With less than two weeks before some states begin mailing ballots for the 2026 midterms, there is plenty to worry about. Donald Trump is escalating his campaign to interfere with the machinery of American elections, demanding sensitive voter files, threatening state officials with prosecution and rewriting the rules for mail-in ballots. On Monday, the Supreme Court gave the administration a procedural victory that could let parts of Trump’s mail-voting scheme move forward, and new litigation is already underway to stop it.

But looking past the daily torrent of alarming headlines reveals another story worth telling. The Big Lie continues to cost its most committed promoters. Many of the MAGA men who cashed in on screaming — falsely — about the 2020 presidential election being stolen are finally facing a legal reckoning for manufacturing the project’s most enduring images.

Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative commentator and filmmaker, settled a defamation case on the eve of trial in Atlanta this month, ending a lawsuit over a so-called documentary released in 2022 that became one of the most influential pieces of post-2020 election conspiracy propaganda. The suit should have stripped “2000 Mules” of any remaining pretense of credibility the moment it was filed, as it  claimed that thousands of people were paid to collect and illegally deposit ballots in battleground states. The film grossed more than $9 million and Trump screened it approvingly at Mar-a-Lago.

One of the supposed “mules” was Mark Andrews, an auditor in Gwinnett County, Georgia, who appeared onscreen in deceptively edited footage returning absentee ballots for himself and four family members before the 2020 election. The film treated a few seconds of surveillance video as license to publicly accuse an ordinary man of an election crime. D’Souza’s voice-over declared, “What you are seeing is a crime. These are fraudulent votes.”

They weren’t. Andrews had done nothing illegal, and after Georgia investigators cleared him of wrongdoing, he sued D’Souza and others involved in the film. The settlement amount remains undisclosed. That is less satisfying than a jury verdict, but it is still a remarkable endpoint for one of the Trump era’s most consequential election-fraud narratives. It also follows D’Souza’s own acknowledgment that the whole project was a fraud. In December 2024 he apologized to Andrews, and Salem Media Group, which distributed the movie, also apologized and withdrew “2000 Mules” and its companion book from distribution.

While D’Souza’s unraveling took years, the next chapter of MAGA’s fraud theater is falling apart in real time. 

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Earlier this month, conservative provocateurs James O’Keefe and Cam Higby dressed in what they described as traditional Muslim clothing. With O’Keefe in a thobe and Higby in a burqa, the pair walked into Minneapolis polling places during the state’s primary to test a decades-old voter vouching law, which lets a registered voter attest that a newly arrived or recently moved neighbor lives in the precinct. O’Keefe used a badly affected accent and, in one instance, gave poll workers the name of a real registered voter, William Pomeranz, who learned days later that his identity had been used in a viral video without his knowledge. A third member of the group, Anthony Rubin, reportedly told poll workers he wanted to vouch for people he described as recently arrived Hamas members from Gaza. 

None of them actually cast a ballot or completed a registration. Rather than uncovering a loophole, they appear to have landed themselves squarely in legal jeopardy.

Falsely signing a vouching oath is perjury under Minnesota law, punishable by up to five years. Misrepresenting your identity to obtain a ballot is a separate felony. Steve Simon, Minnesota’s Democratic secretary of state, slamming the stunt, noted that fewer than 0.6% of the state’s 2024 votes involved vouching at all, and that roughly 71% of those were already registered voters simply updating an address. Local law enforcement in Hennepin County is now reviewing the footage, which has reportedly been viewed more than seven million times. O’Keefe, who was ousted in 2023 from Project Veritas, the right-wing organization he founded, over what its own board called financial malfeasance, built his career on precisely this kind of stunt. He targeted Minneapolis after Trump zeroed in on the state as a hotbed of election fraud based on nothing but racist vibes. Now it looks like O’Keefe is left holding the bag.

That is the recurring joke at the heart of MAGA’s election theater: The people who arrive promising to expose a corrupt system keep discovering that the system has rules for them too.

Scott Presler and his political action committee, Early Vote Action, offer another version of the same schtick. The watchdog group Public Citizen recently filed a complaint alleging that Presler and his group failed to register or disclose spending related to their campaign to unseat three Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices in the state’s 2025 retention election. Under Pennsylvania law, any committee spending more than $250 to influence an election, including a judicial retention race, must register and disclose its donors and expenditures. Presler’s operation reportedly ran a two dozen person paid field staff in the state, sent tens of thousands of postcards to Amish voters and texted more than 100,000 people in Bucks County alone, yet it never once showed up in the state’s campaign finance database. The complaint alleges that Presler and Early Vote Action sidestepped transparency laws meant to let voters know who is bankrolling attempts to hijack their judiciary. 

The justices Presler tried to unseat, all Democrats, were reelected anyway. Since then, he has become a prominent outside advocate for the SAVE America Act, pressing Senate Republicans to embrace the Trump-endorsed legislation’s proof-of-citizenship and voter-identification mandates. A separate Public Citizen complaint alleges that neither Presler nor his affiliated super PAC registered lobbying disclosures for activity promoting the measure on Capitol Hill.

The pattern here is unmistakable.

