First posted on Instagram
Michigan Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin has said she helped organize a military-style tabletop exercise to prepare for a scenario in which, she fears, the Trump administration could use a national security incident in the final weeks of the midterm campaign to change the outcome of the election.
Slotkin, a former CIA analyst and Michigan's junior senator, made the remarks during a conversation with the Michigan Black Business Alliance at Wayne State University's Rosa Café on Tuesday, October 20. She said the administration was "trying to change the outcome of the November vote," pointing to its lawsuit over Michigan's voter rolls, its criticism of mail-in voting and its attempt to change post office rules on who may use a mail-in vote.
"The thing I'm watching very closely as a national security person, cause it's a standard tactic of authoritarians abroad, is like right in the last two weeks of the election, they somehow come up with a national security incident, something that only they can protect us from," Slotkin said. "And they'll need to send out federal law enforcement, ICE, the uniformed military, to a polling place."
She said the possibility was serious enough to warrant advance planning. "So, I'm watching that very, very closely," she said. "As a senator, I felt so strongly about this that I helped organize what's called a TTX, a table-top exercise" used by the military to game out specific scenarios.
Slotkin did not identify a specific incident already underway. She described a scenario she said she was monitoring, not an event she said had happened.
The remarks came days after Slotkin drew criticism for separate comments at the University of Chicago, in which she said she wanted the threat of prosecution to deter young graduates from working in the Trump administration — comments that led a University of Chicago student to file a Senate ethics complaint and that Slotkin later said were only meant to apply to lawbreakers.
Critics have seized on the tabletop-exercise remarks as evidence of something further. Attorney Robert Gouveia, whose video on the remarks carries the description used in the Instagram post, and the Data Republican material he cites, describe the exercises as planning for a parallel or shadow government if the midterm results fall short. That is the critics' characterisation: in the remarks quoted above, Slotkin framed the exercise as preparation for a scenario in which the administration itself disrupts the vote, and she did not describe a plan to set up a parallel government.
The clip of the Wayne State remarks was posted on October 20 and has since circulated widely online, drawing renewed attention to Slotkin's warnings about federal involvement at polling places in the run-up to the November midterms.