July 19, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — A new poll suggests that a significant percentage of Americans on both sides of the political aisle would support seceding from the United States.
The YouGov and BrightLineWatch poll conducted last month asked participants whether they would “support or oppose” their state “seceding from the United States to join a new union,” the Daily Wire reported.
Overall, 37 percent of participants reported they were in favor of secession, a number BrightLineWatch said was “distressingly high.” According to the study, roughly two-thirds of Republicans in the southern U.S. states and almost half of Democrats in the Pacific Coast states support separation from the union.
Analysis by the Daily Wire found that “Republicans and independents in the South were most favorable to secession, at 66 percent and 50 percent, respectively. Of Democrats polled, 47 percent in the Pacific states said they want to break off. Sizable portions of independents in the Heartland and Mountain states also wanted to form their own country.”
Experts rate the insurrection and Trump’s pressure on state officials to overturn the election as among the most abnormal and important events of his presidency and identify them as grave or serious threats to American democracy. https://t.co/kpSwtlaDqX pic.twitter.com/5Yc5ZH1W6n
— Bright Line Watch (@BrightLineWatch) February 18, 2021
BrightLineWatch, an initiative dedicated to “monitor[ing] democratic practices in the U.S.” and calling “attention to threats to American Democracy,” said that “[a]s the country turns 245 years old, Americans have reasons to worry about the state of their democracy.” It said its study found “deep partisan polarization in perceptions of what is right and wrong with American democracy and the steps that should be taken to fix it.”
Experts who helped craft the study rated “the insurrection,” that is, the January 6 riot at the Capitol, “and [President Donald] Trump’s pressure on state officials to overturn the election as among the most abnormal and important events of his presidency,” with the initiative calling the doubts about the 2020 election and subsequent audit efforts “grave or serious threats to American democracy.”
BrightLineWatch said part of its study focused on the Maricopa County audit (which it called a “pseudo-audit”), saying it “sought to test how news of a partisan process questioning electoral outcomes would affect confidence in electoral integrity.”
Recent news from election audits ongoing in Arizona and Georgia have suggested discrepancies between official vote totals reported in the election and new tallies calculated after audits and independent review.
During a July 15 public senate hearing on the Maricopa County election audit, preliminary findings were revealed which indicated substantial discrepancies.
Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the contracting firm leading the Arizona audit, said his team found that 74,243 mail-in ballots counted in the election had no clear record of having been mailed out by the county. In addition, Logan said roughly 18,000 names of people who voted had been removed from the voter rolls shortly after the 2020 election. 11,326 voters who were not on the rolls November 7 appeared on the rolls after the election, on December 4. Logan also said 3,981 individuals voted in the election after registering as late as October 15, 2020. Arizona law requires voters to register at least 29 days prior to an election.
It is unclear whether the discrepancies uncovered by the Arizona audit are reflective of fraud or clerical errors.
To date, Maricopa County has refused to turn over routers which were subpoenaed by the state Senate. Arizona Senate president Karen Fann said the Senate is looking at legal options to pursue the information they need to complete the audit, as well as looking to have county representatives “sit down at the table with us and help explain these anomalies, help us understand why two and two is not adding to four right now.”
Meanwhile, new evidence from Georgia’s Fulton County has found a number of potential problems, including double-counting of ballots and voting by individuals who moved away from the county.
After suing to obtain access to ballots cast in Fulton County in the 2020 election, a group called Voter GA found that 36 batches of mail-in ballots had been double-counted, amounting to a total of over 4,000 votes, Fox News host Tucker Carlson reported July 14.
A report published by The Federalist suggested that at least 10,300 votes had been illegally cast in the 2020 presidential election based on new evidence obtained from the National Change of Address (NCOA) database, which identified Georgia residents who had confirmed their relocations with the U.S. Postal Service.
BrightLineWatch alleges that Trump’s “false narratives about the 2020 election” as well as “his role in the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol” have been important in creating the level of division that has led significant percentages of Americans to support secession.
The polling group claimed that in contrast, “President [Joe] Biden made it a signature goal to reunite a country scarred by partisan and regional divides.”
However, many conservatives have argued that President Biden and other Democrats have used increasingly divisive rhetoric against their political opponents, employing Civil War terminology to characterize the Capitol riot on January 6 and laws that tighten security controls on elections.
“We’re facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War,” Biden claimed in a speech at Pennsylvania’s National Constitution Center July 13, referring to Republican-led voter security measures enacted after the November presidential election. “That’s not hyperbole, since the Civil War.”
President Biden says there is “an unfolding assault taking place in America today, an attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote.”
“We're facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That's not hyperbole, since the Civil War.” pic.twitter.com/O73hIIdnRg
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) July 13, 2021
Biden appeared to suggest that the election security measures, combined with the January 6 riot, posed even greater threats to the union than the Civil War, a four-year long brutal conflict which threatened to permanently divide the nation and resulted in the deaths of roughly 750,000 Americans.
“The Confederates, back then, never breached the Capitol as insurrectionists did on January the 6th,” Biden said. “I’m not saying this to alarm you; I’m saying this because you should be alarmed.”
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