Alright, so we now know Trump's Justice Department is threatening election officials across the country with federal prosecution, based on fascist conspiracy theories about voting systems integrity; a redux of "The Big Lie" that fueled Trump's political rebirth after losing the 2020 US Presidential election and the failed coup (autogolpe specifically) on January 6th, 2021. Whether the Trump regime fascists ever charge anyone with this nonsense or not, we know they're actively trying to take over election boards and the election process more broadly, all over the country. All that's left is to watch them put that control into practice, and I think this Common Dreams story is a good enough place to start on that front.

As recently reported in the Washington Post, Trump's Justice Department lead by Attorney General Pam Bondi, "has taken the unusual step of asking at least nine states for copies of their voter rolls, and at least two have turned them over." These efforts appear to be particularly focused on Colorado, a former battleground state that has been increasingly shifting towards Democrats, where a local Republican operative is pushing to allow the federal government to physically inspect their voting equipment.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-state-voter-datta

'The 2020 Playbook on Steroids': Trump DOJ Requests for State Voter Data Spark Alarm

"Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, called the Trump administration's efforts "the 2020 playbook on steroids."

"This all is part of a bigger ploy to further undermine our voting in this country," warned Griswold. "They are actively in a power grab."

Even some Republican election officials responded with alarm to the Trump administration's requests for voter data and access to voting equipment.

"To me, it felt like they were wanting to intervene before 2026," Justin Grantham, the Republican clerk in Colorado's Fremont County, told the Post, referring to the upcoming midterms.

Carly Koppes, a Republican clerk in Weld County, Colorado, said she rejected requests for a federal inspection of election equipment.

"That's a hard stop for me," said Koppes. "Nobody gets access to my voting equipment, for security reasons."

So, if you were wondering why Pam Bondi and the Trumpenreich Justice Department were looking for ways to prosecute election officials who don't go along with Trump's fascist conspiracy bullshit, even though the fascist right has already been quite successful at stacking election boards, including in many deeply blue counties, with Trump-humping Republicans, folks like Justin Grantham and Carly Koppes are the answer.

I think however the larger point to remember here is that absolutely none of this is actually about maintaining election integrity, and therefore none of the regime's actions have to be moored to the truth in any tangible way. For example, they're not asking to look at Colorado's voting equipment because they think they'll find something fishy. Rather, they intend to point to the investigation itself and any possible charges against Colorado election officials brought by Pam Bondi, which the Trump regime itself is creating whole cloth, as evidence that there is something fishy about a Colorado that doesn't go full fascist in the next cycle of elections. The ultimate results of those investigations and potential trials are largely irrelevant to the Trump regime's current goals of interfering with, and ultimately rigging the US electoral process.

This then brings us to the regime's ongoing obsession with obtaining access to voter rolls; attempts the Trump administration has made through a wide variety of methods, including the Department of Government Efficiency, formerly run by Elon Musk. Obviously, analysis isn't prophecy, but both the Trump regime and the larger Republican Party have aggressively been pushing conspiracy theories about undocumented migrants or deceased Democrats voting, so it doesn't really take a genius to figure out they want to use those voter rolls to generate trumped up accusations of widespread voter fraud, and then use that as a justification to purge or otherwise disqualify huge numbers of people likely to vote against them in upcoming elections. The fact that they can also feed all that data into the digital panopticon Palantir is building so Trump can find all his political enemies, is pure gravy for the Trumpenreich and Downmarket Mussolini.

For much of the past month and a half, we've all partaken of an American political discourse openly asking "why doesn't the Republican Party care about harming their own voters" in the face of an upcoming election cycle? I fear the answer to that question may well be that the Trump regime feels pretty confident about its ability to ensure they can't lose political power in rigged elections.