Ready for a Deep Dive into these Voting Rights Topics?
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The Latest Analysis for You
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The Flawed Database Undergirding the Big Lie
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The Origin of the Big Lie of Election Fraud
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The Big Lie Debunked (Again & Again & Again)
“Journalists [and voters] could better cover this moment in our history by focusing . . . on the consequences for the country if Trump wins again.
How will American life change?
Who will benefit?
Who will suffer?
The question should be “not the odds, but the stakes” as a principle for better campaign coverage”.
– Jay Rosen, Professor of journalism at New York University
[as reported by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, May 16, 2023]
The Latest Analysis for You
Inside Project 2025’s Secret Training Videos
Reporting Highlights
- Deep State Battle: Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could fight the so-called deep state on behalf of a future Trump administration remains on track.
- New Videos: Dozens of never-before-published videos created for Project 2025 were provided to ProPublica and Documented by a person who had access to them.
- Advice Given: “If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”
Project 2025, the controversial playbook and policy agenda for a right-wing presidential administration, has lost its director and faced scathing criticism from both Democratic groups and former President Donald Trump. But Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could battle against the so-called deep state government bureaucracy on behalf of a future Trump administration remains on track.
One centerpiece of that program is dozens of never-before-published videos created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy. The vast majority of these videos — 23 in all, totaling more than 14 hours of content — were provided to ProPublica and Documented by a person who had access to them.
The Project 2025 videos coach future appointees on everything from the nuts and bolts of governing to how to outwit bureaucrats. There are strategies for avoiding embarrassing Freedom of Information Act disclosures and ensuring that conservative policies aren’t struck down by “left-wing judges.” Some of the content is routine advice that any incoming political appointee might be told. Other segments of the training offer guidance on radically changing how the federal government works and what it does.
In one video, Bethany Kozma, a conservative activist and former deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Trump administration, downplays the seriousness of climate change and says the movement to combat it is really part of a ploy to “control people.”
“If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere,” Kozma says.
In the same video, Kozma calls the idea of gender fluidity “evil.” Another speaker, Katie Sullivan, who was an acting assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice under Trump, takes aim at executive actions by the administration of President Joe Biden that created gender adviser positions throughout the federal government. The goal, Biden wrote in one order, was to “advance equal rights and opportunities, regardless of gender or gender identity.”
Sullivan says, “That position has to be eradicated, as well as all the task forces, the removal of all the equity plans from all the websites, and a complete rework of the language in internal and external policy documents and grant applications.”
Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, falsely saying that he knew nothing about it and had “no idea who is behind it.” In fact, he flew on a private jet with Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which leads Project 2025. And in a 2022 speech at a Heritage Foundation event, Trump said, “This is a great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”
A review of the training videos shows that 29 of the 36 speakers have worked for Trump in some capacity — on his 2016-17 transition team, in the administration or on his 2024 reelection campaign. The videos appear to have been recorded before the resignation two weeks ago of Paul Dans, the leader of the 2025 project, and they are referenced on the project’s website. The Heritage Foundation said in a statement at the time of Dans’ resignation that it would end Project 2025’s policy-related work, but that its “collective efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels — federal, state, and local — will continue.”
The Heritage Foundation and most of the people who appear in the videos cited in this story did not respond to ProPublica’s repeated requests for comment. Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign who features in one of the videos, said, “As our campaign leadership and President Trump have repeatedly stated, Agenda 47 is the only official policy agenda from our campaign.”
Project 2025’s 887-page “Mandate for Leadership” document lays out a vast array of policy and governance proposals, including eliminating the Department of Education, slashing Medicaid, reclassifying tens of thousands of career civil servants so they could be more easily fired and replaced, giving the president greater power to control the DOJ and further restricting abortion access.
Democrats and liberal groups have criticized the project’s policy agenda as “extreme” and “authoritarian” while pointing out the many connections between Trump and the hundreds of people who contributed to the project.
“Trump’s attempts to distance himself from Project 2025 have always been disingenuous,” said Noah Bookbinder, president of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “The discovery that the vast majority of speakers in Project 2025 training videos are alumni of the Trump administration or have other close ties to Trump’s political operation is unsurprising further evidence of the close connection there.”
Several speakers in the videos acknowledge that the Trump administration was slowed by staffing challenges and the inexperience of its political appointees, and they offer lessons learned from their stumbles. Some of the advice appears at odds with conservative dogma, including a suggestion that the next administration may need to expand key government agencies to achieve the larger goal of slashing federal regulations.
Rick Dearborn, who helped lead Trump’s 2016 transition team and later served in the Trump White House as deputy chief of staff, recalled in one video how “tough” it was to find people to fill all of the key positions in the early days of the administration.
The personnel part of Project 2025 is “so important to the next president,” Dearborn says. “Establishing all of this, providing the expertise, looking at a database of folks that can be part of the administration, talking to you like we are right now about what is a transition about, why do I want to be engaged in it, what would my role be — that’s a luxury that we didn’t have,” referring to a database of potential political appointees.
Dan Huff, a former legal adviser in the White House Presidential Personnel Office under Trump, says in another video that future appointees should be prepared to enact significant changes in American government and be ready to face blowback when they do.
“If you’re not on board with helping implement a dramatic course correction because you’re afraid it’ll damage your future employment prospects, it’ll harm you socially — look, I get it,” Huff says. “That’s a real danger. It’s a real thing. But please: Do us all a favor and sit this one out.”
“Eradicate Climate Change References”
The project’s experts outline regulatory and policy changes that future political appointees should prepare for in a Republican administration.
One video, titled “Hidden Meanings: The Monsters in the Attic,” is a 50-minute discussion of supposed left-wing code words and biased language that future appointees should be aware of and root out. In that video, Kozma says that U.S. intelligence agencies have named climate change as an increasingly dire threat to global stability, which, she says, illustrates how the issue “has infiltrated every part of the federal government.”
She then tells viewers that she sees climate change as merely a cover to engage in population control. “I think about the people who don’t want you to have children because of the” — here she makes air-quotes — “impact on the environment.” She adds, “This is part of their ultimate goal to control people.”
Later in the video, Katie Sullivan, the former acting assistant attorney general under Trump, advocates for removing so-called critical race theory from public education without saying how the federal government would accomplish that. (Elementary and secondary education curricula are typically set at the state and local level, not by the federal government.)
“The noxious tenets of critical race theory and gender ideology should be excised from curriculum in every single public school in this country,” Sullivan says. (Reached by phone, Sullivan told ProPublica to contact her press representative and hung up. A representative did not respond.)
In a different video, David Burton, an economic policy expert at the Heritage Foundation, discusses the importance of an obscure yet influential agency called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The Trump administration used OIRA to help roll back regulations on economic, fiscal and environmental issues. Under Biden, OIRA took a more aggressive stance in helping review and shape new regulations, which included efforts to combat housing discrimination, ban the sale of so-called ghost guns and set new renewable fuel targets.
Burton, in the Project 2025 video, urges future political appointees to work in OIRA and argues that the office should “increase its staffing levels considerably” in service of the conservative goal of reining in the so-called administrative state, namely the federal agencies that craft and issue new regulations.
“Fifty people are not enough to adequately police the regulatory actions of the entire federal government,” Burton says. “OIRA is one of the few government agencies that limits the regulatory ambitions of other agencies.” (Burton confirmed in a brief interview that he appeared in the video and endorsed expanding OIRA’s staffing levels.)
Expanding the federal workforce — even an office tasked with scrutinizing regulations — would seem to cut against the conservative movement’s long-standing goal of shrinking government. For anyone confused by Project 2025’s insistence that a conservative president should fill all appointee slots and potentially grow certain functions, Spencer Chretien, a former Trump White House aide who is now Project 2025’s associate director, addresses the tension in one video.
“Some on the right even say that we, because we believe in small government, should just lead by example and not fill certain political positions,” Chretien says. “I suggest that it would be almost impossible to bring any conservative change to America if the president did that.”
A Trump Government-in-Waiting
The speakers in the Project 2025 videos are careful not to explicitly side with Trump or talk about what a future Trump administration might do. They instead refer to a future “conservative president” or “conservative administration.”
But the links between the speakers in the videos and Trump are many. Most of those served Trump during his administration, working at the White House, the National Security Council, NASA, the Office of Management and Budget, USAID and the departments of Justice, Interior, State, Homeland Security, Transportation and Health and Human Services. Another speaker has worked in the Senate office of J.D. Vance, Trump’s 2024 running mate.
Sullivan, the former DOJ acting assistant attorney general in charge of the department’s Office of Justice Programs, which oversees billions in grant funding, appears in three different videos. Leavitt, who is in a training video titled “The Art of Professionalism,” worked in the White House press office during Trump’s first presidency and is now the national press secretary for his reelection campaign.
A consistent theme in the advice and testimonials offered by these Trump alums is that Project 2025 trainees should expect a hostile reception if they go to work in the federal government. Kozma, the former USAID deputy chief of staff, says in one video that “many” of her fellow Trump appointees experienced “persecution” during their time in government.
In a video titled “The Political Appointee’s Survival Guide,” Max Primorac, a former deputy administrator at USAID during the Trump administration, warns viewers that Washington is a place that “does not share your conservative values,” and that new hires will find that “there’s so much hostility to basic traditional values.”
In the same video, Kristen Eichamer, a former deputy press secretary at the Trump-era NASA, says that the media pushed false narratives about then-President Trump and people who worked in his administration. “Being defamed on Twitter is almost a badge of honor in the Trump administration,” she says.
Outthinking “the Left”
The videos also offer less overtly political tutorials for future appointees, covering everything from how a regulation gets made to working with the media, the mechanics of a presidential transition process to obtaining a security clearance, and best practices for time management.
One recurring theme in the videos is how the next Republican administration can avoid the mistakes of the first Trump presidency. In one video, Roger Severino, the former director of the Office of Civil Rights in the Trump-era Department of Health and Human Services, explains that failure to meticulously follow federal procedure led to courts delaying or throwing out certain regulatory efforts on technical grounds.
Severino, who is also a longtime leader in the anti-abortion movement, goes on to walk viewers through the ins and outs of procedural law and says that they should prepare for “the left” to use every tool possible to derail the next conservative president. “This is a game of 3D chess,” Severino says. “You have to be always anticipating what the left is going to do to try to throw sand in the gears and trip you up and block your rule.” (In an email, Severino said he would forward ProPublica’s interview request to Heritage’s spokespeople, who did not respond.)
Operating under the assumption that some career employees might seek to thwart a future conservative president’s agenda, some of the advice pertains to how political appointees can avoid being derailed or bogged down by the government bureaucrats who work with them.
Sullivan urges viewers to “empower your political staff,” limit access to appointees’ calendars and leave out career staff from early meetings with more senior agency officials. “You are making it clear to career staff that your political appointees are in charge,” Sullivan says.
Other tips from the videos include scrubbing personal social media accounts of any content that’s “damaging, vulgar or contradict the policies you are there to implement” well before the new administration begins, as Kozma put it.
Alexei Woltornist, a former assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, encourages future appointees to bypass mainstream news outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post. Instead, they should focus on conservative media outlets because those are the only outlets conservative voters trust.
“The American people who vote for a conservative presidential administration, they’re not reading The New York Times, they’re not reading The Washington Post,” Woltornist says. “To the contrary, if those outlets publish something, they’re going to assume it’s false. So the only way to reach them with any voice of credibility is through working with conservative media outlets.”
And in a video about oversight and investigations, a group of conservative investigators advise future appointees on how to avoid creating a paper trail of sensitive communications that could be obtained by congressional committees or outside groups under the Freedom of Information Act.
“If you need to resolve something, if you can do it, it’s probably better to walk down the hall, buttonhole a guy and say, ‘Hey, what are we going to do here?’ Talk through the decision,” says Tom Jones, a former Senate investigator who now runs the American Accountability Foundation.
Jones adds that it’s possible that agency lawyers could cite exemptions in the public-records law to prevent the release of certain documents. But appointees are best served, he argues, if they don’t put important communications in writing in the first place.
“You’re probably better off,” Jones says, “going down to the canteen, getting a cup of coffee, talking it through and making the decision, as opposed to sending him an email and creating a thread that Accountable.US or one of those other groups is going to come back and seek.”
Do you have any information about Project 2025 that we should know? Andy Kroll can be reached by email at andy.kroll@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 202-215-6203.
Videos prepared by Lisa Riordan Seville and Chris Morran. Mariam Elba contributed research.
The Fight To Certify Elections Has Already Begun
These Swing State Election Officials Are Pro-Trump Election Deniers
Inside the Election Denial Groups Planning to Disrupt November
https://www.wired.com/story/election-denial-groups-november-2024/
As the most consequential presidential election in a generation looms in the United States, get-out-the-vote efforts across the country are more important than ever. But multiple far-right activist groups with ties to former president Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee are mobilizing their supporters in earnest, drawing on one baseline belief: Elections in the US are rigged, and citizens need to do something about it.
All the evidence states otherwise. But in recent weeks, these groups have held training sessions about how to organize on a hyperlocal level to monitor polling places and drop boxes, challenge voter registrations en masse, and intimidate and harass voters and election officials. And some are preparing to roll out new technology to fast-track all of these efforts: One of the groups claims they’re launching a new platform for checking voter rolls that contains billions of “data elements” on every single US citizen.
These groups could have a major impact on the 2024 election. In addition to disenfranchising voters and putting additional pressure on already overstretched election offices, they could convince more and more people that US elections are fraudulent.
Catherine Engelbrecht and her organization True the Vote have effectively tried to disenfranchise voters for more than a decade by claiming that voter rolls are filled with phony voter registrations. Engelbrecht’s rhetoric was given an unprecedented boost in the wake of 2020, when Trump and other elected officials mainstreamed conspiracies that the elections had been rigged in favor of Democrats. Hundreds of national and local election denial groups were formed, and many of them amassed huge followings on social media platforms like Telegram. As the 2024 presidential election looms, they are ramping up efforts to do it again.
“It could be exponentially worse than what we saw in 2020, but we’re going to be awake, we’re going to be engaged, we are going to understand the process, and we’re going to have options to continue to hold to those truths,” Engelbrecht said during a March webinar titled “Election Integrity Team Building 101.” “We’re not going to back down. There’s too much to lose.
The hour-long presentation was delivered from a hotel room in Denver, with Engelbrecht laying out what could sound like a relatively benign plan to monitor elections and check voter rolls. “Keep a soft heart, keep a kind word in your mouth, approach people irrespective of party with love. You will find that things will be much better if that is the approach that is taken,” Engelbrecht said. The session, she said, was overbooked.
Engelbrecht then began speaking about elections being “perilously close to cracking in half,” and her presentation became a highlight reel of election conspiracies, references to crystals, Christian nationalist rhetoric, and militaristic jargon. “If this republic’s to be saved, it’s because [of] people like all of you that are on this webinar right now. There are some bad actors out there and we live in particularly chaotic and caustic times,” said Engelbrecht. “If we wait on somebody to do something, we will watch freedom slip away on our watch. That’s how close we are.”
“These groups are trying to lay the groundwork to potentially make later claims about the election that very well may be false. But the more chaos that can be caused along the way will give more fodder to that disinformation,” Andrew Garber, an expert at the Brennan Center for Justice’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, tells WIRED. “It’s not just bad if there’s a mass voter challenge because people might get kicked off the rolls. It’s also bad if people then take that challenge and say, ‘See, look at all these ineligible voters,’ when in fact that’s not the case.”
Engelbrecht founded True the Vote in 2010, when she was an activist for the right-wing populist Tea Party movement. After the 2020 election, Engelbrecht and her collaborator Gregg Phillips became central figures in the Stop the Steal movement, and starred in the widely-debunked election conspiracy film 2000 Mules. They were also arrested for contempt of court after refusing to identify their source behind allegations that the Chinese government had accessed US election data. True the Vote also made wild allegations of widespread ballot stuffing in Georgia during the 2020 vote and a subsequent runoff in 2021. Earlier this year, True the Vote was forced to admit in court that the group had no evidence to back up its claims.
In 2022, the group rolled out a slick new software tool known as IV3, based on technology developed by Phillips, that compared names on voter rolls to a database maintained by the US Postal Service, allowing anyone to challenge voter registrations across the country if they spotted a discrepancy. A WIRED investigation, however, revealed that the information used to challenge the registration of hundreds of thousands of people was based on unreliable data.
Undeterred, True the Vote announced last week that it was relaunching IV3. Phillips claims that the software’s database now has close to “100 billion data elements about every single voter in the United States.” WIRED has not seen proof of this claim. The new IV3 system will soon be available in all 50 states, the organization said. On Thursday, the group held a webinar to train local activists on how to use it. The new system also relies on data from the US Postal Service, but Engelbrecht claimed during the presentation that Phillips and his team had “normalized” the data from all 50 states to ensure the system would not produce inaccurate results. She also said that thousands of people across the country were already registered, and that they had a long waiting list.
Additionally, she said that another software tool developed by Phillips’ team, called Ground Fusion, would be released soon; it is aimed at organizations and PACs looking to identify voting irregularities across larger geographic regions.
Engelbrecht declined to comment, claiming without evidence that WIRED had “written unfairly about True the Vote and IV3 in the past.”
True the Vote is not the only group seeking to leverage technology to supercharge the spread of election conspiracies. A secretive Georgia-based firm called EagleAI NETwork has developed a voter information database to fast-track the deletion of ineligible voters from the system. Voter rights groups have advised against its use, as insignificant errors—such as a missing comma before the suffix “Jr.”—have led to eligible names being removed. Still, at least one county in Georgia has agreed to use EagleAI to review voter challenges and conduct list maintenance activities.
One of EagleAI’s key backers is former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell, who in the past two years has become central to the push to spread election conspiracies on a national level through her well-funded Election Integrity Network.
The group has held in-person training seminars in recent years, with session topics including how to protect “Vulnerable Voters from Leftist Activists” and “Monitoring Voting Equipment and Systems.” More recently, the group has made its training sessions available online, and is now once again ramping up its efforts ahead of the 2024 election with an initiative called Soles to the Rolls, aimed at boosting challenges to voter registration.
Mitchell, EagleAI, and the Election Integrity Network did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Another training webinar called “We the People” was also hosted last month by the America Project and its offshoot, Vote Your Vision. Broadcasted online to hundreds of attendees, the webinar featured a lineup of election conspiracists, Republican lawmakers, a guy who wrote a book about fifth-generation warfare, and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
The webinar, the group’s website said, was designed to give people “the secrets to reclaiming our power and reshaping history” by using “state-of-the-art election tools,” including those involving artificial intelligence technology. While the details of exactly what these tools will look like and how they will be used are unclear, the America Project has already scheduled more training sessions in the coming weeks to give supporters more information. The group also did not reply to requests for comment.
The America Project was cofounded by disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO and conspiracist Patrick Byrne, who also funds part of the organization. Both Flynn and Byrne reportedly attended a White House meeting in late 2020 to urge Trump to essentially declare martial law and seize voting machines.
While Flynn didn’t speak during last month’s webinar, he has arguably done more than anyone since 2020 to push the notion that America’s elections are fundamentally fraudulent, appearing at conferences, in podcasts, and on right-wing news shows on a near-daily basis. Trump has also indicated that Flynn will be brought back into his administration should he win.
These efforts have been given the seal of approval by the Republican National Committee, which was recently restructured by Trump to include election deniers and family members in top positions while cutting minority outreach efforts. One of those election deniers is Christina Bobb, who will be running the “election integrity unit.” A former Trump lawyer and TV presenter on far-right channel One America News, Bobb is a major promoter of the myth that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The RNC’s election-related priorities, according to an internal memo recently obtained by NPR, include “a broader effort over the coming months to [legally] challenge voter identification and signature verification rules which were put into place for the 2020 election.”
During the America Project webinar last month, one of the hosts apologized to listeners for being unable to get Bobb to join the call that day, but promised that she would join a future session—highlighting just how closely these conspiracy-focused groups work with the mainstream GOP apparatus.
“These groups have a playbook nationally that they tend to deploy locally,” says Garber. “Some of these playbooks that have an intended national reach are then deployed through local activists, and it’s concerning because it’s the voters at the local level who suffer the effects. It’s the election officials at the local level trying to keep order at the polls, trying to make sure their voter rolls are up to date, who have to deal with this stuff.”
One of Flynn’s core messages over the past four years has been that “local action equals national impact” —an expression that revolves around a concept called “precinct strategy,” which aims to get people into key positions on local committees in order to push their narratives at the local level. In 2024, that strategy has been primed and polished.
“This concept of precinct strategy was actually endorsed by President Trump in the last election cycle,” Yehuda Miller, a Republican county committee member in New Jersey, said during the America Project seminar. “We want to take the strategy to the next level. We want to get more organized, we want to start organizing across multiple counties in a state, we want to start organizing across multiple states. We have the power to direct our elected officials.”
Joyce Vance, Heather Cox Richardson and Emily Brooks on Trump’s Project 2025:
Civil Discourse, Joyce Vance
Understanding This: About the Court
July 31, 2024
href=”https://substack.com/@joycevance
JOYCE VANCE
On Monday, President Biden went to Texas to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Act banned discrimination in public facilities including restaurants, hotels, and theaters. It integrated schools and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The law was the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, and it has radically transformed our society over the years.
President Biden went to Texas to celebrate the completion of “the job that Lincoln started.” President Johnson nominated the first Black man, Thurgood Marshall, to a seat on the Supreme Court. Now, we have the all-but-official candidacy of the first Black woman running for the presidency. It is an awesome sweep of history.
But President Biden noted we live in an era where civil rights are being rolled back: voting rights, abortion, and affirmative action are only some of the recent items the Supreme Court has attacked. He connected the dots to Project 2025, which he called an “onslaught attacking the civil rights of Americans.”
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He’s absolutely correct. Project 2025 includes some policies that should be unthinkable, like taking away birthright citizenship from existing American citizens or prohibiting schools and workplaces from engaging in initiatives popularly labeled “DEI” that focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Although Trump formally disavowed Project 2025 today, following Biden’s comments yesterday, many of its key points are a core part of his campaign rhetoric.
Like DEI, which is mentioned 39 times in Project 2025, always with an emphasis on eliminating policies that make it more possible for people who have been marginalized to take their place in society. It starts on page 4 with this comment, “The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” Trump has echoed much of that on the stump. You see how expansive the scope of rights rollback Trump intends to engage in is. Whether its Project 2025 or his campaign speeches, the substance is the same.
All of this is happening in an environment where Trump would take office knowing that he has immunity from prosecution for crimes committed while in office.
President Biden: “This nation was founded on the principle that there are no kings in America. Each of us is equal before the law, no one is above the law. And, for all practical purposes, the Court’s [immunity] decision almost certainly means that the president can violate their oath, flout our laws, and face no consequences.” The hypothetical that drives that home is the one offered by Justice Sonia Sotomayor during the oral argument for the immunity case: a president could order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival. The consequences? None. He would be immune.
There are other hypos, but that’s the one that grabs you in your gut. Assassinate a political rival. Assassinate the candidate running against you. Assassinate anyone who gets in your way. In America, with the permission of the Supreme Court.
So, on Monday, while commemorating the 1964 Civil Rights Act, President Biden announced he is backing Supreme Court reform and offered three specific items:
- A Constitutional amendment revoking presidential immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office
- 18-year term limits for Supreme Court Justices
- A binding code of conduct for the Supreme Court
We all understand these are unlikely to come into being while Biden is in office. That would take Constitutional Amendment for the first two and, at a minimum, Congressional legislation to create a binding code. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson called Biden’s proposals dead on arrival. But the important point here is that Biden has shifted the conversation and put it front and center. It’s no longer about whether there can be reform, it’s about what it will look like. Biden has opened the conversation and put it on the front burner to make sure as many Americans as possible have exposure to it.
The reality is that this is not our grandparents’ Court. It is not our parents’ Court. Ever since the decision in Citizens United that allowed corporations to inject unlimited amounts of money into our political bloodstream, unfairly influencing the outcome of elections, something dark has taken hold in our politics. As the President noted today, many of our fundamental rights have been gutted. The Court used to try and rule unanimously in earthquake cases. Brown v. Board, the case that ended discrimination in education, was 9-0. United States v. Nixon, the case that determined presidential immunity didn’t protect President Nixon from complying with subpoenas calling for him to turn over his tapes to the Independent Counsel, was unanimous. That’s a far cry from the 6-3 (5-4 on whether the government can use evidence involving official acts) opinion in Trump v. United States.
Joan Biskupic has a piece for CNN this morning, where she writes that Chief Justice John Roberts “made no serious effort” to write an opinion that could bring Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson on board. There was no “cross-ideological agreement” along the lines that led to bipartisan majorities in other presidential powers cases. Biskupic writes that Roberts was focused on looking “beyond Trump,” as though that matters if he’s reelected.
The Court could have found middle ground. It could have moved forward without the delay that guaranteed Trump could proceed to the election without facing accountability at the hands of a jury. But it did not. Biskupic concluded that Roberts “appears to have abandoned his usual institutional concerns.” Well, yes. Clarence Thomas’ ethics violations (to say nothing of Justice Alito’s) remain unaddressed. Adherence to precedent was all but abandoned is a series of critical cases. And the final nail in the coffin was the decision in the immunity case.
It’s a tough moment. We rely on our courts to be the independent third branch of government that preserves checks and balances on the other two branches. They are not supposed to be unelected politicians in black robes. Permitting doubt to fester on the ethical issues at the same time decisions depart from longstanding legal principles of following precedent isn’t what you would you’d expect from someone who wants to ensure the health of the Court as an institution. Its decisions are enforced because the public has confidence in it, not because it has armies to send out to guarantee that its word is law.
It’s difficult for people who believe in the importance of the rule of law to have serious doubts about the nation’s highest Court. But those doubts are not a flaw in our understanding; they are a failure tolerated by the Court itself, mostly its conservative wing. The Court should have taken steps to restore our confidence. They have not, and so President Biden has stepped into that breach, creating space for a conversation that he hopes Kamala Harris will have the opportunity to finish.
Like we’ve said before, the Court is on the ballot.
We’re in this together.
Project 2025 director steps down amid Trump campaign criticism
EMILY BROOKS
7/30/24
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4800942-project-2025-director-departs/
His exit comes as Democrats have made Project 2025 central to their campaign attacks on Republicans and former President Trump.
Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita said at a CNN-Politico event at the Republican National Convention earlier this month that Project 2025 was “a pain in the a‑‑.”
Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson
July 30, 2024
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/
On Friday, speaking to Christians at the Turning Point Action Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump begged the members of the audience to “vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what: it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine…. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”
The comment drew a lot of attention, and on Monday, Fox News Channel personality Laura Ingraham gave him a chance to walk the statement back. Instead, he said: “I said, vote for me, you’re not going to have to do it ever again. It’s true.” “Don’t worry about the future. You have to vote on November 5. After that, you don’t have to worry about voting anymore. I don’t care, because we’re going to fix it. The country will be fixed and we won’t even need your vote anymore, because frankly we will have such love, if you don’t want to vote anymore, that’s OK.”
Trump’s refusal to disavow the idea that putting him back into power will mean the end of a need for elections is chilling and must be viewed against the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s July 1, 2024, decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States. In that decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court’s right-wing majority said that presidents cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of a president’s “official duties” and that presidents should have a presumption of immunity for other presidential actions.
John Roberts defends the idea of a strong executive and has fought against the expansion of voting rights made possible by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The idea that it is dangerous to permit minorities and women to vote suggests that there are certain people who should run the country. That tracks with a recently unearthed video in which Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance calls childless people “psychotic” and “deranged,” and refers unselfconsciously to “America’s leadership class.”
The idea that democracy must be overturned in order to enable a small group of leaders to restore virtue to a nation is at the center of the “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy” championed by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. Orbán’s imposition of an authoritarian Christian nationalism on a former democracy, in turn, has inspired the far-right figures that are currently in charge of the Republican Party. As Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts put it: “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.”
Kevin Roberts has called for “institutionalizing Trumpism” and pulled together dozens of right-wing institutions behind the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to create a blueprint for a second Trump term. Those who created Project 2025 are closely connected to the Trump team, and Trump praised its creators and its ideas.
Today, The New Republic published the foreword Vance wrote for Kevin Roberts’s forthcoming book. Vance makes it clear he sees Kevin Roberts and himself as working together to create “a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics.” Like others on the Christian right, Vance argues that “the Left” has captured the country’s institutions and that those institutions must be uprooted and those in them replaced with right-wing Christians in order to restore what they see—inaccurately—as traditional America.
That determination to disrupt American institutions fits neatly with the technology entrepreneurs who seem to believe that they are the ones who should control the nation’s future. Vance is backed by Silicon Valley libertarian Peter Thiel, who put more than $10 million behind Vance’s election to the Senate. In 2009, Thiel wrote “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
“The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics,” he wrote. “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
Thiel set Vance up to invest in companies that made him wealthy and touted Vance for the vice presidential slot, and in turn, the Silicon Valley set are expecting Vance to help get rid of the regulation imposed by the Biden administration and to push cryptocurrency. Trump appears to be getting on board with comments about how the tech donors are “geniuses,” praising investor Elon Musk and saying, “We have to make life good for our smart people.” In a piece that came out Sunday, Washington Post reporters Elizabeth Dwoskin, Cat Zakrzewski, Nitasha Tiku, and Josh Dawsey credited the influence of Thiel and other tech leaders for turning Vance from a Never-Trumper to a MAGA Republican.
Judd Legum of Popular Information reported today that the cryptocurrency industry is investing heavily in the 2024 election, with its main super PAC raising $202 million in this cycle. Three large cryptocurrency companies are investing about $150 million in pro-crypto congressional candidates.
On Saturday, Trump said he would make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world.” He promised to end regulations on cryptocurrency, which, because it is not overseen by governments, is prone to use by criminals and rogue states. That regulation is “a part of a much larger pattern that’s being carried out by the same left-wing fascists to weaponize government against any threat to their power,” Trump said. “They’ve done it to me.”
But the problem that those trying to get rid of the modern administrative state continue to run up against is that voters actually like a government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights. In recent days, Minnesota governor Tim Walz has been articulating how popular that government is as he makes the television rounds.
On Sunday, CNN’s Jake Tapper listed some of Walz’s policies—he passed background checks for guns, expanded LGBTQ protections, instituted free breakfast and lunch for school kids—and asked if they made Walz vulnerable to Trump calling him a “big government liberal.” Walz joked that he was, indeed, a “monster.”
“Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn, and women are making their own health care decisions, and we’re a top five business state, and we also rank in the top three of happiness…. The fact of the matter is,” where Democratic policies are implemented, “quality of life is higher, the economies are better…educational attainment is better. So yeah, my kids are going to eat here, and you’re going to have a chance to go to college, and you’re going to have an opportunity to live where we’re working on reducing carbon emissions. Oh, and by the way, you’re going to have personal incomes that are higher, and you’re going to have health insurance. So if that’s where they want to label me, I’m more than happy to take the label.”
The extremes of Project 2025 have made it clear that the Republicans intend to destroy the kind of government Walz is defending and replace it with an authoritarian president imposing Christian nationalism. And when Americans hear what’s in Project 2025, they overwhelmingly oppose it. Trump has tried without success to distance himself from the document.
He and his team have also hammered on the Heritage Foundation for their public revelations of their plans, and today the director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, stepped down. The Trump campaign issued a statement reiterating—in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary—that Trump had nothing to do with Project 2025 and adding: “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should service as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign—it will not end well for you.”
The Harris campaign responded to the news by saying that “Project 2025 is on the ballot because Donald Trump is on the ballot. This is his agenda, written by his allies, for Donald Trump to inflict on our country. Hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real—in fact, it should make voters more concerned about what else Trump and his allies are hiding.”
The reasoning behind the idea of a strong executive, or a “leadership class” that does not have to answer to voters, is that an extremist minority needs to take control of the American government away from the American people because the majority doesn’t like the policies the extremists want.
When Trump begs right-wing Christians to turn out for just one more election, he is promising that if only we will put him into the White House once and for all, we will never again have to worry about having a say in our government. As Trump put it: “The country will be fixed and we won’t even need your vote anymore.”
“How Ideological Diversity Moderates Republican Support for Voter Suppression Measures: The Cases of Georgia and Alabama”
Abstract below of new scholarship from Jesse H. Rhodes and Adam Eichen:
Why do Republicans sometimes decline to enact voter suppression measures, even when contextual conditions (unified control of state government, electoral threats from Democrats, and racial threats from African American and Latinx voters) suggest that they should?
We argue that ideological diversity within state Republican parties plays an important role in moderating Republican efforts to adopt policies that substantially increase the cost of voting.
When a state Republican Party is more ideologically diverse, members may differ significantly on the preferred severity of voting restrictions and the priority of ballot restrictions relative to other issues. Thus, more heterogeneous Republican Parties may be less willing and able to institute voter suppression measures. In contrast, more ideologically unified Republican Parties face fewer barriers to collective action in advancing ballot restrictions, facilitating their adoption of voter suppression measures. We illustrate our arguments with case studies from Georgia and Alabama.
Combating Misinformation and Building Trust in Elections: Assessing Election Official Communications During the 2022 Election Cycle
New report from Thessalia Merivaki and Mara Suttmann-Lea. Abstract:
In this project, we identify the dominant trust-building campaigns used by state and local election officials, with an emphasis on combating misinformation, during the 2022 election cycle. In partnership with the Algorithmic Transparency Institute (ATI.io), we analyzed 50,000 organic posts from over 118 state election officials’ and 1,000 local election officials’ accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter between September 10 and November 15, 2022. We produced a one-of-a-kind repository of these communications, organized using a comprehensive taxonomy of election-related labels. This database is used to identify best trust-building communication practices, and evaluate the effectiveness of these practices on voter attitudes.
“When claims of a stolen election become a political strategy “
New post at the Kofi Annan Foundation website.
“Reckoning with Our Rights: The Evolution of Voter Access in California, Part I”
New in the California Supreme Court Historical Society Review.
Supreme Court approves South Carolina congressional map previously found to dilute Black voting power
THE NEW PROPAGANDA WAR
Autocrats in China, Russia, and elsewhere are now making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world.
How Far would Trump G0?
Robert Kagan’s latest plea for sufficient civic virtue to stop Trump’s reelection
In the Washington Post, adapted from his forthcoming book. His essay is eloquent. Here’s some excerpts:
A healthy republic would not be debating whether Trump and his followers seek the overthrow of the Founders’ system of liberal democracy. … As one 56-year-old Michigan woman present at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 explained: “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.” …
Trump … has explicitly promised to violate the Constitution when he deems it necessary. That by itself makes him a unique candidate in American history and should be disqualifying.
This kind of open challenge to our democracy was never meant to be addressed by the courts. As the Founders well understood, you don’t serve a subpoena to a would-be tyrant and tell him to lawyer up. Nor was it meant to be addressed by the normal processes of democratic elections. They knew, and feared, that a demagogue could capture the allegiance of enough voters to overthrow the system. That was why they gave Congress, and particularly the Senate, supposedly more immune from popular pressures, the power to impeach and remove presidents and to deny them the opportunity to run again — and not simply because they violated some law but because they posed a clear and present danger to the republic. After Trump’s attempt to overthrow the government in 2020, Congress had a chance to use the method prescribed by the Founders in precisely the circumstances they envisioned. But Senate Republicans, out of a combination of ambition and cowardice, refused to play the vital role the Founders envisioned for them. The result is that the nightmare feared by the Founders is one election away from becoming reality.…
Americans … know he would not respect the results of fair elections if he loses, which is the very definition of a tyrant.
So, why will so many vote for him anyway? For a significant segment of the Republican electorate, the white-hot core of the Trump movement, it is because they want to see the system overthrown. …
Many of Trump’s core supporters insist they are patriots, but whether they realize it or not, their allegiance is not to the Founders’ America but to an ethnoreligious definition of the nation that the Founders explicitly rejected. …
If the American system of government fails this year, it will not be because the institutions established by the Founders failed. It will not be because of new technologies or flaws in the Constitution. No system of government can protect against a determined tyrant. Only the people can. This year we will learn if they will.
Why It Matters Legally Whether We Conceive of the Trump Case as One of “Election Interference”
Right-Wing Media Are in Trouble
The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing; it’s utterly collapsing.
[Excerpts:]
The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing, as in the rest of the industry; it’s utterly collapsing.
This past February, readership of the 10 largest conservative websites was down 40 percent compared with the same month in 2020, according to The Righting, a newsletter that uses monthly data from Comscore—essentially the Nielsen ratings of the internet—to track right-wing media. (February is the most recent month with available Comscore data.) Some of the bigger names in the field have been pummeled the hardest: The Daily Caller lost 57 percent of its audience; Drudge Report, the granddaddy of conservative aggregation, was down 81 percent; and The Federalist, founded just over a decade ago, lost a staggering 91 percent. (The site’s CEO and co-founder, Sean Davis, called that figure “laughably inaccurate” in an email but offered no further explanation.) FoxNews.com, by far the most popular conservative-news site, has fared better, losing “only” 22 percent of traffic, which translates to 23 million fewer monthly site visitors compared with four years ago.
A simpler explanation is that conservative digital media are disproportionately dependent on social-media referrals in the first place. Many mainstream publications have long-established brand names, large newsrooms to churn out copy, and, in a few cases, large numbers of loyal subscribers. Sites like Breitbart and Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire, however, were essentially Facebook-virality machines, adept at injecting irresistibly outrageous, clickable nuggets into people’s feeds. So the drying-up of referrals hit these publications much harder.
More broadly, the loss of readership can’t be helpful to the ideological cause. Top-drawing sites like the conspiratorial Gateway Pundit and Infowars help keep the MAGA faithful faithful by recirculating, amplifying, and sometimes creating the culture-war memes and talking points that dominate right and far-right opinion. Less traffic means less influence.
The trouble is that there are now alternatives to the alternatives. The Righting’s proprietor, Howard Polskin, pointed out to me that the websites that dominated the field in 2016—Fox News, Breitbart, The Washington Times, and so on—are no longer the only players in MAGA world. The marketplace has expanded and fragmented since then, splintering the audience seeking conservative or even extremist perspectives among podcasts, YouTube videos, Substack newsletters, and boutique platforms like Rumble. “There’s a lot of choice,” Polskin said. “Even if [the big] sites went out of business tomorrow, there are a lot of voices still out there.”
The precipitous decline in traffic to conservative publications raises a larger and possibly unanswerable question: Did these operations ever really hold the political and cultural clout that critics ascribed to them at their peak? Recall the liberal anger in 2020 when Ben Shapiro was routinely dominating Facebook’s most-engaged content list, generating accusations that Facebook’s algorithm was favoring right-wing posts and pushing voters toward Trump. Yet Joe Biden went on to win the election easily, and Democrats overperformed in the 2022 midterms. Now, as conservatives cry that Big Tech has crushed their traffic, Trump is running neck and neck with Biden in the polls, even with a legal cloud hanging over him and shortfalls of campaign cash. Maybe who wins the traffic contest doesn’t matter as much as it once appeared.
Democratic tech group aims to shake up Republican statehouses in 2024
[Excerpts:]
Tech for Campaigns, a Democratic organization made up of tech industry workers seeking to influence state elections, is expanding its playing field to include six states where Republicans have commanding majorities in state legislatures.
Jessica Alter, the organization’s co-founder and chair, said in an interview that beginning this year, Tech for Campaigns would commit resources to state legislative candidates in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas, in addition to swing states such as Arizona and Michigan where the organization has previously focused.
The move is part of a new, long-term strategy that the organization is calling “Next Ten”: targeting Republican-dominated state capitals where Democrats might have a chance to flip control of the state legislature in the next 10 years.
Tech for Campaigns consists of 17,000 tech workers who are clustered in coastal cities such as San Francisco and New York but who volunteer remotely to help Democrats in state legislative races. This year, they say they’re using artificial intelligence to help create ads and fundraising emails, allowing them to stretch resources further than before.
The organization is unabashedly pro-Democrat, having formed in 2017, a low point for the party, when progressive tech workers in Democratic states decided to think more strategically about helping down-ballot candidates across the country.
Alter said the organization is filling a void where other Democratic organizations have failed to invest.
“Because these places are a little bit more ignored, it’s even more valuable. No one’s knocking down their door to help,” she said.
In contrast to Tech for Campaigns, many conservative tech personalities have backed away from involvement in the 2024 election compared to previous years, but Republican groups have also specifically said they’re leveraging artificial intelligence technology in their election efforts.
Republicans have majorities in each chamber in the Democratic group’s six “Next Ten” state capitals, and in some states, they have supermajorities. In North Carolina, that has meant Republicans can override any veto by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper if they stick together. But the chamber is split 30-20, and Democrats could take away Republicans’ override power if they pick up one seat and keep the governorship.
“So the plan this year is not to flip the North Carolina Senate, for instance, where we’re working very closely, but to break a supermajority,” Alter said.
Democratic state Sen. Jay Chaudhuri said the party’s long-term plan to make North Carolina competitive involves getting new district maps, which will likely require getting more Democrats on the state’s highest court. Last year, a new Republican majority on the state’s Supreme Court allowed new maps far more favorable to Republicans.
Chaudhuri said Tech for Campaigns may help with about five state Senate campaigns this year, with more help expected in years ahead.
“Too often, progressive and Democratic donors are focused much more on the presidential level than the state legislative level. They’re focused too much on winning the election cycle rather than on winning the decade,” he said.
The stakes are rising given the weighty issues facing state lawmakers, from abortion to election administration to LGBTQ rights. And with more than 7,000 people serving in state legislatures, there’s no shortage of candidates with extreme views.
“You’re seeing folks that have signed on to the pledge to remove Texas from the union. You have people that are supported by groups that want to execute people for having abortions,” said Dylan Doody, executive director of the Texas House Democratic Campaign Committee, referring to two ongoing controversies in the state.
Doody said that as a result, Texas has some pickup opportunities for Democrats, and he thinks help from Tech for Campaigns could put them over the top.
“They’re thinking way ahead of where a lot of establishment, old money is thinking,” he said.
Tech for Campaigns helps state legislative candidates in a variety of ways. It assigns volunteers to work closely with campaigns on specific tasks such as website design. Those volunteers also provide ongoing assistance with email fundraising and digital advertising — often using skills from their day jobs at tech companies large and small. Some are helping candidates in states where they grew up, while others have no specific ties to where they are directing their volunteer hours.
The organization also has a political action committee that it uses for voter turnout efforts, separate from campaign work. In the 2020 campaign cycle, it spent $10.5 million, with $6.1 million going to buy ads with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, according to the nonpartisan research site OpenSecrets. For 2024, the organization said its budget will be $10 million to $14 million across all its programs. Its donors have included OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Netflix Co-CEO Greg Peters, though its top donors were tech investors Jessica Livingston, who gave $5 million, and Michael Duca, who gave $1.6 million, according to OpenSecrets.
That money and the volunteer help can go a lot further in a state legislative race than in a race for the U.S. Senate, especially in places where state lawmakers aren’t used to outside help.
Texas state Rep. James Talarico said some of his fellow Democrats have bare-bones budgets, but he said it takes $1 million to run in a competitive Texas House district.
“There are groups nationwide that will swoop in and endorse you — provide their name, put you on a website — which is great and any help is appreciated, but there are very few groups that provide tangible help, meaning dollars or volunteers or communications support, and Tech For Campaigns provides all three,” he said.
Talarico said he’s familiar with claims going back many years that Democrats are on the cusp of turning Texas “blue” — claims that have consistently fallen short of reality — and he said what’s been missing is tangible help.
“I’ve come across other organizations that want to see Texas go blue, but not a lot of organizations that have offered tangible help to make that a reality,” he said.
“The Supreme Court and Young Voter Turnout”
Georgia, with its long history of the suppression of Black voters, has been ground zero for fights about voting rights laws for decades. The state has often seen stark differences in turnout between white and nonwhite communities, with the latter typically voting at a much lower rate.
But not always: In the 2012 election, when Barack Obama won a second term in the White House, the turnout rate for Black voters under 38 in Lowndes County — a Republican-leaning county in southern Georgia — was actually four percentage points higher than the rate for white voters of a similar age.
