Nothing better illustrates the shoddy nature of US elections than a recent error regarding six thousand ballots in Arizona, a state riven by election fraud rows and about to vote on a slate of ‘election deniers’. Early voting is underway, and six thousand ballots covering only federal races were mistakenly sent out, an error that has been identified and allegedly fixed. Plainly six thousand votes can swing elections, but the scandal here is that the person in charge of fixing such errors and running the Arizona election is also a candidate, seeking the top job of governor. Katie Hobbs, current secretary of state, has neither stood aside nor recused herself from her day job. This is a bit like having an influential footy player doubling as the match umpire. Justice may be done, but it’s certainly not seen to be done.

After a summer of polls pleasing to Democrats, the latest numbers are breaking hot and hard for Republicans. Hopefuls talk of landslide wins. Democrats have long resigned themselves to losing seats in the House, which is not unusual in mid-terms, but had hoped to hold the Senate. Now, top aggregator website Real Clear Politics projects a 53-47 GOP Senate advantage, which is a three-seat pickup for Republicans, and all over US swing states, GOP challengers are running down their rivals, with even deep blue New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul in a dead heat.

Democrats had pinned their 8 November mid-term hopes on the abortion issue, after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and spent up big on TV ads in July and August. Massive congressional spending on sweeteners and plundering the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to drive fuel prices down has failed to win over voters hit by runaway inflation, crashing economic growth, and a crime epidemic boosted by a border invasion. Biden’s approval rate is cratering, as daily bloopers dot our screens. Even the blue bulwark of New England is crumbling, with rank outsiders emerging to threaten incumbents.

If 25-year-old House candidate and former Trump staffer Karoline Leavitt and ex-general Don Bolduc get up in New Hampshire – highly unlikely even with polls swinging their way – an historic realignment is indeed on. And these are not do-nothing candidates we are talking about but Trump-endorsed MAGA candidates, who will head to Washington not to make careers but to ‘take America back’. It’s worth noting that Trump’s endorsed candidates had a 92 per cent primary success rate, according to Ballotpedia.

US polling is wildly unreliable, of course – who can forget the Huffington Post’s election eve tip that Hillary Clinton was 98 per cent likely to win in 2016? Some pollsters do get it right – Rasmussen, Robert Cahaly’s Trafalgar group and Richard Baris are among the more accurate – but many media polls are little more than political tools, with data and sampling fiddles allowing pollsters to create or ‘find’ whatever they want.

Assuming the genuine pollsters have got it right, and a big red swing is building, a number of wild cards remain. Does the shy MAGA voter still exist? With Biden labelling Trump supporters as semi-fascists and domestic extremists, one could assume that conservative voters are even deeper underground this time than in 2016 and 2020. Will they turn up at the polls, especially if they think a red win is likely?

Another wild card is the Republican National Committee’s election day campaign, freed in 2018 from judge Dickinson Debevoise’s consent decree that stifled voter integrity activities for nearly 40 years. RNC chair Ronna McDaniel recently said, ‘This is the very first election where the RNC has not been under a consent decree that prevented us legally from being involved in election day operations and poll watching across the country… 2020 we didn’t do it, the RNC couldn’t, 2022 we are and we’re able to do things we’ve never been able to do.’

The party has since trained some 60,000 poll watchers and workers, has put election integrity directors in 17 battleground states since 2021, has a million volunteers engaged and 71 electoral lawsuits running. ‘It’s just the largest ground game we’ve ever made,’ she said. Whether this growing push will be enough to overcome 40 years of embedded Democrat election-day strength remains to be seen. The GOP will probably need a few election cycles to bring their efforts up to par, but at least this time they are in the game.

Moreover, public awareness of electoral fraud is now acute. Election integrity was the third top issue in a 19 October Rasmussen poll, after inflation and the economy, and 55 per cent (much higher among Republicans) agreed cheating affected the 2020 poll. Lax pandemic voter laws covering mail-in ballots, drop boxes and more have been partially rolled back in some states but not all. Electoral laws seem honoured in the breach as much as the observance. In Pennsylvania, for example, amid a slew of court cases, the Democrat secretary of state has ordered undated ballots to be counted in the mid-terms, contrary not only to state law, but also recent US Supreme Court and PA Supreme Court decisions disallowing undated ballots. A recent America First Policy Institute inquiry found hardly any counties or states had kept electoral records for the full twenty-two months required by federal laws.

In this charged atmosphere, skirmishes are already breaking out. The movie 2000 Mules exposed ballot harvesters using drop boxes; now activist observers have begun monitoring the boxes. In Maricopa County, Arizona, a Phoenix voter complained to, who else, our old friend Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, about ‘harassment’ when dropping off papers. ‘There’s a group of people hanging out near the ballot drop box filming and photographing my wife and I as we approached the drop box and accusing us of being a mule,’ said his report. Such fraud fears are well based. In nearby Yuma County former San Luis mayor Guillermina Fuentes pleaded guilty in June to ballot trafficking for Democrats in 2020, and this month two more have been charged, including a San Luis City councillor. Local activists had exposed their ballot harvesting scheme in the Mules movie. In these mid-terms, a new breed of activists will test US election machinery as never before.