Harmeet Dhillon, the U.S. Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, announced on Tuesday that she is sending teams of election monitors to six states this primary season, New Hampshire being one of them. The alleged purpose of this expenditure of taxpayer dollars is to “increase voter confidence.”
Dhillon ought to know better. She attended college in New Hampshire, graduating in 1989. By then, Secretary of State for Life [Emeritus] Bill Gardner* had already been overseeing elections for 12 years, scrupulously enough to make Caesar’s wife look like a floozie. Gardner retired in 2022, but his successor, David Scanlan, would not have survived his twenty year apprenticeship as Gardner’s deputy if he were any less rigorous.
Then again, Dhillon went to Dartmouth, that bastion of Ivy League elitism which is the alma mater of so many prominent defenders of the working class. Either the place has a weird effect on the thought processes of certain susceptible undergraduates, or, like some malevolent locale out of H.P. Lovecraft, it exerts an uncanny attraction on weirdos. How else to explain Laura Ingraham, Class of ’85, and Dinesh d’Souza, Dartmouth ’83?
Call it the Revenge of Samson Occam. Occam was an 18th century Mohegan who, depending on one’s perspective, either found Jesus, or was found by European clergymen. A minister and a scholar, he devoted years of his life to raising funds for the education of his people. Dartmouth got its hands on those funds, and proceeded, over the next 200 years, to graduate exactly 19 Native Americans.
But, as usual, we digress. Our problem today is not some ancient embezzlement. It’s creeping fascism.
Wait. Did we say “creeping”? Galloping would be more like it.
Mike Dater’s latest masterpiece shows how the Democratic Party is torn. It’s engaged in a constant battle against its own progressive wing, lest it lose its big money donors. That hampers its defense against the Republicans’ all-out war against small-d democracy. Fortunately signs of life do appear here and there.
For example, Party lawyer Marc Elias’ Democracy Docket. It pointed out on Tuesday that, as Dhillon’s Civil Wrongs Division announced its “build voter confidence through election monitoring” scheme, it also “sent letters to election officials nationwide threatening potential criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting.” In other words, judging them by their actions rather than their propaganda, “Justice” plans to “increase voter confidence” by terrorizing the genuinely-patriotic citizens who do the honest work of conducting our elections.
Docket’s Yunior Rivas wrote, “The letters frame routine voter list maintenance as a potential criminal matter, warning that election officials could be prosecuted if they knowingly retain noncitizens on the rolls or allow them to receive and cast ballots.
“‘Any election officer, including the chief election officer of the state, who knowingly retains noncitizens on the state’s SVRL or facilitates noncitizens in receiving and casting ballots could be subject to criminal liability,’ Dhillon wrote.”
One likes to think that evildoing eventually has some kind of deleterious consequences for the evildoer. Perhaps it does, though evidence seems lacking lately. Working on behalf of the one percent, on the other hand, seems to have one big built-in advantage: always enough money on hand to do everything all at once. How else to explain the American array of umpteen think tanks staffed with cranks, constantly churning out new ways to disenfranchise workers, in defense of the Empire of Wealth? Get into power, by hook or by crook, haul the blueprints off the shelf, and shove them through congress like… well, you get the picture.
The methods used may be routine, but make no mistake: rigging the next election is a matter of the highest imaginable priority. Extreme weather events may be wreaking havoc across the country—in fact, for a moment over the Fourth it looked like Zeus might have a shot at ending #47’s administration ahead of schedule. Catastrophes, though, generally affect only inconsequential people such as taxpayers.
President Donald Trump is another matter. Recently seen on television in his natural habitat, to wit, onstage, in an ornate gilded chair, catching forty winks while fellow fading despot Recep Tayyip Erdoğan droned on. Not long ago Trump outraged the Kongressional Kaukus by blocking a bill that would have made housing more affordable for their restive constituents. He risked their ire because the Senate would not give up their precious, the filibuster, to give him the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act.
It would be far easier to keep Democrats out of power, and himself out of jail, by keeping them out of the voting booth. Otherwise you have to make up lies about aliens voting, declare martial law, and so forth. All that stuff is a hassle.
* In the spirit of full disclosure, our view of Gardner may be colored by the fact that it was his signature and seal, dated May 1, 1989, that established the current Editor’s right to the trade name “New Hampshire Gazette.”