It proved to be temporary. According to new research by Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., by 2020, turnout for younger white voters in Lowndes was 14 percentage points higher than for Black voters of the same age.
What happened in between? It is impossible to tell for certain, with many variables, such as Obama no longer being on the ballot.
But a growing body of evidence points to a pivotal 2013 Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v. Holder, that knocked down a core section of the Voting Rights Act. The court effectively ended a provision requiring counties and states with a history of racial discrimination at the polls — including all of Georgia — to obtain permission from the Justice Department before changing voting laws or procedures.
Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson
March 22, 2024
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/
[Excerpt]:
Midnight tonight was the deadline for the continuing resolution that was funding much of the government, and the House finally passed the necessary appropriations bills this morning, just hours before the deadline, by a vote of 286–134. Democrats put the bill over the top, adding 185 yea votes to the 101 Republicans voting in favor of the bill. In a blow to House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), 112 Republicans joined 22 Democrats to vote against the measure..
As soon as the bill passed, Johnson recessed the House until April 9.
Because the deadline to prevent a government shutdown was so tight, the Senate needed to take the House measure up immediately. But Senate rules mean that such a quick turnaround needs unanimous consent, and right-wing senators refused to give it.
Instead, Republican senators Ted Budd (NC), Mike Lee (UT), Ted Cruz (TX), and Rand Paul (KY) demanded votes on extremist amendments to try to jam Democrats into a bind before the upcoming election. If the amendments passed, the government would shut down for the purely mechanical reason that the House can’t consider any amendments until it gets back to work in April. So the Democrats would certainly vote against any amendments to keep the government open. But this would mean they were on record with unpopular votes in an election year.
The demand for amendments was partisan posturing, but the delay was particularly nasty: Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), who was a key negotiator of the bill, needed to get back to Maine for her mother’s funeral.
In the House, the passage of the appropriations bill and the recess prompted significant changes. Representative Kay Granger (R-TX) announced she is stepping down from chairing the Appropriations Committee.
Another Republican representative, Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, announced he will leave Congress early, stepping down on April 19. Gallagher is chair of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and has voiced frustration with the current state of his party. His absence will shave the Republican House majority to just one vote, and the timing of his departure means he will not be replaced this session. Wisconsin law leaves any vacancy after the second Tuesday in April until the general election.
Representative Ken Buck (R-CO) announced last week that he, too, was leaving Congress early, complaining that “[t]his place has just evolved into…bickering and nonsense.” Today was his last day in the House. Before he left, he became the first Republican to sign on to the discharge petitions that would bring Ukraine aid to the floor even without House speaker Johnson’s support.
Despite the frustration of their colleagues, extremist Republicans are not backing down. After the appropriations measure passed, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) told reporters she has filed a motion to vacate the chair to punish Johnson for permitting the bill to pass without more extremist demands. Her threat will hang over the two-week break, but it is not clear what the House will do with her motion; they might simply bottle it up in committee.
Greene might not push a vote on the speaker right now in part because of pressure from her colleagues to cut it out. They understand that the extraordinary dysfunction of the House under Republicans’ control is hurting them before the 2024 election, and another speaker fight would only add to the chaos. There is also the reality that with such a small majority, Johnson would have to rely on Democrats to save his speakership if it were challenged, and a number of them have suggested they would vote to keep him in the chair if he would agree to bring a vote on aid for Ukraine to the floor.
Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told CNN that he would “make common cause with anybody who will stand up for the people of Ukraine, anybody who will get desperately needed humanitarian assistance to Gaza, and anybody who will work for a two state solution. I’m up for conversations with anybody.”
The cost of Johnson’s withholding of assistance for Ukraine is mounting. Last night, Russia launched the largest barrages of missiles and drones since its war began at Ukraine’s power grid, leaving more than a million people without power and degrading Ukraine’s energy sector. The Institute for the Study of War assessed today that “continued delays in Western security assistance…are reportedly expected to significantly constrain Ukraine‘s air defense umbrella,” leaving Ukrainian forces unable to defend against missile attacks. Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky once again begged for aid, saying: “Russian missiles do not suffer delays in the way aid packages to our country do. Shahed drones are not affected by indecision like some politicians are.”
Ukraine has been using drones to attack Russia’s oil refineries, but Russia had a new problem today as a deadly attack on a Moscow concert hall claimed at least 60 lives. The Islamic State’s Afghan branch, known as ISIS-K, which advocates for civilian mass-casualty events to weaken governments, claimed responsibility for the attack.
White Christian Nationalism is the dangerous belief that America is – and must remain – a Christian nation founded for its white Christian inhabitants and that our laws and policies must reflect this. Christian Nationalists deny the separation of church and state promised by our Constitution, and they oppose equality for people of color, women, LGBTQ+ people, religious minorities, and the nonreligious.
Increasingly, members of the media, academics and others use the term “Christian Nationalism,” and often “white Christian Nationalism,” to describe a political movement that seeks to topple our democracy by undermining church-state separation and declaring America a “Christian nation.” This resurgent movement is part of the backlash against the changing demographics in America and the struggle to retain traditional white Christian power structures. These extremists are raging against the dying of their privilege.
Since the late 1970s, Americans United has worked to expose and combat White Christian Nationalism. It began with the Religious Right, a religio-political force of extreme Christian fundamentalists who sought to tear down the church-state wall, ‘Christianize’ public schools and other government institutions, roll back women’s rights, strip LGBTQ+ people of basic freedoms, and impose a theocratic state on the country. Backed by a billion-dollar shadow network of powerful organizations and political allies spending millions on litigation, lobbying, and messaging, this movement will stop at nothing to secure their power and privilege.
Donald Trump is a national-security risk
Tom Nichols
March 13, 2024
[Excerpts:]
According to reports last week, the U.S. intelligence community is preparing to give Donald Trump classified intelligence briefings, a courtesy every White House extends to major-party candidates to ensure an effective transition. An excellent tradition—but not one that should be observed this year.
. . . .
Government employees who hold clearances have to attend annual refresher courses about a variety of issues, including some pretty obvious stuff about not writing down passwords or taking money from a friendly Chinese businessman wearing an American baseball cap. (No, really, that’s a scenario in some of the course materials.) But one area of annual training is always about “insider threats,” the people in your own organization who may pose risks to classified information. Federal workers are taken through a list of behaviors and characteristics that should trigger their concern enough to report the person involved, or at least initiate a talk with a supervisor.
Trump checks almost every box on those lists. (You can find examples of insider-threat training here and here, but every agency has particular briefs they give to their organizations.)
. . .
Opposing U.S. policy, for example, is not a problem for people with clearances—I did it myself—but Trump’s hatred of the current administration is wedded to a generic contempt for what he calls the “deep state,” a slam he applies to any American institution that tries to hold him accountable for his behavior. This kind of anti-establishment rage would put any clearance in jeopardy, especially given Trump’s rantings about how the current government (and American society overall) is full of “vermin.”
Meanwhile, a federal worker who had even a fraction of the cache of classified documents Trump took with him after he left Washington would be in a world of trouble—especially if he or she told the Justice Department to go pound sand after being instructed to return them. And by “trouble,” I mean “almost certainly arrested and frog-marched to jail.”
Trump’s knotty and opaque finances—and what we now know to be his lies about his wealth—in New York before he was a candidate would likely also have tanked his access to highly classified information. (Government workers can have a lot of problems of all kinds, but lying about them is almost always deadly for a clearance.) Worse, anyone seeking even a minor clearance who was as entangled as Trump has been over the years with the Russian government and who held a bank account in China would likely be laughed right out of the office.
Trump’s open and continuing affection for men such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and North Korean Maximum-Weirdo Dynasty Boss Kim Jong Un would also be, to say the least, a matter of concern for any security organization. (Or, I should say, for any American security organization. Russia’s FSB, I’m sure, would see no issues here.)
But even if Trump could explain away his creepy dictator crushes and clarify his byzantine finances, he is currently facing more than half a billion dollars in court judgments against him.
That’s a lot of money for anyone, and Trump’s scramble to post a bond for even a small portion of that suggests that the man is in terrible financial condition, which is always a bright-red light in the clearance process. (Debt trips up a lot of people, and I knew folks who had clearances suspended over their money troubles.)
Whether Trump is too erratic or volatile for elected office is a judgment for voters, but his statements and public behavior have long suggested (at least to me and many others) that he is an emotionally unstable person. Emotional problems in themselves are not a disqualification; we all have them. But Trump’s irrational tirades and threats are the kind of thing that can become a clearance issue. The former president’s lack of impulse control—note that he has been unable to stop attacking the writer E. Jean Carroll, despite huge court judgments against him for defaming her—could also lead him to blurt out whatever he learns from his briefings during rallies or public appearances if he thinks it will help him.
As to the other major category considered in granting clearances, I have no idea whether Trump uses or abuses substances or medications of any kind. But what I do know is that Trump encouraged an attack on the U.S. constitutional order and tried to overturn a legal election. He has now vowed to pardon people who were duly convicted in courts of law for their actions in the January 6 insurrection—he calls them “hostages”—and are now serving the sentences they’ve earned.
In sum, Trump is an anti-American, debt-ridden, unstable man who has voiced his open support for violent seditionists. If he were any other citizen asking for the privilege of handling classified material, he would be sent packing.
If he is elected, of course, government employees will have no choice but to give the returning president access to everything, including the files that are among the holiest of holies, such as the identities of our spies overseas and the status of our nuclear forces. Senior civil servants could refuse and publicly resign, and explain why, but in the end, the system (despite Trump’s “deep state” accusations) is designed to support the president, not obstruct him, and a reelected President Trump will get whatever he demands.
If the American people decide to allow Trump back into the White House, President Biden can’t do anything about it. In the meantime, however, he can limit the damage by delaying Trump’s access to classified material for as long as possible.
LDF Release:
Last week, the Legal Defense Fund’s (LDF) Thurgood Marshall Institute released a new research brief, When the State Takes Over: How State Officials Usurping Local Control Threatens Local Black Political Power, authored by Senior Researcher Dr. Sandhya Kajeepeta. The brief, released during Black History Month, outlines the history and growth of local Black political power and the emergence of state takeovers as a strategy for state officials to usurp that power.
The brief provides an important perspective on how Black communities are targeted throughout the country by state takeovers without appropriate justification across multiple domains, including education, economic justice, the criminal legal system, and voting. The growing trend of state takeovers of Black-led cities, occurring when state governments intervene and take control of local affairs, the brief notes, undermines the autonomy of Black communities and represents an anti-democratic shift. Moreover, this shift is rooted in and further perpetuates a dangerous narrative that majority-Black localities are unfit to govern their own communities….
Newly Released Messages Detail Roots of the ‘Fake Electors’ Scheme
Emails and texts unearthed in a lawsuit show how key figures intended their plan to create a “cloud of confusion” to help keep Donald Trump in office after his 2020 election loss.
By Luke Broadwater and Maggie Haberman
March 4, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/us/politics/chesebro-troupis-jan-6-messages.html
[Excerpt:]Just five days after Election Day in 2020, a conservative lawyer named Kenneth Chesebro emailed a former judge who was working for the Trump campaign in Wisconsin, James R. Troupis, pitching an idea for how to overturn the results.
Through litigation, Mr. Chesebro said, the Trump campaign could allege “various systemic abuses” and, with court proceedings pending, encourage legislatures to appoint “alternative” pro-Trump electors that could be certified instead of the Biden electors chosen by the voters.
“At minimum, with such a cloud of confusion, no votes from WI (and perhaps also MI and PA) should be counted, perhaps enough to throw the election to the House,” Mr. Chesebro wrote to Mr. Troupis, referring to the swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Trump allies prepare to infuse ‘Christian nationalism’ in second administration
Spearheading the effort is Russell Vought, president of The Center for Renewing America, part of a conservative consortium preparing for Trump’s return to power.
An influential think tank close to Donald Trump is developing plans to infuse Christian nationalist ideas in his administration should the former president return to power, according to documents obtained by POLITICO.
Spearheading the effort is Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget during his first term and has remained close to him.
Vought, who is frequently cited as a potential chief of staff in a second Trump White House, is president of The Center for Renewing America [CRA] think tank, a leading group in a conservative consortium preparing for a second Trump term.
Christian nationalists in America believe that the country was founded as a Christian nation and that Christian values should be prioritized throughout government and public life. As the country has become less religious and more diverse, Vought has embraced the idea that Christians are under assault and has spoken of policies he might pursue in response.
One document drafted by CRA staff and fellows includes a list of top priorities for CRA in a second Trump term. “Christian nationalism” is one of the bullet points. Others include invoking the Insurrection Act on Day One to quash protests and refusing to spend authorized congressional funds on unwanted projects, a practice banned by lawmakers in the Nixon era.
CRA’s work fits into a broader effort by conservative, MAGA-leaning organizations to influence a future Trump White House. Two people familiar with the plans, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal matters, said that Vought hopes his proximity and regular contact with the former president — he and Trump speak at least once a month, according to one of the people — will elevate Christian nationalism as a focal point in a second Trump term.
The documents obtained by POLITICO do not outline specific Christian nationalist policies. But Vought has promoted a restrictionist immigration agenda, saying a person’s background doesn’t define who can enter the U.S., but rather, citing Biblical teachings, whether that person “accept[ed] Israel’s God, laws and understanding of history.”
Vought has a close affiliation with Christian nationalist William Wolfe, a former Trump administration official who has advocated for overturning same-sex marriage, ending abortion and reducing access to contraceptives.
Vought, who declined to comment, is advising Project 2025, a governing agenda that would usher in one of the most conservative executive branches in modern American history. The effort is made up of a constellation of conservative groups run by Trump allies who’ve constructed a detailed plan to dismantle or overhaul key agencies in a second term. Among other principles, the project’s “Mandate for Leadership” states that “freedom is defined by God, not man.”
The Trump campaign has said repeatedly that it alone is responsible for assembling a policy platform and staffing for a future administration. In response to various news articles about how conservatives are preparing for a second Trump term, campaign advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said in a memo late last year: “Despite our being crystal clear, some ‘allies’ haven’t gotten the hint, and the media, in their anti-Trump zeal, has been all-too-willing to continue using anonymous sourcing and speculation about a second Trump administration in an effort to prevent a second Trump administration.”
Trump’s campaign declined to comment for this story.
Rachel Cauley, CRA’s communication director, said “the so-called reporting from POLITICO in this story is false and we told them so on multiple occasions.”
Trump is not a devout man of faith. But Christian Nationalists have been among his most reliable campaign activists and voting blocs. Trump formed a political alliance with evangelicals during his first run for office, delivered them a six to three conservative majority on the Supreme Court and is now espousing the Christian right’s long-running argument that Christians are so severely persecuted that it necessitates a federal response.
In a December campaign speech in Iowa, he said “Marxists and fascists” are “going hard” against Catholics. “Upon taking office, I will create a new federal task force on fighting anti-Christian bias to be led by a fully reformed Department of Justice that’s fair and equitable” and that will “investigate all forms of illegal discrimination.”
On the eve of the Iowa caucuses, Trump promoted on his social media a video that suggests his campaign is, actually, a divine mission from God.
In 2019, Trump’s then-secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, set up a federal commission to define human rights based on the precepts Vought describes, specifically “natural law and natural rights.” Natural law is the belief that there are universal rules derived from God that can’t be superseded by government or judges. While it is a core pillar of Catholicism, in recent decades it’s been used to oppose abortion, LGBTQ+ rights and contraception.
Vought sees his and his organization’s mission as “renew[ing] a consensus of America as a nation under God,” per a statement on CRA’s website, and reshaping the government’s contract with the governed. Freedom of religion would remain a protected right, but Vought and his ideological brethren would not shy from using their administration positions to promote Christian doctrine and imbue public policy with it, according to both people familiar with the matter, granted anonymity to avoid retaliation. He makes clear reference to human rights being defined by God, not man.
America should be recognized as a Christian nation “where our rights and duties are understood to come from God,” Vought wrote two years ago in Newsweek.
“It is a commitment to an institutional separation between church and state, but not the separation of Christianity from its influence on government and society,” he continued, noting such a framework “can lead to beneficial outcomes for our own communities, as well as individuals of all faiths.”
He went on to accuse detractors of Christian nationalism of invoking the term to try to scare people. “’Christian nationalism’ is actually a rather benign and useful description for those who believe in both preserving our country’s Judeo-Christian heritage and making public policy decisions that are best for this country,” he wrote. “The term need not be subjected to such intense scorn due to misunderstanding or slander.”
To ingratiate himself in conservative circles — and Christian conservative ones — Trump has often turned to operatives from them. Among those who helped was Vought.
As OMB director in the Trump administration, Vought became a disciple of the “America First” movement. He has been a steadfast proponent of keeping the U.S. out of foreign wars and slashing federal spending.
CRA is already wielding influence on Trump’s positions. His thinking on withdrawing the U.S. from NATO and using military force against Mexican drug cartels is partly inspired by separate CRA papers, according to reports by Rolling Stone.
“Russell Vought did a fabulous job in my administration, and I have no doubt he will do a great job in continuing our quest to make America great again,” reads a Trump quote prominently placed on CRA’s website.
Trump will have a major platform to convey his vision for Christian policy in a second term when, on Feb. 22, he addresses a National Religious Broadcasters forum in Nashville. The group is the world’s largest association of Christian communicators.
Trump is also talking about bringing his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, a vocal proponent of Christian nationalism, back into office. Flynn is currently focused on recruiting what he calls an “Army of God” — as he barnstorms the country promoting his vision of putting Christianity at the center of American life.
Vought’s beliefs over time have been informed by his relationship with Wolfe. The two spent time together at Heritage Action, a conservative policy advocacy group. And Vought has praised their yearslong partnership. “I’m proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism,” he posted on X, then Twitter, in January 2023.
Vought often echoes Wolfe’s principles, including on immigration. “Jesus Christ wasn’t an open-borders socialist,” Wolfe wrote for The Daily Caller in April while a visiting CRA fellow. “The Bible unapologetically upholds the concept of sovereign nations.”
While speaking in September at American Moment’s “ Theology of American Statecraft: The Christian Case for Immigration Restriction” on Capitol Hill in September, Vought defended the widely-criticized practice of family separation at the border during the Trump years, telling the audience “the decision to defend the rule of law necessitates the separation of families.”
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 offers more visibility into what policy agenda a future Trump administration might pursue. It says policies that support LGBTQ+ rights, subsidize “single-motherhood” and penalize marriage should be repealed because subjective notions of “gender identity” threaten “Americans’ fundamental liberties.”
It also proposes increasing surveillance of abortion and maternal mortality reporting in the states, compelling the Food and Drug Administration to revoke approval of “chemical abortion drugs” and protecting “religious and moral” objections for employers who decline contraception coverage for employees. One of the groups that partners with Project 2025, Turning Point USA, is among conservative influencers that health professionals have criticized for targeting young women with misleading health concerns about hormonal birth control. Another priority is defunding Planned Parenthood, which provides reproductive health care to low-income women.
Wolfe, who has deleted several posts on X that detail his views, has a more extreme outlook of what a government led by Christian nationalists should propose. In a December post, he called for ending sex education in schools, surrogacy and no-fault divorce throughout the country, as well as forcing men “to provide for their children as soon as it’s determined the child is theirs” — a clear incursion by the government into Americans’ private lives.
“Christians should reject a Christ-less ‘conservatism,’” he expanded in another X missive, “and demand the political movement we are most closely associated with make a return to Christ-centered foundations. Because it’s either Christ or chaos, even on the ‘Right.’”
Wolfe declined to comment.
The effort to imbue laws with biblical principles is already underway in some states. In Texas, Christian conservative supporters have pressured the legislature to require public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom; targeted prohibitions on churches against direct policy advocacy and organized campaigns around “culture war” issues, including curbing LGBTQ+ rights, banning books and opposing gun safety laws.
“There’s been a tectonic shift in how the leadership of the religious right operates,” said Matthew Taylor, a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies, who grew up evangelical. “These folks aren’t as interested in democracy or working through democratic systems as in the old religious right because their theology is one of Christian warfare.”
A federal court declines to revisit a ruling that could weaken the Voting Rights Act
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/30/1222561113/voting-rights-act-arkansas-federal-appeals-court
A federal appeals court has denied a request to revisit a ruling that could undermine a key tool for enforcing the Voting Rights Act’s protections against racial discrimination in the election process.
It’s the latest move in an Arkansas state legislative redistricting case, filed by civil rights groups representing Black voters in the southern state, that could turn into the next U.S. Supreme Court battle that limits the scope of the landmark civil rights law.
The full 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals released its decision Tuesday after attorneys led by the American Civil Liberties Union appealed the ruling by a three-judge panel last year.
That panel found that federal law does not allow private groups and individuals — who have for decades brought the majority of lawsuits under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — to sue because that law does not explicitly name them. Only the head of the Justice Department, the panel found, can bring these kinds of lawsuits.
In the 8th Circuit’s majority opinion, U.S. Circuit Judge David Stras, an appointee of former President Donald Trump who also wrote the panel’s majority opinion, said that the panel’s opinion “mostly speaks for itself.”
Three judges, however, said they would grant the request for a rehearing, including Chief Circuit Judge Lavenski Smith, an appointee of former President George W. Bush; Judge Steven Colloton, another Bush appointee; and Judge Jane Kelly, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama.
“The panel’s error is evident, but the court regrettably misses an opportunity to reaffirm its role as a dispassionate arbiter of issues that are properly presented by the parties,” Colloton wrote in a dissenting opinion that was joined by Kelly.
According to a statement released by the ACLU, the civil rights groups that brought this Arkansas lawsuit are “exploring next legal steps,” which may include a Supreme Court appeal.
For now, the panel’s ruling, which upheld a lower court ruling by U.S. District Judge Lee Rudofsky, applies only to the seven states in the 8th Circuit, which includes Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.
Other federal courts — including a 5th Circuit panel that weighed in on a congressional redistricting case in Louisiana last November — have disagreed with the 8th Circuit panel and Rudofsky, finding that there is what’s known in the legal world as a private right of action under Section 2.
Still, conservative Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas have signaled they’re interested in hearing a case that focuses on this issue.
Edited by Benjamin Swasey
Why Trump’s control of the Republican Party is bad for democracy
“Intimidation of State and Local Officeholders”
New report from the Brennan Center:
Among the report’s findings:
- 43% of state legislators have experienced threats within the past three years. 18% of local officeholders have experienced threats within the past year and a half. (p. 4)
- Because of abuse, 39% of local officeholders and 21% of state legislators are less willing to legislate on contentious issues. Officeholders interviewed gave examples like reproductive rights and gun regulation. (p. 16)
- Among local officeholders, more women and people of color than men or white people have been the subject of abusive language about their children and families. (statistics on p. 8)
- Local and state officeholders said that abuse has made them reluctant to engage with their constituents online or hold public events. (statistics on p. 19)
- 39% of local officeholders said at the time of the survey that the abuse lessened their desire to run for reelection. For women in local office, 48% said at the time of the survey that they were less willing to run for reelection compared to 34% of men. 12% of state legislators said at the time of the survey that the abuse lessened their desire to run for higher office. (p. 16)
- More Republicans than Democrats have experienced an increase in the volume of abuseover the past few years. (p. 8)
- Many attributed this to backlash within their party and for not supporting extreme policy positions.
- In interviews, many local and state officeholders pointed to the viral nature of social media as a primary contributor to the high levels of abuse they experience. (p. 15)
- According to many of the local and state officeholders interviewed, the deregulation of guns has made the abuse they’re experiencing more dangerous for them and their families. (p. 14)
The Case for Conservative Internationalism
How to Reverse the Inward Turn of Republican Foreign Policy
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/case-conservative-internationalism
The Authoritarian Playbook for 2025
How an authoritarian president will dismantle our democracy and what we can do to protect it
JANUARY 2024
A REPORT BY UNITED TO PROTECT DEMOCRACY
https://www.authoritarianplaybook2025.org/
Executive Summary
Introduction
Pardons to License Lawbreaking
Directing Investigations Against Critics and Rivals
Regulatory Retaliation
Federal Law Enforcement Overreach
Domestic Deployment of the Military
The Autocrat Won’t Leave
What Worked Last Time
Recommendations
‘This to Him Is the Grand Finale’: Donald Trump’s 50-Year Mission to Discredit the Justice System
The former president is in unparalleled legal peril, but he has mastered the ability to grind down the legal system to his advantage. It’s already changing our democracy.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/12/donald-trump-indictments-legal-system-00135151
[Excerpt:]
Trump and his allies say he is the victim of the weaponization of the justice system, but the reality is exactly the opposite. For literally more than 50 years, according to thousands of pages of court records and hundreds of interviews with lawyers and legal experts, people who have worked for Trump, against Trump or both, and many of the myriad litigants who’ve been caught in the crossfire, Trump has taught himself how to use and abuse the legal system for his own advantage and aims. Many might view the legal system as a place to try to avoid, or as perhaps a necessary evil, or maybe even as a noble arbiter of equality and fairness. Not Trump. He spent most of his adult life molding it into an arena in which he could stake claims and hunt leverage. It has not been for him a place of last resort so much as a place of constant quarrel. Conflict in courts is not for him the cost of doing business — it is how he does business. Throughout his vast record of (mostly civil) lawsuits, whether on offense, defense or frequently a mix of the two, Trump has become a sort of layman’s master in the law and lawfare.
Starting in 1973, when the federal government sued him and his father for racist rental practices in the apartments they owned, Trump learned from the notorious Roy Cohn, then searched for another Roy Cohn — then finally became his own Roy Cohn. He’s exploited as loopholes the legal system’s bedrock tenets, eyeing its very integrity as simultaneously its intrinsic vulnerability — the near sacrosanct honoring of the rights of the defendant, the deliberation that due process demands, the constant constitutional balancing act that relies on shared good faith as much as fixed, written rules. He has routinely turned what’s obviously peril into what’s effectively fuel, taking long rosters of losses and willing them into something like wins — if not in a court of law, then in that of public opinion. It has worked, and it continues to work. Trump, after all, was at one of his weakest points politically until the first of his four arraignments last spring. Ever since, his legal jeopardy and his political viability have done little but go up, together. Deny, delay and attack, always play the victim, never stop undermining the system: Trump has taken the Cohn playbook to reaches not even Cohn could have foreseen — fusing his legal efforts with his business interests, lawyers as important to him as loan officers, and now he’s done the same with politics. He’s not fighting the system, it seems sometimes, so much as he’s using it. He’s fundraising off of it. He’s consolidating support because of it. He’s far and away the most likely Republican nominee, polls consistently show. He’s the odds-on favorite to be the president again.
“He has attacked the judicial system, our system of justice and the rule of law his entire life,” said J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former federal appellate judge and one of the founders of the recently formed Society for the Rule of Law. “And this to him,” Luttig told me, “is the grand finale.”
Lots of People Will Vote This Year. That Doesn’t Mean Democracy Will Survive.
Dictators and even voters can turn elections into mere pageantry.
What Trump will campaign on in 2024
Immigration
At each of his rallies, Trump hammers Biden on the issue and paints a dystopian picture of migrants flooding the country and changing its makeup.
“All over the world, they’re coming into our country. From Africa, from Asia, all over the world,” Trump said at a recent New Hampshire rally, where he controversially claimed immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” a remark that drew comparisons to Nazi Germany.
Inflation
Inflation has come down significantly from its peak in 2022. Data released Dec. 12 showed the annual inflation rate had fallen from 9.1 percent in June 2022 to 3.1 percent as of November.
Energy
“Drill, baby, drill.”
America First foreign policy
Former Trump aides have warned he would try to pull the United States out of the NATO alliance if he’s reelected, a move that would shake the global order and could spur more aggression from Russia.
And Trump has repeatedly shown an affection for authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin of Russia, Kim Jong Un of North Korea and Viktor Orbán of Hungary . . . .
“Republicans Launch Two-Pronged Attack Against Voting Rights Act”
TPM:
In their endless quest to further defang the Voting Rights Act and gerrymander their way into permanent control, Republican officials have launched a double-headed attack on the landmark civil rights law.
The new attacks emerge as Republican politicians attempt to wriggle out of judges’ orders requiring that they draw additional, majority-minority, likely Democratic districts in their states, which could imperil their party’s thin majority in the House of Representatives.
The attacks on the already-weakened VRA take two forms: arguing that the law doesn’t protect districts controlled by coalitions of multiple minority groups, and that only the U.S. attorney general — not individual voters represented by good government groups, as is most common — can bring lawsuits under the section of the law concerning illegal vote dilution.
The West’s self-deception on Ukraine should not extend to Hungary’s Orban
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/26/orban-ukraine-europe-threat-west-hungary/
[Excerpts:]The risk of that particular self-deception has metastasized largely because of one man: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has made no secret of his intent to destroy Western unity on Ukraine.
It matters little that Orban has driven Hungary’s economy into a ditch, or that its economic output and population of 10 million are tiny fractions of the E.U.’s total. What counts is that Hungary, Putin’s Trojan horse in the heart of Europe, has weaponized the E.U.’s rules on Moscow’s behalf.
Orban, a darling of U.S. Republicans, has gutted Hungary’s democracy and made a sham of baseline E.U. expectations of its members: judicial independence, media freedom, minority rights, fair elections and tolerance.
That tragedy, for Hungarians and for Europe, will become farce next summer when Hungary takes over the rotating E.U. presidency, a role that grants Orban agenda-setting powers for a six-month term.
That bully pulpit will afford him the chance to embarrass the E.U. by showcasing his obstructionism, especially on Ukraine. But the broader threat he represents inside the alliance is real owing to the E.U.’s antiquated voting rules, including the requirement of unanimity of all member states on security and finance questions.
The Only Thing More Dangerous Than Authoritarianism
The forces of Christian nationalism are now ascendant both inside the Church and inside the Republican Party.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/12/christian-nationalism-danger/676974/
December 12, 2023
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/donald-trump-history-kazin
A MILITARY LOYAL TO TRUMP
In 2020, the armed forces were a bulwark against Donald Trump’s antidemocratic designs. Changing that would be a high priority in a second term.
Indispensable Resource from Federal Judicial Center: “Emergency Election Litigation in Federal Courts: From Bush v. Gore to Covid-19”
It’s hard to overstate how rich a resource this Federal Judicial Center book is going to be. It is totally free online; a hard copy will be available for sale soon:
Robert Timothy Reagan, Margaret S. Williams, Marie Leary, Catherine R. Borden, Jessica L. Snowden, Patricia D. Breen, Jason A. Cantone
December 4, 2023
This collection of case studies illustrates how federal judges managed the time pressures of emergency election litigation in the years 2000 through 2020. The case studies are based on reviews of the court records and interviews with more than one hundred judges. The 513 case studies cover 717 emergency cases and an additional 151 related cases.
Downloadable file:
Emergency Election Litigation in Federal Courts: From Bush v. Gore to Covid-19(link is external) 1302 pages
A Warning
America survived the first Trump term, though not without sustaining serious damage. A second term, if there is one, will be much worse.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/01/warning-second-trump-term/676117/
Liz Cheney on why she believes Trump’s reelection would mean the end of our republic
In her new book, “Oath and Honor,” the former GOP Congresswoman warns of the threats to the Constitution posed by Donald Trump, and calls blocking Trump and preventing a Republican House majority from rejecting election results “the cause of our time.”
Psychological science can help counter spread of misinformation, says APA report
WASHINGTON — Debunking, “prebunking,” nudging and teaching digital literacy are several of the more effective ways to counter misinformation, according to a new report from the American Psychological Association.
Written by a panel of U.S. and international experts on the psychology of misinformation, the report outlines the processes that make people susceptible to misinformation and offers solutions to combat it.
People are more likely to believe misinformation if it comes from groups they belong to or if they judge the source as credible, according to the report “Using Psychological Science to Understand and Fight Health Misinformation: An APA Consensus Statement (PDF, 1.75MB).” It defines misinformation as “any information that is demonstrably false or otherwise misleading, regardless of its source or intention.”
The report outlines the key features of misinformation that fool people into believing and spreading it. For instance, it found that people are more likely to believe false statements that appeal to emotions such as fear and outrage. They are also more likely to believe misinformation that paints groups that they view as “others” in a negative light. And people are more likely to believe information the more it is repeated, even when it contradicts their prior knowledge. These findings suggest that it is important to stop misinformation early, the report says.
The report also describes features of social media that help misinformation spread very quickly. “Rapid publication and peer-to-peer sharing allow ordinary users to distribute information quickly to large audiences, so misinformation can be policed only after the fact (if at all),” the report says. “’Echo chambers’ bind and isolate online communities with similar views, which aids the spread of falsehoods and impedes the spread of factual corrections.”
As a result, “most online misinformation originates from a small minority of ‘superspreaders,’ but social media amplifies their reach and influence.”
There are two levels on which misinformation can be stopped, according to the report: systemic approaches, such as legislation and technology standards, and individual approaches focused on changing individual behaviors. The latter include:
- fact-checking, or debunking;
- prebunking, or pre-emptive debunking to prevent people from falling for misinformation in the first place;
- nudges, such as asking people to consider the accuracy of information before sharing it, or rewarding people to be as accurate as possible; and
- formal education or community outreach to raise people’s awareness about healthy online behavior and media use.
The report acknowledges that there is much more to learn and recommends more research funding and industry cooperation to understand behaviors related to misinformation and create tools to correct it. The panel members who wrote the report spent more than a year reviewing the scientific literature to develop their recommendations. The report was commissioned by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and funded as part of a $2 million grant to develop effective solutions to COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.
[Boldface added]With Trump moving closer to renomination, rewriting Jan. 6 attack gains urgency
WHY IS AMERICA AFRAID OF BLACK HISTORY?
No one should fear a history that asks a country to live up to its highest ideals.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/12/freedmens-bureau-act-project-records/675807/
“Why the fight to counter false election claims may be harder in 2024”
Experts say a campaign of legal and political pressure from the right has cast efforts to combat rumors and conspiracy theories as censorship. And as a result, they say, the tools and partnerships that tried to flag and tamp down on falsehoods in recent election cycles have been scaled back or dismantled. That’s even as threats loom from foreign governments and artificial intelligence, and as former President Donald Trump, who still falsely claims to have won the 2020 contest, is likely to use the same tactics again as he pursues the White House in 2024.
Added Wilcox: “Everybody is gun-shy.”…
Amid that furor, in May 2022, the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana filed a lawsuit accusing the Biden administration of colluding with social media companies to censor conservative speech, by pressing platforms to take action on misleading posts about COVID-19 and elections.
This July, a Trump-appointed federal judge ruled the government had likely violated the First Amendment and issued a sweeping injunction blocking agencies’ communications with platforms about most content. The injunction was narrowed by an appeals court, before being put on hold last month by the Supreme Court, which is slated to hear the case this term.
Pressure is coming from Congress as well, where the House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, led by GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, a Trump ally, is conducting its own probe into alleged collusion between the Biden administration and tech companies to unconstitutionally shut down political speech.
To be sure, there is an open debate about what role the government should take in countering rumors or lies about high-risk subjects like elections and public health, and widespread skepticism about the power social media companies wield over public discourse.
But the government, platforms and researchers say the lawsuit and investigation unfairly mischaracterize their communications. They say that while officials and outside groups flag content they believe may break the social networks’ rules, it’s ultimately up to the tech companies to decide what action to take.Jordan is subpoenaing researchers and social media companies, demanding years of email correspondence and conducting hours-long interviews, which his staff has used to make explosive accusations against federal agencies, nonprofit organizations and academic institutions.
“What the federal government could not do directly, it effectively outsourced to the newly emerging censorship-industrial complex,” committee staff wrote in a report published this week….
Academics and researchers who participated in the Election Integrity Partnership in 2020 have been targeted by Jordan’s probe, as well as a private lawsuit brought by America First Legal, an organization run by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller. Those involved say it’s unlikely the partnership will have the same level of information sharing next year.
“The weaponized criticism of research on misinformation is having a negative impact on our ability to understand and address what many of us feel to be a pretty large societal problem,” said Kate Starbird, a co-founder of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, one of the members of the EIP. She’s been the target of harassment and threats over that work.
“They are limiting our ability just to do the research, because we’re spending too much time with our lawyers, but also limiting our ability to have conversations with the people who need our work the most, whether that’s election officials or whether that’s social media platforms,” she said.a
The Key to Mike Johnson’s Christian Extremism Hangs Outside His Office
Trump’s legal issues are bound with a thread of willful dishonesty
The sense in which Trump is the consummate salesman that he presents himself to be is one in which he consistently overinflates what he has to offer. His customers are then left in the unenviable position of admitting they got hustled or nodding along with their peers at the emperor’s luxurious new clothes — on those rare occasions, that is, when the dishonesties are even admitted.
Winning isn’t everything, especially in democracy
https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/winning-isnt-everything-especially-in-democracy
[Excerpt:]One key way in which the principle of democratic representation has been undermined is through extreme partisan gerrymandering. The state legislative maps adopted in Wisconsin after 2010, for example, have ensured Republican victories in a majority of seats ever since even though it is a closely divided purple state. In 2012, thanks to the aggressively gerrymandered electoral maps, Republicans won 60 state assembly seats with only 48.6% of the statewide vote. In 2018, with only 44.8% of the statewide vote, Republicans still netted an astonishing 63 seats. And in 2022, despite an almost evenly divided electorate, Republicans won 64 of the 99 seats in the state assembly, a near two-third majority. The same pattern was replicated, and indeed exacerbated in the case of the state senate maps.
In Wisconsin, as in many states, state legislatures have almost exclusive control over the process of drawing electoral maps, which meant that only the Republican lawmakers who had created maps that assured their party would forever remain in power had the ability to create new maps that would allow for fairer representation of the state’s voters. The only other option against gerrymandering was appealing to the courts to throw out unfair maps, and in 2019 the Supreme Court disallowed federal intervention. This left such challenges in the hands of state supreme courts, and Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled court imposed the legislature’s preferred maps. But the decision by Wisconsin voters to elect Janet Protasiewicz to a vacant seat on the state’s seven-member supreme court in 2022 ended the court’s conservative majority, thus opening the door for a successful challenge to the state’s electoral maps.
In response, GOP officeholders now seem bent on creating a state constitutional crisis by trying to change the rules of the game after Protasiewicz’s victory. They are threatening to impeach her before she has even had a chance to rule on a case. This unprecedented move would be only the second vote by the Assembly to impeach a state judge in Wisconsin history. The Republican-controlled legislature’s naked refusal to abide by the will of Wisconsin’s voters would be even more clearly revealed for what it is—an unconstitutional power grab—if the Assembly voted to impeach the justice but the Senate refused to take any action. In that case, instead of Democratic Governor Tony Evers being able to appoint her replacement (as would happen if she were convicted and removed from office), Protasiewicz would be suspended from all official duties and the court would be deadlocked. Were the legislature to go through with impeachment they would be nullifying the results of a fairly contested election and refusing to accept a legitimate electoral loss.
To state the obvious, ceding power is difficult. But this is what democracy demands of politicians and voters alike on a regular basis. For democracy to function legitimate political loss must be routinely accepted. Those who refuse to accept loss when there is no evidence of fraud or other improprieties often resort to arguing that the loss is illegitimate by virtue of the victory having being achieved by means of the participation of the “wrong” kinds of voters. In Wisconsin and elsewhere, for example, election deniers have argued that Democratic victories were suspect because they relied on votes by various kinds of others (such as non-whites, especially Black voters in large cities, and urban rather than rural voters) or on the influence of outsiders (such as temporary residents like college students and funding from out-of-state donors). But in modern mass democracies we are fellow citizens with many kinds of others, and their views have as much political weight as our own, even when we vehemently disagree with them.
Part of the problem in Wisconsin is that the gerrymandering Republicans used to assure themselves of winning meant that they have rarely had to lose in recent state elections. As a result, they have not had to practice the key democratic capacity of accepting legitimate loss. For the sake of democracy in Wisconsin (and the US as a whole), they need a crash course in how not to be sore losers. As a society, we recognize how necessary it is for adult relationships to not be sore losers (or bad winners), so there are children’s books that teach kids these skills. It seems that we need to send many of our elected officials to democracy school. Losing well is not only an important life lesson, it is also a key civic capacity that is vital for democratic survival.
5 ways Trump and allies plan for a more authoritarian second term
Trump and allies plot revenge, Justice Department control in a second term
Advisers have also discussed deploying the military to quell potential unrest on Inauguration Day. Critics have called the ideas under consideration dangerous and unconstitutional.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/05/trump-revenge-second-term/
If Trump Wins, His Allies Want Lawyers Who Will Bless a More Radical Agenda
Politically appointed lawyers sometimes frustrated Donald J. Trump’s ambitions. His allies are planning to install more aggressive legal gatekeepers if he regains the White House.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/us/politics/trump-2025-lawyers
[Excerpts:]Close allies of Donald J. Trump are preparing to populate a new administration with a more aggressive breed of right-wing lawyer, dispensing with traditional conservatives who they believe stymied his agenda in his first term.
The allies have been drawing up lists of lawyers they view as ideologically and temperamentally suited to serve in a second Trump administration. Their aim is to reduce the chances that politically appointed lawyers would frustrate a more radical White House agenda — as they sometimes did when Mr. Trump was in office, by raising objections to his desires for certain harsher immigration policies or for greater personal control over the Justice Department, among others.
Now, as Trump allies grow more confident in an election victory next fall, several outside groups, staffed by former Trump officials who are expected to serve in senior roles if he wins, have begun parallel personnel efforts. At the start of Mr. Trump’s term, his administration relied on the influentialFederalist Society, the conservative legal network whose members filled key executive branch legal roles and whose leader helped select his judicial nominations. But in a striking shift, Trump allies are building new recruiting pipelines separate from the Federalist Society.
These back-room discussions were described by seven people with knowledge of the planning, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. In addition, The New York Times interviewed former senior lawyers in the Trump administration and other allies who have remained close to the former president and are likely to serve in a second term.
Trump’s violent rhetoric echoes the fascist commitment to a destructive and bloody rebirth of society
The “most important architect” of Trump’s Bogus Electoral College Objections Poised to Be Next Speaker of the House, and Republicans Don’t Want to Talk About It
From this Oct. 2022 NYT article, “They Legitimized the Risk of a Stolen Election–and Reaped the Rewards:”
The most far-reaching of Mr. Trump’s ploys to overturn his defeat, the objections to the Electoral College results by so many House Republicans did more than any lawsuit, speech or rally to engrave in party orthodoxy the myth of a stolen election. Their actions that day legitimized Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede, gave new life to his claims of conspiracy and fraud and lent institutional weight to doubts about the central ritual of American democracy.
Yet the riot engulfing the Capitol so overshadowed the debate inside that the scrutiny of that day has overlooked how Congress reached that historic vote. A reconstruction by The Times revealed more than simple rubber-stamp loyalty to a larger-than-life leader. Instead, the orchestration of the House objections was a story of shrewd salesmanship and calculated double-talk, set against a backdrop of demographic change across the country that has widened the gulf between the parties.
While most House Republicans had amplified Mr. Trump’s claims about the election in the aftermath of his loss, only the right flank of the caucus continued to loudly echo Mr. Trump’s fraud allegations in the days before Jan. 6, The Times found. More Republican lawmakers appeared to seek a way to placate Mr. Trump and his supporters without formally endorsing his extraordinary allegations. In formal statements justifying their votes, about three-quarters relied on the arguments of a low-profile Louisiana congressman, Representative Mike Johnson, the most important architect of the Electoral College objections.
On the eve of the Jan. 6 votes, he presented colleagues with what he called a “third option.” He faulted the way some states had changed voting procedures during the pandemic, saying it was unconstitutional, without supporting the outlandish claims of Mr. Trump’s most vocal supporters. His Republican critics called it a Trojan horse that allowed lawmakers to vote with the president while hiding behind a more defensible case.
Even lawmakers who had been among the noisiest “stop the steal” firebrands took refuge in Mr. Johnson’s narrow and lawyerly claims, though his nuanced argument was lost on the mob storming the Capitol, and over time it was the vision of the rioters — that a Democratic conspiracy had defrauded America — that prevailed in many Republican circles.
