The abortion "bounty" laws in Texas and Oklahoma are the future of America, using ordinary citizens to bring civil litigation and enforcement of unconstitutional ordnances rather than having the government do it. It's recruiting your neighbor as police informants, and we've now returned to the point where groups of these "concerned citizens" are tracking down potential miscreants door-to-door.
Clipboards in hand, Jenifer Short and Emily Tadlock strolled a swanky suburban neighborhood on a recent afternoon, checking homes against a list of voter registrations.
Knocking on the front door of a house with an Alfa Romeo in the driveway, they chatted with a woman, a renter who verified she was registered to vote at the address, but who said another person registered there was the homeowner, who did not live there.
After the brief chat, Short and Tadlock moved on, marking down the information on an “incident report” for the group they’re volunteering for, the Washington Voter Research Project.
“We’re detectives, OK?” said Tadlock, somewhat jokingly describing the work of checking out thousands of voter registrations flagged by the group as potentially suspicious.
Across Washington, hundreds of volunteers like Tadlock and Short have been knocking on doors, questioning residents and searching for evidence of voter fraud — or at least outdated voter rolls.
It’s an effort led by Glen Morgan, a conservative activist from Thurston County known for filing frequent campaign finance complaints against Democratic politicians, unions and other allied groups.
While Morgan seeks to distance the canvassing from outlandish and false conspiracies about the 2020 presidential election, he acknowledged his group has attracted 350 volunteers across the state in part due to the distrust in the election system stoked by former President Donald Trump.
What’s happening here is loosely connected to a national campaign by Trump supporters hunting door-to-door for proof that the 2020 election was fraudulent. The activity in some states has drawn fierce blowback and accusations of voter intimidation. Civil rights groups in Colorado filed a federal lawsuit in March, alleging canvassing by Trump supporters there has targeted neighborhoods with a high number of people of color.
In Washington, the Morgan-led doorbelling campaign has generated complaints from people put off by the inquiries, leading several county auditors and Secretary of State Steve Hobbs to issue public statements warning that the group is not authorized by any election office.
In interviews, some county auditors said they have received reports of canvassers trying to pose as government officials.
“People called very concerned, because they were portraying themselves as county employees,” said Thurston County Auditor Mary Hall. “They had like the Thurston County logo on their clipboard.”
Hall said her office “would never go door-to-door asking voters if they voted or how long they’ve lived there, anything like that.”
As I said yesterday, this open voter intimidation is nothing more than a 2022 field test for a massive operation in 2024. It's going to be an army harassing every polling place where a Democrat mnight win, and it's going to be a phone book's worth of "irregularities" that will only be reported in places where Democrats pull ahead.
And then these wins will be nullified by GOP secretaries of state.
Watch.
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