In the Press

“There will be an argument – I can almost guarantee it – that a bunch of ballots in California should be thrown out because they didn’t segregate them,” said Ben Berwick, an election lawyer at Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that works on democracy issues. “I think this will be laughed out of court if they try to bring this past post-election.”

“That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried or we don’t need to prepare for it,” he added.

Ben Berwick, an election law attorney at the nonpartisan watchdog group Protect Democracy, said the database in its current form was unlikely to give states a strong justification for clearing their voter rolls.

“Even if this is a tool that is available to states, responsible states should recognize what the government itself is recognizing: that this is not — standing alone — a reliable tool,” he said.

“If you’re going to use it at all, you need to use it in a responsible way,” he said. “Which means even if the SAVE database indicates that someone might not be a citizen because they don’t show up in Social Security Administration records, you’ve got to do your legwork to confirm that’s true.”

As Ian Bassin says on today’s “To the Contrary” podcast, he will deploy the Three Ds: Deceive, Disrupt, and Deny. Even after the midterms, Trump will wield largely unaccountable power. He is likely to get his ballroom and his arch, and may well demolish the Kennedy Center. There will be more lakes, rivers, and oceans renamed; more allies alienated; more extrajudicial killings; more ICE brutality; and perhaps more pointless wars.

Paywall: State officials, Democratic congressmen and litigation non-profits have been war-gaming those scenarios for months. Senate Democrats have been holding tabletop exercises with outside advisers, including Eric Holder, a former attorney-general. Justin Vail of Protect Democracy, one of the organisations involved, says the first imperative is to go to court immediately in any such incident. The work involves training county clerks, the first port of call for poll workers.

The goal is “make people afraid and sow chaos,” said Anna Dorman, a lawyer with Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that is suing to prevent the Trump administration from building a federal voter database. The point of the chaos, she said, is to lay the groundwork to challenge election certifications if, as predicted, Republicans lose the House, and possibly even the Senate.

“That certainly fits the playbook and strategy of sowing these lies so they can have these zombie issues that they can resurrect,” Dorman said. “Here are answers to questions that they manufactured to create chaos so they could use that to delay certification.”