That has made objecting politically profitable. Republican partisans have rewarded objectors with grass-roots support, paths to higher office and campaign money. Corporate backers have reopened their coffers to lawmakers they once denounced as threats to democracy. And almost all the objectors seeking re-election are now poised to return to Congress next year, when Republicans are expected to hold a majority in the House.
See also this Dec. 15, 2020 Isaac Chotiner Q and A with Johnson in the New Yorker.
When Johnson, on the cusp of a vote for House Speaker, was asked about it by a reporter, the response from other Members was “boo” and “shut up.” Watch:
“‘I’ve prayed for each of you’: How Mike Johnson led a campaign of election denial”
Politico deep dive:
One day before a mob bludgeoned its way into the Capitol, Rep. Mike Johnson huddled with colleagues in a closed-door meeting about Congress’ task on Jan. 6, 2021.
A relatively junior House Republican at the time, Johnson was nevertheless the leading voice in support of a fateful position: that the GOP should rally around Donald Trump and object to counting electoral votes submitted by at least a handful of states won by Joe Biden.
“This is a very weighty decision. All of us have prayed for God’s discernment. I know I’ve prayed for each of you individually,” Johnson said at the meeting, according to a record of his comments obtained by POLITICO, before urging his fellow Republicans to join him in opposing the results.
A review of the chaotic weeks between Trump’s defeat at the polls on Nov. 3, 2020, and the Jan. 6 Capitol attack shows that Johnson led the way in shaping legal arguments that became gospel among GOP lawmakers who sought to derail Biden’s path to the White House — even after all but the most extreme options had elapsed.
As Trump’s legal challenges faltered, Johnson consistently spread a singular message: It’s not over yet. And when Texas filed a last-ditch lawsuit against four states on Dec. 8, 2020, seeking to invalidate their presidential election results and throw out millions of ballots, Johnson quickly revealed he would be helming an effort to support it with a brief signed by members of Congress.
Throughout that period, Johnson was routinely in touch with Trump, even more so than many of his more recognizable colleagues.
Some of Johnson’s vocal opponents at the Jan. 5, 2021, closed-door meeting were Reps. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who warned Johnson’s plan would lead to a constitutional and political catastrophe.
“Let us not turn the last firewall for liberty we have remaining on its head in a bit of populist rage for political expediency,” Roy said at the time, according to the record.
Nearly three years later, on Wednesday afternoon, Roy and Bacon cast two of the unanimous House GOP votes to make Johnson the next speaker….
[Boldface added]
“The No Labels Party’s Radical New Plan to Force a Contingent Election”
Third Way memo (via Playbook):
Since they launched their third-party presidential effort last year, the No Labels Party has repeated a central refrain: “our bipartisan ticket, led either by a Democrat or a Republican, will not be a spoiler—we are in this to win.” But that has now changed. No Labels has made clear that their new plan is to put a Republican at the top of their ticket. And because they can’t win the presidency outright, they’ve indicated that their intention now is to exercise leverage over the winner by denying both major parties 270 Electoral College Votes (ECVs). That radical new plan would ensure a second Trump term.
None of this is speculation. No Labels put out a chart based on their new polling that shows their candidate (from either party) can’t win and would be a spoiler helping Trump. The New York Times reported they are intending to nominate a Republican. And their Chief Strategist said in an interview (supported by a No Labels explainer) that they are interested in denying the major party candidates 270 ECVs, thereby throwing the election to the House of Representatives.
Here’s the evidence—based entirely on things No Labels has written and said—of their radical shift in strategy and the dire consequences for the country. This is a new path for their third-party effort, but the destination would be the same: the election of Donald Trump….
Trump fake elector scheme: where do seven states’ investigations stand?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/22/trump-fake-elector-scheme-case-tracker
Jim Jordan’s Conspiratorial Quest for Power
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/30/jim-jordans-conspiratorial-quest-for-power
[Excerpts:]On the Hill, the different ideological factions inside the Party were known as the Five Families; the most unruly of these was the House Freedom Caucus, a group of thirty-three hard-line anti-institutionalists. The closest the conference came to a proactive message was its vow to investigate Joe Biden and to fight the scourge of the federal bureaucracy.
During the race for House Speaker in January, twenty members of the Freedom Caucus withheld their votes from McCarthy. In exchange for their support, they made numerous demands; one of them was the creation of a freestanding committee to uncover how the federal government was supposedly cracking down on conservatives. McCarthy appeased them, in part, by agreeing to create a subcommittee run out of the Judiciary Committee and led by Jordan, who had helped found the Freedom Caucus, in 2015. More than anyone in the House at the time, several G.O.P. insiders told me, Jordan held the key to McCarthy’s Speakership.
—–
On January 2, 2021, Jordan led a conference call with Trump to discuss how they could delay certifying the election. One of the ideas was to encourage Trump supporters, via social media, to march on the Capitol on January 6th. Jordan spoke routinely with the President by phone during the next few days, including twice on January 6th, and he texted Trump’s chief of staff with advice on how to get Vice-President Mike Pence not to count electoral votes. Hours after the insurrection, Jordan stationed himself next to the House floor to whip votes against certification. Before leaving office, Trump gave him the country’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Jordan, Trump has said, “is a warrior for me.”
Inside the Next Republican Revolution
Paul Dans of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, has formed a committee to recruit what he calls “conservative warriors” to assault his nemesis, the “deep state.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/09/19/project-2025-trump-reagan-00115811
[Excerpts:]
. . . The Heritage Foundation, and scores of conservative groups aligned with [Heritage director Dan’s] program are seeking to roll back nothing less than 100 years of what they see as liberal encroachment on Washington.
They want to overturn what began as Woodrow Wilson’s creation of a federal administrative elite and later grew into a vast, unaccountable and mostly liberal bureaucracy (as conservatives view it) under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, numbering about two and a quarter million federal workers today.
They aim to defund the Department of Justice, dismantle the FBI, break up the Department of Homeland Security and eliminate the Departments of Education and Commerce, to name just a few of their larger targets. They want to give the president complete power over quasi-independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies that have been the bane of Trump’s political existence in the last few years.
And they want to ensure that what remains of this slashed-down bureaucracy is reliably MAGA conservative — not just for the next president but for a long time to come — and that the White House maintains total control of it. In an effort to implement this agenda — which relies on another Reagan-era idea, the controversial “unitary theory” of the Constitution under which Article II gives the president complete power over the federal bureaucracy — Dans has formed a committee to recruit what he calls “conservative warriors” through bar associations and state attorneys general offices and install them in general counsel offices throughout the federal bureaucracy.
Conservative Election Activists Use Virginia as a Dry Run for 2024
Inspired in part by Donald Trump’s baseless rigged-election claims, the activists are trying to recruit supporters to serve as poll watchers and election workers in the state’s legislative contests.
The state is a month away from tossup elections that will decide control of the state’s closely divided legislature.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/11/us/politics/virginia-election-integrity-activists
[Excerpts:]In 2021, after Republican victories in Virginia, conservative activists were so proud of their work training poll watchers, recruiting election workers and making other attempts to subtly influence the voting system that they wrote a memo called “The Virginia Model.” The memo detailed ways that other states could follow Virginia’s lead in protecting so-called election integrity.
Now these activists are turning their attention back to Virginia, which is a month away from tossup elections that will decide control of the state’s closely divided legislature and offer both national parties clear evidence of their electoral strengths and weaknesses heading into 2024.
In the run-up to the 2021 election, activists trained by Virginia Fair Elections collected claims of malfeasance and filed a lawsuit challenging at least 390 ballot applications that were missing Social Security numbers. The suit was dismissed, but conservative news outlets focused on the complaint and began to argue that the coming vote in Virginia would be “stolen,” as many activists believed had happened in 2020. (Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, ended up winning, and his party made gains in the legislature.)
Nonetheless, Republican-aligned groups like Virginia Fair Elections continue to try to tighten voting laws.
Virginia Fair Elections is managed by the Virginia Institute for Public Policy, a conservative think tank that was formed in 1996 with moderate fund-raising in the low six figures annually. But as the think tank shifted its focus to so-called election integrity efforts after the last presidential contest, it raised over $508,000 in 2021, according to data kept by ProPublica.
That money included a $125,000 grant earmarked for the “Virginia Fair Elections project” from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a major funder of groups that have proliferated myths about voter fraud. Its board includes Cleta Mitchell, a longtime conservative lawyer who played a key role in trying to overturn the 2020 election.
In 2021, the “Virginia Model” executed by Virginia Fair Elections became the blueprint for the Election Integrity Network, a national coalition guided by Ms. Mitchell that quickly became one of the most influential organizations seeking to change voting laws and recruit local activists.
Last year, Virginia Fair Elections hosted a two-day gathering conceptualized by Ms. Mitchell. The group boasted of having trained 4,500 poll watchers and election officials, and of covering 85 percent of polling locations in Virginia on Election Day in 2021 and during the 45 days of early voting.
“Analysis of the Lawfulness of Kenneth Chesebro’s Elector Plan Under Federal Election Law”
Matthew Seligman at Just Security:
https://www.splcenter.org/news/2023/09/21/georgia-voter-suppression-southern-systemic-racism
“The irony is that you had some censors who said that those who didn’t want books pulled from schools could just go to the public libraries,” says Deborah Caldwell-Stone, who directs the association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.
This morning, the folks from PEN America are out with an even more comprehensive look at the jihad against reading:
The number of public school book bans across the country increased by 33 percent in the 2022-23 school year compared to the 2021-22 school year, according to a new PEN America report. “Banned in the USA: The Mounting Pressure to Censor” highlights the disproportionate number of bans occurring in Florida — where over 40 percent of all book bans took place in the 2022-23 school year — and shows how state legislation and coordinated pressure campaigns from local groups and individuals have driven mass restrictions on access to literature.
Since PEN America started tracking public school book bans in July 2021, the organization has recorded nearly 6,000 instances of banned books. This includes 3,362 book bans affecting 1,557 unique titles during the 2022-23 school year, impacting the work of 1,480 authors, illustrators, and translators.
There are multiple drivers of these trends. Over the past school year, vaguely-worded state legislation and local and national advocacy groups have converged, pressuring districts to remove more books from student access. Fear of penalties, legal liabilities, and criminal punishments are escalating book bans to new heights.
Leading the way? Florida, which has surpassed Texas as the book-banning center of the U.S.. But it’s getting worse. PEN American notes that “Laws and tactics that emerged in the Sunshine State are also being replicated elsewhere. The language of the so-called ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law that originated in Florida has been mimicked in Iowa, where vagueness and lack of state guidance similarly led school districts to ban books. Book Looks, a website created by a Moms for Liberty member from Florida to encourage book censorship, has been used widely to ban books, from Pennsylvania to Virginia.
“More kids are losing access to books, more libraries are taking authors off the shelves, and opponents of free expression are pushing harder than ever to exert their power over students as a whole,” said Suzanne Nossel, Chief Executive Officer of PEN America. “Those who are bent on the suppression of stories and ideas are turning our schools into battlegrounds, compounding post-pandemic learning loss, driving teachers out of the classroom and denying the joy of reading to our kids. By depriving a rising generation of the freedom to read, these bans are eating away at the foundations of our democracy.”
Among PEN’s major findings:
- Book bans in public K–12 schools continue to intensify. In the 2022–23 school year, PEN America recorded 3,362 instances of books banned, an increase of 33 percent from the 2021–22 school year.
- Over 40 percent of all book bans occurred in school districts in Florida. Across 33 school districts, PEN America recorded 1,406 book ban cases in Florida, followed by 625 bans in Texas, 333 bans in Missouri, 281 bans in Utah, and 186 bans in Pennsylvania.
- Hyperbolic and misleading rhetoric about “porn in schools” and “sexually explicit,” “harmful,” and “age inappropriate” materials led to the removal of thousands of books covering a range of topics and themes for young audiences. Overwhelmingly, book bans target books on race or racism or featuring characters of color, as well as books with LGBTQ+ characters. And this year, banned books also include books on physical abuse, health and well-being, and themes of grief and death. Notably, most instances of book bans affect young adult books, middle grade books, chapter books, or picture books—books specifically written and selected for younger audiences.
- Punitive state laws, coupled with pressure from vocal citizens and local and national groups, have created difficult dilemmas for school districts, forcing them to either restrict access to books or risk penalties for educators and librarians. Eighty-seven percent of all book bans were recorded in school districts with a nearby chapter or local affiliate of a national advocacy group known to advocate for book censorship. Sixty-three percent of all book bans occurred in eight states with legislation that has either directly facilitated book bans or created the conditions for local groups to pressure and intimidate educators and librarians into removing books.
“Trump electors: ‘fake’ or ‘contingent’?”
Three Republicans who cast Electoral College votes for Donald Trump after the 2020 presidential election were acting as federal officers and doing what the law allowed, defense lawyers told a federal judge on Wednesday.
The Trump electors — former Georgia GOP Chairman David Shafer, state Sen. Shawn Still and former Coffee County GOP Chairwoman Cathy Latham — are charged in Fulton County with conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election. They are seeking to get their cases removed from Fulton Superior Court to U.S. District Court in Atlanta….
Attorneys for the defendants argued their clients were “contingent” electors under the federal Electoral Count Act. Among other things, the law requires states to resolve legal disputes about the outcome of elections six days before presidential electors cast their ballots — the so-called “safe harbor” deadline.
When presidential electors met on Dec. 14, 2020, Trump’s lawsuit challenging the election in Georgia was still pending. That meant Gov. Brian Kemp’s certification of Democrat Joe Biden was no longer valid, argued Shafer’s attorney, Craig Gillen….
Cross called Gillen’s arguments “novel,” “nonsense” and “fantasy.” She noted that, after correcting deficiencies, Trump refiled his lawsuit the day before the safe harbor deadline. Under the electors’ argument, that gave the court one day to resolve the dispute.
Cross said the electors had presented no case law supporting the idea “that you can file a procedurally and substantively deficient challenge and, suddenly, everything’s up in the air.” She said the Republicans did not become federal officers simply by claiming to be official presidential electors.
“They were fake electors,” Cross said. “They were impersonating electors. They were not electors at all.”
Wisconsin GOP lawmakers move to oust top election official, newly elected Supreme Court justice
Experts call Wisconsin one of the most gerrymandered states in the country. Now Republican lawmakers want to lock in their redistricting map and impeach newly elected liberal state Supreme Court justice Janet Protasiewicz before she issues her first ruling.Here & Now‘s Scott Tong talks with author and journalist Ari Berman. Berman has been covering election law, redistricting and voting rights for years. He is the author of the book “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America” and a national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones.This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
BY ASKING FOR TANYA CHUTKAN’S RECUSAL, TRUMP INVITED A LESSON IN HIS CENTRALITY TO JANUARY 6
Trump’s motion for Tanya Chutkan to recuse was not designed to work. Rather, it was designed as a messaging vehicle, to establish the basis for Trump to claim that a Black Judge was biased against him so he can better use it to discredit rule of law and as a campaign and fundraising vehicle.
Because Trump’s motion was primarily a messaging vehicle, the — legally apt — messaging with which DOJ responded is of some interest.
Invited to do so by Trump, DOJ laid out how central Trump is to the thousand other January 6 prosecutions.
Invited to do so by Trump, for example, DOJ provided eight other times — in addition to the cases of Robert Palmer and Christine Priola cited in the recusal motion — where defendants before Judge Chutkan have implicated Trump in their actions.
As GOP investigates prosecutors, experts worry about judicial independence
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/09/09/republican-investigations-judicial-independence/
[excerpts:]. . . in the wake of 91 criminal charges against Trump, the party’s blitz of attacks on prosecutors threatens to degrade an important precedent that protects prosecutorial independence and the ability to fairly root out wrongdoing without partisan influence or gain, according to legal experts.
“Big picture, this does seem incredibly troubling,” said Caren Morrison, a former federal prosecutor who is an associate professor at Georgia State University College of Law. “For years I’ve told my students that one principle we can always rely on is the principle of prosecutorial discretion — it is unassailable and that is the essence of their power: They can choose which cases to pursue and which cases not to pursue. … We are kind of at a point where nobody agrees on what the rules are.”
And state lawmakers have begun discussions to remove Willis from her seat through a disciplinary commission in Georgia — one of several states that have recently adopted laws aimed at reining in the power of locally elected prosecutors.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (Ohio), one of the three GOP chairmen who targeted Bragg, announced an investigation into Willis after an Atlanta-area grand jury indicted Trump and 18 of his associates on charges related to attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Jordan requested information regarding any federal funding the office receives, along with any correspondence between Willis’s office and the Justice Department. Republican lawmakers have also gone after David Weiss, the newly appointed special counsel tasked with prosecuting President Biden’s son Hunter after his plea deal collapsed in July. Weiss filed court papers on Wednesday saying he intends to seek an indictment against Hunter Biden by the end of this month.
Jordan and others have drawn sharp criticism from Democrats for what they view as attempts to undermine active and ongoing criminal investigations.
In a nine-page letter to Jordan sent on Thursday, Willis blasted the chairman for what she called an unconstitutional attempt “to interfere with a state criminal matter” and transgression of the separation of powers. She also warned Jordan that if House Republicans followed through on threats to deny federal funding to Willis’s office, that “such vengeful, uncalled-for legislative action would impose serious harm on the citizens we serve, including the fact that it will make them less safe.”
“Whomever is the accused deserves an adjudication which is, as much as possible, the application of law to facts, and you do everything you can to shield that inquiry from the rough-and-tumble of constituent politics,” said Robert Raben, the former Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legislative Affairs under President Bill Clinton. “There are important lines of division that should not be penetrated — and we can squabble about where those lines are — but hauling up an investigator while something is pending to influence something to which you are not a party is inappropriate,” he added.
Raben is the author of what is known as the “Linder Letter” — one of the most commonly referenced distillations of the guardrails needed between the branches of government to prevent disclosures that could compromise national security, criminal investigations, prosecutions or civil cases, and individual privacy. Written in 2000 and addressed to former congressman John Linder (R-Ga.), the chairman of the Subcommittee on Rules and Organization of the House, at the beginning of a new Congress during a presidential election year, the letter was sent in advance of an “avalanche of politically tinged investigations” from the GOP-controlled Congress, according to Raben.
It is regularly cited as the basis of the Department of Justice’s long-standing refusal to comply with information requests related to ongoing investigations. The letter was referenced by Carlos Uriarte, the assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legislative Affairs under Biden, in his inaugural correspondence with the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee, in which he reiterated the department’s practice of not providing information about ongoing investigations.
Former Attorney General Edward Levi, who was appointed in 1975 by President Gerald Ford in the wake of the Watergate scandal, delivered an address that year on the importance of confidentiality in government to preserving the separation of powers as he worked to restore the credibility of the department.
“Our ability to analyze the legal and public interests involved has become a prisoner of our vocabulary,” Levi said in the speech. “Much more is involved than the President’s personal prerogative standing against the people’s right to know. The problem is the need for confidentiality and its limitations in the public interest for the protection of the people of our country.”
The “accommodations process” between Congress and the executive branch — designed to resolve conflicts between the competing needs of both branches — has at times accommodated the investigatory interests of Congress while protecting the interests of an ongoing criminal investigation. But it’s a complicated dance that runs into what Stephen Boyd, the assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legislative Affairs under Trump, describes as a philosophical conflict between Congress and the Justice Department.
“A professional and correctly conducted Justice Department investigation starts with a fact, and then follows to another fact, and leads to some sort of conclusion,” Boyd said. “A Capitol Hill political investigation often starts with a conclusion and then looks for facts to support it. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Congress is wrong, but it means they are most interested in the things that prove their point.”
Boyd added that lawmakers serious about investigating prosecutorial misconduct have other avenues to raise issues regarding whether a case has been handled appropriately — either through the Inspector General of the Department of Justice or the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility.
In some states, however, lawmakers have enshrined into law the ability to punish prosecutors themselves.
Republican lawmakers in Georgia pushed through a law earlier this year that created a commission to discipline and remove state prosecutors who “refused to uphold the law.” Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who signed the bill into law, last month shut down calls for a special session to investigate Willis and has rejected attempts to retaliate against her. The commission’s structure is still being finalized, according to Stacey Jackson, a district attorney for the Chattahoochee Judicial Circuit who is working on the matter, but it will be able to start accepting complaints by Oct. 1, 2023. The Texas legislature also pushed through legislation this spring that gives courts the power to remove district attorneys who decide not to pursue certain crimes for misconduct.
Local efforts to pass legislation that punishes prosecutors has run parallel to Trump’s brazen attacks on the judicial system and those who have brought charges against him. Trump’s presidential campaign aired a television ad in August that leveled unsubstantiated claims against Willis, and also attacked Bragg, Smith, and New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), who has sued the Trump Organization and Trump family.
Trump’s salvos against prosecutors and the Justice Department have come at a cost: The Post previously reported that the U.S. government spent nearly $2 million for U.S. Marshals to provide security to Smith and other officials between November 2022 and March 2023. Security measures have been bolstered for several other officials involved in the proceedings around Trump’s criminal charges.
Some House Republicans have recently rallied around ideas to prohibit the use of federal funding to pay for Smith’s investigation. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) introduced a bill in July proposing that “no funds authorized or appropriated by federal law and none of the funds in any trust fund to which funds are authorized or appropriated by Federal law, shall be expended for the special counsel’s office.” Some Georgia lawmakers have also pushed to defund Willis — a move that Georgia’s House Speaker Jon Burns (R) called an “attempt to interfere with the criminal justice system” and “harmful to public safety.”
How American Democracy Fell So Far Behind
The country’s Constitution was once the standard-bearer for the world. Today, many other countries have much fairer systems for electing their leaders and passing laws.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/american-constitution-norway/675199/
Amid Robert Rundo’s Extradition, the White Supremacist Active Clubs Network Remains a Threat
September 1, 2023
[Excerpt:]Amid Robert Rundo’s Extradition, the White Supremacist Active Clubs Network Remains a Threat
Robert Rundo, co-founder of the white supremacist Rise Above Movement, is back in the United States, extradited to California from Romania to once again face federal rioting charges. Rundo, who left the United States for southeastern Europe after his criminal case was briefly dismissed in 2019, remained an active participant in the transnational white supremacist movement during his time abroad. Rundo’s time in Europe was characterized by his emergence as a prominent white supremacist leader, driven by his development of “white nationalism 3.0.”
This decentralized model has resulted in the creation of localized white supremacist Active Clubs, which promote fraternity and a so-called white “warrior spirit,” while also engaging in physical training for what members perceive to be an impending race war. Rundo also established a propaganda arm, Media2Rise, and an online merchandising entity, Will2Rise, to create a white supremacist brand that could expand Active Club messaging and deepen connections between Active Clubs and other white supremacist groups like Patriot Front.
In August 2017, RAM members also traveled to Charlottesville, Virginia to take part in the deadly “Unite the Right” rally. Three RAM members would later be charged and sentenced for provoking and engaging in fights as part of their conspiracy to riot.
[Boldface added]
Removal of Criminal Cases to Federal Court: Two Dozen FAQ’s
August 27, 2023
“Why Tribalism Took Over Our Politics”
Ahead of his arrest on Thursday in Georgia, Donald Trump repeatedly told his supporters about the legal peril he faced from charges of election interference. But the danger wasn’t his alone, he said. “In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you,” he told a campaign rally.
It was the latest example of the Republican former president employing a potent driver of America’s partisan divide: group identity. Decades of social science research show that our need for collective belonging is forceful enough to reshape how we view facts and affect our voting decisions. When our group is threatened, we rise to its defense.
The research helps explain why Trump has solidified his standing as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination despite facing four indictments since April. The former president has been especially adept at building loyalty by asserting that his supporters are threatened by outside forces. His false claims that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 election, which have triggered much of his legal peril, have been adopted by many of his supporters.
Democrats are using the tactic, too, if not as forcefully as Trump. The Biden campaign criticized Republicans in Wednesday’s presidential debate as “extreme candidates” who would undermine democracy, and President Biden himself has accused “MAGA Republicans” of trying to destroy our systems of government.
The split in the electorate has left many Americans fatigued and worried that partisanship is undermining the country’s ability to solve its problems. Calling themselves America’s “exhausted majority,” tens of thousands of people have joined civic groups, with names such as Braver Angels, Listen First and Unify America, and are holding cross-party conversations in search of ways to lower the temperature in political discourse.
Yet the research on the power of group identity suggests the push for a more respectful political culture faces a disquieting challenge. The human brain in many circumstances is more suited to tribalism and conflict than to civility and reasoned debate.
The differences between the parties are clearer than before. Demographic characteristics are now major indicators of party preference, with noncollege white and more religious Americans increasingly identifying as Republicans, while Democrats now win most nonwhite voters and a majority of white people with a college degree.
“Instead of going into the voting booth and asking, ‘What do I want my elected representatives to do for me,’ they’re thinking, ‘If my party loses, it’s not just that my policy preferences aren’t going to get done,’ ” said Lilliana Mason, a Johns Hopkins University political scientist. “It’s who I think I am, my place in the world, my religion, my race, the many parts of my identity are all wrapped up in that one vote.”…
On the Voting Rights Act of 1965
Letters from an American
Heather Cox Richardson
August 24, 2023
heathercoxrichardson@
n the 1960s, Republicans made a devil’s bargain, courting the racists and social traditionalists who began to turn from the Democratic Party when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt began to make inroads on racial discrimination. Those same reactionaries jumped from the Democrats to create their own party when Democratic president Harry S. Truman strengthened his party’s turn toward civil rights by creating a presidential commission on civil rights in 1946 and then ordering the military to desegregate in 1948. Reactionaries rushed to abandon the Democrats permanently after Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, joining the Republicans at least temporarily to vote for Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, who promised to roll back civil rights laws and court decisions.
“Your State-by-State Guide to Every State Supreme Court”
Every state and territory has its own supreme court and every supreme court has tremendous power over legal cases and public policy within its borders—but the resemblances end there. No two courts are exactly the same. Each has its rules and idiosyncrasies, each comes with different procedures for how someone becomes and stays a judge, and each has a distinct set of roles and functions.
For anyone hoping to navigate this maze, these differences can quickly become overwhelming. Does this court have anything to do with setting bail schedules? Is it involved in certifying election results? Is anyone on its bench old enough they’ll soon have to retire? Will a vacancy spark a special election?
With this page, Bolts lays out the answers to these questions, and a great many more, for every single high court in all 50 states, plus Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico.
For each of these 54 courts (Oklahoma and Texas each have two high courts), Bolts fleshes out its structure, how judges make it on and get to stay on it, the scope of its judicial powers, and its other critical rulemaking and policymaking roles.
If you want to take a step back and are wondering why these courts even matter, read our accompanying article that will introduce you to these powerful institutions and answers your big-picture questions.
This research was conducted by Quinn Yeargain, an assistant professor of law at Widener University. Daniel Nichanian contributed to the preparation of this page.
Explore the information by clicking on the state that interests you below, or by comparing how the same category plays out across various states.
“Could Trump be barred under the constitution’s ‘engaged in insurrection’ clause?”
“Disqualification under the 14th amendment does not require a criminal conviction, Noah Bookbinder, the executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), said in an interview earlier this month. The push to disqualify Trump is likely to play out at the state level in parallel to both the federal and state cases criminally charging Trump and allies in connection with their efforts to overturn the election. The left-leaning group Free Speech for People has already sent letters to election officials in 10 states urging them to declare Trump ineligible to run for office under the 14th amendment. Crew is also preparing to file litigation in several states to disqualify Trump from the ballot, Bookbinder said.
“’It’s really important to resolve this as soon as possible and definitely before the election and not afterwards,’ said Edward Foley, a law professor at the Ohio State University. ‘I am worried that if this doesn’t get resolved definitively, this issue could arise on January 6, 2025 if Trump were to win the electoral college having been on the ballot.
“’You could envision an effort to try and disqualify Trump after he’s won. And I think that would be a disaster. That would be a real constitutional crisis,’ he added.
“Even if Trump winds up being constitutionally disqualified, many Americans may chafe, especially in the midst of a politically heated election year, at not being able to vote for their preferred candidate.
‘Viscerally in a democracy we don’t like the idea that we’re not allowed to vote for someone who we might want to vote for,’ Foley said. ‘On the other hand, Barack Obama might actually be a pretty strong candidate for the Democratic party right now … he’s constitutionally disqualified. However much Americans or Democrats might want to nominate Barack Obama, it’s just constitutionally not permissible to do so.’
“The venue for the disqualification efforts could vary by state – it may be secretaries of state, boards of elections, or state courts that hear the challenges. ‘As a practical matter, the first time a state official decided that Trump was disqualified under Section 3, my guess is it would shoot up to the supreme court real fast and, I don’t know, who knows what the answer would be,’ said Michael McConnell, a law professor at Stanford who has been more skeptical about the use of the 14th amendment to disqualify Trump.
“’The amendment should be interpreted as … an enormous last resort and maybe January 6 rose to that level. It certainly was a much more serious civil disturbance than we usually see. But whether it’s actually an insurrection. I think it’s a bit of a stretch,’ he said. ‘There were hundreds of participants in the January 6 incursion who have been criminally prosecuted and none of them have been charged with insurrection. Trump is one step removed.’
“But Calabresi said that Trump could be disqualified under the 14th amendment, even absent a formal insurrection charge. He noted that the standard for proving Trump engaged in an insurrection would be lower in the civil cases to disqualify him than in the criminal prosecutions.
“McConnell said his skepticism of disqualification was not intended as a defense of Trump, but rather a concern over what would happen if candidates started frequently trying to disqualify their rivals from the ballot.
“’I don’t want to see him water down the meaning of these words so that bringing disqualification motions against your political opponents becomes yet another aspect of our dysfunctional legal and electoral system,’ he said.”
The story of Rico and Rudy
By Richard Galant
August 20, 2023
https://view.newsletters.cnn.com
[Excerpts:]
It was RICO that brash young federal prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani used to craft an all-encompassing indictment against the heads of New York’s organized crime families in 1985.
Thirty years later, it was Georgia’s version of RICO that Fani Willis, a rising prosecutor in the Fulton County district attorney’s office, used to convict 11 people of racketeering in the Atlanta test score cheating scandal. And it was the same law that Willis, now the county’s district attorney, used to indict Giuliani last week, along with former President Donald Trump and 17 others, charging them with acting as a racketeering enterprise to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia.
RICO laws are an especially powerful weapon prosecutors can use to charge a group of people who act together. Evidence of their misdeeds can secure convictions and allow for strict sentences that otherwise couldn’t be imposed.
The 97-page indictment unveiled by Willis last week cites a lot more evidence than could be arrayed against a sandwich served at lunch.
“The indictment paints an incredibly damning picture,” wrote former federal prosecutor Jennifer Rodgers, “alleging an organized attempt by the former president and his allies to undermine the fabric of American democracy — something even the most sympathetic defendant will not easily be able to fight. Trump has denied wrongdoing, as have the other defendants who have made public statements to date.”
“The indictment describes eight ways in which the enterprise intended to achieve its criminal goals, including: making false statements to state legislators; making false statements to state officials; the fake electors scheme; the harassment and intimidation of election workers like Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss; soliciting the Justice Department to make false statements; soliciting the vice president to unlawfully reject Electoral College votes; the unlawful breach of election equipment in Coffee County; and obstruction of justice to cover up the conspiracy.”
Will the 14th Amendment disqualify Trump?
This issue could knock Trump off ballots nationwide. Get ready for it to dominate primary season
By David Lauter
August 18, 2023
Fact-Checking the Breadth of Trump’s Election Lies
The former president faces multiple charges related to his lies about the 2020 election. Here’s a look at some of his most repeated falsehoods.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/us/politics/trump-election-lies-fact-check
The 6 Kinds of Republican Voters
Aug. 17, 2023
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/17/upshot/six-kinds-of-republican-voters.html
The Trump Georgia Indictment, Annotated
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/15/us/politics/trump-georgia-indictment-annotated.html
A grand jury in Fulton County, Ga., on Monday unveiled the fourth criminal indictment of former President Donald J. Trump. Like a federal indictment earlier this month, this one concerns Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss. But it differs in that it charges 18 other defendants who are alleged to have taken part in the scheme.
The New York Times is annotating the document.
A Former Federal Prosecutor Explains the Latest Trump Indictment
How Donald Trump tried to undo his loss in Georgia in 2020
If you do not support my dad 100 percent, we have a problem, Donald Trump Jr. told the group, a Trump campaign staffer familiar with the meeting testified to the House committee that investigated the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The state party chairman, David Shafer, emerged looking “like he had seen a ghost,” the staffer said.
The message was received. That evening, Republican leaders in Georgia held a rally-style news conference in support of Trump.
The same week, the president’s allies circulated a video falsely accusing a Georgia election worker of throwing away ballots, making her the immediate target of harassment and threats. And White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and others began evaluating a plan for how legislatures in states like Georgia could overturn the will of voters.
The rapid series of events kicked off an aggressive pressure campaign that only intensified as weeks passed and the results more and more firmly showed that Trump had lost.
In phone calls, speeches, tweets and media appearances, Trump and his allies pushed to overturn the 2020 election results in six swing states where certified results declared Joe Biden the winner, an effort that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol as Congress convened to confirm the results.
Nowhere was the effort more acute than in Georgia, where all of their strategies came together in a complex and multilayered effort that unfolded against the hyperpartisan backdrop of two ongoing U.S. Senate races.
Those close to Trump prodded state officials to identify fraud that would cast Biden’s victory in doubt. In the process, they personally targeted individual election workers with false claims of cheating, unleashing waves of threats, and amplified conspiracy theories about rigged machines that persist today. In the end, after Trump sought to use every lever of power to overturn the results, top state Republicans stood in his way, refusing to buckle under the pressure.
While much of what happened in Georgia has surfaced in leaked recordings, court proceedings and congressional testimony, the fullest story yet could emerge this week, when the district attorney in Fulton County, home to Atlanta, is widely expected to seek an indictment of Trump and those who supported his efforts there.
A Former Federal Prosecutor Explains the Latest Trump Indictment
Trump indictment sidesteps key details unearthed by Jan. 6 panel
08/09/23
Election Interference Demands a Collective Defense
How Democracies Can Fight Back Against Foreign Meddling
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/election-interference-demands-collective-defense
PBS NewsHour
August 2, 2023
SUPPORT FOR TRUMP HOLDS STEADY
By Laura Santhanam, @LauraSanthanam
Health Reporter & Coordinating Producer for Polling
As former President Donald Trump’s legal troubles mount, there has been little overall shift in public opinion about whether he has done something wrong.
But according to the latest PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll, Republican faith in Trump’s faultlessness has shown signs of dwindling this summer.
A majority of Republicans – 58 percent – say they still plan to vote for Trump, according to this latest poll, conducted July 24 to 27. That was before new charges were brought against Trump in the case focused on his handling of classified documents. And a majority of Republican primary voters have dismissed the criminal and civil allegations, investigations, indictments and trials involving Trump as being politically motivated, regardless of the evidence gathered against him, said Republican strategist Douglas Heye.
But taken together, Trump’s legal difficulties may be weighing him down among some voters within his own party. Thirty-seven percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said if Trump continues to run for president, they are likely to support another candidate, up from 32 percent in mid-June.
The percentage of respondents overall who feel Trump has done nothing wrong is also diminishing.
The poll found that:
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- About half of U.S. adults think Trump has done something illegal. That includes most Democrats and a slim majority of independents.
- At the same time, roughly a quarter of Americans think Trump has acted unethically, but not illegally.
- Another 19 percent said Trump has done nothing wrong, which has shrunk from about a quarter of Americans last month.
Image by Jenna Cohen/PBS NewsHour -
The Department of Justice’s superseding indictment Thursday contained additional federal charges against Trump, including obstruction and willful retention of national defense information, as part of the investigation into classified documents at the former president’s Florida estate. A Mar-a-Lago employee, Carlos De Oliveira, was also indicted for conspiring with Trump and his aide, Walt Nauta, to delete surveillance footage during the investigation.
These latest charges add to Trump’s mounting legal challenges. He’s involved in four major criminal probes that are investigating:
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- Hush money payments made during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign to silence affair allegations, from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan
- Efforts from Trump and his allies to interfere with the election process in Georgia, from the Fulton County District Attorney
- Attempts to overturn Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, including the Jan. 6 attack, from special counsel Jack Smith
- Trump’s handling and storage of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago after leaving office, also from special counsel Smith
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Trump has already been indicted on dozens of felony charges in two of those cases. He continues to deny any wrongdoing, which allows “him to reinforce his core message — that the system’s rigged,” Republican strategist Douglas Heye said.The bottom line: Republicans are split over the gravity of Trump’s actions.
Trump supporters “haven’t really spent a lot of time with any of the evidence because they don’t want to,” Republican strategist Whit Ayres said.
Support among Trump’s core base likely won’t change unless a Republican presidential contender confronts Trump, or he is challenged in debates, Heye added.
Trump has succeeded in turning his legal problems into political cash. The Trump campaign has said they have raised millions of dollars after every indictment.
“Republican voters like Trump, and they see him as somebody who is still a strong, if not the strongest, candidate in 2024,” said Amy Walter, editor of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter. “Whether or not there are more indictments that come out, it is doubtful that they will do anything to diminish that feeling among Republicans.”
Letters from an American, Heather Scott Richardson
August 2, 2023
Today a grand jury in Washington, D.C, indicted former president Donald J. Trump for conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. The charges stemmed from Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. A grand jury is made up of 23 ordinary citizens who weigh evidence of criminal activity and produce an indictment if 12 or more of them vote in favor.
The grand jury indicted Trump for “conspiracy to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted and certified by the government; “conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified”; and “conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.”
“Each of these conspiracies,” the indictment reads, “targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election.” “This federal government function…is foundational to the United States’ democratic process, and until 2021, had operated in a peaceful and orderly manner for more than 130 years.”
As Rachel Weiner pointed out in the Washington Post, “conspiracies don’t need to be successful to be criminal, and perpetrators can be held responsible if they join the conspiracy at any stage.”
The indictment referred to six co-conspirators without identifying them by name, but the details included about them suggest that Co-Conspirator 1 is Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani; Co-Conspirator 2 is lawyer John Eastman, who came up with the plan for then–vice president Mike Pence to use his ceremonial role of counting the electoral votes to throw the election to Trump; Co-Conspirator 3 is Trump lawyer Sidney Powell; Co-Conspirator 4 is Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department lawyer whom Trump tried to push into the role of attorney general so he could lie that there had been election fraud; Co-Conspirator 5 appears to be Kenneth Chesebro, a Trump attorney behind the idea of the false electors.
The identity of Co-Conspirator 6, a political consultant, is unclear.
On The Reid Out tonight, law professor Neal Katyal suggested that the six were not indicted because the Justice Department “doesn’t want the trial of the other six to be bundled up with this and slow this down.” Los Angeles Times senior legal affairs columnist Harry Litman concluded that the absence of Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, from the indictment indicates he’s cooperating with the Department of Justice. Meadows had a ringside seat to the last days of the Trump administration.
The indictment is what’s known as a “speaking indictment,” one that explains the alleged crimes to the public. It undercuts Trump loyalists’ insistence that the Department of Justice is trying to criminalize Trump’s free speech by laying out that Trump did indeed have a right to challenge the election—which he did, and lost. He also had a first-amendment right to lie about the election.
What he did not have was a right to use “unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.” [Boldface added]
The indictment begins by settling out that Trump “lost the 2020 presidential election” but that “despite having lost, [Trump] was determined to remain in power.” So he lied that he had actually won. “These claims were false, and [Trump] knew they were false.” More than 15 pages of the 45-page indictment establish that Trump knew the allegations he was making about election fraud were lies.
In one memorable December exchange, a senior campaign advisor wrote in an email, “When our research and campaign legal team can’t back up any of the claims made by our Elite Strike Force Legal Team, you can see why we’re 0–32 on our cases. I’ll obviously hustle to help on all fronts, but it’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy sh*t beamed down from the mothership.”
The Trump team used lies about the election to justify organizing fraudulent slates of electors in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Allegedly with the help of Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, they attempted to have the legitimate electors that accurately reflected the voters’ choice of Biden replaced with fraudulent ones that claimed Trump had won in their states, first by convincing state legislators they had the power to make the switch, and then by convincing Vice President Mike Pence he could choose the Trump electors.
When Pence would not fraudulently alter the election results, Trump whipped up the crowd he had gathered in Washington, D.C., against Pence and then, according to the indictment, “attempted to exploit the violence and chaos at the Capitol” to overturn the election results. “As violence ensued,” the indictment reads, Trump and his co-conspirators “explained the disruption by redoubling efforts to levy false claims of election fraud and convince Members of Congress to further delay the certification based on those claims.” On the evening of January 6, 2021, the indictment alleges, Trump and Co-Conspirator 1 called seven senators and one representative and asked them to delay the certification of Biden’s election.
While they were doing so, White House counsel Pat Cipollone called Trump “to ask him to withdraw any objections and allow the certification. The Defendant refused.” Just before midnight, Co-Conspirator 2 emailed Pence’s lawyer, once again begging the vice president to “violate the law and seek further delay of the certification.”
While Trump loyalists are trying to spin the indictment as the weaponization of the Department of Justice against Trump, legal analyst George Conway noted on CNN tonight: “All the evidence comes from Republicans. If you go through this indictment and you annotate the paragraphs to figure out who are the witnesses the [special counsel] would use to prove particular points, they’re all Republicans. Those are the people who were having the discussions, telling [Trump], ‘You lost.’”
Trump will be arraigned at 4:00 p.m. Eastern time on August 3. The case of the United States of America v. Donald J. Trump has been randomly assigned to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, appointed by President Obama in 2014 and confirmed 95–0 in the Senate. Chutkan has presided over dozens of cases concerning the defendants who participated in the events of January 6, 2021, and has been vocal during sentencing about the stakes of that event. In December 2021 she said: “It has to be made clear that trying to stop the peaceful transition of power, assaulting law enforcement, is going to be met with certain punishment.”
“The attack on our nation’s capital on January 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy,” Special Counsel Jack Smith said in his statement about the indictment.
“The men and women of law enforcement who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6 are heroes. They’re patriots, and they are the very best of us. They did not just defend a building or the people sheltering in it. They put their lives on the line to defend who we are as a country and as a people. They defended the very institutions and principles that define the United States.”
The prosecution of former president Trump for trying to destroy those institutions and principles, including our right to consent to the government under which we live—a right the Founders articulated in the Declaration of Independence—should deter others from trying to do the same. Moreover, it will defend the rights of the victims—those who gave their lives as well as all of us whose votes were attacked—by establishing the truth in place of lies. That realistic view should enable us to recommit to the principles on which we want our nation to rest.
Such a prosecution will reaffirm the institutions of democracy. Donald Trump tried to destroy “the free exercise and enjoyment of a right and privilege secured…by the Constitution and laws of the United States—that is, the right to vote, and to have one’s vote counted.” Such an effort must be addressed, and doing it within the parameters of our legal system should reestablish the very institutions Trump loyalists are trying to undermine.
As former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said this evening: “Like every criminal defendant, the former President is innocent until proven guilty…. The charges…must play out through the legal process, peacefully and without any outside interference…. As this case proceeds through the courts, justice must be done according to the facts and the law.”
The Indictment of Donald Trump—And His Enablers
Will the Republican Party now abandon its Faustian bargain?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/08/trump-indictment-gop-trial
The ‘fake electors’ and their role in the 2020 election, explained
Pro-Trump electors are central to several of the investigations into efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn his 2020 election loss.
By Amber Phillips
Download The Washington Post app.
What Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán Understand About Your Brain
Why do some people who support Trump also wind up believing conspiracy theories? There’s a scientific explanation for that.
Lying and conspiratorial thinking might seem to be two different problems, but they turn out to be related. I study political rhetoric and have tried to understand how populist politicians use language to develop a cult-like following, divide nations, create culture wars and instill hatred. This pattern goes back to antiquity and is seen today in leaders including former President Donald Trump, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. These leaders are capable of using words and speeches to whip people into such an emotional tempest that they will do things like march on the seat of Congress or invade a neighboring country.
