Alamogordo is a small desert town located roughly midway between Roswell and Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. If the name sounds familiar, that’s likely due to the Trinity Test on July 16, 1945, that detonated the world’s first nuclear weapon at the nearby USAAF Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range. Alamogordo’s residents witnessed the birth of the atomic age.
Last week the town made news for another first. The three Republican commissioners for Otero County, the local seat of government, refused to certify the county’s results from the June 7 statewide primary elections. Cowboys for Trump founder Couy Griffin and his fellow commissioners claimed without evidence that the vote-counting machines supplied by Dominion Voting Systems could not be trusted.
Dominion, one of three major providers of voting machines in the United States, has been demonised by Trump and his allies as part of their relentless dissemination of the “Big Lie”. The company has filed multiple defamation lawsuits against right-wing cable networks Fox News, Newsmax and One America News Network, Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, and pillow spruiker Mike Lindell, for their roles in spreading Trump’s Lies. Their poison is now bearing toxic fruit.
Notwithstanding their false allegations, Otero County’s conspiracy-minded commissioners had no legal authority to withhold their approval. Their duties are prescribed by state law, with certification being a procedural formality. Any voting irregularities unable to be resolved via the normal counting process must be adjudicated by state courts, not the county commissioners. Following the local rebellion, New Mexico’s Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver and Attorney General Hector Balderas moved to enforce the law.
Last Wednesday the New Mexico Supreme Court ordered the commissioners to record the almost 7400 votes cast as valid by Friday’s certification deadline. Faced with potential civil and criminal legal consequences for their conduct, two of the rebels blinked. On Friday they reversed their decision in a 2-1 vote to certify the results.
Trump cowboy Griffin remained defiant. “My vote to remain a no isn’t based on any evidence. It’s not based on any facts,” he said. “It’s only based on my gut feeling and my own intuition, and that’s all I need.” Griffin was compelled to record his dissent via telephone, because he was in Washington, DC, to be sentenced for breaching Capitol grounds during the January 6 insurrection.
As with the Trinity Test, this is only the beginning. What unfolded in Alamogordo will soon be repeated across America. Furious at Trump’s defeat and mired in denial, Republicans are positioning themselves to rig elections nationwide. In addition to myriad new gerrymandering and voter suppression laws enacted in red states since the 2020 election, GOP activists have exploited lies about “election integrity” to pursue new plans to fix the results. Their tactics are an electoral equivalent to denial-of-service attacks on the internet: designed to harass, choke and overwhelm the election process. Chaos is their aim. Chaos breeds opportunity for fraud.
A feature of their strategy is to install MAGA partisans in official roles to ignore votes they don’t like. People like Couy Griffin. The Washington Post has identified more than 100 2020 election deniers who Republicans have nominated for this November’s elections. If they win, and many will, they will wield direct influence over the conduct and counting for the 2024 presidential election. The lesson they learned from 2020 is not that they should have better policies to win more votes. It’s that they should decide who wins.
Should they attempt to steal the 2024 election, the only option left to stop them will be the courts. But with the Supreme Court even more partisan now than it was during the Bush/Gore showdown in 2000, that avenue provides little comfort. We all remember how that race turned out.
Election denial has metastasised like a cancer throughout the Republican Party. This past weekend the Texas GOP, the largest state branch in the nation, held its annual convention in Houston. More than 5000 delegates adopted a platform that declared President Biden “was not legitimately elected” and demanded the repeal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that guaranteed ballot access for Black Americans.
Addressing the crowd, Texas Commissioner of Agriculture Sid Miller bellowed: “The battlefield used to be between Republicans and Democrats. Then it was between conservatives and liberals. Now the battlefield has once again changed. This new battlefield is between patriots and traitors.”
Texas Republicans are so infested with conspiracist delusions that the party changed its official logo after the January 6 insurrection to incorporate the symbol and battle cry of far-right QAnon cult: “We Are the Storm”. Apocalyptic language and violent rhetoric are the hallmarks of the GOP’s fascist tilt.
On Thursday retired Federal Court judge J. Michael Luttig testified before the January 6 committee. Luttig is an icon in conservative legal circles. John Eastman, who drafted the blueprint detailing Trump’s insurrection plan, clerked for Luttig. So did Ted Cruz. Luttig was a serious contender for nomination to the Supreme Court. It was Luttig who steeled Mike Pence to resist Trump’s demands to block the count of the Electoral College votes. Luttig has been outspoken about Republicans’ ongoing efforts to steal the 2024 election.
Here’s how he opened his testimony: “A stake was driven through the heart of American democracy on January 6, 2021, and our democracy today is on a knife’s edge.” He stated that “the war on democracy was instigated by the former president and his political party allies”, who “falsely claimed and proclaimed to the nation that he had won the election, and then he and they set about to overturn the election that he and they knew the former president had lost”.
Luttig warned the committee, and the American people, that “Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy”.
As Couy Griffin and millions like him prove, he’s not wrong.
