Forget About Putin-- We Have Our Own Home-Grown Stalinism in the U.S.

Reuters has an excellent report on pro-Trump Republicans who have attacked U.S. election systems, stealing voting data or attempting to do so under the supposed justification of searching for "election fraud." Reuters counts eight known recent attempts, the most infamous being the case of Colorado election clerk Tina Peters, who now faces multiple felony charges after allowing voting data to be breached and stolen. 

Nutty Republican officials and allies are breaching election systems so that they can comb through voter data looking for "fraud" that they claim to be omnipresent simply because they refuse to believe Americans did not vote overwhelmingly to reelect Trump.

In Michigan's Adams Township, a QAnon-promoting clerk was found in possession of sensitive election tabulation hardware four days after it went missing; another Michigan episode in which a Republican activist impersonated a government official in an attempt to steal equipment; a Colorado election clerk caught on video making "forensic" copies of "everything on the election server"—the two hard drives the information was copied to have not been recovered. Pillow kingpin Mike Lindell features heavily as a financier of election conspiracy theories that have now morphed into pro-Trump crimes and attempted crimes.

All of the cases are based on the most ridiculous of conspiracy theories, and each involves brazen disregard for the law.  One local Republican official is threatening to get an elections official fired if that elections official doesn't let the Republican have access to secured voting equipment that by law nobody is allowed to have access to because then it wouldn't be secure.  In Texas, a big Republican donor is now under indictment for financing a supposed "investigation" into election fraud that saw one of his investigators run a random Texan off the road and hold him at gunpoint on the bizarre belief that the man's truck was stuffed with fake ballots.

Reuters is reporting on a wave of conspiracy-minded Republican cranks now looking to target the nation's election systems by stealing sensitive data.  But the bigger story is that the GOP is looking to legalize those sorts of breaches, not tamp down on them. The problem the GOP trying to solve is that, in states like Georgia, Americans aren't voting for Republicans in sufficient numbers for Republicans to win. The solution they've come up with is to declare that if a Republican candidate doesn't win, it's because there was a secret conspiracy to fudge the numbers—thus requiring Republican "investigation" into votes against them.  If this doesn't sound like good old fashioned election-fixing Stalinism, then I don't know what would.