The Electoral College: A flawed system; a questionable reform
By David Lauter
Essential Politics — L.A. Times
Traumatized by the results of 2000 and 2016, when Republicans George W. Bush and Donald Trump won the presidency despite getting fewer votes than their Democratic opponents, many on the left and center-left have developed a deep aversion to the state-by-state counting of electoral votes, regarding it as both anti-democratic and anti-Democratic.
A Gallup poll taken in 2020, for example, found that roughly 9 in 10 Democrats favored abolishing the electoral college and choosing the president solely on the basis of who gets support from the most voters. Just 2 in 10 Republicans agreed.
Responding to that sentiment, lawmakers in 25 states — most of them with Democratic majorities — have voted for an interstate agreement designed to bypass the electoral college and choose the president by popular vote. It won’t be in effect for 2024, but could be by 2028.
The irony would be deep if Democrats succeeded in abolishing the system just in time for it to flip back in their favor.
Could that happen? Yes, and the tipping point is far closer than many people appear to believe.
A flawed system; a questionable reform
The electoral college has several flaws:
The system encourages presidential candidates to spend the lion’s share of time and energy on the few states whose votes are truly up for grabs — no more than eight this time around — although there’s not much evidence that those states gain anything other than a ton of political ads on television.
There’s the risk, small but not zero, of electors casting their votes for someone other than the candidate who won their state.
And because the system guarantees at least three electoral votes to each state and the District of Columbia, it amplifies the power of the very smallest jurisdictions. Wyoming’s 581,000 residents control three electoral votes; California’s 39 million have 54. On a proportional basis, that gives Wyoming’s overwhelmingly Republican residents almost four times the electoral clout of Californians. The same goes for the heavily Democratic voters of Vermont, who also get three electoral votes.
The flaw that attracts the most attention, however, is the system’s ability to elect a president who has support of a minority of voters nationwide — a feature that has delivered victories to Republicans twice in the last six elections.
That’s a rarity. As Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman recently documented on the Crystal Ball election site, the system is pretty unbiased most of the time: In the 19 presidential elections since the end of World War II, the results of the electoral college and the popular vote matched closely.
Usually, but not always.
In 1948, for example, the electoral college had a pronounced Republican tilt. Democratic President Harry Truman won anyway, but his margin in the electoral college was famously thin despite his healthy victory in the popular vote. In 2000, the Democratic nominee, Vice President Al Gore, was less lucky. A slight Republican tilt in the electoral college was enough to give Bush the White House after the Supreme Court declared him the winner in Florida. And, of course, in 2016, a fairly large Republican tilt in the electoral college handed the White House to Trump even though Hillary Clinton got more votes.
In 2020, President Biden overcame an even bigger electoral college bias to win: He took the popular vote by 4.5 percentage points but garnered only a 0.6% edge in electoral votes.
The reason the electoral college and the popular vote don’t always track is that election results are much closer in some states than others. In recent years, that’s had a lot to do with California.
In 2020, for example, Biden won the state by 29 points, garnering about 5 million more votes than he needed to capture its electoral votes. That swelled his national popular vote margin but didn’t gain him anything in the electoral college. The Democrat racked up a similarly disproportionate margin in New York, padding his popular vote margin by another couple million.
Meanwhile, elections in the swing states often turn on a few tens of thousands of voters.
Because most people pay attention to the electoral college only when something goes awry, and both of the anomalies in living memory favored the GOP, a lot of people assume the electoral vote always leans Republican. Not so.
In both of President Obama’s victories, for example, the electoral vote had a Democratic bias although no one paid much attention. Since World War II, the electoral college has had a Democratic tilt nine times and a Republican one 10.
It could easily flip again. Just look at the results of the 2022 midterm elections, as Coleman and Kondik noted.
Suppose in the next election California and New York remain blue, but Democratic margins shrink a bit. And suppose that at the same time, Democrats win the swing states.
That pretty much describes what happened in 2022: Republicans ate into the Democratic margins in California and New York, and in the aggregate, their candidates for the House got more votes. But Democrats swept the field in statewide races in Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania and won Senate races in Nevada, Georgia and New Hampshire.
If those results had occurred in a presidential race, Democrats would have lost the popular vote but won the electoral college vote.
That brings us to the proposed National Interstate Popular Vote Compact, which is designed to short-circuit the electoral college without amending the Constitution. The idea is that states would mutually agree to give their electoral votes to whichever candidate won the national popular vote, not the candidate who won each individual state. The compact would go into effect if it’s enacted by states that together account for 270 electoral votes, a majority of the electoral college.
The California Legislature approved the compact in 2011, with sponsors arguing that it would prod candidates to pay more attention to the state. At the time, it was very much a theoretical proposition. A dozen years later, it’s seeming more real. States with 205 electoral votes have signed on.
So imagine it’s election night 2028, and the popular vote compact is in effect. Democratic candidate Gretchen Whitmer has won California by 20 points and carried the big swing states, but appears to have lost the nationwide popular vote to Republican Ron DeSantis, who racks up big margins in Florida and Texas. Would California voters really be OK with the state’s electoral votes going to make DeSantis president?
The question is made more acute by the fact that support for abolishing the electoral college has come almost entirely from one side of the aisle. Republican leaders are happy to see Democratic states give up control of their electoral votes, but they have no intention of doing so themselves.
The same thing has happened with other political reforms. Consider redistricting: California and several other large, Democratic-majority states have adopted nonpartisan commissions to draw political district lines. Republican states have declined, and in some states, like Ohio and Florida, where voters approved limits on gerrymanders, Republican lawmakers have flouted them.
As a result, the U.S. effectively has two systems for drawing election boundaries — a highly partisan one used by Republican-majority states as well as some Democratic ones and a less partisan system used exclusively in blue and purple jurisdictions. That asymmetry has helped Republicans obtain a House majority.
Backers of the popular vote plan say their reform would be safe against partisan mischief — victory would go to the popular vote winner regardless of party. But the history of politics is a repeated tale of unexpected consequences. Given the partisan imbalance on this one, California lawmakers should consider whether they still want to disarm their side if the opposition won’t do likewise.
Trump on Trial: A Model Prosecution Memo for Federal Election Interference Crimes
Jul 13, 2023
Civic Information Handbook
From Karen Kornbluh and Adrienne Goldstein, in collaboration with UNC Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life, comes this valuable resource. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:
Social media platform tools are better suited for campaigns seeking to manipulate and agitate users than to empower and inform. Platforms and regulators must get involved to fix the design flaws that allow false and misleading information to flourish in the first place. Policymakers should update and enforce civil and human rights laws for the online environment, compel radical transparency, update consumer protection rules, insist that industry make a high-level commitment to democratic design, and create civic information infrastructure through a new PBS of the Internet. In the absence of such policy reform, amplifiers of civic information may never be able to beat out the well-resourced, well-networked groups that intentionally spread falsehoods. Nonetheless, there are strategies for helping civic information compete.
This handbook aims to:
- Educate civic information providers about coordinated deceptive campaigns
…including how they build their audiences, seed compelling narratives, amplify their messages, and activate their followers, as well as why false narratives take hold, and who the primary actors and targeted audiences are.
- Serve as a resource on how to flood the zone with trustworthy civic information
…namely, how civic information providers can repurpose the tactics used by coordinated deceptive campaigns in transparent, empowering ways and protect themselves and their message online.
The Markup
July 10, 2023
The Corruption of Lindsey Graham
A case study in the rise of authoritarianism.
https://specialto.thebulwark.com/p/the-corruption-of-lindsey-graham
[Excerpt:]
I set out to research the story of Graham’s relationship with Trump because I wanted to understand how authoritarianism arose in the United States. I wanted to see how the poison worked: the corruption, the rationalizations, the vulnerabilities in the system. I wanted to learn how democracies could detect such threats and counteract them.
Here are some of the lessons I learned.
- Emerging authoritarianism doesn’t look like an ideology. It appears in the form of a demagogue. It’s easy to support him while laughing off the idea that you’re embracing authoritarianism.
- Celebration of fear is a warning sign. When a demagogue brags about intimidating his enemies, and when voters and politicians flock to him for that reason, look out. Maybe he knows who the real villains are. Or maybe he’s the sort of person who attacks anyone in his way.
- Authoritarian voters are the underlying threat. In every country, there are people who want a leader to break institutions and rule with an iron fist. These voters form a constituency that can lure politicians to embrace such a leader. At a minimum, they can deter politicians from opposing that leader. And if he loses power, the next authoritarian can exploit the same constituency.
- Political parties are footholds for authoritarians. An aspiring strongman doesn’t have to gain power all at once. He can start by capturing a party and becoming its flagship candidate. This gives everyone in the party a reason to help him.
- Politicians are blinded by their arrogance. They think they can manipulate an emerging authoritarian by collaborating with him. They underestimate the extent to which what they see as an alliance—but is really subservience—will corrupt and constrain them.
- Politicians are misled by personal contact with the authoritarian. He may seem charming or manageable, but that’s because he’s among friends and flatterers. These situations don’t reflect how he’ll treat people who get in his way.
- Cowardice is enough to empower an authoritarian. He doesn’t need a phalanx of wicked accomplices. He just needs weak-willed politicians and aides who will go along with whatever he does. Every country has plenty of those.
- Authoritarianism is a trait. Politicians can always find reasons why this or that corrupt act by an authoritarian isn’t prosecutable or impeachable. These excuses gloss over the underlying problem: his personality. If he gets away with one abuse of power, he’ll move on to the next.
- Democracy becomes a rationale to serve the authoritarian. Once he wins a nomination or an election, politicians can exalt him as the people’s choice. They can use this mandate to dismiss criticism of his conduct and to reject any attempt to remove him from office.
- Power becomes a rationale to serve the authoritarian. Once he’s in office, politicians can tell themselves that by defending him, they’re earning his trust, gaining influence over him, and steering him away from his worst impulses.
- Rationalization becomes a skill and a habit. The first time you excuse an authoritarian act, it feels like a one-time concession. But each time you bend, you become more flexible. The authoritarian keeps pushing, and you keep adjusting.
- Ad hoc legal defenses become authoritarianism. Each time the leader abuses his power, apologists claim he has the authority to do so. Over time, as he commits more abuses, these piecemeal assertions of authority add up to a defense of anything the leader chooses to do.
- Normalization and polarization are enough to create a mass authoritarian movement. People get used to a strong-willed leader, and their partisan reflexes kick in. If the leader is in your party, you may feel an urge to attack anyone who goes after him. You become part of his political army.
- Exposure of the authoritarian’s crimes galvanizes his base. His supporters turn against the media, the legislature, law enforcement, and any other institution that investigates him. They view his accumulating scandals as more evidence that the true villains are out to get him.
- Demonization of the opposition paves the way to tyranny. It lowers the moral threshold for supporting the leader. You must defend him, no matter what he does, because his enemies are worse.
- A party detached from its principles becomes a cult. Once the party begins to shed prior beliefs in deference to a leader, it loses independent standards by which to judge him. The party becomes the man, and dissent from him becomes heresy.
- Democracy’s culture of compromise is a weakness. Over time, an authoritarian’s will to gain and wield power grinds down politicians who are content to negotiate among competing interests. As he relentlessly imposes his will, they find reasons and ways to accommodate him.
- Civil servants are easily smeared and purged. Some of them might investigate, expose, or refuse the leader’s corrupt orders, since they weren’t appointed by him or elected on his ticket. But that independence makes them easy to attack as “Deep State” conspirators who are subverting the people’s will.
- It’s easy to provoke and exploit violence without endorsing it. You just say the election was stolen, and the president’s followers take it from there. Then, after their rampage, you warn that any punishment of him might drive them to violence again.
- It’s easy to rationalize ethnic or religious persecution. Demagogues tend to use any division in society—ethnic, sexual, religious—as a wedge against their enemies. A skilled politician can excuse this behavior on the grounds that bigotry is only the method, not the motive.
Trump’s indictment plus candidacy could endanger democracy and the rule of law
The collision of former president Donald Trump’s criminal indictment with the presidential campaign could further undermine confidence in democratic principles and institutions of government, experts say
“How the Far Right Tore Apart One of the Best Tools to Fight Voter Fraud”
NPR on the exodus of red states from ERIC.
And a deeper look at the red-state exodus that followed — eight states and counting have now pulled out of ERIC — shows a policy blueprint for an election denial movement, spearheaded by a key Trump ally, eager to change virtually every aspect of how Americans vote. . . .
NPR analyzed hundreds of thousands of posts on five alternative social media sites frequented by the far right — Gettr, Gab, Parler, Telegram and Trump’s Truth Social — over the past two years, and found that conversation about ERIC really only began after the first Gateway Pundit article published.
The Gateway Pundit’s initial article drew extensively on the writing and interviews of Adams, the conservative voting attorney.
In late 2021, Adams appeared on a conservative radio program and called ERIC “diabolical.” . . .
On a voting podcast called “Who’s Counting,” ERIC has become a frequent villain.
“ERIC is a very insidious organization,” said the host, Cleta Mitchell, in one episode from last summer.
Mitchell is an influential Republican election attorney who was at the center of Trump’s failed attempts to overturn the 2020 election. She was on the infamous phone call in early 2021 when Trump asked Georgia election officials to “find” votes.
“How a Fringe Legal Theory Became a Threat to Democracy”
Andrew Marantz for the New Yorker on the independent state legislature theory:
If the Supreme Court reverses the state-court ruling, it would be a vindication of the independent-state-legislature theory, or I.S.L.T., a line of legal reasoning that scarcely existed twenty-five years ago but has since travelled from the fringes of legal discourse to the centers of power. Some advocates of the theory interpret a clause of the Constitution to mean that state legislatures can run federal elections almost however they choose—drawing maps for partisan advantage, outlawing forms of voting (such as mail-in ballots) that tend to favor one party, and challenging election results on thin procedural grounds. Even when these actions violate state constitutions, the advocates say, state courts would be powerless to stop them. (It’s this lack of oversight that would render the legislatures “independent,” though a less euphemistic word for it might be “rogue.”) . . .
The independent-state-legislature theory ultimately boils down to a single word: “legislature.” It appears in two relevant places in the Constitution—the Elections Clause, which pertains to how federal elections are administered, and the Electors Clause, regarding the appointment of Presidential electors. Both processes are to be directed in “each State” by “the Legislature thereof.” Benjamin Ginsberg, the Bush-Cheney campaign’s national counsel, told me that, in 2000, I.S.L.T. “was never our main focus. It was one of many things we were flinging against the wall.” John Bolton, one of the Bush campaign’s lawyers, who later served as national-security adviser under Trump, told me, “I don’t know that we fully thought through the future implications. It was more, The clock is ticking. What else can we try?” . . .
To the extent that there is serious scholarship buttressing I.S.L.T., much of it has been promulgated by one guy, an associate professor at Florida State University named Michael Morley. He graduated from Yale Law School in 2003, clerked for a conservative circuit-court judge, and has since attended dozens of Federalist Society events. Morley did not submit an amicus brief in Moore v. Harper; reached recently by e-mail, he wrote that he has “consistently and publicly criticized attempts to cast doubt on the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election.” A law professor who knows Morley told me, “I don’t think he’s a total wing nut. I think he found an interesting academic argument that no one else was making, and the work he did on it has been important to his career, so now he can’t fully walk away from it, but he can’t fully defend it, either.” Law journals are full of provocative thought experiments. They all seem like fun and games until someone uses one to justify an insurrection.
“How AI Could Take over Elections – and Undermine Democracy”
Archon Fung and Larry Lessig have written this column on potential uses of artificial intelligence in electoral campaigns:
Imagine that soon, political technologists develop a machine called Clogger – a political campaign in a black box. Clogger relentlessly pursues just one objective: to maximize the chances that its candidate – the campaign that buys the services of Clogger Inc. – prevails in an election. . . .
It would offer three advances over the current state-of-the-art algorithmic behavior manipulation. First, its language model would generate messages — texts, social media and email, perhaps including images and videos — tailored to you personally. Whereas advertisers strategically place a relatively small number of ads, language models such as ChatGPT can generate countless unique messages for you personally – and millions for others – over the course of a campaign.
Second, Clogger would use a technique called reinforcement learning to generate a succession of messages that become increasingly more likely to change your vote. Reinforcement learning is a machine-learning, trial-and-error approach in which the computer takes actions and gets feedback about which work better in order to learn how to accomplish an objective. Machines that can play Go, Chess and many video games better than any human have used reinforcement learning.
Third, over the course of a campaign, Clogger’s messages could evolve in order to take into account your responses to the machine’s prior dispatches and what it has learned about changing others’ minds. Clogger would be able to carry on dynamic “conversations” with you – and millions of other people – over time. Clogger’s messages would be similar to ads that follow you across different websites and social media.
Must Read on How Outside Donors Have Undermined State Political Parties and the Electoral Consequences
This was one of the more fascinating pieces I’ve read on the sources of weakness in modern state parties, how that weakness affects their competitiveness, and the role of non-party, outside donors in that process. We’ve known that the McCain-Feingold law caused enormous damage to state political parties, and it’s unclear what role that law might have played in the background. This story is primarily about outside donor alliances that think they can perform party functions better than the parties. The story is about the decline of the Democratic Party in Florida, written by a long-time Democratic political operative there. The whole story is worth reading.
The story is titled: “Anatomy of a Murder: How the Democratic Party Crashed in Florida.” It appears here. Some excerpts:
MIT Election Lab Releases Report on 2022 Elections
Charles Stewart summarizes some of the main findings at ElectionLine. The full report is here.
- The percentage of voters who cast their ballot by mail dropped more than 10 points from 2020, to 32%.
- 40% of mail voters reported using online ballot tracking.
- Average wait times to vote were about equal to the last midterm election for Election Day voters, and declined for early voters.
- Only 10% of Election Day voters and 9% of early voters reported seeing something disruptive when they voted; they most commonly reported voters talking loudly or in dispute with an election worker or other voter. Slightly less than 5% of voters who returned their ballot to a drop box reported seeing something disruptive when dropping off their ballot.
- Voter confidence overall remained similar to past years. The partisan gap in confidence that opened up in 2020 closed somewhat in 2022, with Republicans becoming more confident.
- When asked about election security, respondents said that the measures that would give them the greatest assurance were logic-and-accuracy testing, securing paper ballots, and post-election audits. Partisan attitudes about the prevalence of vote fraud remained polarized in 2022, although less so than in 2020.
“Voting Rights Federalism”
Ruth Greenwood and I have posted this article on state voting rights acts (SVRAs), which will be published in a symposium issue of the Emory Law Journal. Here’s the abstract:
It’s well-known that the federal Voting Rights Act is reeling. The Supreme Court nullified one of its two central provisions in 2013. The Court has also repeatedly weakened the bite of the statute’s other key section. Less familiar, though, is the recent rise of state voting rights acts (SVRAs): state-level enactments that provide more protection against racial discrimination in voting than does federal law. Seven states have passed SVRAs so far—four since 2018. Several more states are currently drafting SVRAs. Yet even though these measures are the most promising development in the voting rights field in decades, they have attracted little scholarly attention. They have been the subject of only a handful of political science studies and no sustained legal analysis at all.
In this Article, then, we provide the first descriptive, constitutional, and policy assessment of SVRAs. We first taxonomize SVRAs. That is, we catalogue how they diverge from, and build on, federal protections against racial vote denial, racial vote dilution, and retrogression. Second, we show that SVRAs are constitutional in that they don’t violate any branch of equal protection doctrine. They don’t constitute (or compel) racial gerrymandering, nor do they classify individuals on the basis of race, nor are they motivated by invidious racial purposes. Finally, while existing SVRAs are quite potent, we present an array of proposals that would make them even sharper swords against racial discrimination in voting. One suggestion is for SVRAs simply to mandate that localities switch to less discriminatory electoral laws—not to rely on costly, time-consuming, piecemeal litigation. Another idea is for SVRAs to allow each plaintiff to specify the benchmark relative to which racial vote dilution should be measured—not to stay mute on the critical issue of baselines.
Muller on Ballot Access
Derek T. Muller, Ballot Access (forthcoming, Oxford Handbook of American Election Law):
Voters use ballots to choose their preferred candidates or to express support or opposition to ballot initiatives and referenda. There are many and diverse rules for how these people or items appear on the ballot in the first place—who can obtain “ballot access.” Once states began printing ballots in the late nineteenth century, they began to develop standards for which candidates, political parties, or ballot measures could appear on the ballot. States may require prospective candidates to circulate petitions and secure a number of signatures from voters to demonstrate support before their names could appear on the ballot. States set deadlines for candidates to circulate those petitions or to file for candidacy. Or states may limit the candidates who may appear on the general election ballot to those who meet a threshold level of votes in an earlier round of voting.
In the middle of the twentieth century, the United States Supreme Court became increasing interested in establishing rules for federal courts to evaluate states’ ballot access rules. On the one hand, the state has an interest in preventing an overcrowded ballot and ensuring that only serious candidates appear on it. On the other hand, the state’s rules may be unduly restrictive, which may reduce voters’ choices or entrench one or both major political parties in office. The Court has developed a balancing test to determine whether the rules are too onerous or whether the state has adequately justified its interest. These fact-intensive balancing tests have left federal courts with the task of figuring out these context-specific questions.
Codrington on Voting and State Constitutions
Wilfred U. Codrington III, Voting Under State Constitutions (forthcoming, Oxford Handbook of American Election Law):
Unlike their federal counterpart, state constitutions confer the right to vote in plain and affirmative terms. State charters also contain unique provisions that, among other things, regulate the redistricting process and set out the terms for political participation, including direct citizen lawmaking. And critically, state constitutions interact with the federal Constitution, which limits them in meaningful respects, while also governing the local administration of elections. Indeed, every political contest has aspects that are governed by state constitutions, making them an integral, yet underappreciated, source of American election law. This chapter underscores these and other crucial points by examining several dimensions of voting under state constitutions. It first lays out a broad history of voting under state charters. Then it provides a general overview of key structural components of state constitutions that govern the right to vote, followed by a brief assessment of two particularly important doctrinal matters explained in the context of particularly contested issues. Finally, the chapter closes by raising a few topics that would benefit from additional research and exploration to advance the scholarship in this ever-developing area of election law.
Green on Adversarial Election Administration
Rebecca Green, Adversarial Election Administration (forthcoming North Carolina Law Review):
As Americans, we are conditioned to believe that involving partisans in the administration of elections is inherently problematic. Understandably. The United States is a major outlier; virtually every other developed democracy mandates nonpartisan election administration. Whether on the left or right— especially since the 2020 election—we are barraged with headlines about actual or feared partisanship on the part of those who run our elections. What this narrative misses, however, is a crucial and underrecognized fact: by design, partisans have always played central roles at every level of U.S. election administration. What is more, partisans are baked into the U.S. election process for lofty reasons. Placing rival partisans in the election process increases transparency, enhances accountability, and (in theory) improves public trust in outcomes. Rival partisans populate election administration for the same reason we rely on the adversarial process in court: adversarialism leads to outcomes in which members of the public are more likely to abide. As with the justice system, adversarial election administration is not a perfect formula. But the better we understand the mechanisms of rival partisanship in election administration, the better our chances of improving them. This Article takes on this task, examining the history of adversarial election administration in the United States, describing how adversarial actors function in modern U.S. elections, and suggesting how states might better leverage adversarial election administration to bolster transparency, boost accountability, and secure election outcomes voters can trust.
Florida and Texas Go After Voters for Honest Mistakes
The hunt for nonexistent voter fraud is a pretext for efforts to intimidate eligible voters.
New Issue: Fordham Law Voting Rights and Democracy Forum
Tired of the 24 hour news cycle? Check out the final issue of the inaugural Fordham Law’s Voting Rights and Democracy Forum. With articles written by both established scholars in the field and JD candidates, it is a refreshing change of pace. Richard Briffault argues that New York’s first round of independent redistricting was an “epic fail.“
“In 2014, following passage in two successive legislatures, New York voters ratified amendments to the state constitution to change both the process and substantive rules governing the decennial redistricting of the state’s legislature and congressional delegation. . . . . Sadly, the new process employed in the 2022 redistricting was an epic fail. This Essay examines the first test of this new constitutional procedure and contends that the IRC, the state legislature, and the subsequent judicial intervention, all flunked it.”
Other crisp and timely articles in the volume include:
“The Supreme Court has an electoral ‘bomb’ on its hands. Will it defuse it before 2024?”
Politico explores the issues for the 2024 election raised by the North Carolina Supreme Court’s recent decision which likely moots Moore v. Harper. Justin Levitt extensively quoted along with Marc Elias.
The Coming Storm in depth on QAnon
I recently listed to this episode of the BBC’s “The Coming Storm” on the origins of QAnon and its connection to January 6. Many regular blog readers may have heard it already, but for those, who like me are not huge fans of in-depth stories about Trump, QAnon, and political conspiracies, I strongly recommend giving it a try. I found it hugely informative. The episode was recommended to me by trusted colleagues in the U.K. I decided to give it a try and particularly appreciated hearing two British journalists and their outsider take on the state of U.S. politics.
Axios
May 10, 2023
Brace yourself for a new, scary dynamic in American politics: the trust-nothing era.
Why it matters: Two new trends are about to unfold in real time, Mike Allen and Sara Fischer report.
1. Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson are joining forces, each warning that you should trust nothing outside Twitter.
- Carlson announced via a video on Twitter Tuesday that “starting soon” he’ll be “bringing a new version” of his Fox News show to Twitter.
2. The brains behind generative AI warned administration officials during a recent White House meeting of an imminent explosion of highly convincing and manipulative fake videos and stories in the run-up to the 2024 election.
- Think fake news on steroids — and lighting up your screen.
What we’re watching: You’ll hear powerful voices on Twitter and other platforms imploring people to assume that everything from mainstream media is a lie. And authentic, computer-generated lies will give everyone reason to trust nothing.
- “At the most basic level, the news you consume is a lie — a lie of the stealthiest and most insidious kind,” Carlson said in a video announcing he plans to relaunch his show on Twitter. “Facts have been withheld on purpose along with proportion and perspective. You are being manipulated.”
- Musk tweeted yesterday: “Trust nothing, not even nothing.”
Reality check: Twitter itself is likely to be ground zero for the spread of AI-generated fakes and lies.
The big picture: Compared to the rest of the world, Americans are already much more skeptical of what they see on social media and what they’re told by traditional media outlets. What’s next: As a trust gap widens, Americans will turn to unconventional sources to navigate an increasingly complicated world.
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- Across both major political parties, more Americans are turning to their employers and business leaders for trusted information.
“The Impact of COVID-19, Election Policies, and Partisanship on Voter Participation in the 2020 U.S. Election”
New from Paul Herrnson and Charles Stewart:
The COVID-19 pandemic had the potential to wreak havoc on elections. Democracies initiated varied policies to minimize health risks to voters and election workers. This study assesses the impact of voting policies, personal exposure to COVID, and partisanship on voter behavior in the 2020 U.S. general election. Using a comparative state-politics approach and new data, we demonstrate that exposure to COVID substantially influenced voter turnout, and election policies had a major effect on whether a voter cast a ballot by mail, early in-person, or in-person on Election Day. Unique circumstances, including the emergence of voting policies as a polarizing issue, also spawned a new partisan voting gap that is especially prominent among heavy news consumers. Compared to 2018, many more Democrats than Republicans abandoned Election Day voting in favor of mail voting.
Democracy Erodes from the Top: Leaders, Citizens, and the Challenge of Populism in Europe
“Securing the 2024 Election”
New Brennan Center report with recommendations for 2024. Among them:
Priority: Combat election disinformation
State lawmakers should prohibit the spread of false information about the time, place, and manner of voting when it is shared with the intent to prevent voters from voting.
The federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency should work with federal and state partners to migrate local election offices’ websites to .gov domains, which are only given to U.S.-based government entities and signal credibility to voters trying to find accurate information.
Priority: Protect election workers
The Department of Homeland Security should continue to require states to spend a portion of homeland security grants on election security, as it did in fiscal year 2023.
State lawmakers should prohibit intimidating conduct at the polls and anywhere else election officials are working. They should allow election workers to shield their personally identifiable information from the public.
Priority: Defend against insider threats
Local election officials should develop training, regulations, and protocols that help prevent, identify, and respond to insider threats (when rogue election workers themselves put election security at risk).
The federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency should develop best practices to guard against insider threats.
Priority: Ensure technological resilience
Local election officials should create backup systems and plans so that voting can continue in the event of a cyberattack or technical issue.
State lawmakers should mandate post-election audits.
We’re Suing Florida to Help Clear Up Voting Confusion for People with Past Convictions
Florida’s voter registration application violates federal law because it doesn’t provide guidance to would-be voters with felony convictions about their eligibility to vote.
The Effort to Suppress the Vote Is Spreading to the Republican Mainstream
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/04/republican-effort-to-suppress-the-vote
“Defamation and Democracy: The Democracy Case for Preserving the ‘Actual Malice’ Standard”
John Langford, Rachel Goodman, and Rebecca Lullo have written this policy brief for Protect Democracy and Law for Truth.
Republicans Face Setbacks in Push to Tighten Voting Laws on College Campuses
Party officials across the country have sought to erect more barriers for young voters, who tilt heavily Democratic, after several cycles in which their turnout surged.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/29/us/politics/republicans-young-voters-college
The Federalist Society Isn’t Quite Sure About Democracy Anymore
After recent Supreme Court wins, the society’s youth arm debates the next stage for the conservative legal movement.
Feb. 25, 2023
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/watching-tucker-carlson-for-work?
Fox News has been the country’s most watched cable channel for twenty-one years. That impressive streak belies how few Americans actually watch it—the network averaged 2.33 million viewers a night in 2022—but it remains something of a thought leader for the conservative movement. The network, its producers, and opinion hosts are adept at sussing out which culture-war wedge issues will keep viewers tuning in. Those viewers seem to represent the G.O.P.’s primary voter base—often older, more dedicated partisans—that has propelled increasingly extreme candidates into the mainstream over the past two decades. The network’s stars, such as Carlson, are savvy operators, eager to keep ratings up, even if what they’re peddling is patently false.
Abughazaleh films her roundups on Fridays and posts them to TikTok, where she’s building a following. Her most popular video, which includes a clip of a Fox News host comparing Washington, D.C., to Somalia, has just under a million views.
“I watch Tucker Carlson so you don’t have to,” the bio spaces of her social-media accounts read.
Abughazaleh has been professionally watching Carlson, who has around three million viewers a night, for nearly two years. “You don’t know Fox News until you are watching it for a job,” she said. “You see all these patterns emerge.” The Fox universe is a place with a different “news” sense than most of the country, she said—narratives about I.R.S. armies, food shortages, race wars, and predatory trans activists—but its niche story lines are likely predictive of what we’ll be talking about over the next two long campaign years. Though, in Abughazaleh’s view, Carlson has floundered a bit since the midterms. “I think he’s still kind of lost right now,” she said. “He’s not really sure what direction to take it.”
To Abughazaleh, the often ludicrous quality of Carlson’s show is exactly what makes it so dangerous.
“People need to know that the scary things are stupid as well,” she said. “They either go all in on ‘Oh, my God, this is so funny’ and ‘Fox News is technically entertainment,’ or they go all in on ‘This is so scary, blah blah blah.’ It’s both things. Two things can be true at once.”
At the same time, perhaps because she follows him so closely, Abughazaleh is skeptical of the conventional wisdom that Carlson is one of the most powerful people in the United States. She and the other Media Matters researchers all seemed convinced that it was more the 8 p.m. Fox time slot that bestowed power.
For millions of viewers, “it’s just a Pavlovian response to put on Fox News at eight o’clock,” Lawrence said. “Tucker needs the eight-o’clock hour on Fox News way more than Fox News needs Tucker.”
“Lawyers in Backsliding Democracy”
Scott Cummings has posted this draft on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This Article examines the role of lawyers in democratic backsliding. To explain the relation of lawyers to backsliding, the Article presents a theory of professional fissuring, in which the forces driving inequality in the profession widen divisions among lawyers to the point where normative constraints holding lawyers back from the brink of egregious ethical violations atrophy—creating openings for legal attacks on democratic institutions and the rule of law. Using the 2020 Stop the Steal Campaign as a case study, the Article suggests how fissuring can create a systemic risk of backsliding, contributing to the mobilization of law against the rule of law itself—a phenomenon this Article calls anti-legal mobilization. By advancing a theory of fissuring, the Article creates a new framework for thinking about lawyers and legal process, breaking from the traditional focus on lawyers as guardians of democracy to show how they may also be agents of its demise. In so doing, the Article makes three central contributions. [Boldface added]
First, it theorizes a relationship between backsliding and lawyering: creating a conceptual framework with a set of hypotheses about what types of structural changes in legal practice, regulation, and education predict or enable backsliding. It thus imagines retrogression of legal norms and practices as “canaries in the coalmine” of democracy, altering us to structural weaknesses that can be exploited by forces determined to consolidate authoritarian power. Second, it adduces evidence from the American case to suggest how the features of backsliding in the legal profession have longer-standing roots: traceable to declining resources for access to justice, the politicization of public lawyering, and the reorientation of legal education around neoliberal market values. Third, the Article offers proposals to reform professional regulation and education to respond to the problem of backsliding, while considering theoretical implications of fissuring theory for the study of lawyers in autocratic legalism.
How The Fake Electors Scheme Explains Everything About Trump’s Attempt To Steal The 2020 Election
Study Offers Neurological Explanation for How Brains Bias Partisans Against New Information
Summary: Researchers report that people who share political ideologies have similar neural fingerprints when it comes to political words and process new information similarly. The study shows how polarization arises at the point where the brain receives and processes new information.
Source: Brown University
What causes two people from opposing political parties to have strongly divergent interpretations of the same word, image or event?
America’s Coming Age of Instability
Why Constitutional Crises and Political Violence Could Soon Be the Norm
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/trump-americas-coming-age-instability
“HISTORY HAS BECOME A BATTLEGROUND”: WHY WE’RE STILL LIVING IN TRUMP’S POST-TRUTH AMERICA
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/01/why-were-still-living-in-trumps-post-truth-america
The Republican Party’s assault on truth, supercharged by Donald Trump—whose prolific lying and “fake news” catchphrase defined his presidency perhaps more than his policies—brought scores of historians to the fore of mainstream news media. But the task of correcting the record has proven to be a daunting challenge in the current information ecosystem. Few historians understand the country’s historical battleground better than Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer, who, in their new book, Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past, trace the origins of 20 age-old right-wing myths that continue to permeate American discourse today.
The book’s incisive essays poke holes in everything from American exceptionalism and white backlash to Confederate monuments and America First, taking us on a sobering tour through some of the nation’s deepest and darkest chapters. Kruse and Zelizer, two Princeton professors, argue that Republicans are no longer just revising those chapters; they’re trying to expunge them altogether. “It’s easy to say, ‘Just stick to the facts, and assume that will win out,’” Zelizer tells me. “But that’s not the era that we live in.”
“A 2 million-person, campaign-wide field experiment shows how digital advertising affects voter turnout”
New in Nature Human Behavior from Minali Aggarwal et al.:
We present the results of a large, US$8.9 million campaign-wide field experiment, conducted among 2 million moderate- and low-information persuadable voters in five battleground states during the 2020 US presidential election. Treatment group participants were exposed to an 8-month-long advertising programme delivered via social media, designed to persuade people to vote against Donald Trump and for Joe Biden. We found no evidence that the programme increased or decreased turnout on average. We found evidence of differential turnout effects by modelled level of Trump support: the campaign increased voting among Biden leaners by 0.4 percentage points (s.e. = 0.2 pp) and decreased voting among Trump leaners by 0.3 percentage points (s.e. = 0.3 pp) for a difference in conditional average treatment effects of 0.7 points (t1,035,571 = −2.09; P = 0.036; DICˆ=0.7DIC^=0.7 points; 95% confidence interval = −0.014 to 0). An important but exploratory finding is that the strongest differential effects appear in early voting data, which may inform future work on early campaigning in a post-COVID electoral environment. Our results indicate that differential mobilization effects of even large digital advertising campaigns in presidential elections are likely to be modest.
New Documents Show Heritage Actions Activities to Make Voting and Registration Harder
The 990 tax filing was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with the Guardian. It points to the pivotal role that Heritage Action is increasingly playing in shaping the rules that govern US democracy.
The efforts help explain the unprecedented tidal wave of restrictive voting laws that spread across Republican-controlled states in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. The Brennan Center reported that more voter suppression laws were passed in 2021 than in any year since it began monitoring voting legislation more than a decade ago.
The expenditures also signal a dramatic increase in Heritage Action’s advocacy activities. In 2020, Heritage Action had reported no spending at all on outside lobbying.
Heritage Action, whose board includes the Republican mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, is set up as a 501(c)4 under the US tax code which exempts it from paying federal taxes. It operates as a “dark money” group, avoiding disclosing the sources of its total annual revenue of over $18m.
In the past two years the organization through its public messaging has echoed Donald Trump’s lie that US elections are marked by rampant fraud. A private plan prepared by Heritage Action last year set out a two-year, $24m “election integrity” strategy.
The plan, obtained by Documented, proposed a two-pronged approach that would work to block moves by Democrats in Congress to bolster voting rights while at the same time pressing Republican-controlled states to impose restrictions on access to the ballot box. It said: “Where Democrats hold power, we must defend against bad policy. Where conservatives and our allies are in power, we must advance changes that protect the lawful votes of Americans.”
The Heritage Action plan, which was first reported by the New York Times, is being published by the Guardian for the first time.
Part of Heritage Action’s two-year strategy is to promote what it calls “model election laws”, focusing initially on eight battleground states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Texas and Wisconsin. In a private meeting with donors in Tucson, Arizona, in 2021, the group’s executive director, Jessica Anderson, boasted about the role Heritage Action had played in pressing Republican-controlled legislatures to impose strict restrictions on voting, including limits on mail-in voting and early voting days.
In a video of that meeting obtained by Documented, Anderson told the donors that the group acted “quickly and quietly”, bragging that “honestly nobody noticed” their behind-the-scenes influence. Heritage Action staff have registered to lobby in at least two dozen states.
The laser-like focus on key swing states like Georgia appears to have had an impact. The New York Times found that one-third of the 68 voting bills filed in Georgia in 2021 contained policy measures and language that aligned closely with proposals from Heritage Action.
The group has publicly claimed that it had a hand in advancing 11 voting bills in at least eight states in 2021, though in some cases legislation was passed in only one chamber or went on to be vetoed by the state’s governor.
Heritage Foundation, under the auspices of its elections supremo Hans von Spakovsky, curates an “election fraud database”. It claims to expose the errors, omissions and mistakes made by election officials, but it presents incomplete and misleading information and underscores how exceptionally rare fraud is within the US system.
What the January 6th Report is Missing
by Jill Lepore
January 9, 2023
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/16/what-the-january-6th-report-is-missing?
The investigate committee singles out Trump for his role in the Capitol attack. As prosecution, the report is thorough. But as historical explanation, it’s a mess.
What the Rioters in Brazil Learned From Americans
Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters showed that antidemocratic revolutions can be contagious too.
By far the most important weapon that the United States of America has ever wielded—in defense of democracy, in defense of political liberty, in defense of universal rights, in defense of the rule of law—was the power of example. In the end, it wasn’t our words, our songs, our diplomacy, or even our money or our military power that mattered. It was rather the things we had achieved: the two and a half centuries of peaceful transitions of power, the slow but massive expansion of the franchise, and the long, seemingly solid traditions of civilized debate.
That tradition was broken, not just by the Trump administration but by the claque of men around Donald Trump who began dreaming of a different kind of American influence. Not democratic, but autocratic. Not in favor of constitutions and the rule of law, but in support of insurrection and chaos. Not through declarations of independence but through social-media trolling campaigns. Many of the actual achievements of this claque have been negligible or, more likely, exaggerated for the purposes of fundraising. Steve
Still, I suspect that the real influence of the American experience in Brazil comes not from the preening likes of Bannon, the former Trump adviser Jason Miller, or any of the minor figures who have excitedly, and perhaps lucratively, been promoting #StoptheSteal in Brazil, but—as in the 18th century—through the power of example. Note the pattern here: After he lost November’s election, Bolsonaro refused to attend the inauguration of his successor. Instead, he went (of all places) to Florida. He and his followers have been pursuing fictional claims in lawsuits in the Brazilian courts. They then chose January 8, almost exactly two years after the assault on the American capital, to stage their attack—a strange date in some ways, because the sitting president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has already been inaugurated, and the chaotic assault on Congress will not block him from exercising power. Today’s riot makes more sense if the point was to create a visual echo of what happened in Washington.
But the power of example works in other ways too. If Americans want to help Brazil defend its democracy and avoid sinking into chaos, and if we want to avoid #StoptheSteal movements proliferating in other democracies, then the path forward is clear. We need to prove conclusively both that these movements will fail—after all, the American version already did—and that their instigators, from the very top to the very bottom, pay a high price for that failure. The January 6 committee has just made a clear recommendation to the Justice Department, asking for a criminal case to be brought against Trump. The events in Brasília today should remind us that the department’s response to this demand will shape politics not only in the United States, but around the world.
New data shows the folly of Trump’s crusade against early voting
Vermont, Kentucky and Nevada dramatically expanded the ability to cast ballots before Election Day, and neither party gained an edge.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/01/02/trump-early-voting-new-data-00075611
What the Wars and Crises of 2022 Foreshadow for 2023
Tyrants and thugocrats tightened their hold amid challenges to democracies but they face problems too.
By Robin Wright
December 30, 2022
“’It was not all bad though,’ [Richard] Haass [president of the Council on Foreign Relations] said of 2022. America’s main rivals faced internal troubles at the same time that many of the worst democracy deniers were defeated in the U.S. midterm elections. The West demonstrated resilience and a reinvigorated unity, he noted. So did protesters across continents. “From Mariupol to Managua, from Kabul to Kigali, from Taipei to Tehran, we have witnessed innumerable acts of bravery and defiance on behalf of freedom and against authoritarian aggression,” Freedom House, a nonprofit organization that monitors democracy worldwide, said last week. For all the extraordinary crises that the U.S. and other democracies will have to navigate in 2023, the thugocrats are likely to face their own challenges, too.”
“COVID-19 and Voter Turnout and Methods in the 2020 US General Election”
Paul Hernnson and Charles Stewart have posted this draft on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
COVID-19 caused worldwide disruption to virtually every aspect of human life, including elections. This study assesses the impact of COVID death rates, convenience voting policies, and partisanship on voter behavior in the 2020 U.S. general election. Using a new data set comprising county and some state data, we demonstrate that countywide COVID-death rates depressed turnout somewhat from 2016 levels, and it contributed to increased use of mail and early-in-person voting options. We also show that the availability of different options structured the methods voters used to cast a ballot. Our results reveal that the emergence of voting policies as a salient issue contributed to a new partisan gap in voter behavior.
Inside the January 6th Committee
Robert Draper and
The committee’s chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, and its vice chairwoman, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, had worked with the staff to organize the hearings around seven specific methods by which Trump and his allies sought to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election:
the willful spreading of lies that the election had been stolen; trying to coerce the Department of Justice into disputing the election results; pressuring Vice President Mike Pence; pressuring state and local officials; seeking to recruit phony electors in several contested states; summoning a mob to Washington; and then, upon inciting that mob, sitting back for more than three hours and doing nothing to stop the violence. [Boldface added]
Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol
Committed to the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union and ordered to be printed.
December 22, 2022.
Former President Trump’s Big Lie of of Election and Voter Fraud is the subject of Chapter 1 of the Select Committee’s Report, presented according to this outline:
1.1 The Big Lie Reflected Deliberate Exploitation of the “Red Mirage”
1.2 Trump’s Pre-Election Plan to Declare Victory
1.3 Trump’s Pre-Election Efforts to Delegitimize the Election Process
1.4 President Trump’s Launch of the Big Lie
1.5 Post-Election: President Trump Replaces his Campaign Team
1.6 President Trump’s Campaign Team Told Him He Lost the Election and There Was No Significant Fraud
1.7 President Trump Has his Day in Court
1.8 President Trump Repeatedly Promoted Conspiracy Theories
1.9 Dominion Voting Systems
1.10 The State Farm Arena Video
1.11 The Fake Ballot Myth
1.12 The “Multiple Counting of Ballots” Fiction
1.13 The Imaginary “Dead” and “Ineligible” Voters
1.14 “President Trump’s January 6th Speech
Lessons for Our Elections from the January 6 Hearings
The hearings exposed structural flaws in our democracy. Here’s how to fix them.