The Trump administration is building an extraordinary federal apparatus, backed by the Supreme Court’s blessing on at least part of it, to police an epidemic of noncitizen voting that its own Justice Department cannot document well enough to win a single voter roll case in 23 tries. The propagandists who manufactured the visual evidence for that epidemic, chief among them D’Souza, are settling defamation suits and apologizing to the private citizens they smeared. The stunt artists trying to manufacture a fresh round of viral fraud evidence are instead generating criminal referrals against themselves. And the MAGA media personalities raising money and influence around the cause of “election integrity” are themselves facing questions about whether they followed the disclosure rules that govern political spending.

The Big Lie was never just a rhetorical grievance nursed by Trump’s inner circle. It was a lucrative enterprise built to destroy our faith in elections. Instead, it continues to expose the people who sold it. 

The midterms will bring more attempts to manufacture doubt with ominous warnings and baseless allegations of fraud. The lesson from 2020, despite Trump’s return to the White House, has not changed. Do not yield to MAGA’s performance. Fight back and protect the people who administer elections.

The post MAGA influencers are still paying for the Big Lie appeared first on Salon.com.

America is a politically polarized country. But one topic has both the left and the right in full agreement: Flock cameras suck. No one likes the government spying on them.

To make matters worse, police and 911 staff enjoy using Flock cameras to stalk their exes. — Read the rest

The post Police and 911 staff have used Flock cameras to stalk their exes appeared first on Boing Boing.

Georgia Election Board Employee Allegedly Goes Rogue, Requests Federal Intervention

Last week, a letter surfaced from the Georgia Election Board, signed by board executive director James Mills, requesting that the federal government intervene in his state’s election. Addressed to attorney general Todd Blanche and cc-ing Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, the letter asked that the agencies get involved with and oversee numerous aspects of Georgia’s 2026 election.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office denounced the letter. “People who are serious about election security don’t inject chaos in the eleventh hour,” a Raffensperger spokesperson told MS NOW.

Then, over the weekend, the story got weirder: Members of the state election board alleged that Mills never was authorized by the board to send the letter, and was essentially using his position to freelance ahead of the election.

“We have no control over our executive director, and he does whatever the hell he wants to,” the chair of the board, John Fervier, told reporter Jessica Huseman, who broke that aspect of the story for Votebeat.

The five-member Georgia Election Board, readers may remember, was restructured in 2023 to provide Republicans with a significant majority. President Trump has praised various members of that majority, who have entertained conspiracy theories about the way in which the state conducts its elections. A year before the DOJ launched its own investigation of the 2020 election in Fulton County, the Georgia Election Board ordered one.

Fervier, the chair who accused Mills of freelancing, is a Republican but has frequently clashed with his three Republican colleagues on the board and instead voted with its sole Democrat. He’s also clashed — sometimes very publicly — with Mills, who was hired by the board but is not on the board.

Another Republican member of the board also expressed displeasure with Mills to Votebeat’s Huseman, saying that, though this letter may have been inspired by a resolution the board voted on that urged Raffensperger’s office to begin software updates for voting machines and empowered Mills to seek federal help around those updates, Mills’ requests to the DOJ and DHS went far beyond that. That member, Salleigh Grubbs, also said board members were not given a chance to review Mills’ letter.

“In private enterprise, if I told an employee I wanted to see something before it goes and he did this, we’d be having a very different conversation,” Grubbs said. “I thought we were all on the same team.”

This mess is kind of funny, but also very serious. More broadly, this is the kind of thing we should expect heading into the midterms — an official, and perhaps not even an important official, acting on their own to encourage the Trump administration to get involved in an election and take sweeping action. The DOJ and DHS have not yet responded in any public way to Mills, but the administration has valorized similar figures who have gone rogue, such as former Mesa County, Colorado Clerk Tina Peters. Requests like Mills’ give the DOJ material to spin into whatever narrative it wants.

Bolsonaro’s Son Is on the Cusp of Becoming Brazil’s President

Flavio Bolsonaro, son of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro, came in first place in the country’s presidential election Sunday with 47% of the vote, beating President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who had 45%. Because neither candidate cleared 50%, the race will now go to a runoff on Oct. 25.

• Jair Bolsonaro, of course, was at the center of a Jan. 6-like auto-coup attempt after Lula beat him in 2022. The younger Bolsonaro has framed his campaign around revenge for his father and his associates, who were handed jail sentences.
• The right has been ascendant in Latin America, with reactionary candidates winning several elections in a row. Many explicitly align themselves with Donald Trump.
• Runoff systems, such as the one in Brazil, have sometimes blunted the rise of far-right factions. I’ll be watching to see if that happens here.
• Brazil is often compared to America in that it more successfully addressed a very similar auto-coup, prosecuting the former president behind it. Should Flavio Bolsonaro win election, that contrast will become less clear cut.

In Church, Merch, and State, Sarah Posner writes about the intersection of religion and politics in the United States. This column is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

President Donald Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan delivered a no-holds-barred defense of Trump’s mass deportation regime at the Georgia Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Victory Dinner in Duluth, Georgia, last week in an event that appeared designed to bolster the campaigns of two major Republican candidates running for U.S. Senate and governor in the state. 

Homan’s speech signaled that an unabashed defense of the administration’s immigration brutality is a key part of its midterm strategy to mobilize right-wing evangelical and Catholic voters to back Republicans. In a surprisingly profanity-laced speech that castigated critics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), including Democrats and federal judges, Homan became another administration official to inject himself into midterms campaigning this cycle, this time to lend a Christian imprimatur to Trump’s racist and violent assault on immigrants.