As voters cast ballots largely without incident on Tuesday afternoon, former president Donald Trump took to social media to declare that a minor, already rectified problem with absentee balloting in Detroit was “REALLY BAD.”
Washington Post: Trump called a protest. No one showed. Why GOP efforts to cry foul fizzled this time.
11.9.2022 / By Rosalind S. Helderman, Patrick Marley and Tom Hamburger
Washington Post: Trump called a protest. No one showed. Why GOP efforts to cry foul fizzled this time.
After two years of promises from Trump and his supporters that they would flood polls and counting stations with partisan watchers to spot alleged fraud, after unprecedented threats lodged against election workers, after calls to ditch machines in favor of hand counting and after postings on internet chat groups called for violent action to stop supposed cheating, a peaceful Election Day drew high turnout and only scattered reports of problems.
Election officials said they believed the relative normalcy resulted from a combination of concerted effort on the part of well-prepared poll workers and voters, as well as the fact that some of Trump’s loudest supporters were less potent than they had claimed. The basic dynamics of a midterm election — which always draw less passion than presidential contests and in which voters do not rally around a single candidate — played a role as well. …
Election officials said nationally that fewer partisan challengers showed up than they had thought likely, given pre-election rhetoric from figures like former Trump adviser and popular podcaster Stephen K. Bannon, who boasted of a massive new network of “election integrity” activists. (“We’re going to be there and enforce those rules, and we’ll challenge any vote, any ballot, and you’re going to have to live with it, okay?” he said on a recent episode of his show.)
Nathan Savidge, county clerk in Republican-dominated Northumberland County, Pa., said there were about 50 poll watchers spread among 74 precincts, about twice as many as in 2020. In Ottawa County, Mich., a heavily Republican county west of Grand Rapids where election denialism was rife, a local group struggled to find enough volunteers to monitor the county’s drop boxes.
“Sometimes, with tactics like this, the story is the intimidation,” Suzanne Almeida, director of state operations for the watchdog group Common Cause. “It’s about making a movement seem bigger than it is … making a fringe idea feel very mainstream, and like it’s everywhere.”