“Conceptual Replication of Four Key Findings about Factual Corrections and Misinformation During the 2020 U.S. Election: Evidence from Panel Survey Experiments”
Alexander Coppock, Kimberly Gross, Ethan Porter, Emily Thorson, and Thomas J. Wood, Conceptual Replication of Four Key Findings about Factual Corrections and Misinformation During the 2020 U.S. Election: Evidence from Panel Survey Experiments (British Journal of Political Science):
In the final two months of the 2020 U.S. election, we conducted eight panel experiments to evaluate the immediate and medium-term effects of misinformation and factual corrections. Our results corroborate four sets of existing findings: fact-checks reliably improve factual accuracy, while misinformation degrades it; effects of fact-checks on belief accuracy endure, although they fade with time; effects on attitudes are minuscule; and there are important partisan asymmetries. We also offer one new empirical finding suggesting that effect heterogeneities by personality type and cognitive style may reflect attention paid to treatments. Our study confirms that the fundamental push and pull of misinformation and factual corrections on political beliefs holds even in electoral settings as saturated with mistruths as the 2020 U.S. election.
“Election officials feared the worst. Here’s why baseless claims haven’t fueled chaos”
NPR has a nice analysis of why voting went smoothly last week and why those seeking to spread false claims and sow doubts failed to fuel a similar level of chaos this election cycle: Preparation, Security, and the former President’s diminished presence on social media. The latter we can expect will not be true in 2024, with Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
How Tennessee Disenfranchised 21% of Its Black Citizens
While many states have made it easier for people convicted of felonies to vote, Tennessee has gone in the other direction.
How to Save America from Extremism and Authoritarianism by Changing the Way We Vote
Ranked choice voting, multi-member House districts and other surprisingly simple tinkers that could fix our democracy
By David Montgomery
November 6, 2022
Washington Post Magazine
The Best Way to Protect Elections From Partisan Manipulation
Election administration is a job for professionals.
Coordinating Audits and Recounts to Strengthen Election Verification
November 2022
https://verifiedvoting.org/publication/audits-recounts-nov-2022/
This paper explains how audits and recounts can work together to bolster public confidence in elections.
The 2020 presidential election was followed by an extensive period of scrutiny and challenge. Some of these activities were typical—automatic recounts, optional recounts, and routine tabulation audits—and some were highly irregular. Widespread misinformation sowed confusion and distrust.
As election officials strive to promote public confidence in our elections, it is important to emphasize that recounts and tabulation audits are normal procedures, and they are vital to our elections. Recounts and audits, when properly designed and conducted, can help assure candidates and the public that there was a fair examination of the results and an accurate count of all legally cast votes.
State requirements for tabulation audits have been expanding. Recounts are common and will continue to be part of the contentious post-election landscape. Elections need both audits and recounts, and they need audits and recounts to work well together. This paper describes how to dovetail audits and recounts to bolster public confidence in election results. Every state can do better, and this paper provides guidelines for how.
‘Citizen Integrity’ Teams’ Efforts Could Be Groundwork for Next False Claims About Election Results
Big Donors Working to Overturn the 2020 Election Are Backing Election Denial Candidates in 2022
The Courts Are the Only Thing Holding Back Total Election Subversion
The false claim of a stolen election metastasized into an election-denialist movement far worse than we could have ever imagined.
5 Unfounded Claims About Voting in the Midterm Elections
Here are some of the main falsehoods and rumors that have spread on social media in the lead-up to Election Day.
Voter Data, Democratic Inequality, and the Risk of Political Violence
56 Pages Posted: 31 Oct 2022
Date Written: August 15, 2022
Abstract
Campaigns’ increasing reliance on data-driven canvassing has coincided with a disquieting trend in American politics: a stark gap in voter turnout between the rich and poor. Turnout among the poor has remained low in modern elections despite legal changes that have dramatically decreased the cost of voting. In this Article, we present evidence that the combined availability of voter history data and modern microtargeting strategies have contributed to the rich-poor turnout gap. That is the case despite the promises of big data to lower the transaction costs of voter outreach, as well as additional reforms that have lowered the barriers to voting in other ways. Because the poor are less likely to have voted in prior elections, they are also less likely to appear in the mobilization models employed by data-savvy campaigns.
In this Article, we draw on a novel data set of voter data laws in every state and show that turnout rates among the poor are lower in states that disclose voter history data to campaigns. We also find that after states change their laws to provide voter history to campaigns, these campaigns are far less likely to contact the poor.
The consequences of this vicious cycle are already known: the unique interests of the poor have been entirely unrepresented in the political process. Such political marginalization and alienation of an entire class from the democratic process is not only a problem for the poor; it poses a systemic threat to political moderation and democratic stability. Politically marginalized and alienated groups may resort to nonpolitical means to effectuate social change and may also become ripe for recruitment by extremist and anti-democratic elements that are latent in every society. Recent incidents of domestic political violence demonstrate that the United States is no exception.
To address this threat of marginalizing the poor from democratic politics, we advance three sets of proposals. First, we argue that states should regulate the information environment of political campaigns. Prohibiting the collection and distribution of voter history data is not practical, but states should lean into their privacy laws to prohibit the matching of voter files with other administrative data sets and should provide voter history data to campaigns independent of any information about individual political preferences. Second, states should create financial incentives for campaigns to expand their mobilization efforts to include a more representative target population that is more inclusive of the poor. Traditional campaign finance voucher and tax rebate programs are likely inadequate on their own. Instead, we propose a series of novel incentive programs that would provide cash grants to campaigns that report the most donors during each reporting period and to parties that generate more turnout than their historical average. Finally, we advance proposals for social media platforms to self-regulate “look-alike” targeting and segmented online political ads that amplify inequalities in mobilization and exacerbate political marginalization.
Political parties and individual campaigns in the United States are currently not mandated by law to promote political equality. The above reforms aim to align the short-term interests of parties and campaigns (winning the next election) with the long-term public interest in preserving a healthy democracy. Constructing a more inclusive political system will benefit everyone who seeks to live in a sustainable representative democracy, not just those who are currently marginalized. [Boldface added]
Does the Constitution Guarantee a Right to Vote? The Answer May Surprise You.
For decades, the courts and Congress have taken the lead in expanding the legal right to vote, but the founders never explicitly included it.
“Unraveling the unfounded conspiracies about Dominion Voting Systems”
See how your votes aren’t equal
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Mike Parsons: “New Poll Shows Path Forward on Impartial Election Administration”
The following is a guest post from Mike Parsons (Senior Counsel for Election Reformers Network and Program Affiliate Scholar at NYU Law):
It’s no secret that trust in U.S. elections is worryingly low. But a new survey points the way towards a promising area for bipartisan reforms to shore up confidence in our elections: impartial election administration.
The nationwide poll of 1,498 likely voters — commissioned by Election Reformers Network (ERN) and released last week — delves more deeply into how voters think elections should be run. Its findings offer important insights into how to build a realistic and achievable long-term strategy to protect fair elections in our hyper-partisan era.
To start, the poll found wide partisan differences in perceptions over whether elections are run fairly — no surprise to regular ELB readers. But, when respondents were asked how election officials should act, large majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike all said it’s very important that election officials act impartially. In addition, over two thirds of respondents (again, including large majorities of D’s, R’s, and I’s) said it’s difficult to trust the impartiality of election officials who are elected with the support of a party. And, perhaps most striking, there was strong support for stricter rules to ensure election officials are impartial and qualified for their roles. This includes impartiality rules like barring election officials from publicly endorsing candidates or hosting political fundraisers, and qualifications rules like requiring the state’s chief election official to have prior election administration experience.
In sum, the poll makes clear that voters of all stripes care deeply that elections are run impartially, don’t believe that’s currently happening, and like the idea of reforms that would move us in that direction. This is valuable (and rare) common ground in an increasingly polarized but critical reform space.
To be sure, reform won’t happen overnight. And it is absolutely vital that we support, protect, and fund election officials currently working on the frontlines of democracy even as we pursue more fundamental reforms. The overwhelming majority of Democratic, Republican, and Independent/Unaffiliated election workers regularly put country before party and proudly administer professional, accurate, and secure elections that deserve the public’s trust. Incremental reforms can and should codify existing best practices for impartial administration, accelerate the trends towards professional administration that are already underway, and help make it easier for current officials (including party-affiliated officials) to do their jobs by reducing outside partisan pressures and bolstering voter confidence. By adopting reforms that de-emphasize partisanship in election management, we can strengthen voter trust in the short term and lay the groundwork for more transformative change over the long term.
What does this incremental path look like? ERN’s model ethics legislation and model qualifications legislation would leave in place the system of partisan elections that most states use to pick their chief election official, while making important improvements. The ethics bill would bar election officials from the most troubling and explicitly partisan acts, like publicly endorsing other candidates or holding political fundraisers. And the qualifications bill would require that candidates for chief election official have some experience or expertise in running elections — a simple, common-sense rule that would have disqualified almost all of this year’s election denier candidates.
Both bills would begin the process of shifting the candidate pool for chief election officials away from partisan politicians and toward independent professionals. Both bills take steps that respondents to the survey said they support. And both bills lay key groundwork for more fundamental reforms.
Of course, we shouldn’t lose sight of those longer-term goals. Ultimately, states should do what nearly every other advanced democracy does: use non-partisan experts to run elections. One promising approach for choosing them would be to give the task to an independent commission modeled on the judicial nominating commissions already used by a number of states. This may seem far off from our current reality – but so too were independent redistricting commissions not too long ago.
And there are good reasons to think that the prospects for this path to reform are real.
First and foremost is the urgency of the threat. With election deniers potentially in line to become chief election officials in several states, it has become clearer than ever how entrusting these crucial posts to partisan politicians can pose risks to fair elections or, at the very least, public confidence in the fairness of our elections. Simply put, the risks of inaction are now too great.
In addition, the survey findings confirm that many voters deeply distrust our current system, and support exactly these types of changes. This reform energy is also reflected in the growing number of states — Michigan, Colorado, New Mexico, Missouri, and Wyoming, to name a few — that are exploring ways to make their election systems less vulnerable to partisan manipulation.
But perhaps the greatest sign is that these reforms command such widespread support across party lines. Like the potential for reforms to the Electoral Count Act, incremental reforms to enhance and advance impartial election administration are something that almost everyone can agree on. And in that the survey offers a bit of something we all need: hope.
How Election Lies Took Over the Republican Ticket Nationwide
By Karen Yourish, Danielle Ivory, Aaron Byrd, Weiyi Cai, Nick Corasaniti, Meg Felling, Rumsey Taylor and Jonathan Weisman
Oct. 13, 2022
What Will Happen to America if Trump Wins Again? Experts Helped Us Game It Out.
The scenarios are … grim.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/10/10/country-after-second-trump-term/
THE INEVITABLE INDICTMENT OF DONALD TRUMP
Merrick Garland hasn’t tipped his hand, but it’s clear to me that he will bring charges against the former president.
“Hand-counting ballots may sound nice. It’s actually less accurate and more expensive.”
election administration, UncategorizedFranita Tolson
This is the second article in a series that NPR is running to shed light on how our voting process works. The article refutes claims that hand-counting ballots are preferable for tabulating votes because the research shows that hand-counts are “significantly less accurate, more expensive and more time consuming” than machine tabulation.
New Report on History of Tech and Elections
Katie Harbath and Collier Fernekes at the Bipartisan Policy Center have published “A Brief History of Tech and Elections: A 26 Year Journey.” Without endorsing its normative take, the report does offer a nice synthesis and review of the developing role of technology and social media in our elections.
NCC’s Guardrails of Democracy Project
On Wednesday, the National Constitution Center is hosting a webinar as part of its Guardrails of Democracy project. The specific topic is “Election 2022: Are We Ready?” David French, Ilya Somin, and I will be participating on behalf of the three teams that NCC created to prepare reports for the Guardrails project.
In addition, Ilya recently hosted a symposium of blog posts at the Volokh Conspiracy on the Guardrails project. Here are links to the symposium pieces:
Lana Ulrich, The National Constitution Center’s “Restoring the Guardrails of Democracy” Initiative
Edward Foley, Three Reforms to Protect Democracy from Election Denialism
Walter Olson, Restoring the Guardrails of Democracy: A Libertarian View
David French, An Upgrade, not a Rebuild
Walter Olsen, Guardrails of Democracy, Extended: Comparing Notes On The Team Libertarian Report
Edward Foley, Three Points of Agreement on Democracy Protection
Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Lawrence Tribe on the future of the Voting Rights Act
The New York Review of Books
September 24, 2022 Newsletter
Other than Moore v. Harper, what other significant cases do you see coming in the next term?
There are many, but I would single out Merrill v. Milligan, a case from Alabama in which the Supreme Court will have the majority it has been moving toward to essentially finish the project of gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
This interview probably isn’t a good place for me to elaborate, but I would point your readers toward a wonderful article by Linda Greenhouse in The Atlantic for October 2022, “John Roberts’s Long Game,” in which she argues that the Chief Justice’s position, “essentially, is that any effort to eradicate racial discrimination, is itself racial discrimination,” a Kafkaesque distortion of the Reconstruction Amendments if ever there was one.
Trump’s ‘big lie’ fueled a new generation of social media influencers
Accounts that rose to prominence spreading disinformation about the 2020 election now drive other polarizing debates, a Washington Post data analysis found
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/20/social-media-influencers-election-fraud/
Social Media Companies Still Boost Election Fraud Claims, Report Says
The report, by New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, argues that the companies fuel false conspiracies about election fraud despite promises to combat them.
The major social media companies all say they are ready to deal with a torrent of misinformation surrounding the midterm elections in November.
A report released on Monday, however, claimed that they continued to undermine the integrity of the vote by allowing election-related conspiracy theories to fester and spread.
In the report, the Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University said the social media companies still host and amplify “election denialism,” threatening to further erode confidence in the democratic process.
The companies, the report argued, bear a responsibility for the false but widespread belief among conservatives that the 2020 election was fraudulent — and that the coming midterms could be, too. The report joins a chorus of warnings from officials and experts that the results in November could be fiercely, even violently, contended.
A Crisis is Coming: The Twin Threats to American Democracy
David Leonhardt is a senior writer at The Times who won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Great Recession.
Is Ron DeSantis the Future of the Republican Party?
September 13, 2022
If DeSantis has proved himself a true believer, it is in himself more than any cause. “I think he stumbled into this,” Curbelo, the former Florida congressman, told me of DeSantis’s forays into culture warfare, crediting the governor for his political dexterity in making conservative red meat sound like common sense.
The governor’s approach to voting issues is especially instructive. Shortly after taking office, he moved to restrict the recently restored voting rights of people with felony convictions, enshrined in a 2018 ballot measure, by requiring those with serious criminal histories to fully pay court fines and fees before re-enfranchisement. His emphasis on scattered episodes of possible fraud has appeared to be situational, highlighted by the creation of an Office of Election Crimes and Security and an announcement in August that more than a dozen former felons were being arrested for illegally voting. (In media interviews and court filings, some of the offenders have claimed they were effectively entrapped, encountering no issue when they sought to determine if they could vote and learning of an eligibility problem only upon their arrest.) When several people from the Villages, the vast Central Florida retirement community that skews Republican, were arrested for trying to cast multiple ballots in the 2020 election, DeSantis did not convene a news conference.
There’s No Escaping the Truth About Trump
The former president has imprinted his moral pathologies and will-to-power ethic on the Republican Party.
About the author: Peter Wehner is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum, and the author of The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/trump-republicans-authoritarian-tendencies
Letters from an American, Heather Scott Richardson
September 6, 2022
And, today, New Mexico judge Francis J. Mathew ruled that Couy Griffin, the founder of Cowboys for Trump, must be removed from his office as Otero County commissioner for participating in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. In a lawsuit brought by New Mexico citizens, Mathew ruled that Griffin is disqualified for office under the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits from holding office anyone who had engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” against the country. This is the first time this clause has been enforced since 1869, and the first time a court has found the attack on the Capitol was an insurrection.
It Didn’t Start with Trump: The Decades-Long Saga of How the GOP Went Crazy
The modern Republican Party has always exploited and encouraged extremism.
By David Corn
September-October 2022 Issue
Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson
September 22, 2022 issue
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/09/22/these-disunited-states-steven-simon-jonathan-stevenson/
Trump vows pardons, government apology to Capitol rioters if elected
The comments came on the same day President Biden was delivering a prime-time address warning of the threat to democracy from “MAGA Republicans” and election deniers.
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT BIDEN ON THE CONTINUED BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF THE NATION
Independence National Historical Park
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
September 1, 2022
The president condemned Trump-led extremism and cast the midterm elections as a “battle for the soul of the nation.”
PHILADELPHIA — President Biden traveled to Independence Hall on Thursday to warn that America’s democratic values are under assault by forces of extremism loyal to former President Donald J. Trump, using a prime-time address to define the midterm elections as a “battle for the soul of this nation.”
The speech was intended to deliver a dark message about threats to the fabric of the country’s democracy. But aides said Mr. Biden sought to strike a balance just two months before elections that will determine control of Congress, seeking to offer a sense of optimism about the future and urging Americans to fight back against extremism.
“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic,” Mr. Biden said, noting that not all Republicans follow Mr. Trump’s ideology. “But there’s no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans. And that is a threat to this country.”
Citing the “extraordinary experiment of self-government” represented by the American Constitution, Mr. Biden said that “history tells us a blind loyalty to a single leader and a willingness to engage in political violence is fatal to democracy.”
The stakes are high for the president and his political advisers, who believe they must cast the midterms as nothing less than an existential choice for voters between Mr. Biden’s agenda and a return to the extremism of “MAGA Republicans” who have enabled Mr. Trump’s ideology. Mr. Biden plunged into the cultural issues that his party believes could help galvanize Democratic voters, by bringing up reproductive rights and fears that Supreme Court could undo gay marriage.
Read More
Trump’s Second Term Would Look Like This
The former president and his allies have explained their plans quite clearly.
About the author: Jonathan Rauchis a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/trump-2024-reelection-viktor-orban-hungary/671264/
[Excerpt:]Today, however, we can do more than just speculate about how a second Trump term would unfold, because the MAGA movement has been telegraphing its plans in some detail. In a host of ways—including the overt embrace of illiberal foreign leaders; the ruthless behavior of Republican elected officials since the 2020 election; Trump allies’ elaborate scheming, as uncovered by the House’s January 6 committee, to prevent the peaceful transition of power; and Trump’s own actions in the waning weeks of his presidency and now as ex-president—the former president and his allies have laid out their model and their methods.
Begin with the model.
‘You are more powerful than you think.’ Why one man says it’s too soon to write off democracy in America
Updated August 28, 2022
https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/28/us/eric-liu-american-democracy-resilient-cec
[Excerpt:]Liu, 54, is CEO and co-founder of Citizen University, a nonprofit group based in Seattle, Washington, that teaches people how to cultivate civic power. He also is an evangelist for democracy, a charismatic writer and speaker whose philosophy could be distilled in this observation from the late historian Howard Zinn: “Democracy is not what governments do; it’s what people do.”Democrats see the once unthinkable: A narrow path to keeping the House
While Democrats acknowledge they still face major hurdles, there has been an unmistakable mood shift, according to interviews with candidates, strategists and officials
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/27/democrats-republicans-house-midterms/
Don’t Succumb to MAGA Fatalism
Three strategies to cope with Trump-induced gloom.
THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY IS NOW AT THE TOP OF MIDTERM VOTERS’ MINDS
According to a new poll, “threats to democracy” have overtaken the cost of living as the chief issue facing American voters, most of whom believe that Donald Trump should remain under legal investigation over his failed plot to subvert the election.
There Is No Happy Ending to America’s Trump Problem
Mr. Linker, a former columnist at The Week, writes the newsletter “Eyes on the Right.”
[Excerpts: Read the entire opinion]
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/opinion/trump-fbi-republicans
Down one path is the prosecution of the former president.
That would set an incredibly dangerous precedent.
We wouldn’t even avoid potentially calamitous consequences if Mr. Trump somehow ended up barred from running or his party opted for another candidate to be its nominee in 2024 — say, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida.
How long do you think it would take for a freshly inaugurated President DeSantis to pardon a convicted and jailed Donald Trump? Hours? Minutes? And that move would probably be combined with a promise to investigate and indict Joe Biden for the various “crimes” he allegedly committed in office.
That’s why it’s imperative we set aside the Plan A of prosecuting Mr. Trump. In its place, we should embrace a Plan B that defers the dream of a post-presidential perp walk in favor of allowing the political process to run its course. If Mr. Trump is the G.O.P. nominee again in 2024, Democrats will have no choice but to defeat him yet again, hopefully by an even larger margin than they did last time.
There is an obvious risk: If Mr. Trump runs again, he might win. But that’s a risk we can’t avoid — which is why we may well have found ourselves in a situation with no unambivalently good options.
Democratic senator says that Arizona GOP has ‘dangerous ideas’
On CNN’s “State of the Union,” anchor Jake Tapper asked Kelly about his thoughts on the state’s GOP with regard to candidates running for office who have denied that President Biden was legitimately elected or suggested that their political opponents be jailed.
“Well, unfortunately, I think right now that the folks you mentioned have some really dangerous ideas, and they’re not consistent with most Arizonans, even most Republicans in Arizona,” Kelly told Tapper.
“So I’m hoping we can move away from that. My Republican colleagues that I talk to in the United States Senate, I mean, these are good, good people, by and large, who are working really hard,” Kelly added. “And they don’t need those dangerous ideas in the United States Senate.”
Kelly’s remarks come after a new Fox News poll showed that the lawmaker has an 8-point lead over his Trump-backed challenger in his state’s Senate race. Fifty percent of respondents said they support Kelly, while 42 percent said they back Masters.
How Trump’s Endorsements Elevate Election Lies and Inflate His Political Power
The former president’s 220 endorsements have been guided more by self-serving impulses than by unseating Democrats.
[Excerpt:]
The unifying thread through the majority of Mr. Trump’s endorsements has been a candidate’s willingness to help him spread the lie that he won the 2020 presidential race. Many of these candidates either took concrete actions to subvert the election, such as voting in Congress or state legislatures to delay certification of the vote, suing to overturn results or backing partisan reviews of the ballot count. Others made clear public statements in political ads, social media posts or on the campaign trail that expressed doubts about the 2020 election. [Boldface added]
Beto O’Rourke’s book spotlights Texans’ struggles for voting rights
[Excerpt:]O’Rourke has listed both “The Odyssey” and Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero’s Journey” as his favorite books. (He named his first son Ulysses.) This Ur-story of a long and winding journey infuses the book. Of course, in his picaresque travelogue of Texan political activism, O’Rourke is also telling his own story — as a careful listener and tireless avatar of all those who have fought against injustice, past and present.
But of all the injustices, the contemporary assault on the right to vote stands front and center. Like many Republican-controlled state legislatures, Texas passed laws in 2021 that curtailed access to voting methods favored by Democratic-aligned constituencies (especially voters of color) under the guise of “election integrity.” Since 2013 (following the Shelby County v. Holder decision, which substantially weakened the Voting Rights Act), Texas has closed 750 polling stations.
The Arizona Republican Party’s Anti-Democratic Experience
First, it turned against the establishment. Now it has set its sights on democracy – the principles, the process and even the word itself.
By Robert Draper
August 15, 2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/15/magazine/arizona-republicans-democracy
‘Stop the Steal’ Is a Metaphor
The scholar Theda Skocpol—renowned for her research on the Tea Party movement a decade ago—explains how American politics has evolved since then.
She isn’t really fighting to keep her seat in Congress. She’s fighting Donald Trump.
August 12, 2022
The Absurd Argument Against Making Trump Obey the Law
MICHELLE GOLDBERG
What has strengthened Trump has not been prosecution but impunity, an impunity that some of those who stormed the Capitol thought, erroneously, applied to them as well. Trump’s mystique is built on his defiance of rules that bind everyone else. He is reportedly motivated to run for president again in part because the office will protect him from prosecution. If we don’t want the presidency to license crime sprees, we should allow presidents to be indicted, not accept some dubious norm that ex-presidents shouldn’t be.
The question is how much deference the rest of us should give to this belief. No doubt, Trump’s most inflamed fans might act out in horrifying ways; many are heavily armed and speak lustily about civil war. To let this dictate the workings of justice is to accept an insurrectionists’ veto. The far right is constantly threatening violence if it doesn’t get its way. Does anyone truly believe that giving in to its blackmail will make it less aggressive?
I’m a Conservative, and I Don’t Know What the GOP Stands For
Free markets? Nope. Limited government. Uh-uh. Strong foreign policy? No, America first. Rule of law? LOL.
Dick Cheney ad to air on Fox News, bringing stinging critique to Trump’s favorite shows
By Tom Howell Jr.
The Washington Times
August 10, 2022
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/aug/10/dick-cheney-ad-air-fox-news-bringing-stinging-crit/
“It’s important not only for Fox News viewers, but for the network’s hosts and top executives, to hear former Vice President Cheney‘s warning about the ongoing danger Donald Trump and his lies pose to our constitutional republic,” Cheney spokesman Jeremy Adler told the outlet.
If Trump broke a law on the removal of official records, would he be barred from future office?
[Excerpt:]
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/08/us/politics/donald-trump-president-criminal-law
Early reports that the F.B.I. search of former President Donald J. Trump’s residence in Florida related to an investigation into whether he had unlawfully taken government files when he left the White House focused attention on an obscure criminal law barring removal of official records. The penalties for breaking that law include disqualification from holding any federal office.
Because Mr. Trump is widely believed to be preparing to run for president again in 2024, that unusual penalty raised the prospect that he might be legally barred from returning to the White House.
Specifically, the law in question — Section 2071 of Title 18 of the United States Code — makes it a crime if someone who has custody of government documents or records “willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies or destroys” them.
If convicted, defendants can be fined or sentenced to prison for up to three years. In addition, the statute says, if they are currently in a federal office, they “shall forfeit” that office, and they shall “be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.”
On its face, then, if Mr. Trump were to be charged and convicted of removing, concealing or destroying government records under that law, he would seem to be ineligible to become president again.
But there was reason for caution: The law briefly received a close look in 2015, after it came to light that Hillary Clinton, then widely anticipated to be the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, had used a private email server to conduct government business while secretary of state. [Boldface added]
Some Republicans were briefly entranced with whether the law could keep Mrs. Clinton out of the White House, including Michael Mukasey, a former attorney general in the administration of George W. Bush. So was at least one conservative think tank.
But in considering that situation, several legal scholars — including Seth B. Tillman of Maynouth University in Ireland and Eugene Volokh of the University of California, Los Angeles — noted that the Constitution sets eligibility criteria for who can be president, and argued that Supreme Court rulings suggest Congress cannot alter them. The Constitution allows Congress to disqualify people from holding office in impeachment proceedings, but grants no such power for ordinary criminal law.
Mr. Volokh later reported on his blog that Mr. Mukasey — who is also a former federal judge — wrote that “upon reflection,” Mr. Mukasey had been mistaken and Mr. Tillman’s analysis was “spot on.”
State Legislatures Are Torching Democracy
DeSantis stokes culture wars as 2024 profile grows
“I do think that voters are going to have a hard time choosing between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis because they are so similar in what they offer,” Schilling said. “I don’t think there is a DeSantis without Donald Trump opening that huge door for him . . . .”
What would happen if a state official refused to certify an election?
Election deniers might get elected in November. Experts say there are backstops in place — for now.
Analysis by Amber Phillips, Staff writer
The Different Potential Versions of Any “Independent State Legislature Doctrine”
In my testimony on the independent state legislature theory (ISLT) to the House Administration Committee, I identified seven different potential versions of such a doctrine, should the Court endorse it at all. That highlights the fact that the question is not just whether the Court endorses such a doctrine, but what the scope of that doctrine would be. I thought it might be helpful to list those different potential versions here.
In my testimony, I address the practical consequences of each of these different versions, as well as the historical evidence, for or against, any of these versions. Here, I will just list these versions without elaborating upon them. One can find endorsements of each, or at least suggestions of support for them, either in statements individual Justices have issued or in well-informed commentary. Also, if the Court endorses the doctrine, that doctrine could include more than one of these specific versions.
I’ve listed them more or less in order of how wide-ranging the consequences would be of each version, with the most sweeping versions listed first:
1. State constitutions. State constitutions cannot impose substantive constraints on state legislation regulating national elections
2. Voter-initiated laws. Voter-initiated legislation cannot impose substantive constraints on state legislation regulating national elections
3. General v. Specific State Constitutional Provisions. State constitutions or voter-initiated laws can impose substantive constraints on such legislation, but cannot transfer permanently transfer entirely out of the legislature’s hands a fundamental function involving state regulation of national elections (such as redistricting)
4. Regulating v. Permanently Displacing State Legislatures. State constitutions can impose substantive constraints on state legislation regulating national elections if those constraints are specific enough, but state courts cannot enforce more general state constitutional provisions against state legislation regulating national elections.
5. Direct Conflicts with State Election Laws in the Administration and Interpretation of State Election Laws. State executive officials and courts cannot invoke general principles or canons of interpretation that generate a result which directly contradicts or conflicts with a provision in state election law regulating national elections.
6. Straying ”Too Far” from State Election Laws in Administration and Interpretation of State Election Laws. Even if executive action or state judicial interpretation does not generate a result that directly conflicts with state election law, the ISLT precludes executive action or state judicial interpretation that strays too far from the text of state election laws that regulate national elections.
7. Limits on State Court Remedial Relief. State courts can enforce substantive provisions in state constitutions or voter-initiated enactments, but if the courts find a violation, they must give the legislature the first opportunity to decide how to remedy that violation, at least absent urgent time constraints.
Note that I do not include on this list a version in which state legislation regulating national elections could not be subject to gubernatorial veto. I’m not aware of any major defender of the ISLT who argues for that version.
Why Garland Should Go Big
He shouldn’t bring a pen to the gun fight
https://morningshots.thebulwark.com/p/why-garland-should-go-big?
Republicans’ next big play is to ‘scare the hell out of Washington’ by rewriting the Constitution. And they’re willing to play the long game to win.
- The conservative movement isn’t done reshaping the Constitution from the ground up.
- Conservatives are now pushing an unprecedented convention to re-write the US bedrock text since 1788.
- So far, 19 GOP states have joined a rapidly-growing conservative movement to call a new convention.
“How Six States Could Overturn the 2024 Election”
Barton Gellman in The Atlantic on the potential implications of Moore v. Harper for presidential elections (if, a big if, any independent state legislature holding in the congressional election context extends to presidential elections, too).
To understand the stakes, and the motives of Republicans who brought the case, you need only one strategic fact of political arithmetic. Six swing states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina—are trending blue in presidential elections but ruled by gerrymandered Republican state legislatures. No comparable red-trending states are locked into Democratic legislatures. . . .
If you give the legislature a blank check on the manner of appointing presidential electors, then a Republican majority could—in the most muscular version of ISL—simply disregard a Biden victory in the state’s popular vote and appoint Trump electors instead. . . .
But if the Supreme Court adopts the ISL doctrine in Moore, the argument that Texas made will become a model in 2024. The conditions that Texas cited in its argument are almost always present in contemporary elections. Legislatures pass laws on the conduct of the vote, but election administrators have to interpret those laws and set implementing rules such as precinct locations, polling times, and counting procedures. State courts sometimes mandate changes in the rules to comply with their state constitutions. It’s all but impossible to conduct an election without making rules or choices that the legislature did not specifically authorize.
The pernicious threat of ISL, wrote Richard L. Hasen, an election-law expert at UCLA, is that “a state legislature dominated by Republicans in a state won by Democrats could simply meet and declare that local administrators or courts have deviated from the legislature’s own rules, and therefore the legislature will take matters into its own hands and choose its own slate of electors.”
Here’s a test to see whether Supreme Court justices are above the law
Now, the group is making its most ambitious move yet: It is filing a specific demand with the Supreme Court to kick Eastman, the chief architect of the coup plot, out of the elite Supreme Court Bar (lawyers eligible to argue in the highest court). And it has requested that Justice Clarence Thomas recuse himself from the disciplinary proceeding because of the role that Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, played in the 2020 scheme.
The Youth Voting Rights Act Would Transform Access for Young Voters
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/youth-voting-rights-act-what-is
The Youth Voting Rights Act, introduced this month by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Representative Nikema Williams (D-GA):
1) establishes a national standard of review for 26th Amendment legal challenges;
2) expands voter registration services at public colleges and universities;
3) allows young people in every state to preregister to vote before turning 18;
4) requires institutions of higher education to have on-campus polling places, with waivers available as appropriate;
5) codifies the right to vote from a college address;
6) guarantees that states accept student IDs to meet voter-identification requirements;
7) creates a grant program that supports youth involvement in elections, including paid fellowships for young people to work with state and local election administrators to engage their peers; and
8) gathers data on registration and voting based on age and race.
Most third parties have failed. Here’s why ours won’t.
Trump Just Told Us His Master Plan
If he gets in next time, he won’t be dislodged by any means.
Trump’s first term was mitigated by his ignorance, indolence, and incompetence. Since the humiliation of his 2020 defeat, however, Trump has been studying how to use a second chance if he gets one. The one abiding interest of his life, revenge, will provide the impetus. Next time, he will have the wholehearted support of a White House staff selected to enable him. Next time, he will have the backing in Congress of a party remade in his own image. Next time, he’ll be acting to ensure that his opponents never again get a “next time” of their own.
He may not succeed, but he’ll know what he’s trying to do.
The Forgotten Constitutional Weapon Against Voter Restrictions
A former Justice Department lawyer thinks he’s found a way to penalize states that undermine voting rights.
The Trailer: How DeSantis and other GOP candidates are ditching ‘legacy media’ for friendly outlets
As the number of local media outlets shrink, and as alternative media outlets boom, Republicans are finding less use for what they disparagingly call “fake news” — or, more diplomatically, the “legacy media.” Social media, and decades of investment in conservative outlets, have made it easy to reach voters outside of the “legacy” filter.
In Pennsylvania, four Republicans running for governor briefly demanded a Republican debate moderator as a condition for facing off; Doug Mastriano, who won the nomination, kept media outlets out of his closing rallies. In Missouri, two leading candidates in the GOP’s U.S. Senate primary avoided televised debates; one of them, ex-Gov. Eric Greitens, only committed to a debate run by two conservative news sites.
“Donald Trump might be the last president to be elected with a majority of CNN hits,” said Matt Schlapp, the president of the American Conservative Union and its CPAC conferences. “There is just so much hostility within legacy media toward people with our point of view that you do have to ask yourself — after all these experiences, is it even worth it to try?”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who had selected Levin to moderate two of the debates, presided over an “invite-only” conference at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. While a few more outlets were permitted to cover his dinner speech on Saturday, DeSantis talked proudly about keeping them out of the day-long conference — the debates, speeches from legislative and statewide GOP leaders, and talks by prominent conservative pundits.
“We in the state of Florida are not going to allow legacy media outlets to be involved in our primaries,” DeSantis reportedly told the crowd of more than a thousand conservatives, who had paid at least $100 to attend the summit. “I’m not going to have a bunch of left-wing media people asking our candidates gotcha questions.”
“I have friends across the country,” DeSantis reportedly told his audience. “They say all they do is watch Florida, because they figure three months later, their state may get around and doing what we’re doing.”
The insurrectionists’ clubhouse: Former Trump aides find a home at a little-known MAGA hub
Nearly two dozen alleged members of the Jan. 6 plot are connected to a single Capitol Hill address.
[Excerpt:]The network has broad reach and keeps an eye on future elections: CPI helped found and support the election monitoring nonprofit run by ex-Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell, along with roughly a dozen other dark money and advocacy groups, virtually all of which share the address of the CPI town house on official reporting. Mitchell did not respond to inquiries from Grid for this story.
These organizations employ or assist at least 20 key operatives, reportedly involved in Trump’s failed effort to subvert the 2020 election, including Mitchell, ex-Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, and former Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Clark, who was the subject of both a recent Jan. 6 hearing and an FBI raid. And they help raise millions for Trump-aligned members of Congress — more than $38 million over the 2020 and 2022 election cycles, according to the nonprofit OpenSecrets.
The House Freedom Caucus, whose members were allegedly involved in planning and executing strategies to derail the certification of 2020 election results to help Trump retain power, keeps its PAC at CPI’s headquarters and holds meetings at the brownstone. The Senate Conservatives Fund also calls the building home. The group has backed Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, who, according to text messages obtained by the Jan. 6 congressional committee, was involved in a pressure campaign directed by Trump attorney John Eastman to get state legislators to change election results in key states. When the effort failed, Lee voted to certify the election. The fund also supports Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri, who both promoted vote fraud lies and voted against certifying the election results.
Caroline Wren, a key organizer for the “Stop the Steal” rally preceding the Capitol riot, was invited by CPI to speak at an event last year. The group made Dan Scavino, Trump’s social media guru, a CPI digital fellow and asked him to speak about “Winning Communications Strategy” at a recent conference. According to the Jan. 6 committee, Scavino wrote many of Trump’s postelection posts falsely alleging vote fraud and promoting his rally on Jan. 6. Jenna Ellis, a Trump lawyer who wrote memos attempting to justify overturning the election, records her podcast, “The Jenna Ellis podcast,” at CPI. Requests for comment to Wren, Scavino and Ellis went unanswered.
CPI and its affiliates are more than just a safe harbor: The network and its employees are a continued source of false vote fraud allegations, and produce and amplify defensive messaging in conservative circles responding to the major revelations of the Jan. 6 hearings.
“They’ve got a lot of money, and they’re willing to use that money in any way to advance their goals,” said Norm Ornstein, election expert and emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “And their goals are radical goals about voter suppression, overturning election results if they don’t like them and trying to keep any Democrat who’s in office from governing.” [Boldface added]
DOJ Challenges AZ Voter Registration Law
From the press release:
The Justice Department announced today that it has filed a lawsuit against the State of Arizona challenging voting restrictions imposed by House Bill 2492 (2022), a recently-enacted law set to take effect in January 2023. The United States’ complaint challenges provisions of House Bill 2492 under Section 6 of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) and Section 101 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964….
The United States’ complaint contends that House Bill 2492 violates the NVRA by requiring that applicants produce documentary proof of citizenship before they can vote in presidential elections or vote by mail in any federal election when they register to vote using the uniform federal registration form created by the NVRA. This requirement flouts the 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Ariz., Inc., 570 U.S. 1 (2013), which rejected an earlier attempt by Arizona to impose a similar documentary proof of citizenship mandate on applicants seeking to vote in federal elections. The United States’ complaint also contends that House Bill 2492 violates Section 101 of the Civil Rights Act by requiring election officials to reject voter registration forms based on errors or omissions that are not material to establishing a voter’s eligibility to cast a ballot.
Tuscon.com has this story, and the Hill this one.
On Conservative Radio, Misleading Message Is Clear: ‘Democrats Cheat’
Election fraud claims from 2020 are widespread on talk radio, contributing to the belief that the midterm results cannot be trusted.
Stuart Thompson writes about online information flows.
Despite rebukes, Trump’s legal brigade is thriving
Their claims were dismissed as baseless, but many attorneys have never faced discipline and have found new business as go-to MAGA lawyers.
New Insights Into Trump’s State of Mind on Jan. 6 Chip Away at Doubts
Former President Donald J. Trump has weathered scandals by keeping his intentions under wraps, but recent testimony paints a stark portrait of a man willing to do almost anything to hang onto power.
A Strengthening Case Against Donald Trump
After the last two weeks of testimony at the January 6th committee hearings, she says the answer is tilting toward yes on both counts in the case of former President Donald Trump.
On Tuesday, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson served up new details about President Trump’s behavior before, during, and after the attack on the Capitol. Her testimony filled in some of the blanks legal experts said might prevent the Department of Justice from indicting the former president.
The committee has now issued a subpoena for the former White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, who opposed plans to overturn the 2020 election – and is seen as a critical witness in establishing criminal liability.
Barbara McQuade joined Diane to help explain the strengthening case against Donald Trump.
GUESTS
Barbara McQuade, Former United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan; professor, University of Michigan Law School
https://wamu.org/story/22/07/01/a-strengthening-case-against-donald-trump
Supreme Court Will Hear Moore v. Harper, the Independent State Legislature Theory Case from North Carolina; This Case Could Severely Curtail the Ability of State Courts to Protect Voting Rights and Stop Partisan Gerrymandering
The Supreme Court today just agreed to hear Moore v. Harper, an “independent state legislature” theory case from North Carolina. This case has the potential to fundamentally rework the relationship between state legislatures and state courts in protecting voting rights in federal elections. It also could provide the path for election subversion.
The issue presented in this case has been a recurring one in recent years. Two parts of the Constitution, Article I, Section 4 as to congressional elections and Article II as to presidential elections give state “legislatures” the power to set certain rules (in the Art. I, section 4 context, subject to congressional override). The Supreme Court has long understood the use of the term legislature here to broadly encompass a state’s legislative process, such as the need for a governor’s signature on legislative action (or veto override) about congressional elections. See Smiley v. Holm. As recently as 2015, the Supreme Court held that the voters in Arizona could use the initiative process to create an independent redistricting commission to draw congressional districts even when the state legislature objected. See Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission v. Arizona Legislature.
But that latter case was 5-4 with a strong dissent by Chief Justice Roberts, who believed the legislature could not be cut out of the process. Most of the Justices in the majority in that case are now off the Court.
There’s a more radical version of the idea that the Legislature has power, standing on its own as a body and not part of the general structure of state government, in the independent state legislature theory.
Take the facts of the Moore case. The North Carolina Supreme Court, interpreting a provision of the state constitution protecting the right to vote, held that partisan gerrymandering violated the state constitution and required drawing fairer lines, including in Congressional districts. That state court is majority-Democrat and the NC General Assembly is majority Republican. The Republican legislature argued that this holding usurped its sole and plenary power to choose the manner for drawing congressional districts.
Pause on that for a moment: the theory in its extreme is that the state constitution as interpreted by the state supreme court is not a limit on legislative power. This extreme position would essentially neuter the development of any laws protecting voters more broadly than the federal constitution based on voting rights provisions in state constitutions.
And this theory might not just restrain state supreme courts: it can also potentially restrain state and local agencies and governors implementing rules for running elections.
And this kind of argument shows how the ISL theory, if taken to its extreme, could help foment election subversion. How so? Suppose a state agency interprets state rules to allow for the counting of certain ballots, and doing so favors one candidate. If the leaders of the legislature are from the other party, and they say that the interpretation does not follow the views of the legislature, it’s impermissible and the results need to flip.
Now there may be many responses to such arguments, including arguments like laches—you can’t start raising these arguments after an election when things don’t go your way.
This was in fact the theory that Trump allies tried to raise after the PA Supreme Court extended the time to receive absentee ballots in the 2020 elections because of covid, relying on voter protective provisions in the State constitution. Trump allies argued this usurped the power of the state legislature to set deadlines, and Justice Alito at the time (Circuit Justice for the Third Circuit) put the counting of such ballots on hold. There were about 10,000 such ballots, far fewer than the 80,000 vote victory of Biden in the state. But if it had been closer, a radical reading of ISL could have led to a flipping of results.
Now may be more limited ways of reading the ISL theory, such as to apply only when a state court or agency decision very strongly deviates from legislative language about how to run federal elections.
There are also strong originalist arguments that might persuade some of the Justices not to adopt such a radical reading of these constitutional provisions.
But buckle up! An extreme decision here could fundamentally alter the balance of power in setting election rules in the states and provide a path for great mischief.
[This post has been updated]
The People v. Donald Trump
The evidence for a possible criminal case against the former president is piling up.
JUNE 29, 2022
New Focus on How a Trump Tweet Incited Far-Right Groups Ahead of Jan. 6
Federal prosecutors and congressional investigators are documenting how the former president’s “Be there, will be wild!” post became a catalyst for militants before the Capitol assault.
