICA,” read a post on Telegram.
Popularized by the partisan fauxumentary “2,000 mules,” in which Dinesh D’Sousa crafts a fanciful tale about people dropping off hundreds of thousands of fake and fraudulent ballots which were then scanned by Venezuelan election machines and then the ballots were counted in Estonia before a mother and daughter in Atlanta snuck ballots from under tables….
But I digress. Even winners of this year’s Republican primary elections have screamed fraud, as Arizona GOP Kari Lake demonstrated when she said her supporters simply overcame all the fraud of her opponents–some of whom were also conspiracy theory Republicans.
“What we’re going to be dealing with in 2022 is more of a citizen corps of conspiracists that have already decided that there’s a problem and are now looking for evidence, or at least something they can twist into evidence, and use that to undermine confidence in results they don’t like,” said Matthew Weil, the executive director of the Elections Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “When your entire premise is that there are problems, every issue looks like a problem, especially if you have no idea what you’re looking at.”