The Supreme Court has chipped away at the Voting Rights Act for 9 years. This case could be the next blow.
The diminished Voting Rights Act has already played a key role in the 2022 elections via redistricting.
Trump’s legal exposure may be growing – and 4 other takeaways from the Jan. 6 hearing
Essential Politics: New Mexico shows Trump’s false voter fraud conspiracy is not going away
What We Learned About Trump, Pence, and the January 6th Mob
The Jan. 6 select committee makes a criminal referral — its own way
For all the quibbling over whether they should ask DOJ to investigate Donald Trump, panel members effectively did so on Thursday.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/16/jan-6-committee-doj-trump-00040320
Of Course Trump Is Responsible for His Lies
Steve Bannon and the Politics of Bullshit
A profile of the Trump ally on the eve of the January 6 Committee Hearings raises ominous questions about what’s lurking on the rightward fringes of American politics
AMERICAN RASPUTIN
Steve Bannon is still scheming. And he’s still a threat to democracy.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/07/steve-bannon-war-room-democracy-threat/638443/
The January 6 committee is doing what the political media failed to do
The Jan. 6 committee has a narrow but priceless opening
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/05/jan-6-committee-hearings-high-stakes/
[Excerpt:]
Lies about the 2020 election are an animating force for an entire faction of the GOP and have been mobilized as a pretext for corrupting the electoral system to smooth the way for a more successful assault on majority rule in the next presidential election. Even in the face of all our other challenges, protecting democracy is our nation’s most important task. The Jan. 6 committee has a narrow but priceless opening to sound the call to battle.
https://www.brennancenter.org/about/staff/will-wilder
To Trust Election Results, We Must Trust The People Administering Them
By Amber McReynolds and Heather Balas|
The situation is not hopeless. Policy options include: 1) Selecting election officials using impartial appointment models; 2) Electing these officials in nonpartisan races that remove all party affiliations from the ballot; or 3) Requiring election experience for people running for the posts.
Many election officials support such reforms. Secretaries of state have told us that a law prohibiting political endorsements would help them say no to such requests. County clerks in states like Washington support reforms to make election administration nonpartisan. And local election officials, including in Virginia, are raising alarms over the increasingly partisan role of party-selected county election boards.
To be clear, our nation is blessed with many election officials who serve tirelessly. We absolutely must protect them from harm or coercion. At the same time, we must insist that election officials’ integrity remain beyond reproach. States must, at minimum, pass ethics codes for elected officials requiring political and financial neutrality, and they must do it right away.
‘It’s going to be an army’: Tapes reveal GOP plan to contest elections
Placing operatives as poll workers and building a “hotline” to friendly attorneys are among the strategies to be deployed in Michigan and other swing states.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/01/gop-contest-elections-tapes-00035758
States’ Concerted Efforts to Curb Election Misinformation
Cecilia Kang, N.Y. Times, reports on efforts in several states to combat election misinformation in advance of November.
Senate candidate Oz shows how Trump still threatens democracy
Trump loyalist who lost Georgia governor primary with just 3.4% of the vote is refusing to admit defeat
Gerrymandering, a legal form of vote stealing, more entrenched now than ever
Election officials have an extremely important and wonderful story to tell. They oversee and administer one of the best voting systems in the world, one that gives millions of Americans a voice in determining their future and the future of their country.
Wisconsin: “Republican state elections commissioner Dean Knudson abruptly resigns, rebuking his party’s embrace of Trump’s false election claims”
A Republican member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission under fire from members of his own party for refusing to entertain 2020 election distortions stunned his colleagues Wednesday by announcing his resignation from the oversight board and blasting the GOP’s continued focus on former President Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election.
Lawyer Says He Dealt Directly With Trump Over Jan. 6 Plans
Election Deniers Thrive Even as Trumpism Drifts: 5 Primary Takeaways
DeSantis taps self-described ‘Florida gun lawyer’ to oversee elections
(CNN) Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has put in charge of the state’s election systems a deeply conservative state lawmaker who has championed legislation to ban so-called sanctuary cities and calls himself the “Florida gun lawyer.”
Trump should be charged. Don’t let the House pass the buck.
So now it is up the select committee and the Justice Department, which both seem to be caught in a cycle of hand-wringing. They worry about the “taint” of a referral and agonize over fears that Trump and the GOP will discredit any investigation as a partisan witch hunt.
But here’s a reality check: No matter what they do, no matter how cautiously they act, Trump will react with bad faith and demagoguery.
The Justice Department could hire an avatar of respectability and integrity to handle the prosecution (see: Robert Mueller) — and it wouldn’t matter. Whatever it does, Trump will let loose the dogs of disinformation, deceit and obstruction.
Knowing it can’t control the reaction, maybe the select committee should just do the right thing — and finally, finally end the cycle of timidity, self-deterrence and buck-passing.
Mark Meadows removed from North Carolina voter rolls
Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has been removed from North Carolina’s voter rolls, according to the State Board of Elections.
Meadows is also being investigated for allegations of voter fraud, the State Bureau of Investigation said.
The decision to remove the former North Carolina congressman and Trump adviser from the state’s voter rolls came after it was revealed that Meadows was registered to vote in September 2020 at a mobile home in Scaly Mountain, N.C., despite not residing there.
In Conference Call Before Riot, a Plea to ‘Descend on the Capitol’
Days before Jan. 6, a onetime aide to Roger J. Stone Jr. told Trump backers to make lawmakers meeting to finalize the 2020 election results feel that “people are breathing down their necks.”
This was Trump Pulling a Putin
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/11/magazine/trump-putin-ukraine-fiona-hill
Amid the current crisis, Fiona Hill and other former advisers are connecting President Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine to Jan. 6. And they’re ready to talk.
Jan. 6 Panel Has Evidence for Criminal Referral of Trump, but Splits on Sending
Despite concluding that it has enough evidence, the committee is concerned that making a referral to the Justice Department would backfire by politicizing the investigation into the Capitol riot.
How the GOP learned to stop worrying and love ‘stolen election’ claims
Lesson plan: An experiment in misinformation
OVERVIEW
Students will be introduced to Birds Aren’t Real, a satirical conspiracy theory, then create connections to mis- and disinformation while watching a PBS NewsHour Classroom video lesson.
OBJECTIVES
-
- Students will learn to understand and apply concepts of mis- and disinformation in context.
- Students will construct knowledge around conspiracy theories, mis- and disinformation using a satirical conspiracy theory as an example.
- Students will evaluate how Birds Aren’t Real operates and create connections between how mis- and disinformation is spread.
Opinion: Is Trump crazy — or calculating? His opponents have to decide.
Opinion: Hey, Tucker Carlson, are you still rooting for Russia over Ukraine?
Call it a stealth coup
https://www.tribdem.com/news/editorials/columns/leonard-pitts-jr-call-it-a-stealth-coup/
Opinion: The fool’s gold of Trump’s decertification plan
As Donald Trump flails about trying to “rescind” the 2020 presidential election and castigating Republicans who point out the Constitution doesn’t allow that, here is a heads-up for state legislators considering doing his bidding: You were elected to office by the same voters using the same ballots on the same day.
If somehow Joe Biden’s victory was fraudulent, so was yours.
It is worth asking all secretary of state candidates some questions: Would they have certified the 2020 election? And under what circumstances, with what hard evidence, would they refuse to certify future elections? Do they recognize that invalidating a vote for one office means invalidating the votes for all offices on a ballot? Their answers will be revealing, and Republican officials whose elections may be called into question should pay attention.
These issues spotlight the crucial role of election officials — the people charged in our democracy with calling balls and strikes. When umpires or referees call a game so that the team they favor wins, we recognize that as an “illegal fix.”
When they make claims that betray a basic lack of knowledge of how elections work, we should call them what they are: unqualified for the office.
Judge Rules Parts of Florida Voting Law Are Unconstitutional
The ruling against a major Republican election law, issued by a federal judge in Tallahassee, is likely to be overturned either by a higher appeals court or the U.S. Supreme Court.By Reid J. Epstein, Patricia Mazzei and Nick Corasaniti
March 31, 2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/us/politics/florida-voting-law.html?referringSource=articleShare
[Excerpt:]
A federal judge in Florida ruled on Thursday that sections of the state’s year-old election law were unconstitutional and racially motivated, and barred the state from making similar changes to its laws in the next decade without the approval of the federal government.
The sharply worded 288-page order, issued by Judge Mark E. Walker of the Federal District Court in Tallahassee, was the first time a federal court had struck down major elements of the wave of voting laws enacted by Republicans since the 2020 election. Finding a pattern of racial bias, Walker in his ruling relied on a little-used legal provision to impose unusual federal restrictions on how a state legislates.
“For the past 20 years, the majority in the Florida Legislature has attacked the voting rights of its Black constituents,” Walker wrote in the decision, which frequently quoted the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Walker argued that the attacks were “part of a cynical effort to suppress turnout among their opponents’ supporters. That, the law does not permit.”
Judge Walker’s decision is certain to be appealed and is likely to be overturned either by the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta, which tends to lean conservative, or the Supreme Court, which has sharply limited the federal government’s power to intervene in state election law.
The Hyperbole and Horror of Ginni Thomas
Frank Bruni
The Bulwark: Morning Shots with Charlie Sykes
March 30, 2021
Trump’s Treason
https://morningshots.thebulwark.com/p/trumps-treason?s=r
March 28, 2022: Inside Ted Cruz’s last-ditch battle to keep Trump in power
The Texas senator’s effort alienated some allies and sparked questions about ties to John Eastman, a longtime friend and author of key legal memos in Trump’s efforts.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/28/ted-cruz-john-eastman-jan6-committee/
[Excerpt:]
An examination by The Washington Post of Cruz’s actions between Election Day and Jan. 6, 2021, shows just how deeply he was involved, working directly with Trump to concoct a plan that came closer than widely realized to keeping him in power. As Cruz went to extraordinary lengths to court Trump’s base and lay the groundwork for his own potential 2024 presidential bid, he also alienated close allies and longtime friends who accused him of abandoning his principles.
Under Trump, DHS directed to probe bogus claims about voter fraud
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/17/mark-meadows-voter-registration-investigation/
In late April of 2020, a top political appointee in the Trump administration called for Department of Homeland Security officials to scrutinize an unusual topic for a national security agency: possible voter fraud in the upcoming election. A subsequent directive included a focus on mail-in voting, according to a document reviewed by POLITICO.
That guidance came as then-President Donald Trump fomented claims that the expansion of mail-in voting would corrupt the 2020 election — which later fed his unsubstantiated assertions that the election was stolen.
DHS’ intelligence office did not release any materials substantiating the president’s claims. But it did find that the Kremlin spread lies about mail-in voting.
The issuance of a directive involving voter fraud to the DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis, which has not been previously reported, casts a new light on the extent of Trump World’s efforts to use government resources to investigate spurious claims about U.S. elections.
It also raises new questions about how a domestic political complaint found its way onto the intelligence community’s to-do list.
Ginni Thomas Admits She Attended January 6 Stop the Steal Rally
She says she left before Trump supporters stormed the Capitol.
Texas mail ballot rejections soar under new restrictions
By PAUL J. WEBER and ACACIA CORONADO
March 16, 2022
The Trumpist Ukraine Blame Game
After the invasion, there may or may not be room for Putin apologists in the Republican Party, but there is certainly room for Trump apologists.
March 13, 2022
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/21/the-trumpist-ukraine-blame-game?
2020 Was a Banner Year for U.S. Election Administration
https://elections-blog.mit.edu/articles/2020-was-banner-year-us-election-administration
Thank God Trump Isn’t President Right Now
Biden isn’t perfect, but he beats the alternative.
MARCH 9, 2022
HTTPS://WWW.THEBULWARK.COM/THANK-GOD-TRUMP-ISNT-PRESIDENT-RIGHT-NOW-RUSSIA-PUTIN-UKRAINE/
Judge denies Fox News motion to dismiss defamation suit by election-tech company Smartmatic
By Jeremy Barr
March 9, 2022
https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/03/09/smartmatic-fox-lawsuit-not-dismissed/
Pressing for Evidence, Jan. 6 Panel Argues That Trump Committed Fraud
March 8, 2022
Democrats are Fighting like Hell for Voting Rights
Republicans didn’t like the way the last election went, so they are trying to make it harder for folks to vote. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
Published Mar. 04, 2022
https://www.thedailybeast.com/democrats-are-fighting-like-hell-for-voting-rights
New evidence shows Trump was told many times there was no voter fraud — but he kept saying it anyway
The House Jan. 6 panel aims to prove that Trump was acting corruptly by continuing to spread misinformation about the election long after he had reason to know he had legitimately lost
By Rosalind S. Helderman, Jacqueline Aleman, Josh Dawsey and Tom Hamburger
March 3, 2022
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/03/trump-election-jan-6/
Jan. 6 Committee Lays Out Potential Criminal Charges Against Trump
By Luke Broadwater and Alan Feuer
Published March 2, 2022Updated March 3, 2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/us/politics/trump-criminal-charges-jan-6.html
[Excerpt:]
In a court filing in a civil case in California, the committee’s lawyers for the first time laid out their theory of a potential criminal case against the former president. They said they had accumulated evidence demonstrating that Mr. Trump, the conservative lawyer John Eastman and other allies could potentially be charged with criminal violations including obstructing an official proceeding of Congress and conspiracy to defraud the American people.
The filing also said there was evidence that Mr. Trump’s repeated lies that the election had been stolen amounted to common law fraud.
CHARLES M. BLOW
Open Letter to President Biden From a Dispirited Black Voter
March 2, 2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/opinion/biden-black-voter.html?referringSource=articleShare
She Defended Democracy. Do Voters Care?
Secretary of State Katie Hobbs might wind up the only person standing between Arizona and the triumph of the Big Lie.
FEBRUARY 28, 2022
[Excerpt]
At this particular moment, the people who are most likely to become Arizona’s next governor are two 52-year-old women who have planted their flags on opposite sides of the battlefield for American democracy. If Lake or another Big Lie–endorsing candidate wins, a 2024 election-subversion scenario is not difficult to conjure: In two years, Donald Trump runs again for president. He is defeated again, and again, instead of conceding, he accuses Democrats of fraud. This time, though, the system works in his favor. Trump calls on his allies, newly installed in key election-administration positions in states and cities across the country, to contest the results. In Arizona, the new Republican secretary of state, Mark Finchem, chooses not to certify the election, and Governor Lake refuses to sign a certificate of ascertainment appointing the winning candidate’s electors. Instead, she suggests a different slate of electors who will vote for Trump, and they do, sending a certificate of that vote to Congress. In spite of a wave of legal challenges brought by Democrats, Republican political leaders in other swing states follow suit, setting off a chain of events in which Trump, despite losing, is declared the next president. Distrust in America’s institutions reaches new heights. Some question whether America remains a democracy. Others cheer.
These are the stakes of Katie Hobbs’s campaign for governor. She’d better hope that Arizona voters understand them.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/02/katie-hobbs-arizona-governor-candidate/622057/
Democracy May Depend on a New Partisan Battleground: Races for Secretary of State
The once-sleepy,down-ballot elected office has suddenly become one of themost vital roles of the nation.
FEBRUARY 28, 2022
https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/02/28/secretary-of-state/
Frustrated Michigan clerks call for election reforms: ‘Now is the time’
By Craig Mauger
February 28, 2022
[Excerpt:]
Lansing — Two organizations that represent hundreds of Michigan clerks called on state lawmakers Monday “to set aside their agendas” and make bipartisan improvements to voting policies ahead of the November statewide election.
Mary Clark, president of the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks, and Marc Kleiman, president of the Michigan Association of County Clerks, made the request in a two-page letter addressed to “state and legislative leaders.”
Shame On Those Who Defended Trump’s “Perfect Call”
Never forget that as president Donald Trump led an organized campaign to withhold military aid and blackmail the Ukrainians. And that Republicans let him get away it.
FEBRUARY 27, 2022
HTTPS://WWW.THEBULWARK.COM/SHAME-ON-THOSE-WHO-DEFENDED-TRUMPS-PERFECT-CALL/
The war against democracy finds allies in America First
By Philip Bump
National correspondent
February 27, 2022
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/27/war-against-democracy-finds-allies-america-first/
What does “America first” mean?
This tagline generally associated with former president Donald Trump seems self-obvious, which is the heart of its utility. “America first” means putting America first, which … sure. But how? In what context?
MICHELLE COTTLE
CPAC: A Bacchanal of Right-Wing Pageantry, Passion and Grievance
Ms. Cottle is a member of the editorial board.
While U.S. leaders are dealing with war in Europe and disruption of the global order, the leading lights of MAGA America are in central Florida this week for that annual bacchanal of right-wing pageantry and passion known as the Conservative Political Action Conference.
McCarthy endorses Cheney’s primary rival in rebuke of Republican incumbent who has denounced Trump
February 17, 2022|Updated February 18, 2022
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/17/mccarthy-cheney-jan-6/
[Our favorite excerpt:]
Upon hearing the news of Trump’s endorsement of Hageman for the at-large seat, Cheney quipped a quick answer: “Bring it.”
States of Denial: A Guide to Some of the GOP’s Most Brazen Attacks on Voting Rights and Elections
The Republican playbook: gerrymander, suppress, subvert.
ARI BERMAN Senior Reporter
February 16, 2022
A running list of who the January 6 committee has subpoenaed or requested to appear
The Conservative Case for Avoiding a Repeat of Jan. 6
Feb. 14, 2022
By J. Michael Luttig
Mr. Luttig, a former judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, has been advising a number of senior Republican senators on the Electoral Count Act.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/opinion/electoral-count-act.html?referringSource=articleShare
Don’t bet on the GOP coming to its senses just yet
Posted February 8, 2022
https://rollcall.com/2022/02/08/dont-bet-on-the-gop-coming-to-its-senses-just-yet/
[Excerpts:]
Will a growing percentage of Republican voters come to recognize Trump’s lies and reject his assertion that the election of 2020 was stolen? Will they be shocked and upset that he surrounded himself by so many advisers who said he could simply change the outcome of the 2020 election? And will more Republicans start to recognize Trump’s lies and see him as a bully who is intent on winning, even if that means undermining key democratic institutions?
I remain skeptical.
That may change, of course. But most Republicans who find Trump repugnant have already signaled their opposition to him, and the party apparently lacks a large contingent of people — in the grassroots, in elective office and in the national party’s leadership — for whom character, integrity and the truth are important.
Along with attention, GOP House firebrands attract primary fights
Opponents question effectiveness of Greene, Boebert and Cawthorn
Posted February 8, 2022
https://rollcall.com/2022/02/08/along-with-attention-gop-house-firebrands-attract-primary-fights/
[Excerpt:]
Now the MAGA axis of the House freshman class is attracting Republican challengers who say that, with the GOP in position to win control of the House majority, Republican voters in Georgia, North Carolina and Colorado deserve representatives who want to pass laws rather than pick fights on Twitter.
That’s a direct attack on their high-profile opponents. It’s also a version of a conversation taking place in Republican primaries across the country as the GOP struggles to determine how much of former President Donald Trump’s in-your-face political style to adopt into the party’s DNA
Voting Rights Lab: The Markup
A Weekly Election Legislation Update
February 7, 2022
Today is Monday, February 7. We are tracking 1,953 bills so far this session, with 458 bills that restrict voter access or election administration and 926 bills that improve voter access or election administration. The rest are neutral or mixed or unclear in their impact.
Trump was advised by ‘snake oil salesmen,’ former Pence chief of staff says
“I think unfortunately the president had many bad advisers,” Marc Short said.
By MYAH WARD
02/06/2022
[Excerpt:]
“I think unfortunately the president had many bad advisers, who were basically snake oil salesmen giving him really random and novel ideas as to what the vice president could do,” Short told host Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “But our office, you know, researched that and recognized that was never an option.”
Short said he wasn’t sure if Trump’s beliefs could be fully attributed to bad advisers or if the president was seeking the bad advice to produce the result he wanted.
What the January 6th Papers Reveal
The Supreme Court ruled to give the House Select Committee access to a trove of documents detailing election-negating strategies that Donald Trump and his advisers entertained—including a military seizure of voting machines—but he continues to peddle a counter-narrative in which he’s the victim.
February 6, 2022
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/14/what-the-january-6th-papers-reveal?
‘Taking the Voters Out of the Equation’: How the Parties Are Killing Competition
The number of competitive House districts is dropping, as both Republicans and Democrats use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.
Reid J. Epstein and
February 6, 2022
There’s new evidence showing the lack of fraud in 2020 that Trump’s base will never see
By Philip Bump, Staff writer
February 2, 2022
[Excerpt:]If you started counting every ballot cast for president in the state of Ohio in 2020, one each second, it would on average take you about two days, five hours and 10 minutes before you came across one that the state thought might have been cast illegally. That’s one every 191,000 seconds.On Tuesday, the state reported that its review of voting in the most recent federal election had, predictably, uncovered isolated examples of apparent illegal voting. Those suspect votes — not yet proved to be illegal, mind you — totaled 31 ballots. That’s out of 5.9 million ballots cast for president, meaning that 0.0005 percent of cast ballots were even suspect.
President Donald Trump won Ohio by 476,000 votes. Safe to say that his victory was not tainted by rampant fraud.
Trump’s latest claim that election could have been ‘overturned’ looms over electoral count debate in Congress
By Mike DeBonis
February 1, 2022
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/01/trump-electoral-count-act/
Democrats, Want to Defend Democracy? Embrace What Is Possible.
Mr. Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow in global democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford.
January 25, 2021
[Excerpt:]So far, the Republican leaders of the Senate and House, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, have expressed openness to Electoral Count Act reform. Beyond such a bill, Republican senators such as Mitt Romney have also signaled an openness to considering some reforms on voting rights.
We can’t know what might be possible through bipartisan negotiations, but we do know that the Democrats’ two voting rights bills have not gotten passed this year.
Special report: How Stefanik won power and support for spreading Trump’s ‘Big Lie’
January 25, 2022
“You dance right up to the line and then you back away. That’s what she does,” McGuire said.
Ann Coulter Is Rooting for a Trump-DeSantis Throw-Down. She’s Not Alone.
Jan. 23, 2022
Ms. Cottle is a member of the editorial board.
Ann Coulter has a gift for pushing just the right buttons to inflict maximum irritation. She has been a top-tier troll since Donald Trump was little more than a failed casino magnate.
Which makes Ms. Coulter’s recent attacks on the former president — her onetime political idol — at once delectable and illuminating. Take her contrarian assessment of Mr. Trump’s chokehold on the Republican Party.
“No one wants Trump,” she asserted in a column last week. “He’s fading faster than Sarah Palin did — and she was second place on a losing presidential ticket.”
Parsing recent polling data, Ms. Coulter made the case that high approval for Mr. Trump among Republicans is less about his enduring appeal than about the G.O.P. having been boiled down to a Trumpian rump. Increasingly, she contended, “the only people calling themselves ‘Republicans’ these days are the Trump die-hards.”
Why Millions Think It Is Trump Who Cannot Tell a Lie
Jan. 19, 2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/opinion/trump-big-lie.html?referringSource=articleShare
Why is Donald Trump’s big lie so hard to discredit?
This has been a live question for more than a year, but inside it lies another:
Do Republican officials and voters actually believe Trump’s claim that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election by corrupting ballots — the same ballots that put so many Republicans in office — and if they do believe it, what are their motives?
Read the never-issued Trump order that would have seized voting machines
The Jan. 6 select panel has obtained the draft order and a document titled “Remarks on National Healing.” Both are reported here in detail for the first time.
Among the records that Donald Trump’s lawyers tried to shield from Jan. 6 investigators are a draft executive order that would have directed the defense secretary to seize voting machines and a document titled “Remarks on National Healing.”
POLITICO has reviewed both documents. The text of the draft executive order is published here for the first time.
Effort to overhaul archaic election law wins new momentum
BY JORDAIN CARNEY – 01/21/22
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/590718-effort-to-overhaul-archaic-election-law-wins-new-momentum
Multiple groups on Capitol Hill are working on reforms to the Electoral Count Act, which lays out how the Electoral College results are counted. And in a rare area of overlap, GOP leaders in both chambers and President Biden are opening the door to changes to the 1887 law.
Though talks on the law have been quietly happening behind the scenes on Capitol Hill for weeks, they are moving to the forefront as lawmakers try to figure out what, if anything, can be done in the election space after a separate, Democratic attempt to pass a sweeping voting rights bill unraveled.
Rudy Giuliani, oversaw fake electors plot in 7 states
By Marshall Cohen, Zachary Cohen and Dan Merica, CNN
Updated January 21, 2022
[Excerpt:]
Washington (CNN)Trump campaign officials, led by Rudy Giuliani, oversaw efforts in December 2020 to put forward illegitimate electors from seven states that Trump lost, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the scheme.
The sources said members of former President Donald Trump’s campaign team were far more involved than previously known in the plan, a core tenet of the broader plot to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory when Congress counted the electoral votes on January 6.
DeSantis’ proposed election police force alarms voting rights advocates
By Steve Contorno and Fredreka Schouten, CNN
Updated January 20, 2022
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/01/19/politics/ron-desantis-pushes-election-police-force/index.html
Opinion: Finally, some moral clarity in the voting rights debate
ByJennifer Rubin, Columnist
January 20, 2021
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/20/finally-some-moral-clarity-voting-rights-debate/
[Excerpt:]
Democrats cannot force Republicans to do the right thing. But Democrats did force Republicans and their two Democratic cohorts to reveal the paucity of their arguments and the puniness of their consciences.
Democrats brace for likely defeat of voting rights push due to GOP filibuster
Janaury 19, 2021
Trump Soft-Launches His 2024 Campaign
The former president’s message at his Arizona rally was as clear as it was dishonest: He didn’t lose to Joe Biden in 2020, and he’ll spend the next year working to elect Republicans who agree.
January 15, 2021
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/01/trump-arizona-rally-2024-election/621244/
The Voting Rights Conundrum, Part I
Stephen Griffin
January 14, 2022
https://balkin.blogspot.com/2022/01/the-voting-rights-conundrum-part-i.html
Democrats Face a Dilemma on Voting: Compromise or Keep Pressing?
With their broad voting rights push nearing a dead end, Democrats must soon decide whether to embrace a far narrower bipartisan effort to protect vote counting and administration.
Jan. 14, 2022
What’s Next In The Push To Protect The Vote
The fight over voting rights has taken center stage in Washington. Election law expert Richard Hasen explains what’s at stake and why he’s looking beyond Congress to preserve free and fair elections in the United States.
https://dianerehm.org/shows/2022-01-14/whats-next-in-the-push-to-protect-the-vote
By not calling off the rioters, Trump may be held liable for the attack and the lawsuits demanding damages.
BY BESS LEVIN
January 10, 2022
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/01/donald-trump-january-6-lawsuits-liability?
December 4, 2021
Voting Battles of 2022 Take Shape as G.O.P. Crafts New Election Bills
Republicans plan to carry their push to reshape the nation’s electoral system into next year, with Democrats vowing to oppose them but holding few options in G.O.P.-led states.
By Nick Corasaniti
Identifying and Minimizing the Risk of Election Subversion and Stolen Elections in the Contemporary United States
Harvard Law Review Forum, forthcoming 2022
33 Pages Posted: 20 Sep 2021 Last revised: 8 Oct 2021
Part I of this Essay describes the path to this unexpected moment of democratic peril in the United States.
Part II explains the three potential mechanisms by which American elections may be subverted in the future.
Part III recommends steps that can and should be taken to minimize this risk. Preserving and protecting American democracy from the risk of election subversion should be at the top of everyone’s agenda. The time to act is now, before American democracy disappears.
The attacks on the 2024 election are already underway
Democrats Can Save Voting by Bringing Back the Mr. Smith Filibuster
A reckoning is coming: They don’t want the Senate to fiddle while democracy burns.
Jonathan Alter
https://www.thedailybeast.com/democrats-can-save-voting-by-bringing-back-the-mr-smith-filibuster
TRUMP’S CAPACITY TO STEAL THE 2024 ELECTION IS ONLY GROWING
What happens when the administration is hinged on the unhinged?
The Republicans We’re Thankful For
MICHELLE COTTLE
The Global State of Democracy 2021
Building Resilience in a Pandemic Era
November 22, 2021
https://www.idea.int/gsod/sites/default/files/2021-11/the-global-state-of-democracy-2021_0.pdf
Statement in Support of the Freedom to Vote Act
STATEMENT
Nov. 21, 2021
[Excerpt:]We, the undersigned, are scholars of democracy writing in support of the Freedom to Vote Act, the most important piece of legislation to defend and strengthen American democracy since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This bill would protect our elections from interference, partisan gerrymandering, dark money, and voter suppression. We urge all members of Congress to pass the bill, if necessary by suspending the Senate filibuster rule and using a simple majority vote.
This is no ordinary moment in the course of our democracy. It is a moment of great peril and risk.
Steve Bannon indicted by federal grand jury
At the Willard and the White House, the Jan. 6 Panel Widens Its Net
Luke Broadwater and
Senate GOP blocks latest Dem push for voting reform
Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski was the only Republican to join Democrats on the bill named for the late Rep. John Lewis.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/03/senate-republicans-voting-reform-block-519082
Georgia secretary of state: Trump ‘had no idea how elections work’
BY REID WILSON – 11/02/21
The findings of The Washington Post’s Jan. 6 investigation (and former President Trump’s response):
October 31, 2021
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/10/31/response-trump-jan-6-insurrection/
Download The Washington Post app.
From: CNN Opinion <cnnopinionfeedback@
Date: October 31, 2021 at 9:40:09 AM EDT
Beloved is banned.Please report infractions.Signed your future Guv.Ahead of Tuesday’s election for governor of Virginia, Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin released an ad starring an activist, “Laura Murphy, who campaigned against the teaching of (Toni) Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, ‘Beloved,’ on the grounds the story’s grueling depiction of racial violence gave her son — then a high school senior — nightmares,” wrote Peniel E. Joseph.
The Nobel laureate’s “work calls upon all Americans, but especially our young people, to interrogate the past to create a better democratic future,” Joseph observed. “Censoring the American past does not make White students less vulnerable to feelings of despair about the challenges of racial inequity, discrimination and violence we face as a nation.”
Joe Manchin’s Deep Corporate Ties
An underexamined aspect of Manchin’s pro-business positions in the Senate is his early membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council.
By Dan Kaufman
October 26, 2021
End Of The Line For Congressional Voting Rights Legislation?
by Matt Shuham, THE FRANCHISE FROM TMP,
October 25, 2021
OCTOBER 25, 2021 || ISSUE NO. 24
EXCLUSIVE: Jan. 6 Protest Organizers Say They Participated in ‘Dozens’ of Planning Meetings With Members of Congress and White House Staff
Two sources are communicating with House investigators and detailed a stunning series of allegations to Rolling Stone, including a promise of a “blanket pardon” from the Oval Office
BY Hunter Walker
October 24, 2021
Democrats look for plan B on filibuster
Democrats are struggling with their inability to reform the legislative filibuster, as intense pressure from activists meets dug-in opposition from within the caucus.
The latest frustration over the Senate rule comes after Republicans blocked a revised election reform bill Wednesday, marking the latest Democratic priority to fall victim to the chamber’s 60-vote requirement for most legislation.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/577703-democrats-look-for-plan-b-on-filibuster
Hill: Trump reelection would spur ‘one constitutional crisis after another’
BYMORGAN CHALFANT–10/20/21
Fiona Hill, the former White House national security official who testified against former President Trump during his first impeachment, says that the prospect of Trump running for election again in 2024 represents a threat to the country and the Constitution.
Trump allies eye election law push should he be reelected
The president has made claims of fraud the centerpiece of his post-presidency. It would be a legislative feature of a second term too.
10/15/2021
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/15/trump-allies-election-law-reelection-516077
Trump Tells GOP: Back My Big Lie or I’ll Burn the Party Down
After costing his party the Senate, along with the White House, he’s looking ahead: Nice elections you got there. Be a shame if something happened to them.
Updated Oct. 15, 2021
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-tells-gop-back-my-big-lie-or-ill-burn-the-party-down?ref=scroll
The Constitutionalist
October 13, 2021
Voting Rights Lab Report: A THREAT TO OUR DEMOCRACY: ELECTION SUBVERSION IN THE 2021 LEGISLATIVE SESSION
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https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#inbox/FMfcgzGlkZBXZpWklbMcNHHHwCTdLcQZ
September 29, 2021
https://votingrightslab.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/20210924-VRL-Election-Subversion-Report-.pdf
The Freedom to Vote Act Would Counteract State Laws That Undermine Elections
By Danielle Root, Michael Sozan, and Alex Tausanovitch
October 5, 2021
Trump holds fast to his election lies as the GOP establishment hugs him tighter
10/09/2021
The Memo: New Trump revelations bolster critics while fans shrug
Rep. Cori Bush Questions Gowri Ramachandran About Election Subversion and the Cyber Ninjas Fake Arizona Audit at House Hearing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ5euPJuQTQ
John Eastman tried to help Donald Trump subvert American democracy. He should be shunned
BY ERWIN CHEMERINSKY SPECIAL TO THE SACRAMENTO BEE
[Erwin Chemerinsky is dean and professor of law at the UC Berkeley School of Law.]
SEPTEMBER 30, 2021
Read more at: https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/article254564607.html#storylink=cpy
Opinion: Our constitutional crisis is already here
Opinion by Robert Kagan
Contributing columnist
Sept. 23, 2021
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/23/robert-kagan-constitutional-crisis/
Special Report: Backers of Trump’s false fraud claims seek to control next elections
By Tim Reid and Nathan Layne, Jason Lange
Sept. 22, 2021
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/backers-trumps-false-fraud-claims-seek-control-next-us-elections-2021-09-22/
Opinion: The survival of U.S. democracy may hinge on this decision by Pa.’s next governor
by Will Bunch | Columnist
Sept. 26, 2021
Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American
<heathercoxrichardson@substack.com>
September 25, 2021
“Through voter suppression, gerrymandering, the filibuster, and the Electoral College, and now with new election laws in 18 states, they have guaranteed that they will retain control no matter what voters actually want. Their determination to keep Democrats from power has made them abandon democracy.”
“For their part, Democrats are trying to protect the voting rights at the heart of our democracy, believing that if all eligible Americans can vote, they will back a government that works for the people.”
Senate Democrats unveil new voting rights bill
BY REBECCA BEITSCH AND MARTY JOHNSON – 09/14/21
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/572096-senate-democrats-unveil-new-voting-rights-bill
Democrats see consequences from redistricting reform push
By NICHOLAS RICCARD
September 5, 2021
Just days after Texas’ unprecedented, restrictive anti-abortion law took effect, Republicans around the country are looking to import it. “GOP officials in at least seven states, including Arkansas, Florida, South Carolina and South Dakota, have suggested they may review or amend their states’ laws to mirror Texas’s,” write WaPo’s Meryl Kornfield, Caroline Anders and Audra Heinrichs.
We can’t help but notice that many of those states have something in common: Republican governors with 2024 ambitions.
Cleta Mitchell Helped Set Up Escrow Account to Funnel $1 Million to Support Sham Arizona Audit
September 3, 2021, 4:04 pmchicanery, fraudulent fraud squadRICK HASEN
From: Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American <heathercoxrichardson@substack.com>
Date: September 1, 2021
Today, the Texas legislature passed SB1, the sweeping voter suppression bill Democrats had tried to stop by walking out of the legislature to deny the Republicans a quorum. The new measure is a microcosm of voter suppression bills across the nation in Republican-dominated states.
It bans mail ballot drop boxes and gets rid of drive-through voting and extended hours. It criminalizes the distribution of applications for mail-in ballots and permits partisan poll watchers to have “free movement” in polling places, enabling them to intimidate voters. Texas is just 40% white and has 3 million unregistered voters, the vast majority of whom are Black or Latino. The new measure is designed to cut young people of color, whose numbers are growing in Texas and who are overwhelmingly Democrats, out of elections. In debates on the measure, Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan asked members not to use the word “racism.”
Justice Department releases Voting Rights Act mapmaking guidance
States warned against diluting voting power of minorities
Posted September 1, 2021
https://www.rollcall.com/2021/09/01/justice-department-releases-voting-rights-act-mapmaking-guidance/
Which Senators And Representatives Vote In Favor Of Democracy?
Filed under Democracy
Published Sep. 1, 2021
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/which-senators-and-representatives-vote-in-favor-of-democracy/
Election-fraud conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell pressed by Australian reporter: ‘Do you ever hear yourself and think that it sounds ridiculous?’
Aug 31, 2021
Trump’s political operation paid more than $4.3 million to Jan. 6 organizers but questions remain about the full extent of its involvement
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2021/08/trumps-political-operation-paid-more-than-4-3-million-to-jan-6-organizers-questions-remain-about-full-involvement/
After A Bitter Fight, The Texas House Passes A Restrictive Voting Bill
Benjamin Swasey
August 27, 2021
How a Defunct Federal Provision Helped Pave the Way for New Voting Restrictions
Curbs on drop boxes, tougher ID requirements and purges of voter rolls would have been weakened, or never even passed, if a federal oversight system had been in place.
By Nick Corassaniti
Aug. 26, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/26/us/politics/voting-restrictions.html?referringSource=articleShare
“Rucho v. Common Cause—A Critique”
August 24, 2021, 3:37 pmredistrictingRICK HASEN
Emmet Bondurant has written this article for the Emory Law Journal. Here is the abstract:
Once upon a time, the right to vote was held by the Supreme Court to be among the most precious of the rights protected by the Constitution, on which all other rights were dependent for their existence. Protection of the right to vote was not a partisan issue. Some of the leading defenders of the right to vote—including Justices Brennan, Powell, Stevens, and Kennedy—had all been appointed by Republican Presidents.
As the confirmation process of federal judges by the Senate has become increasingly partisan, so have the decisions of the Supreme Court. The partisan divide has been particularly evident in the Court’s campaign finance and election law cases, which have, to an increasing degree, been decided along partisan lines of the Supreme Court. These cases illustrate that the United States is very much a government of men (and women) and not of laws, and that Chief Justice Roberts’ claims that the Justices of the Court are impartial umpires and that there are no Republican Justices or Democratic Justices are myths. No case is a better illustration of the partisan trend in the Supreme Court’s election law decisions than Rucho v. Common Cause.
In a 5-4 party-line vote, the Court disregarded thirty years of Supreme Court precedent and held for the first time that partisan gerrymandering is a political question beyond both the competence and the jurisdiction of the federal courts. The majority opinion was authored by Chief Justice Roberts, whose entire opinion was based on a misrepresentation of the constitutional basis of the plaintiffs’ claims. The Chief Justice also misrepresented the Court’s prior precedents and disregarded the factual findings and undisputed evidence of the effectiveness of partisan gerrymandering in favoring candidates and dictating electoral outcomes. The majority opinion is both contradictory and hypocritical.
Georgia election board to review Fulton County votes setting up possible takeover
https://news.yahoo.com/georgia-election-board-review-fulton-133021748.html
By Jane C. Timm and Teaganne Finn
Wed, August 18, 2021,
[Excerpts:]
Georgia’s Republican-controlled State Election Board took a step Wednesday toward a possible takeover of elections in Fulton County, the latest example of Republican efforts to exert control over the administration of elections at the most local of levels.
In Georgia, the board took aim at Fulton County, which delivered key wins for the Democratic party during the 2020 election cycle and has long been a target of Republican lawmakers. An independent monitor found no evidence of fraud or impropriety, but Republican lawmakers in the state nonetheless requested another review of the county’s election processes last month.
And on Wednesday morning, the board voted to appoint three people to conduct a performance review of Fulton County. Members include Republican Ricky Kittle, chairman of the Catoosa County elections board; Democrat Stephen Day, a member of the Gwinnett County elections board; and Ryan Germany, general counsel for Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
They’ll conduct an investigation of equipment, registration, processes, and compliance with state law. The overall process — from lawmakers’ initial request to a complete takeover — could take nearly a year, Georgia Public Broadcasting reported.
Pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act
The bill would restore crucial protections that have been removed from the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The Brennan Center
August 17, 2021
How the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act Targets Discrimination
The Brennan Center testified before the House about the congressional action needed to restore the Voting Rights Act to full strength.
The Brennan Center
August 16, 2021
Voting Rights Activists Cling To Hope In ‘Race Against Time’
By Kate Riga
August 13, 2021
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/voting-rights-activists-for-the-people
Evaluating Look Ahead America’s ‘The Georgia Report’ on Illegal, Out-of-State Voting in the 2020 Election
Justin Grimmer, Hoover Institution and Stanford University∗ Andrew B. Hall, Stanford University †
Daniel M. Thompson, UCLA‡
August 11, 2021
Note: On July 30th the authors of the Georgia Report posted a revised version of their report online in response to a draft of this memo we sent them. The revised version quibbles unconvincingly with the three arbitrarily chosen example cases we use for expository purposes below while doing nothing to respond to the core methodological issues we have identified. As such, the Georgia Report remains fatally flawed and unreliable.
https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/research/docs/georgiareport_3.pdf
By Choice and Circumstance, Democrats Put Voting Rights on the Ballot
Limited in their options and in disagreement about how far to go to pass federal legislation, Democrats are approaching voting rights as an issue to be won in future elections.
By Marc Tracy
Published July 13, 2021Updated Aug. 11, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/us/politics/democrats-for-the-people-act.html?referringSource=articleShare
Opinion: Norman Lear: As I begin my 100th year, I’m baffled that voting rights are still under attack
July 27, 2021
[Excerpt:]
To legislators getting between people and the ballot box, and to senators who are standing in the dishonorable tradition of those who filibustered civil rights legislation, I say this: You may pass some unjust laws. You may win elections by preventing or discouraging people from voting.
But you will not in the end defeat the democratic spirit, the spirit that animated the Tuskegee airmen to whom I owe my life, the spirit that powers millions of Americans who give of themselves to defend voting rights, protect our environment, preserve peaceful pluralism, defeat discrimination, and expand educational and economic opportunity.
The right to vote is foundational to addressing all these issues. It is at the heart of everything I have fought for in war and in peacetime.
To senators who are willing to sacrifice the right to vote to some outdated notion of bipartisanship and Senate tradition, I almost do not know what to say. On the scale of justice, this is not even a close call. Do what’s right.
Protecting voting rights should not be today’s struggle. But it is. And that means it is our struggle, yours and mine, for as long as we have breath and strength.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/27/norman-lear-99th-birthday/
Trump Pressed Justice Dept. to Declare Election Results Corrupt, Notes Show
“Leave the rest to me” and to congressional allies, the former president is said to have told top law enforcement officials.
By Katie Benner
Updated: July 31, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/us/politics/trump-justice-department-election.html
[Excerpts:]
The exchange unfolded during a phone call on Dec. 27 in which Mr. Trump pressed the acting attorney general at the time, Jeffrey A. Rosen, and his deputy, Richard P. Donoghue, on voter fraud claims that the Justice Department had found no evidence for. Mr. Donoghue warned that the department had no power to change the outcome of the election. Mr. Trump replied that he did not expect that, according to notes Mr. Donoghue took memorializing the conversation.
“Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me” and to congressional allies, Mr. Donoghue wrote in summarizing Mr. Trump’s response.
After the departure of Mr. Rosen’s predecessor, William P. Barr, became public on Dec. 14, Mr. Trump and his allies harangued Mr. Rosen and his top deputies nearly every day until Jan. 6, when Congress met to certify the Electoral College and was disrupted by Mr. Trump’s supporters storming the Capitol, according to emails and other documents obtained by Congress and interviews with former Trump administration officials.
The conversations often included complaints about unfounded voter fraud conspiracy theories, frustration that the Justice Department would not ask the Supreme Court to invalidate the election and admonishments that department leaders had failed to fight hard enough for Mr. Trump, the officials said.
The Justice Department provided Mr. Donoghue’s notes to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, which is investigating the Trump administration’s efforts to unlawfully reverse the election results.
The department found that the error rate of ballot counting in Michigan was 0.0063 percent, not the 68 percent that the president asserted; it did not find evidence of a conspiracy theory that an employee in Pennsylvania had tampered with ballots; and after examining video and interviewing witnesses, it found no evidence of ballot fraud in Fulton County, Ga., according to the notes. [Emphasis added]
Trump told DOJ officials to ‘just say that the election was corrupt’ and ‘leave the rest to me,’ new documents show
Eliza Relman, Sonam Sheth July 30, 2021
https://www.businessinsider.fr/us/trump-doj-officials-say-election-was-corrupt-notes-show-2021-7
Despite Trump’s continued insistence that the election was “rigged” and stolen from him, nonpartisan experts and election officials concluded that the 2020 election was the safest and most secure in US history. [Emphasis added.]
The MyPillow Guy Really Could Destroy Democracy
Anne Applebaum
July 29, 2021
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/mike-lindells-plot-destroy-america/619593/
In the time I spent with Mike Lindell, I came to learn that he is affable, devout, philanthropic—and a clear threat to the nation.
[Excerpt:]
In the cases of Aschberg and Ford, this had tragic, real-world consequences. Lindell hasn’t created Ford-level havoc yet, but the potential is there. Along with Bannon, Giuliani, and the rest of the conspiracy posse, he is helping create profound distrust in the American electoral system, in the American political system, in the American public-health system, and ultimately in American democracy. The eventual consequences of their actions may well be a genuinely stolen or disputed election in 2024, and political violence on a scale the U.S. hasn’t seen in decades. You can mock Lindell, dismiss him, or call him a crackhead, but none of this will seem particularly funny when we truly have an illegitimate president in the White House and a total breakdown of law and order.
Democrats Brace for a Narrower Path to Challenge New Voting Laws
The Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday involving Arizona voting laws appeared to limit the options for voting rights groups to mount legal challenges to restrictive new measures being passed in Republican-controlled states.
By Nick Corasaniti and Reid J. Epstein
Published July 1, 2021Updated July 19, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/us/politics/voting-rights-act-laws.html?referringSource=articleShare
What’s on the Horizon for Remote Voter Identity Verification?
By Rachel Orey and Collier Ferneckes
July 13, 2021
https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/remote-voter-id/
[Excerpt:]
The 2020 election was the most secure in our nation’s history. Yet in response to false claims of rampant voter fraud, some state legislatures have introduced strict identification requirements for mail voting. These identification requirements too often hamper voter access without addressing the most pressing security threats facing our elections system: sustained underfunding and outdated cybersecurity. Our desire to explore identification measures in this paper is born out of a desire to expand voters’ access to the ballot while protecting against ever-evolving future threats. An election system which is free, fair, and accessible must not be static; an election system that truly meets voters’ needs must be flexible and responsive. This paper is just the beginning of scoping out what a modernized remote voter identity verification system might look like.
As the nation trends towards a wider reliance on convenience voting methods, this report explores how states and localities can ensure that their voter verification policies achieve the nexus of accuracy, accessibility, equity, and practical feasibility. This paper is not intended to provide specific recommendations about how election officials should be conducting identity verification. Rather, it provides a survey of the major benefits and drawbacks of the policy alternatives in use today, as well as the methods that might gain traction down the road.
The Briefing
Michael Waldman, Brennan Center for Justice
Subscribe at https://www.brennancenter.org/briefing
[Excerpt:]
As my colleague Sean Morales-Doyle told Congress on Friday, this will undermine free and fair elections.
“The reality is that state legislatures are not hacking, but slicing away at voting rights from every angle,” he testified. “They shave away access to mail voting, they cut back on in-person voting, they trim voters from the rolls through faulty purges. While any one slice might appear minor, the end result is death by a thousand cuts.”
Loneliness Is Breaking America
July 19, 2021
MICHELLE GOLDBERG
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/opinion/trump-covid-extremism-loneliness.html?referringSource=articleShare
” . . . after reading an article adapted from “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost” by Michael C. Bender, a Wall Street Journal reporter, I changed my mind and picked it up. What caught my attention wasn’t his reporting on White House disarray and Trump’s terrifying impulses — some details are new, but that story is familiar. Rather, I was fascinated by Bender’s account of the people who followed Trump from rally to rally like authoritarian Deadheads.
Bender’s description of these Trump superfans, who called themselves the “front-row Joes,” is sympathetic but not sentimental. Above all, he captures their pre-Trump loneliness.
“Many were recently retired and had time on their hands and little to tie them to home,” writes Bender. “A handful never had children. Others were estranged from their families.” Throwing themselves into Trump’s movement, they found a community and a sense of purpose.
There are many causes for the overlapping dysfunctions that make contemporary American life feel so dystopian, but loneliness is a big one.
A socially healthy society would probably never have elected Trump in the first place. As Daniel Cox, a senior fellow in polling and public opinion at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote in FiveThirtyEight shortly after the 2020 election, the “share of Americans who are more socially disconnected from society is on the rise. And these voters disproportionately support Trump.”
Letters from an American, https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/about?utm_source=menu-dropdown
Subscribe: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com
July 21, 2021
Excerpt:
The story that grabbed headlines today was that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) rejected two of the five people House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) chose to put on the House select committee to investigate the January 6 insurrection. McCarthy immediately withdrew all of the five people he had appointed, accusing the Speaker of partisanship.
But let’s call this like it is. The Republicans killed a bill to create a bipartisan select committee to investigate the insurrection. Then, when Pelosi set up a select committee instead on the exact same terms that Republicans had used to set up one of their many Benghazi committees, McCarthy tried to sabotage the process by naming as three of his five picks men who bought into former president Trump’s Big Lie and challenged the votes on the night of January 6.
Republicans unite on “election integrity” message for coming elections
By Caitlin Huey Burn and Adam Brewster
UPDATED ON: MARCH 22, 2021 / CBS NEWS
Upon losing an election, political parties usually search their souls – with the help of operatives poring over polling and data – to plot their resurgence. Democrats are embarking on such a mission after losing a startling number of House seats, even though Joe Biden won the presidency and they won control of the Senate, if just barely.. But Republicans this year are forgoing the traditional election post-mortem, despite their losses, and instead are pursuing a hardliners’ “election integrity” message that resonates with their base and unites factions within the party.
Although the Republican Party has otherwise been divided on its future in the post-Trump era, on the issue of election laws, the Republican National Committee, state legislatures, conservative outside groups, and federal lawmakers appear to be singing the same tune.
Read More
“So it doesn’t matter what side of the aisle you’re on. It’s more important to be on the right side of history.”
It Didn’t Start with Trump: The Decades-Long Saga of How the GOP Went Crazy
The modern Republican Party has always exploited and encouraged extremism.
By David Corn
September-October 2022 Issue
It Didn’t Start with Trump: The Decades-Long Saga of How the GOP Went Crazy
The Long Unraveling of the Republican Party
Three books explore a history of fractious extremism that predates Donald Trump.
It is time to consider a radical solution to stave off the prospect of political violence and even civil war in the US.
Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson
September 22, 2022 issue
https://www.nybooks.com/issues/2022/09/22/
Trump’s Second Term Would Look Like This
The former president and his allies have explained their plans quite clearly.
By Jonathan RauchAbout the author: Jonathan Rauchis a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/trump-2024-reelection-viktor-orban-hungary/671264/
[Excerpt:]Today, however, we can do more than just speculate about how a second Trump term would unfold, because the MAGA movement has been telegraphing its plans in some detail. In a host of ways—including the overt embrace of illiberal foreign leaders; the ruthless behavior of Republican elected officials since the 2020 election; Trump allies’ elaborate scheming, as uncovered by the House’s January 6 committee, to prevent the peaceful transition of power; and Trump’s own actions in the waning weeks of his presidency and now as ex-president—the former president and his allies have laid out their model and their methods.
Begin with the model.
How the “big lie” spread
https://www.axios.com/2021/11/20/trump-2020-election-fraud-misinformation
Donald Trump’s “big lie” playbook — the collection of falsehoods alleging that the 2020 election was stolen through voting fraud — mirrors the tactics used by sophisticated spreaders of disinformation.
The big picture: Research from the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center shows there’s a typical cycle that people use to manipulate the media and spread disinformation. Trump’s dissemination of false claims of a stolen election demonstrates how the cycle works.
How it works: Disinformation spreaders typically start by planning their narratives early and seeding their lies online, where they can spread quickly, reaching people faster than critics can counter the disinformation.
- That’s what happened when Trump planted the seeds of his voting fraud claims early — well before the general election — and spread them through interviews and social media.
- Information gatekeepers like journalists, TV networks and tech platforms then try to mitigate the problem, as they did by banning Trump’s accounts after the Jan. 6 insurrection.
- The former president adapted by creating other channels to get out his message, such as a new blog, which ultimately shut down, and most recently a plan to launch a social media network called “Truth Social,” which has filed to go public via a SPAC.
“The main and most effective way the cycle gets broken is in that they never jump from Stage 2 to Stage 3″ and “something just sputters out in Stage 2,” says Emily Dreyfuss, senior editor at the Shorenstein Center.
- “When that happens, which is all the time, the campaign never gets much attention and so most people never know it existed in the first place.”
The Arizona Republican Party’s Anti-Democratic Experience
First, it turned against the establishment. Now it has set its sights on democracy – the principles, the process and even the word itself.
By Robert Draper
August 15, 2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/15/magazine/arizona-republicans-democracy
[Excerpt:]The effect of disinformation on the growing extremism of Arizona’s conservative activist community was described to me by a former state Republican operative who asked not to be named so that he could speak candidly about a trend he found to be disturbing. He told me that he frequently received emails from several of the state’s conservative precinct committeepersons. “I’ve never known a group of people, many of whom I genuinely liked, to be so misinformed,” the former operative told me. “I wish I could send you a file of memes that I’ve seen from them over the years. They’re lies or half-truths designed to incite rage. So, what ends up happening is you start to get all these clustered groups that start to spread disinformation, but they’re also the same people that are the root source of power in Arizona’s political system, which is the local precinct committee.”
‘Stop the Steal’ Is a Metaphor
The scholar Theda Skocpol—renowned for her research on the Tea Party movement a decade ago—explains how American politics has evolved since then.
If Trump broke a law on the removal of official records, would he be barred from future office?
[Excerpt:]
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/08/us/politics/donald-trump-president-criminal-law
Early reports that the F.B.I. search of former President Donald J. Trump’s residence in Florida related to an investigation into whether he had unlawfully taken government files when he left the White House focused attention on an obscure criminal law barring removal of official records. The penalties for breaking that law include disqualification from holding any federal office.
Because Mr. Trump is widely believed to be preparing to run for president again in 2024, that unusual penalty raised the prospect that he might be legally barred from returning to the White House.
Specifically, the law in question — Section 2071 of Title 18 of the United States Code — makes it a crime if someone who has custody of government documents or records “willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies or destroys” them.
If convicted, defendants can be fined or sentenced to prison for up to three years. In addition, the statute says, if they are currently in a federal office, they “shall forfeit” that office, and they shall “be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.”
On its face, then, if Mr. Trump were to be charged and convicted of removing, concealing or destroying government records under that law, he would seem to be ineligible to become president again.
But there was reason for caution: The law briefly received a close look in 2015, after it came to light that Hillary Clinton, then widely anticipated to be the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, had used a private email server to conduct government business while secretary of state. [Boldface added]
Some Republicans were briefly entranced with whether the law could keep Mrs. Clinton out of the White House, including Michael Mukasey, a former attorney general in the administration of George W. Bush. So was at least one conservative think tank.
But in considering that situation, several legal scholars — including Seth B. Tillman of Maynouth University in Ireland and Eugene Volokh of the University of California, Los Angeles — noted that the Constitution sets eligibility criteria for who can be president, and argued that Supreme Court rulings suggest Congress cannot alter them. The Constitution allows Congress to disqualify people from holding office in impeachment proceedings, but grants no such power for ordinary criminal law.
Mr. Volokh later reported on his blog that Mr. Mukasey — who is also a former federal judge — wrote that “upon reflection,” Mr. Mukasey had been mistaken and Mr. Tillman’s analysis was “spot on.”
State Legislatures Are Torching Democracy
The Different Potential Versions of Any “Independent State Legislature Doctrine”
In my testimony on the independent state legislature theory (ISLT) to the House Administration Committee, I identified seven different potential versions of such a doctrine, should the Court endorse it at all. That highlights the fact that the question is not just whether the Court endorses such a doctrine, but what the scope of that doctrine would be. I thought it might be helpful to list those different potential versions here.
In my testimony, I address the practical consequences of each of these different versions, as well as the historical evidence, for or against, any of these versions. Here, I will just list these versions without elaborating upon them. One can find endorsements of each, or at least suggestions of support for them, either in statements individual Justices have issued or in well-informed commentary. Also, if the Court endorses the doctrine, that doctrine could include more than one of these specific versions.
I’ve listed them more or less in order of how wide-ranging the consequences would be of each version, with the most sweeping versions listed first:
1. State constitutions. State constitutions cannot impose substantive constraints on state legislation regulating national elections
2. Voter-initiated laws. Voter-initiated legislation cannot impose substantive constraints on state legislation regulating national elections
3. General v. Specific State Constitutional Provisions. State constitutions or voter-initiated laws can impose substantive constraints on such legislation, but cannot transfer permanently transfer entirely out of the legislature’s hands a fundamental function involving state regulation of national elections (such as redistricting)
4. Regulating v. Permanently Displacing State Legislatures. State constitutions can impose substantive constraints on state legislation regulating national elections if those constraints are specific enough, but state courts cannot enforce more general state constitutional provisions against state legislation regulating national elections.
5. Direct Conflicts with State Election Laws in the Administration and Interpretation of State Election Laws. State executive officials and courts cannot invoke general principles or canons of interpretation that generate a result which directly contradicts or conflicts with a provision in state election law regulating national elections.
6. Straying ”Too Far” from State Election Laws in Administration and Interpretation of State Election Laws. Even if executive action or state judicial interpretation does not generate a result that directly conflicts with state election law, the ISLT precludes executive action or state judicial interpretation that strays too far from the text of state election laws that regulate national elections.
7. Limits on State Court Remedial Relief. State courts can enforce substantive provisions in state constitutions or voter-initiated enactments, but if the courts find a violation, they must give the legislature the first opportunity to decide how to remedy that violation, at least absent urgent time constraints.
Note that I do not include on this list a version in which state legislation regulating national elections could not be subject to gubernatorial veto. I’m not aware of any major defender of the ISLT who argues for that version.
American media wants to save democracy. Is it helping?
The Forgotten Constitutional Weapon Against Voter Restrictions
A former Justice Department lawyer thinks he’s found a way to penalize states that undermine voting rights.
It’s been a hard few years for people worried about voting rights in America. Republican-controlled states are imposing a raft of new restrictions. A divided Congress has failed to pass any legislation in response. And the Supreme Court just agreed to hear a case that could give state legislatures unchecked power over election rules.
But perhaps a largely forgotten provision of the Constitution offers a solution to safeguard American democracy. Created amid some of the country’s most violent clashes over voting rights, Section 2 of the 14th Amendment provides a harsh penalty for any state where the right to vote is denied “or in any way abridged.”
A state that crosses the line would lose a percentage of its seats in the House of Representatives in proportion to how many voters it disenfranchises. If a state abridges voting rights for, say, 10 percent of its eligible voters, that state would lose 10 percent of its representatives — and with fewer House seats, it would get fewer votes in the Electoral College, too.
Under the so-called penalty clause, it doesn’t matter how a state abridges the right to vote, or even why. The framers of the constitutional amendment worried that they would not be able to predict all the creative ways that states would find to disenfranchise Black voters. They designed the clause so that they wouldn’t have to. “No matter what may be the ground of exclusion,” Sen. Jacob Howard, a Republican from Michigan, explained in 1866, “whether a want of education, a want of property, a want of color, or a want of anything else, it is sufficient that the person is excluded from the category of voters, and the State loses representation in proportion.”
That approach could come in handy for discouraging states from imposing more limits on voting, as the country witnesses what Adam Lioz, senior policy counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, calls “the greatest assault on voting rights since Jim Crow.”
There’s just one problem: The penalty clause isn’t being enforced — and never has been.
One man is now waging a legal campaign to change that. It’s a long shot, but if he succeeds, it could serve as a sharp deterrent against voting rights restrictions and even reshape the entire electoral map. At minimum, the push highlights why such language was included in the Constitution in the first place.
The Trailer: How DeSantis and other GOP candidates are ditching ‘legacy media’ for friendly outlets
As the number of local media outlets shrink, and as alternative media outlets boom, Republicans are finding less use for what they disparagingly call “fake news” — or, more diplomatically, the “legacy media.” Social media, and decades of investment in conservative outlets, have made it easy to reach voters outside of the “legacy” filter.
In Pennsylvania, four Republicans running for governor briefly demanded a Republican debate moderator as a condition for facing off; Doug Mastriano, who won the nomination, kept media outlets out of his closing rallies. In Missouri, two leading candidates in the GOP’s U.S. Senate primary avoided televised debates; one of them, ex-Gov. Eric Greitens, only committed to a debate run by two conservative news sites.
“Donald Trump might be the last president to be elected with a majority of CNN hits,” said Matt Schlapp, the president of the American Conservative Union and its CPAC conferences. “There is just so much hostility within legacy media toward people with our point of view that you do have to ask yourself — after all these experiences, is it even worth it to try?”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who had selected Levin to moderate two of the debates, presided over an “invite-only” conference at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. While a few more outlets were permitted to cover his dinner speech on Saturday, DeSantis talked proudly about keeping them out of the day-long conference — the debates, speeches from legislative and statewide GOP leaders, and talks by prominent conservative pundits.
“We in the state of Florida are not going to allow legacy media outlets to be involved in our primaries,” DeSantis reportedly told the crowd of more than a thousand conservatives, who had paid at least $100 to attend the summit. “I’m not going to have a bunch of left-wing media people asking our candidates gotcha questions.”
A campaign spokeswoman followed up those remarks with a tweet aimed at “fake news journalists” — a picture of DeSantis onstage.
“How’s the view from outside security?” she asked.
The campaign committed to the bit; questions about how the credentialed outlets were selected, or whether anyone was recording the debates for the record, went unanswered. Reporters who were kept outside wrote stories anyway, cadging recordings of the conference and talking to attendees and candidates.
Those stories portrayed DeSantis as a growing force in the party, the only one Florida conservatives considered as an alternative to Trump, who’d once blocked media outlets he didn’t like from his rallies. Humbling the “legacy media” was, obviously, a political winner. The Floridian, whose founder was named the 2011 CPAC “blogger of the year,” mocked the “media meltdown” from “a small group of liberal crybaby bloggers,” while publishing some of the only videos that made it out of the hotel ballroom.
Conservatives who covered the conference said that they were frustrated with what they saw as relentless media negativity, pointing to the coverage DeSantis got during the covid-19 pandemic, when he lifted restrictions far more quickly than governors in more liberal states.
“I think that there’s a level of the mainstream media that, instead of highlighting good things, wants to destroy things, in a way,” said Will Witt, who had founded The Florida Standard last month after more than four years working at the conservative video outlet Prager U. “I want to highlight the good things about the state of Florida, the things that are happening here that are actually making people’s lives better, like the economy. I want to put out straight news reporting, not a narrative.”
That’s how plenty of readers and voters feel about their political leaders — Democrats, too. Since last summer, after the violent withdrawal of Americans and refugees from Afghanistan, some liberals blamed negative media coverage for the president’s falling poll numbers on what they said was a “both-sideism” that the news media engaged in after relentlessly negative coverage of Trump.
Democrats tend to have higher trust in “the media,” defined broadly, than Republicans; according to Gallup’s semiannual survey of faith in public institutions — and that trust spiked during a presidency that referred to critical outlets as “the enemy of the people.” In last week’s update, Gallup found that Democrats were seven times as likely to have faith in newspapers as Republicans, and three times as likely to have faith in TV news.
Those skeptical Republicans now have an array of sources that deliver political news they trust, including podcasts and TV shows that interview Republicans without what DeSantis called “gotcha” questions. This spring, when the Republican National Committee voted to stop participating in the Commission on Presidential Debates, the reasons ranged from criticism of Trump, to a schedule that started after early voting began in some states, to how some of the commission’s members had criticized the former president.
“Our optimistic, conservative Republican message resonates with Americans,” RNC chair Ronna McDaniel wrote after the vote in Breitbart, founded 15 years ago as a bulwark to legacy media coverage and narrative-spinning. “That’s why many of our nation’s most powerful institutions — like Big Tech, academia, and some legacy media outlets — work overtime to ensure that we aren’t given a level playing field.”
Cutting some media out of the process wasn’t an RNC invention. It’s also been 15 years since Democrats running for president agreed not to appear in a debate hosted by Fox News, and just three years since the party’s last group of presidential candidates debated whether even to appear in Fox-hosted town halls.
Republican media skepticism runs deeper, and the tools are there to work around the outlets they’ve stopped trusting. In March, when a super PAC called A Stronger Texas Fund hosted a debate in the state’s deep red 8th Congressional District, the organizers tapped ex-Fox Nation host Lara Logan as their moderator. Logan’s discursive questions sometimes threw off the candidates.
But the organizers were thrilled. Logan, they said, had focused on topics that other media might not have bothered with, like a donation that Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) had made to Morgan Luttrell, the eventual winner of the race.
In Florida, it wasn’t clear what all the Republicans in the congressional debates had been asked. But the coverage on conservative outlets was positive, and highlighted the differences that Levin — and DeSantis, who sat in as a moderator briefly — had gotten the candidates to clear up. On Saturday night, when DeSantis told his familiar story of standing up to liberal orthodoxy, he might as well have been talking about the media blowoff.
“I have friends across the country,” DeSantis reportedly told his audience. “They say all they do is watch Florida, because they figure three months later, their state may get around and doing what we’re doing.”
“LOST, NOT STOLEN: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election”
This extremely detailed report, just released, was put together by eight prominent conservatives, including three former federal judges. It carefully examines “every claim of fraud and miscount put
forward by former President Trump and his advocates, and now put the results of those
investigations before the American people, and especially before fellow conservatives who may
be uncertain about what and whom to believe.”
Our conclusion is unequivocal: Joe Biden was the choice of a majority of the Electors, who themselves were the choice of the majority of voters in their states. Biden’s victory is easily explained by a political landscape that was much different in 2020 than it was when President Trump narrowly won the presidency in 2016. President Trump waged his campaign for re-election during a devastating worldwide pandemic that caused a severe downturn in the global economy. This, coupled with an electorate that included a small but statistically significant number willing to vote for other Republican candidates on the ballot but not for President Trump, are the reasons his campaign fell short, not a fraudulent election.
Donald Trump and his supporters have failed to present evidence of fraud or inaccurate results significant enough to invalidate the results of the 2020 Presidential Election. We do not claim that election administration is perfect. Election fraud is a real thing; there are prosecutions in almost every election year, and no doubt some election fraud goes undetected. Nor do we disparage attempts to reduce fraud. States should continue to do what they can do to eliminate opportunities for election fraud and to punish it when it occurs. But there is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole. In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a single precinct. It is wrong, and bad for our country, for people to propagate baseless claims that President Biden’s election was not legitimate.
Strongest Evidence of Guilt: A Chart Tracking Trump’s Knowledge and Intent in Efforts to Overturn the Election
By Ryan Goodman, Justin Hendrix and Clara Apt
Just Security
July 11, 2022
January 6 and abuse of legislative & executive powers
In a recent essay on the need to revise the Electoral Count Act (as well as in a recent New Yorker interview), I have emphasized the need to focus on the abuse of Article I legislative powers in connection with the January 6 insurrection. The attempt to nullify Biden’s Electoral College victory, including the violence at the Capitol that was part of that attempt, would not have occurred without Representatives and Senators—like Mo Brooks and Josh Hawley—being willing to object to electoral votes cast for Biden, without having any valid basis for those objections under the existing Electoral Count Act or the Constitution. Under 3 U.S.C. § 5, the joint session of Congress was obligated to accept as “conclusive” all electoral votes cast by electors whose appointment the courts had confirmed “at least six days before” the casting of those electoral votes, pursuant to laws enacted before Election Day in November.
Read More Even the effort to get Vice President Pence to unilaterally nullify Biden’s Electoral College victory (regardless of how the Senate and House of Representatives would have voted on the objections raised by Brooks, Hawley, and other members of Congress) was an attempt to abuse Article I legislative powers—because Pence would have been acting in his Article I role as Senate president, and not as a member of the Article II Executive branch of the federal government. I have emphasized this point because I think it is important for setting priorities on how to avoid the risk that the kind of election subversion that failed on January 6, 2021 might succeed on January 6, 2025. If Trump is a candidate in 2024, he obviously won’t be an incumbent. But the risk of an effort to nullify an Electoral College victory of his Democratic opponent remains largely the same. To be sure, Trump wouldn’t have an incumbent Vice President to pressure. But the possibility that pro-Trump Representatives and Senators might be willing to abuse their role under the Electoral Count Act and Twelfth Amendment still very much exists. Trump as a non-incumbent candidate in 2024 could repeat much of the improper behavior he engaged in as part of his effort to subvert the 2020 outcome. He could attempt to pressure election officials to “find” votes or otherwise manipulate the process of counting ballots and certifying results. He could also attempt again to arm-twist members of state legislatures, hoping to get them to submit rival sets of electoral votes on his behalf. He could even try to march to the Capitol on January 6, 2025 in an effort to intimidate members of Congress into acting on his behalf. These moves would be made as the standard-bearer of his party, rather than an officeholder, but in a two-party system they would constitute major misconduct in an effort to manipulate the election’s outcome. Thus, in assessing the risk of election subversion on January 6, 2025, it makes sense to focus on what we have learned in connection with January 6, 2021 about the potential abuse of Article I legislative powers that might occur again. Still, in addition to the attempted abuse of Article I legislative powers, the evidence presented in the hearings held so far by the House January 6 Select Committee demonstrates significant abuse of Article II executive, powers. Trump’s effort, with the assistance of Jeffrey Clark, to get the federal Department of Justice to interfere improperly with state election procedures, especially in Georgia, was an abuse of Article II authority. (Thankfully, it was adamantly resisted by other DOJ officials, including Jeffrey Rosen and Richard Donoghue.) Any attempt by federal officers, whether civil or military, to seize ballots or voting equipment would have been an even more egregious abuse of Article II power, but fortunately it seems that this outrageous idea was quickly dismissed as a non-starter. And if President Trump had attempted to use any federal officers, including Secret Service agents, as part of an effort to use force to affect the joint session of Congress on January 6, that would have been an especially unconstitutional plot to use his Article II office seditiously against the procedures that the Constitution itself establishes for the confirmation of Electoral College results. Consequently, we must take seriously the ways in which Trump as an incumbent attempted to cling to power after losing the election. Indeed, as Bob Bauer has recently argued, the combined lesson of Watergate and the January 6 insurrection, is that there serious dangers of incumbent presidents acting improperly as they seek a second term. While the two-term limit was intended to strike a balance between permitting the reelection of a popular incumbent and avoiding the risk of abusing the powers of the presidency to win reelection, it may be necessary to recalibrate this balance in light of the ways the powers of the presidency have increased since FDR.Yet even as we remain attentive to this issue, we should not lose sight of the more immediate danger we face from potential abuse of congressional power in the context of counting Electoral College votes.
Amidst all of the talk of what crimes Executive Branch officials, including President Trump, may have committed in connection with the January 6 Insurrection, what about the members of Congress who set the stage for what occurred? Whether or not their conduct may be untouchable as a result of the immunity provided by the Speech and Debate Clause of the Constitution (an issue I do not address here), their moral culpability for what happened on January 6—and the abuse of their role in the process of counting electoral votes—must be at the center of attention if we are going to prepare properly for the 2024 election.
The People v. Donald Trump
The evidence for a possible criminal case against the former president is piling up.
JUNE 29, 2022
Supreme Court Will Hear Moore v. Harper, the Independent State Legislature Theory Case from North Carolina; This Case Could Severely Curtail the Ability of State Courts to Protect Voting Rights and Stop Partisan Gerrymandering
The Supreme Court today just agreed to hear Moore v. Harper, an “independent state legislature” theory case from North Carolina. This case has the potential to fundamentally rework the relationship between state legislatures and state courts in protecting voting rights in federal elections. It also could provide the path for election subversion.
Read More The issue presented in this case has been a recurring one in recent years. Two parts of the Constitution, Article I, Section 4 as to congressional elections and Article II as to presidential elections give state “legislatures” the power to set certain rules (in the Art. I, section 4 context, subject to congressional override). The Supreme Court has long understood the use of the term legislature here to broadly encompass a state’s legislative process, such as the need for a governor’s signature on legislative action (or veto override) about congressional elections. See Smiley v. Holm. As recently as 2015, the Supreme Court held that the voters in Arizona could use the initiative process to create an independent redistricting commission to draw congressional districts even when the state legislature objected. See Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission v. Arizona Legislature. But that latter case was 5-4 with a strong dissent by Chief Justice Roberts, who believed the legislature could not be cut out of the process. Most of the Justices in the majority in that case are now off the Court. There’s a more radical version of the idea that the Legislature has power, standing on its own as a body and not part of the general structure of state government, in the independent state legislature theory. Take the facts of the Moore case. The North Carolina Supreme Court, interpreting a provision of the state constitution protecting the right to vote, held that partisan gerrymandering violated the state constitution and required drawing fairer lines, including in Congressional districts. That state court is majority-Democrat and the NC General Assembly is majority Republican. The Republican legislature argued that this holding usurped its sole and plenary power to choose the manner for drawing congressional districts. Pause on that for a moment: the theory in its extreme is that the state constitution as interpreted by the state supreme court is not a limit on legislative power. This extreme position would essentially neuter the development of any laws protecting voters more broadly than the federal constitution based on voting rights provisions in state constitutions. And this theory might not just restrain state supreme courts: it can also potentially restrain state and local agencies and governors implementing rules for running elections. And this kind of argument shows how the ISL theory, if taken to its extreme, could help foment election subversion. How so? Suppose a state agency interprets state rules to allow for the counting of certain ballots, and doing so favors one candidate. If the leaders of the legislature are from the other party, and they say that the interpretation does not follow the views of the legislature, it’s impermissible and the results need to flip. Now there may be many responses to such arguments, including arguments like laches—you can’t start raising these arguments after an election when things don’t go your way. This was in fact the theory that Trump allies tried to raise after the PA Supreme Court extended the time to receive absentee ballots in the 2020 elections because of covid, relying on voter protective provisions in the State constitution. Trump allies argued this usurped the power of the state legislature to set deadlines, and Justice Alito at the time (Circuit Justice for the Third Circuit) put the counting of such ballots on hold. There were about 10,000 such ballots, far fewer than the 80,000 vote victory of Biden in the state. But if it had been closer, a radical reading of ISL could have led to a flipping of results. Now may be more limited ways of reading the ISL theory, such as to apply only when a state court or agency decision very strongly deviates from legislative language about how to run federal elections. There are also strong originalist arguments that might persuade some of the Justices not to adopt such a radical reading of these constitutional provisions. But buckle up! An extreme decision here could fundamentally alter the balance of power in setting election rules in the states and provide a path for great mischief. [This post has been updated]
What We Lose When We Lose Competitive Congressional Districts
Democracy Is Surprisingly Easy to Undermine
Politicians around the world are borrowing Trump’s “Stop the Steal” tactics. These false fraud allegations are profoundly dangerous.
June 17, 2022
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/trump-fraud-stop-steal-copycats
https://www.brennancenter.org/about/staff/will-wilder
To Trust Election Results, We Must Trust The People Administering Them
By Amber McReynolds and Heather Balas|
It isn’t only in Georgia that our nation faces these challenges. Every state’s top election official, as well as at least 60 percent of their local counterparts, enters office with ties to a political party — making the U.S. an outlier among advanced democracies. Canada, Great Britain and Australia, for example, pick equivalents of secretaries of state by appointment based on qualifications and without regard to political party.
The situation is not hopeless. Policy options include: 1) Selecting election officials using impartial appointment models; 2) Electing these officials in nonpartisan races that remove all party affiliations from the ballot; or 3) Requiring election experience for people running for the posts.
Many election officials support such reforms. Secretaries of state have told us that a law prohibiting political endorsements would help them say no to such requests. County clerks in states like Washington support reforms to make election administration nonpartisan. And local election officials, including in Virginia, are raising alarms over the increasingly partisan role of party-selected county election boards.
To be clear, our nation is blessed with many election officials who serve tirelessly. We absolutely must protect them from harm or coercion. At the same time, we must insist that election officials’ integrity remain beyond reproach. States must, at minimum, pass ethics codes for elected officials requiring political and financial neutrality, and they must do it right away.
The RNC’s Ground Game of Inches
Inside the secretive, dubious, and extremely offline attempt to convert minorities into Republicans
JUNE 1, 2022
[Excerpt:]
BROADLY SPEAKING, THERE ARE TWO COMPONENTS to any political campaign: the air war, the barrage of paid media that fills up every TV, radio, and internet platform when Election Day grows near, and the ground game, the grassroots operations that pester people on phones and at front doors. To get some sense of how important and effective paid advertising is, consider this: The 2022 midterm cycle is currently forecast to bring a midterm record $8.9 billion in ad spend alone, a mind-blowing 130 percent increase over 2018. Advertising is expensive because it works.
Republicans have long had an indomitable advantage in the air war, for good reason. Conservatives have a finely tuned, infinitely funded propaganda machine, with basically zero limitations or scruples. Backed by corporations and billionaires, they blanket TV, radio, and all social media platforms, including places where Democrats don’t go. That doesn’t even account for the universe of conservative “news” sites, pop-up disinformation outlets, and more.
Democrats compete over the air, of course, but have historically earned their competitive advantage on the ground. The Obama campaign, famously, sported a massive grassroots apparatus, microtargeting millions of voters.
Democrats have strived to get better over the air; indeed, in 2020 more undisclosed outside money went toward electing Democrats than Republicans, which went straight into ad buys. But Republicans, too, have worked to close the gap on the ground. In the wake of Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential loss, where the party was mocked for its pitiful ground game, the RNC has set out to create a grassroots juggernaut.
The challenge with the ground game is that it’s effective but inefficient. According to an often-cited study from political scientists Alan Gerber and Don Green, one face-to-face conversation can boost a voter’s likelihood to go to the polls by up to 20 percent, which can plausibly change the outcome of a close election. The problem, of course, is getting people to open their front doors and avail themselves of those conversations.
But the RNC’s community center model works year-round rather than just the month before the election, and doesn’t pester voters at home but lures them in. Given the astonishing costs of political advertising now, the cost per voter of renting a center and doling out free pizza is not as inefficient as it once seemed. It borrows, in many ways, from the sustained organizing model of the Bernie Sanders campaign.
“It’s really smart politics,” said Chuck Rocha, president of Solidarity Strategies, who ran the famously successful Latino outreach program for Sanders in 2020. “Because they have unlimited money and support … they can go in and put these community centers up with the facade that they care about the community. What they’re really trying to do is spend a bunch of money just to get three or four more percent of the Black or brown vote.”
‘It’s going to be an army’: Tapes reveal GOP plan to contest elections
Placing operatives as poll workers and building a “hotline” to friendly attorneys are among the strategies to be deployed in Michigan and other swing states.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/01/gop-contest-elections-tapes-00035758
Pam Fessler: “How to tell, and sell, the story of our elections”
The following is a guest post from Pam Fessler:
Brad Raffensperger – famous for rebuffing Trump’s call to “find” him 11,780 votes in 2020 – might have won the Republican primary for GA secretary of state. But the effort to undermine public confidence in elections is alive and well. When it looked like GA Gov. Brian Kemp would beat Trump pick David Perdue in the primary by a whopping 50 percentage points, election deniers in Pennsylvania went on high alert. “Georgia Grassroots get mobilized…. No freaking way! Pennsylvania is behind you!! Expose the fraud!!,” posted Audit the Vote PA, a group still trying to “decertify” the 2020 presidential results. And whose candidate, Doug Mastriano, won the GOP primary for PA governor primarily on his false claims that the last election was stolen.
What does this mean for election officials? It means they still face a huge challenge convincing a chunk of the American electorate that our elections are fair, accurate and run by people they can trust. I’ve written a new communication guide with The Elections Group called “Telling Our Story,” which we hope will help them do that. It includes tips on working with the media (hint: they’re not the enemy), educating voters, using social media, fighting disinformation and – most important of all – promoting the U.S. election system and the people who make it work.
We remind election officials they have a great story to tell and encourage them to tell it from the heart. Despite its flaws, we have one of the best voting systems in the world. Americans should be proud, instead of threatening to kill those who administer it because they don’t like the results. The guide recognizes the need to counter disinformation with the facts. But it also recommends appealing to Americans’ sense of patriotism and desire to have the freedom to choose their leaders. “The other side is tapping into the fear emotion. We need to tap into the patriotic, pride emotion,” says former VA Election Commissioner Chris Piper. We suggest that election officials tell personal stories, humanizing the process and reminding voters that elections are run by their neighbors and friends.
This guide draws on good work already taking place in election offices around the country. We link to best practices and examples of innovative communications techniques. Unfortunately, too many local election officials are overworked, under-resourced and, after 2020, shellshocked. They still do little more than engage with voters on the basics, such as where, how and when to vote. Surprisingly few use social media, despite the fact that it’s where the conspiracy theories and lies are allowed to thrive.
That’s one reason we changed the working title from “Telling Your Story” to “Telling Our Story.” Civic groups, businesses, faith leaders, and others need to rally around election officials and help them communicate the truth. Among other things, we link to advice from the National Conference of State Legislatures to lawmakers – some of whom have been at the forefront of election denialism – on how they too can help counter election disinformation and public confusion. This is a job for all of us. Maybe someone can sponsor a national ad campaign to celebrate election workers, the way airlines promote flight attendants and drug companies promote nurses and doctors.
We designed the guide as a “living document,” to be updated as needed. Many people are trying desperately now to figure out how to protect democracy from those trying to destroy it. Hopefully, that effort will produce more, good ideas on shifting the narrative. We’re happy to pass those ideas along.
[Boldface added]
Financing of Races for Offices that Oversee Elections: May 2022
Candidates who push election denial are winning primaries and leading fundraising in races for offices that will run the 2024 elections.
“The ‘Right’ History: Religion, Race, and Nostalgic Stories of Christian America”
Author: Ruth Braunstein, a professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut. cited in Opinion: Trump Has Uncorked a ‘Toxic Blend of Extremist Orientations’
White House Report of the Interagency Steering Group on Native American Voting Rights
From the White House Fact Sheet:
Read More Since their first days in office, President Biden and Vice President Harris have prioritized strengthening our democracy and taken steps to protect voters from the current efforts to suppress the vote and subvert our electoral process. The unprecedented nature and scale of the present attacks on voting rights must be met with federal legislation, which is why the President and Vice President have repeatedly called for the Senate to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The President and Vice President have also forcefully called for changing Senate rules to prevent a minority of Senators from blocking action on this fundamental right from which all other rights flow. Congress still has the responsibility to act, but the President is committed to using every tool at his disposal to protect the sacred right to vote. On March 7, 2021, the 56th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, he signed an Executive Order on Promoting Access to Voting, directing an all-of-government effort to promote information about the voting process and to further the ability of all eligible Americans to participate in our democracy. That work is ongoing, and agencies will continue to develop ways to deliver non-partisan election information and enable eligible Americans to register and to vote. A key provision of the Executive Order on Promoting Access to Voting highlighted the unique trust responsibility that the Federal government has for Tribal Nations and Native communities. In light of this responsibility, President Biden directed the creation of an Interagency Steering Group on Native American Voting Rights, whose mission is to study the barriers Native voters face in casting their ballot and having those votes counted, and to recommend steps to mitigate or eliminate these barriers. For far too long, members of Tribal Nations and Native communities have faced unnecessary burdens when they attempt to exercise their sacred right to vote. Native voters often have to overcome language barriers, a lack of accessibility for voters with disabilities, cultural disrespect and outright hostility, geographically remote residences, and persistent poverty — conditions that have only been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. State laws and local practices also present too many Native voters with undue impediments to full and fair exercise of the franchise, including barriers in receiving information about the voting process, discriminatory redistricting, and burdens in voter registration, voter identification, voting in person, and voting by mail.
The very different media universes in which Americans live, visualized
You may be an exception; there are many. But, as new polling from YouGov and the Economist shows, there are patterns in media consumption that correlate to education, age, income — and party affiliation.
The research is interesting not because it reveals anything particularly earth-shattering; the demographics of newspaper readers are both well-established and a fixation of people who are trying to sell newspapers. Instead, the new polling provides a fascinating breadth in considering where people get their news and which outlets they trust.
Billionaire-Backed Group Enlists Trump-Supporting Citizens to Hunt for Voter Fraud Using Discredited Techniques
The Voter Reference Foundation is putting the nation’s voter rolls online while making unsupported claims suggesting election fraud. The group’s funding can be traced to a Super PAC funded by the CEO of Uline.
by Megan O’Matz
March 7, 2022
https://www.propublica.org/article/voter-ref-foundation
Democracy May Depend on a New Partisan Battleground: Races for Secretary of State
The once-sleepy,down-ballot elected office has suddenly become one of themost vital roles of the nation.
FEBRUARY 28, 2022
https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/02/28/secretary-of-state/
The war against democracy finds allies in America First
By Philip Bump
National correspondent
February 27, 2022
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/27/war-against-democracy-finds-allies-america-first/
What does “America first” mean?
This tagline generally associated with former president Donald Trump seems self-obvious, which is the heart of its utility. “America first” means putting America first, which … sure. But how? In what context?
Read More In 2016, Trump spoke often of the loss of American manufacturing jobs, helping him overperform expectations in the Upper Midwest where those job losses were most acutely felt. But it was clear that, even then, this specific manifestation of the concept was only a small part of its appeal. Trump’s campaign gained traction not for his (often overstated) economic arguments but for his rhetoric about the purported dangers America faced, like criminal immigrants crossing into the United States and terrorist infiltrators. Those sentiments were more important in building support for his candidacy than economic hardship. And they reflect the once-quiet subtext of “America first”: America for Americans and not for the hordes seeking entry. But it goes further. Focus America on Nebraska and not New York, that hub of global cosmopolitanism. “America first” is a statement about tradition, about the America Trump wanted to make great. It’s about leveraging American power primarily to protect where power has traditionally been held in America. It’s about rejecting a sense of America as a participant in a dynamic, diverse world and about responding to America’s own increased diversity. It’s a statement about protecting Americans — the Americans who feel as through their power has eroded. Over the weekend, a group using the name America First held a conference in Florida. Led by a notorious white nationalist named Nick Fuentes, the group explored the explicitly racist and toxic applications of the phrase. No one did so with more eagerness than Fuentes. “Tonight I say: We are going to rule this country,” he told the cheering audience, largely made up of young White men. After pronouncing that “the United States government has become the evil empire in the world,” he pledged that he and they would “build and raise up a parallel economy” to avoid the constraints otherwise placed on overt racists. Fuentes, who was at the far-right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, repurposed one of its nationalist catchphrases as he railed against his group’s enemies. “To every RINO, every lying journalist, every carjacker, gangbanger, illegal immigrant, every OnlyFans whore, every mobbed-up politician and pundit on the payroll of some Middle Eastern country, to the people that have looted our wealth, addicted our youth to drugs, thrown open our borders to invaders from all over the world, to the corrupt that have sold out our country and our people: we are coming for you. … You think you can replace us? You’re wrong. We will replace you.” This is not subtle, certainly, but Fuentes at another point was more explicit. “Our secret sauce here? It’s these young White men,” he said. The audience cheered. “That’s what we call the secret ingredient. America and the world has forgotten about them, but not us.” Seventy years ago, those young White men would have been broadly assured of social, political and economic power, thanks in part to the structure of the economy, yes, but thanks also to the ways in which society was structured to their advantage. It still largely is, but often not as tangibly or rewarding as it once was — thanks, they assume, to immigrants and globalists and Jewish people and so on. So, turn back the clock. Put “America first” once again. Then Fuentes made a revealing transition. “You know, they say about America, they say, ‘Diversity is our strength,’ you know,” he said. “And I look at China and I look at Russia —” He stopped himself for a moment. It’s pretty clear where he was going: China and Russia are powerful despite broad racial and cultural homogeneity; ergo, that’s the best path forward. This is certainly more than debatable in many different ways, but the point is that Fuentes got sidetracked. “Can we get a round of applause for Russia?” He got one. He also got chants of “Putin! Putin!” from the audience, referring, of course, to the Russian president who last week launched an unprovoked invasion of neighboring Ukraine. Fuentes has been explicit in praising the invasion. On Telegram, he called the invasion “the coolest thing to happen since 1/6” — referring to the attack at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, which he called “awesome” during his speech, as he had weeks after it occurred last year. Beyond the strongman shtick that motivates enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin and for movements like Fuentes’s, this is revealing. Putin’s motivations for invading are complex and rooted in a variety of historic, social and economic causes. But a central motivation is his concern about Ukraine being pulled away from Russia’s orbit and into Europe’s. He’s been actively combating that shift for decades, worrying about the expansion of liberal democracy in a country with such close ties to the one that he runs as an autocrat. His is a literal war against democracy and it’s one that Fuentes and others cheer. Last year, I interviewed historian Thomas Zimmer, who focuses on the history of democracy. He articulated a broad struggle of the sort that President Biden has often evoked, pitting democracy against authoritarianism (precisely the way in which Biden framed Russia’s invasion last week). But Zimmer went further: the current political moment in the United States isn’t simply about democracy against autocracy, as played out at the Capitol on Jan. 6, but inextricably about pluralistic democracy, a democracy in which a diverse set of interests compete fairly and earnestly for power through free elections. The increase of political power among Black and Hispanic and Asian and female and gay Americans doesn’t mean that White American men don’t still represent a plurality, but it means that the power that group has enjoyed is now power that is more often challenged. Hence the scale of the fight, hence the focus on “protecting” elections — and hence the way in which the global far-right has taken an interest in what’s happening here. “I think the U.S. becomes the most advanced, most acute test case of whether or not it is even possible to erect a stable, multiracial, pluralistic democracy, or whether the country will remain a White Christian nation defined by White Christians,” Zimmer said. “I think it’s become a sort of a test case of world historic importance.” That framing fits neatly with Fuentes’s position: He cheers Russia as homogenous and then as aggressors against a young democracy. The two intertwine. Consider other right-wing voices that have praised or defended Putin in recent days. There’s Trump himself, of course, who has repeatedly described Putin as “smart,” including in his lengthy tirade at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Saturday. What else did Trump advocate during that speech? Well, he once again disparaged those coming to the country, saying that “our country is being poisoned from within.” Or consider Tucker Carlson, who for days before the invasion defended Putin’s purported motivations. At one point, last week, he wondered aloud on his Fox News program why Democrats “want you to hate Putin.”
“Has Putin shipped every middle class job in your town to Russia?” he asked, capturing that first, concrete sense of “America first.” And then, two sentences later: “Is he teaching your kids to embrace racial discrimination?”
A bit later still, he informed viewers who they “should be mad at,” including the people “who are calling you a racist” and those who are “allowing your country to become polluted and overrun.” Carlson in the past has embraced the racist idea that the left is intentionally spurring immigration to dilute the power of White Americans. He has also praised the increasingly autocratic leader of Hungary for taking a hard line on immigration in service of nationalism.
Putin’s defenders in his fight against democracy are those who are disparaging America’s diversity, over and over again.
[/expand]\
Last year, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) was one of a small group of right-wing legislators who floated the idea of a political action committee adopting “America First” as its name. Included in its proposed platform were specific articulations of the need to defend the country’s “uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions.” It argued for infrastructure that “reflects the architectural, engineering and aesthetic value that befits the progeny of European architecture.”
In short order, those considering signing on were pressured to step away. While Greene had been identified as a participant by multiple colleagues, her team insisted she hadn’t “approved or agreed to” the document that circulated.
On Friday, Greene undercut the idea that she stood apart from the rhetoric included in the platform: She was the surprise guest speaker at Fuentes’s conference. Condemnation came quickly, including from her own party, and she later claimed to have been unfamiliar with Fuentes’s past comments and his organization. But, of course, she has her own demonstrated track record of amplifying conspiracy theories and far-right rhetoric.
During his speech at CPAC, Trump praised Greene. Fuentes responded on Telegram.
“After a day of vicious attacks against Marjorie Taylor Greene for speaking at AFPAC last night, Donald Trump gives her a shoutout and endorsement from the main stage at CPAC,” he wrote. He speculated that perhaps Trump would attend his group’s America First conference next year or the year after.
Given where the group stands in the struggle between pluralistic democracy and autocracy, it’s not hard to see that happening.
How is the “Purcell principle” threatening voting rights in America?
The Supreme Court’s rule, intended to avert election confusion, may enable new forms of voting discrimination
February 17, 2022
There’s new evidence showing the lack of fraud in 2020 that Trump’s base will never see
By Philip Bump, Staff writer
February 2, 2022
If you started counting every ballot cast for president in the state of Ohio in 2020, one each second, it would on average take you about two days, five hours and 10 minutes before you came across one that the state thought might have been cast illegally. That’s one every 191,000 seconds.
On Tuesday, the state reported that its review of voting in the most recent federal election had, predictably, uncovered isolated examples of apparent illegal voting. Those suspect votes — not yet proved to be illegal, mind you — totaled 31 ballots. That’s out of 5.9 million ballots cast for president, meaning that 0.0005 percent of cast ballots were even suspect.
President Donald Trump won Ohio by 476,000 votes. Safe to say that his victory was not tainted by rampant fraud.
Matthew Seligman: “A Realistic Risk Assessment of Electoral Count Act (ECA) Manipulation in 2024”
The following is a guest post from Matthew Seligman:
Congress suddenly seems focused on reforming the Electoral Count Act as a fragile bipartisan consensus is emerging that the ECA is broken and must be fixed. Critical questions remain about how to design a replacement. The answers to those questions depend on the details of how the existing ECA could be manipulated, and a misdiagnosis could exacerbate the risks rather than eliminate them.
Today, I posted a short essay explaining why the dominant perspective among commentators and (it seems) some members of Congress is incorrect. That perspective focuses on the risk that the two chambers of Congress would concurrently vote to reject a legitimate slate of electors. That focus is understandable, because that’s exactly what Trump’s allies in Congress tried to do in 2021. In prior scholarship, I have called that strategy the Two-Chamber Congressional Override, and it’s a serious problem that Congress must address. But it misses the greater risk in the foreseeable future: that a critical governor and a hyperpartisan House could steal a state’s electoral votes, without the Senate.
Read More Here’s how, which I call the Swing State Governor’s Gambit: suppose an Irresponsible Party controls the House and the governorship in the critical tipping point swing state. Think Florida in 2001, when Jeb Bush was governor and Republicans controlled the House. Let’s assume that the Senate, which historically is more reasonable than the House on these issues, would always vote for the legitimate slate and against an illegitimate slate. And suppose the governor goes rogue and sends in an illegitimate slate of electors, ignoring the true results of the popular election in the state. If no one sends in an alternative slate reflecting the true results, then only the rogue governor’s illegitimate slate reaches Congress. And Section 15’s rules say that this single slate will be counted, unless both chambers concurrently vote to reject it. Because the Irresponsible Party controls the House, it won’t do so. Result: the rogue governor and the rogue House steal the state’s electoral votes. And what if a heroic state official, like a secretary of state, bravely sends in an alternative slate of electors reflecting the true results of the popular election? The rogue governor’s illegitimate slate still gets counted. In a multiple slate scenario like that, if the two chambers agree on which competing slate to count, then it counts. The reasonable Senate votes to count the secretary of state’s legitimate slate. But the Irresponsible Party controls the House, which will vote to count the rogue governor’s illegitimate slate. And Section 15’s governor’s tie-breaker says that when the chambers disagree, the slate certified by the governor is counted. Result: the rogue governor and the rogue House steal the state’s electoral votes. So there are at least two different ways that partisans could manipulate the ECA, the Two-Chamber Congressional Override and the Swing State Governor’s Gambit. Congress seems to be focusing on the first, which requires that the Irresponsible Party controls both the House and the Senate to concurrently vote to reject a legitimate slate of electors. And it is ignoring the second, which requires that the Irresponsible Party controls only one chamber of Congress and a critical governorship. Because both strategies for manipulation are technically viable under the existing ECA, the relevant relative risk assessment turns on whether it is more likely that (a) the Irresponsible Party controls both the House of Representatives and the Senate, or (b) the Irresponsible Party controls both the House of Representatives and a critical swing state governorship. In other words, is it more likely that the Irresponsible Party controls the Senate or a critical governorship? I think that under plausible political assumptions about the Senate and swing state governors, it is vastly more likely that the Irresponsible Party would control a critical swing state governorship—like David Perdue in Georgia—than the Senate. If I’m right about that, then the Swing State Governor’s Gambit is the most pressing threat. Reform must therefore focus both on the risk that the chambers of Congress would together reverse the results of the presidential election and on the risk that the House of Representatives together with a governor would do so. And it must proceed with reform with full understanding that the realistic risk of the latter is far greater. In Advantaging Authoritarianism: The U.S. Electoral System & Antidemocratic Extremism, Protect Democracy examines the links between escalating antidemocratic extremism and the U.S. electoral system: “one uniquely translating limited factional support into outsized political influence.” In particular, it interrogates how specific features of the U.S. electoral system may be structurally favoring political extremism, such as by exaggerating one party’s electoral wins over the other, diluting minority voting power, weakening competition between the major parties, preventing an electorally viable new center-right party, and rewarding extreme factions at the ballot box, among other effects. As political scientist Robert Dahl once observed, the U.S. system, “natural as it may seem to us, is of a species rare to the vanishing point among the advanced democracies.” Advantaging Authoritarianism examines its anomalous features; the ways in which those features are aggravating extremism; and how various reforms could help to turn the tide. While the authoritarian threat confronting the U.S. is a near-term crisis, successfully confronting it will also require long-term, structural solutions.
Political Fragmentation in Democracies of the West
Date Written: October 2, 2021
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3935012
Abstract
The decline of effective government throughout most Western democracies poses one of the greatest challenges democracy currently confronts. A major reason for this decline is that democracies have become more politically fragmented. In the proportional-representation systems of Western Europe, power is now divided across many more political parties, including recent, insurgent ones. In the first-past-the-post system of the United States, the main parties are much more internally fragmented. Outside groups, and even individual actors, have far greater power to disrupt and undermine government efforts to forge policy than in the past.
This article expands and extends earlier work I have done on political fragmentation in the United States. It identifies the various forms political fragmentation has taken across the Western democracies in general. The article then explores the major economic and cultural forces driving fragmentation across democracies.
This piece then turns to the communications revolution, as another major cause of the political fragmentation in democracies today. The communications revolution might inherently undermine the capacity for legitimate, broadly accepted political authority – the authority necessary to be able to govern effectively in democratic systems. Political fragmentation is the result of dissatisfaction with the way democracies have been governing, yet it also makes effective governance all the more difficult. Overcoming this fragmentation and delivering effective governance is the most urgent challenge facing democracies across the West.
“The Voting Rights Conundrum”
Stephen Griffin on how voting rights commentary often ignores history, especially in the South:
January 14, 2022
The Voting Rights Conundrum, Part I
Stephen Griffin
https://balkin.blogspot.com/2022/01/the-voting-rights-conundrum-part-i.html
Although there may be a Senate debate, as a practical matter the effort to pass voting rights measures may be dead for now. However, but the issues raised by the current House bill (originally two bills) will likely be with us for some time. Regardless of what happens in the Senate, I see some problems with the way the public debate has been conducted, even among voting rights experts, and that’s my concern here. I’ll start with Yuhal Levin’s op-ed in the New York Times, arguing that . . .
Read More the concerns Democrats and progressives have about voting rights procedures are misplaced. Levin points out that the process of voting, such as registration, has been generally made easier in recent years, certainly easier if our frame of reference extends back to the 1980s, before the adoption of “motor voter” legislation and early voting. This is the perspective taken by Justice Alito’s majority opinion in Brnovich. For his part, Levin sees the parties as focused unduly on measures to improve (or obstruct) voter turnout, which is highly unlikely to actually affect which party wins or loses. I agree with him on this point. As he portrays it, the parties are locked in an unproductive policy stalemate. Unfortunately, this viewpoint leaves out one region and one group of surpassing importance to the Democratic party and, one hopes, to the nation as a whole – African Americans in the South. Perhaps Levin is overlooking the question of race because he references the “Freedom to Vote Act”, rather than the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the response to Shelby County and Brnovichwhich renews for a new era the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA). But, in fact, a number of elements in the two laws are linked in that many of the states that have enacted restrictive laws are in the South, such as Georgia, Texas, and Florida. If Levin is suggesting that Democrats ignore the perspective of African Americans in the South, that is an obvious nonstarter. Indeed, given the history represented by John Lewis, their perspective ought to be our perspective. Misperceiving the relevance of race seems something of a theme in recent commentary on the proposed voting rights measures and the advocacy of the Biden administration. Consider a recent Washington Post’s “Fact-Checker” column by Glenn Kessler. The essential problem with the Post’s analysis is that it analyzes the administration’s statements as if the voting rights controversy began in the aftermath of the 2020 election. But the legal reality the John Lewis Act is meant to address goes back to the aftermath of the 2013 Shelby County decision, nine years ago. It is well documented that in the immediate aftermath of the decision, states like North Carolina and Texas passed laws that would have been subject to DOJ preclearance under the VRA and probably disapproved. These laws were subject to litigation, like the McCrory case in North Carolina and Veasey v. Abbott in Texas in which multiple appellate courts found that state legislatures acted with a racially discriminatory purpose. From the perspective of the advocates of the John Lewis Act, to whom President Biden was speaking in his Atlanta address, this history matters. Moreover, the Post’s analysis ignores that one of the main purposes of the 1982 VRA amendments was to mandate that voting rights claims, either in terms of vote dilution or vote denial, be judged in light of the “totality of the circumstances” – that is, against the historical background which produced not only Jim Crow laws but the consistent efforts of southern whites to evade the effect of the VRA after1965, something the Post never mentions. Immense bodies of factual analysis gathered each time the VRA was reenacted and the lessons of decades of DOJ preclearance and litigation show the persistence of efforts by whites to structure the political system to systematically favor their interests. By treating the voting rights controversy as if it originated with President Biden and the laws passed in 2021, the Post undercuts any meaningful assessment of what Biden is referring to in discussing the present legacy of Jim Crow. This makes the Post’s descriptive analysis a cartoon of what has actually been occurring on the ground, especially in the South, post-Shelby County. In addition, the Post’s analysis is not accurate on what the legal standard is to determine whether a voting rights law was passed with a racially discriminatory purpose. It strongly implies that the test is purely subjective – that is, whether lawmakers “openly advertise” their intention to hinder access to the ballot for minorities. Here we need to advert again to the 1982 VRA amendments, as well as constitutional doctrine, to understand what is going on with respect to the lawsuits filed after Shelby County, as well as the lawsuit filed by the DOJ in 2021 against Georgia. Although the legal analysis here can be intricate, the basis for the 1982 amendments was the kind of “objective” test continually promoted by Justice White for the Supreme Court in voting rights decisions like White v. Regester and Rogers v. Lodge as well as the more consequential Washington v. Davis. As noted above, an objective test places the emphasis on making circumstantial inferences from the relevant historical background. Open admissions of intent are not necessary to satisfy either the constitutional test or under the 1982 amendments. The Post, for example, notes that Georgia complains that the DOJ is not suing other states for similar laws. But the Post fails to note the obvious – the reason the DOJ is suing Georgia rather than other states is because Georgia has a special history going back to Jim Crow in restricting voting rights for Blacks, the kind of history made relevant by the 1982 amendments. That’s how the label “Jim Crow,” becomes relevant to voting rights, something the Post fails to say. All that said, outside the context of race, voting rights advocates often fail to acknowledge a rather severe baseline problem with the kind of analysis they employ. If State A makes casting a ballot easier (perhaps because of the pandemic) and then reneges and goes back to the original status quo, is there a violation of the Constitution? Surely only if the Constitution requires making casting a ballot as easy as possible, a controversial proposition that is far from clear. Voting rights advocates often argue as if the constitutional baseline were “as easy as possible,” but that requires an argument they do not often provide. In any “fact checking” analysis, some allowances have to be made given such complexities. But I think in this case, the Post’s analysis fell far short of adequacy.
In a subsequent post, I hope to say something about the strategy people of good will in both parties should employ to avoid the worst in the next presidential election.
WHAT HAPPENED TO AMERICAN CONSERVATISM?
The rich philosophical tradition I fell in love with has been reduced to Fox News and voter suppression.
Identifying and Minimizing the Risk of Election Subversion and Stolen Elections in the Contemporary United States
Harvard Law Review Forum, forthcoming 2022
33 Pages Posted: 20 Sep 2021 Last revised: 8 Oct 2021
Part I of this Essay describes the path to this unexpected moment of democratic peril in the United States.
Part II explains the three potential mechanisms by which American elections may be subverted in the future.
Part III recommends steps that can and should be taken to minimize this risk. Preserving and protecting American democracy from the risk of election subversion should be at the top of everyone’s agenda. The time to act is now, before American democracy disappears.
Today, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, based in Stockholm, Sweden, released its 2021 report on “The Global State of Democracy.” “Democracy is at risk,” the report’s introduction begins. “Its survival is endangered by a perfect storm of threats, both from within and from a rising tide of authoritarianism.” “The world is becoming more authoritarian as nondemocratic regimes become even more brazen in their repression and many democratic governments suffer from backsliding by adopting their tactics of restricting free speech and weakening the rule of law.”
The report identifies the United States as one of the democracies that is “backsliding,” meaning that it has “experienced gradual but significant weakening of Checks on Government and Civil Liberties, such as Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Association and Assembly, over time.”
“The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale,” the report says.
Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson
November 22, 2021
‘January 6 Was Practice.’ The Atlantic Publishes Special Issue on American Democracy in Crisis
Cover story by Barton Gellman on a Republican Party still in thrall to Donald Trump—and better positioned to subvert the next election than it was the last
Does Low Turnout Matter?
By Tabatha Abu El-Haj
November 16, 2021
The old consensus was not really. Voters, it was argued, basically reflect the views of non-voters. In recent years, some political scientists are not so sure. Two empirical facts drive the new skepticism.
First, despite significant gains in high turnout elections like 2020, the electorate that turns out remains unrepresentative on axes of class, race, and age. Apart from seniors, the general rule is that individuals at the top of the socioeconomic ladder are much more likely to turn out on Election Day than those at the bottom. Income and education, however, are not the only axes of distortion. Americans who are over 65 remains significantly more likely to vote than those who are under 35.
The demographic biases of the electorate are most acute during primaries, midterms, and off-cycle elections—including the age bias.
The old view was that none of this mattered because the electorate’s partisan preferences roughly match that of the eligible electorate. That may still be true, but the conclusion that non-voting doesn’t matter may still be wrong. The strongest data pertain to the gap between young and old voters. A series of PEW studies show that younger Americans have distinctly more progressive views on a range of views, regardless of party affiliation from gay marriage and racial inequality to global warming and the role of government. Data also show that young voters are significantly more likely to prefer the Democratic Party. (My personal view is that we underestimate how the age bias of the electorate explain mid-term backlash against the party in power—the Nate Cohn graph on below 60% turnout would seem to confirm that hunch.)
Beyond age, the class bias of the electorate may also matter. Nonvoters generally have different life experiences, and this seems to translate into different policy preferences—if not partisan preferences. Kay Schlozman’s 2012 study, The Unheavenly Chorus, found inactive voters are not only much more likely to report struggling to pay bills, obtain healthcare, and find decent housing, but also much more likely to have utilized public benefit programs. Data also suggest that economic position affects economic policy preferences from welfare spending to taxes—though not a range of other hot-button policy issues. For example, Pew found, in 2014, that “Opinions about the factors that result in wealth and poverty differ across income categories,” and further that this appears to translate into different views of the value of government assistance, reporting that “People with lower incomes express more positive views of government programs to aid the poor than do those with higher incomes.” Academic studies on the New-Gilded Age and the distinct views of the super-rich, including the work of Benjamin Page & Cari Lynn Hennessy, are consistent with the broader observation that views on economic policy tend to track class position.
Apart from the above, a recent Knight Foundation study emphasizes that perhaps the greatest difference between voters and non-voters is their lack of faith in the electoral system.
Two Great Symposiums on Election Law from NYU and Fordham
By Tabatha Abu El-Haj
November 16, 2021
From the NYU Law Review: Volume 96, Issue 4
Lee Drutman, Elections, Political Parties, and Multiracial, Multiethnic Democracy: How the United States Gets It Wrong
Justin Levitt, Failed Elections and the Legislative Selection of Presidential Electors
Janai Nelson, Parsing Partisanship and Punishment: An Approach to Partisan Gerrymandering and Race
Joshua S. Sellers & Justin Weinstein-Tull, Constructing the Right to Vote
Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos, The New Vote Dilution
From the Fordham Law Review:Volume 90, Issue 2
Jerry H. Goldfeder, Excessive Judicialization, Extralegal Interventions, and Violent Insurrection: A Snapshot of Our 59th Presidential Election
Aba Ayer, Voting as Exclusion
John D. Feerick, The Electoral College: Time for a Change?
James A. Gardner, The Illiberalization of American Election Law: A Study in Democratic Deconsolidation
Rebecca Green, Election Observation Post-2020
Michael T. Morley, The Independent State Legislature Doctrine
Derek T. Muller, Reducing Election Litigation
Richard Winger, How States Can Avoid Overcrowded Ballots but Still Protect Voter Choice
Final Report of the Commission on Information Disorder
November 2021
[Excerpts from introductory “Letter from the Co-Chairs”]Information disorder makes any health crisis more deadly. It slows down our response time on climate change. It under- mines democracy. It creates a culture in which racist, ethnic, and gender attacks are seen as solutions, not problems. Today, mis- and disinformation have become a force multiplier for exacerbating our worst problems as a society. Hundreds of millions of people pay the price, every single day, for a world disordered by lies.
This report is the culmination of an in-depth investigation aimed at better defining the causes and challenges of information dis- order, and offering a viable framework for action.
Each recommendation that follows rep- resents a discrete, actionable idea. Though not all of the recommendations are mutu- ally dependent, they should be considered together—they reinforce and build off one another.
Our recommendations cover multiple areas: technology, society, government, and media. It is also important to note that, with imperfect information, we make imperfect deci- sions. Due to the opacity of tech and media platforms—how they operate and how they optimize their products—we do not have sufficient understanding of all the coordinated levers that could reduce societal harms while still allowing for innovation, and both individual and community benefit.
This crisis demands urgent attention and a dedicated response from all parts of society. Every type and level of leader must think seriously about this crisis and their role in it. Each can and should enter this conversation, genuinely listening to the problems and taking real ownership of solutions. Our Com- mission has aimed to model that process and demonstrate the utility of its outcomes.
We hope that the decision-makers who are ready to take on that challenge will use this framework for action to help reduce information disorder and lessen its destructive role in our world. The Commission hopes its work will spark a new level of leadership and the immediate action that leadership makes possible.
Katie Couric
Chris Krebs
Rashad Robinson
Watch Archived Video: Disinformation in American Elections: Pt. 3 (Social Scientists) with Joan Donovan, Renee DiResta, and Brendan Nyhan (Moderated by Pam Fessler)
November 6, 2021
You can watch archived video of this event at UCI Law’s Fair Election and Free Speech Center at this link:
Voting Rights Lab Report:
A THREAT TO OUR DEMOCRACY: ELECTION SUBVERSION IN THE 2021 LEGISLATIVE SESSION
September 29, 2021
https://votingrightslab.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/20210924-VRL-Election-Subversion-Report-.pdf
2021 has been a historic year for voting rights, with some discouraging setbacks occurring in state legislatures across the country. From Texas to Florida to Georgia, millions of voters have watched as state lawmakers around the country erect new and unnecessary barriers to the ballot box, adopting policies that will curtail participation in our democracy.
These efforts to restrict voter access have been fueled by rampant disinformation campaigns, which ran for months ahead of the 2020 election, successfully invalidating the election results in the minds of millions of Americans. The spread of disinformation has not only created a window for lawmakers to pass restrictive laws. It has degraded trust in our elections system so severely that even efforts to modernize and expand access to our election system invite accusations of fraud — as we saw in Georgia or in the recent California recall election.
In this climate of distrust, a quiet but deeply disturbing legislative trend has emerged — one that threatens not just voter access but the most elemental foundations of our democracy: bills shifting the allocation of power in election administration to partisan actors, criminalizing non-partisan elections administrators and initiating sham election reviews to instill further doubt in elections.
Identifying and Minimizing the Risk of Election Subversion and Stolen Elections in the Contemporary United States
Harvard Law Review Forum, forthcoming 2022
UC Irvine School of Law Research Paper No. 2021-50
33 Pages Posted: 20 Sep 2021 Last revised: 8 Oct 2021
University of California, Irvine School of Law
Date Written: September 18, 2021
Abstract
The United States faces a serious risk that the 2024 presidential election, and other future U.S. elections, will not be conducted fairly, and that the candidates taking office will not reflect the free choices made by eligible voters under previously announced election rules. The potential mechanisms by which election losers may be declared election winners are: usurpation of voter choices for President by state legislatures purporting to exercise constitutional authority to do so, possibly blessed by a partisan-divided Supreme Court and acquiesced to by Republicans in Congress; fraudulent or suppressive election administration or vote counting by law- or norm-breaking election officials; and violent or disruptive private action that prevents voting, interferes with the counting of votes, or interrupts the assumption of power by the actual winning candidate.
Read MoreUntil recently, it would have been absurd to raise the possibility of such election subversion or a stolen election in the United States. Few cases have emerged in at least the last 50 years in the United States of actual election subversion by election officials, leading to an election loser being declared the election winner, despite other unique pathologies of American election administration.
Ironically, the conduct of former President Donald J. Trump in repeatedly and falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen has markedly raised the potential for an actual stolen election in the United States.
Millions of Trump’s Republican supporters now believe the false claim of a stolen election, and some Republican elected officials have pursued bogus sham “audits” and taken other steps that undermine voter confidence in the fairness of the election process. Threats of violence and intimidation have led to unprecedented attrition among election administrators, and some exiting officials are being replaced by those who may not have allegiance to the integrity of the election system. Those Republican election officials who stood up to Trump in 2020 and saved the United States from a potential constitutional and political crisis have been censured, stripped of power, and challenged for office by those embracing the “Big Lie.” Together, these actions serve both to delegitimate the election of Democrats including President Joe Biden in 2020 and to open the door to election manipulation in future elections. Elected officials, election officials, and others believing or purporting to believe the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen may seek to justify subverting future election results in response to earlier purported fraud.
The solutions to these problems are both legal and political. Legal changes should include: (1) paper ballot, chain-of-custody, and transparency requirements, including risk-limiting audits of election results; (2) rules limiting the discretion of those who certify the votes, including Congress through reform of the Electoral Count Act; (3) rules limiting the over-politicization of election administration, especially by state legislatures; (4) increased criminal penalties imposed on those who tamper with federal elections or commit violence or intimidation of voters, elected officials, or elected candidates; and (5) rules countering disinformation about elections, particularly disinformation about when, where, and how people vote. In addition, it will be necessary to organize for political action to reenforce rule-of-law norms in elections. This means advocating for laws that deter election subversion and against laws making stolen elections easier; politically opposing would-be election administrators who embrace false claims about stolen elections; and preparing for mass, peaceful protests in the event of attempts to subvert fair election outcomes.
Part I of this Essay describes the path to this unexpected moment of democratic peril in the United States. Part II explains the three potential mechanisms by which American elections may be subverted in the future. Part III recommends steps that can and should be taken to minimize this risk. Preserving and protecting American democracy from the risk of election subversion should be at the top of everyone’s agenda. The time to act is now, before American democracy disappears.
Hasen, Richard L., Identifying and Minimizing the Risk of Election Subversion and Stolen Elections in the Contemporary United States (September 18, 2021). Harvard Law Review Forum, forthcoming 2022, UC Irvine School of Law Research Paper No. 2021-50, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3926381 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3926381
The Need for a White House Office of Democracy Reform
By Alex Tausanovitch, Danielle Root, and Michael Sozan
January 15, 2021
The United States has just emerged from an election that former National Security Adviser and incoming Director of the Domestic Policy Council Susan Rice described as “our democracy’s near-death experience.” The outgoing president, with the complicity of many congressional Republicans, engaged in an effort to undermine the results of that election with bad-faith, unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud. Their lies culminated in an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building—led by conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and other right-wing extremists intent on preventing Congress from certifying the electoral votes. While that effort failed, it sent a stark message: American democracy can no longer be taken for granted.
Read MoreSome leaders in Congress have understood, years ahead of the curve, that American democracy faced serious challenges—and they have led an unprecedented effort to strengthen democratic institutions. The For the People Act, also known as H.R. 1, contains the most transformative anti-corruption and pro-voting measures since the post-Watergate era. It passed the U.S. House of Representatives in March of 2019 and received the support of every member of the Senate Democratic caucus. The bill now faces a tough fight in a narrowly divided Senate, but its strong support thus far has made clear that the long-neglected pro-democracy agenda now has many champions in Congress.
RELATED
- The Freedom to Vote Act Would Counteract State Laws That Undermine Elections
- Momentum Grows for Bold Democracy Reform
The White House as an institution, however, has some catching up to do. Historically, democracy issues writ large have received limited attention from the president and his staff. In previous administrations, there was no single point person at the White House for issues such as voting rights, redistricting, and campaign finance regulation; to the extent that these issues received any White House attention, they were divided among political advisers and policy staff specializing in other areas.
There is every indication that the new administration intends to treat these issues with the seriousness they deserve. Rice, who will lead the administration’s domestic policy agenda, has endorsed H.R. 1, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (H.R. 4), and D.C. statehood. Vice President-elect Kamala Harris co-sponsored these bills while serving in the Senate. And most notably, President-elect Joe Biden ran his campaign with a strong democracy reform platform and promised to make bold reforms a top priority in his administration.
However, without dedicated staff, effectuating these policies will be a tall order. Further exacerbating this problem is the country’s lack of a Cabinet-level agency responsible for democracy issues. The U.S. Department of Justice enforces voting rights, but it does not robustly engage in developing voting policy. The Federal Election Commission is charged with interpreting and enforcing campaign finance law, but it is an independent agency that does not coordinate with the White House on matters of policy. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission plays an important role in supporting state efforts to better administer elections, but it is a small agency without enforcement power or sufficient funding.
To address this deficit, the Biden administration should create a new office within the Domestic Policy Council that focuses specifically on democracy reform. The office should be led by a single individual and charged with advancing substantive policies that combat political corruption; ensure that every American can easily exercise their right to vote; and ensure that every American is effectively represented in the political process. The leader of this new office, and any appropriate staff, should have experience with voting, redistricting, campaign finance, government ethics, and other issues related to democracy reform. They should be encouraged to proactively develop and promote democracy reform policy and should be empowered to convene experts and stakeholders across agencies, write reports on relevant topics, and draw on resources from other White House offices.
The 2020 election and the ongoing campaign of disinformation about its results have made clear that American democracy is more fragile than many had thought. The fight to safeguard and sustain American democracy, and to secure a more democratic world, will depend on political leadership—and, perhaps most of all, on leadership from the White House.
On the Center for American Progress’ Democracy and Government Reform team, Alex Tausanovitch is the director of campaign finance and electoral reform;Danielle Root is the associate director of voting rights and access to justice; and Michael Sozan is a senior fellow.
The Freedom to Vote Act Would Counteract State Laws That Undermine Elections
By Danielle Root, Michael Sozan, and Alex Tausanovitch
October 5, 2021
The U.S. Senate recently took another step toward passing transformative voting rights and election reform legislation, with Senate Democrats introducing the Freedom to Vote Act on September 14, 2021. This far-reaching reform package would take actions such as reducing the influence of money in politics, ending partisan gerrymandering, and fortifying U.S. elections against foreign interference. But perhaps most importantly, this legislation would also set nationwide voting standards to help counteract anti-democratic laws passed by legislatures in at least 17 states. These state laws are often aimed at disadvantaging historically underrepresented communities, including communities of color, as well as lower-income voters and people with disabilities. Moreover, some of these state laws facilitate a growing threat: that partisan, conspiracy-minded election officials could sabotage legitimate election results.
For these reasons, it is imperative to expeditiously pass federal legislation to fortify free and fair elections against partisan manipulation. If Senate Republicans again block progress on comprehensive voting rights legislation, Senate Democrats must take action with a majority vote to safeguard the very foundation of American democracy—ensuring that voters, not politicians, get to decide the outcome of elections. The filibuster, an anachronistic Senate rule not conceived by the U.S. Constitution, cannot be allowed to take precedence over preserving the democratic principles on which America was founded.
This analysis highlights how specific components of the anti-democratic laws passed in four key states—Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and Texas—will create new barriers for millions of Americans to access the ballot and explains how provisions in the Freedom to Vote Act will specifically counter these laws and help prevent political interference in elections.
Read MoreBackground
Laws aimed at suppressing Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, as well as people with disabilities, in order to create electoral advantage for one political party over another unfortunately have a long and shameful history in the United States. Former President Donald Trump and his allies have modernized and exacerbated these efforts by spreading lies about free and fair election processes. Long before Trump lost the 2020 election, he falsely claimed that the election would be fraudulently conducted and that the result would be invalid if he lost, despite the fact that voter fraud is exceedingly rare.
Trump and his allies continued peddling their “big lie” after the election, attempting in multiple states to overturn the legitimate victory of Joe Biden. They falsely asserted that there was an array of different voting irregularities—often in predominantly Black and Latino communities—and that millions of votes should have been invalidated. Along the way, Trump tried to pressure state election officials to overturn the valid results, using a number of thoroughly discredited theories antithetical to American democracy.
Trump’s undemocratic crusade culminated in the violent January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, where his supporters stormed the building, attempting to disrupt the constitutional counting of electors. Within hours, 147 Republican members of Congressvoted to challenge the duly chosen electors in at least one state. Trump’s misconduct resulted in his second impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives.
Despite Trump’s attempts to stop the peaceful transition of power, President Biden was duly inaugurated as president. But these events have not dampened Trump’s quest to invalidate the presidential election. Trump has encouraged sham election auditsin several states. Perhaps more alarming, lawmakers across the nation have assisted Trump’s anti-democratic efforts, jamming through a plethora of laws in at least 17 statesthat suppress the vote and increase the risk that partisan officials will undermine the results. Many of these state laws have two related purposes: (1) to make it harder for communities of color and other historically underrepresented communities to vote, and (2) to make it easier for partisan officials to undermine valid election results with which they disagree.
In the meantime, congressional Democrats pushed for the passage of sweeping legislation to set national federal election standards, an authority granted to Congress in the U.S. Constitution. In March, House Democrats passed their comprehensive democracy legislation, the For the People Act (H.R.1). After Senate Republicans blocked any progress on the Senate’s parallel legislation, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) worked with several other Democratic senators to craft a somewhat more limited bill, the Freedom to Vote Act, partly in an effort to attract Senate Republicans’ support. Their efforts also incorporated feedback from state and local election officials from around the nation, to whom the legislation provides greater flexibility to implement the new provisions.
If enacted, the Freedom to Vote Act would be a giant step toward building a stronger, more inclusive democracy where all Americans can have confidence in election outcomes, even if this compromise legislation omits some important provisions from the For the People Act. President Biden voiced strong support for the legislation and reportedly is willing to ask senators to reform the filibuster in order to pass it. The Freedom to Vote Act is also widely supportedby the American public.
The Freedom to Vote Act has four principal pillars:
- It would set national standards to protect and expand the right to vote.
- It would help protect the integrity of elections and make it harder for partisan officials to subvert valid election results.
- It would prohibit partisan gerrymandering and empower courts to invalidate overly partisan maps, an urgently needed change given that many states have already begun their 10-year redistricting process.
- It would reduce the power of big money in elections by, for example, shining a bright light on so-called dark money campaign spending and implementing a cutting-edge voluntary small-donor public financing system for House elections.
How the Freedom to Vote Act would help curb voter suppression and prevent election sabotage
Since the start of 2021, lawmakers across the country have filed hundreds of anti-voter bills in state legislatures. Many of these bills would curtail policies such as vote by mail, early voting, and curbside voting—secure methods that have made voting more convenient for millions of Americans. Other bills would severely restrict who is allowed to assist voters in returning their ballots and would force voters to navigate needless, onerous obstacles before they are allowed to even obtain a ballot or cast one that will be counted. Often, these anti-voting bills target Black, Indigenous, and other people of color as well as people with disabilities and members of other historically underrepresented communities.
Concurrently, the past year has seen rapid growth in legislative proposals that would increase the ability of partisan state officials to interfere with the results of elections. According to a report released in June by States United Democracy Center, Protect Democracy, and Law Forward, 41 states have already introduced 216 bills in 2021 that would allow legislators to meddle with election administration. These bills include provisions that would give partisan legislatures the final sign-off on election results, greater control over election personnel, and the ability to interfere with “the minutiae of election administration”—and would impose criminal penalties on election administrators for small missteps.
So far, only 24 of those bills have been enacted into law. But the trend is likely to continue, as more and more candidates and elected officials aligned with Donald Trump embrace the myth of a stolen election as a core issue.
The Freedom to Vote Act includes strong provisions that would protect the right to vote and counter state anti-voting efforts. Other provisions would defend free election processes and make them less vulnerable to political interference. Some of the bill’s most notable provisions include the following actions.
Bolster voter registration
- Establishes nationwide automatic voter registration (AVR) through state departments of motor vehicles with grandfathering provisions for existing AVR programs and options to expand to additional state agencies
- Creates nationwide online registration and streamlined processes
- Establishes nationwide same-day registration during early voting and on Election Day
- Establishes nationwide preregistration for 16- and 17-year-olds
- Grants voter registration privacy protections for voters who have experienced domestic or dating violence, stalking, sexual assault, or trafficking
Protect in-person voting access
- Guarantees at least 13 days of early voting, including on weekends
- Makes Election Day a legal holiday
- Grants voting protections for people with disabilities who are subject to guardianship
- Permits Indigenous tribes to designate ballot pickup and collection centers on tribal lands, which can serve as voters’ residential and mailing address for election purposes
- Tasks jurisdictions with ensuring that no voter is forced to wait more than 30 minutes to vote at polling places
- Requires jurisdictions to provide voters with timely notifications of polling place changes
- Restricts states from limiting polling place hours and bans states from prohibiting curbside voting
- Prohibits states from restricting distribution of food and beverages to voters waiting in line to vote
- Prohibits states with voter ID requirements from imposing strict limits on allowable forms of identification
Preserve mail voting
- Sets up a nationwide system of no-excuse vote by mail with ballot tracking; prepaid postage; permanent mail voting for voters choosing to receive a mail ballot each election; due process procedures for signature matching and signature curing processes; secure and accessible ballot drop boxes, including on tribal lands; and prohibitions against requiring strict forms of identification or witness and notary signatures to obtain or cast a mail ballot
- Empowers third parties such as get out the vote (GOTV) groups to distribute mail ballot applications
- Authorizes election officials to treat voter registration forms as applications for mail voting
- Funds grant programs for improving access to voter registration and voting for people with disabilities as well as pilot programs for registering and voting privately and independently from home
- Requires voting protections for U.S. citizens and uniformed service members and their families living and serving overseas
Safeguard election participation
- Expands access to and availability of voter registration and voting information, including for people with disabilities and people with limited English proficiency
- Establishes a private right of action for Americans who are denied their right to vote
- Restores voting rights to formerly incarcerated people
- Prohibits jurisdictions from using unreliable information or discriminatory methods to remove voters from voter registration rolls, such as the fact that a registrant did not vote in one or more past election
Protect elections against political interference and bolster election security
- Prohibits firing of local election officials without cause
- Enhances rules for preservation of election-related records and equipment
- Broadly prohibits undue burdens on the right to vote
- Provides grants to states for poll worker recruitment and training
- Protects against poll observers harassing voters or interfering with elections
- Requires candidates and political committees to report foreign contacts
- Requires use of voter-verified paper ballots to ensure that election results are secure and can be accurately reviewed
- Phases in a requirement that states conduct post-election audits
- Sets out requirements for counting provisional ballots
- Establishes new safeguards for the security of voting machines and data
State-by-state analysis of how the Freedom to Vote Act would counteract laws that undermine elections
The above provisions would counteract many of the worst state efforts to undermine voting rights and U.S. democracy. The four states examined below—Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and Texas—illustrate this point. These states have already adopted anti-democratic laws that, if left to stand, would block voters from casting ballots in upcoming elections and allow partisan actors to manipulate election outcomes for personal gain.
Arizona
Last spring, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) signed a series of anti-voting laws restricting access to policies that helped Arizona voters participate in the 2020 election, namely vote by mail, which about 86 percent of Arizona voters used to cast ballots in the 2020 election. The state has also made headlines for launching a partisan and conspiracy-laden investigation of Arizona’s 2020 election results, conducted by a private company whose founder made pro-Trump statements. The review ultimately—and unsurprisingly—uncovered no evidence of fraud. But it nonetheless helped fuel baseless suspicionsabout the results and has even led other states, including Texas, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, to pursue similar “investigations.”
Here is what Arizona’s laws do and how the Freedom to Vote Act would remedy them:
- Arizona’s new law
In Arizona, voters who are deemed “inactive”—meaning they do not vote by mail in two consecutive election cycles and fail to respond to a mailer within 90 days—will be purged from the state’s permanent early voting list and will no longerautomatically receive ballots each cycle. Opponents of the law claim that roughly 150,000 people in Arizona will be removed as a result.
The Freedom to Vote Act
The Freedom to Vote Act does not distinguish between frequent and infrequent mail voters and does not punish people for choosing not to cast their ballot by mail every election. Voters choosing to receive a mail ballot each election would remain on permanent mail voting lists unless they were no longer eligible to vote in Arizona or have submitted a written request for removal.
- Arizona’s new law
Arizona law prohibits election officials from preemptively mailing mail ballots to voters who are not on the state’s permanent early voting list unless the voter has specifically requested one.
The Freedom to Vote Act
Election officials are permitted to treat voter registration forms as mail ballot applications so that voters do not have to undertake a separate process for requesting a ballot.
- Arizona’s new law
State law now requires mail ballots to be signed and received by 7 p.m. on election night. Any mail ballot that is not signed and received by that deadline will be discarded. This will create problems for voters who return their mail ballots mistakenly unsigned in the few days preceding Election Day or on Election Day itself.
The Freedom to Vote Act
Election officials are required to notify voters within one business day if their ballot is received unsigned. The act would give voters three days following the official ballot receipt deadline to sign their ballot in order to have it counted.
- The Freedom to Vote Act
The Freedom to Vote Act would also strengthen requirements that safeguard election records—so that Arizona and other states could not hand election documents over to private contractors without supervision.
Florida
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed the state’s new anti-voting bill into law in May. The law was signed behind closed doors during a private pro-Trump event, which local media was barred from attending, although the governor did permit Fox News to livestream the event. Florida’s new law includes several election administration changes that will harm Floridians and undercut fair elections in the state.
Here is what Florida’s law does and how the Freedom to Vote Act would remedy it:
- Florida’s new law
The law places new restrictions on vote by mail by requiring certain voters to provide strict forms of identification to even so much as request a mail ballot. More than 4.5 million Floridians voted by mail in the 2020 election.
The Freedom to Vote Act
The bill would block Florida from requiring strict identification for requesting absentee ballots.
- Florida’s new law
Floridians used to have the option of adding their names to permanent mail voting lists and receiving a mail ballot automatically for each cycle over a four-year period. The new state law, however, forces Floridians to navigate onerous mail ballot request processes more frequently by requiring voters to request mail ballots everytwo years.
The Freedom to Vote Act
Voters choosing to receive a mail ballot each election would remain on permanent mail voting lists unless and until they are no longer registered in the state of Florida or have provided the state with written notice that they wish to be removed.
- Florida’s new law
Florida’s law limits drop box availability to early voting periods and to official county election offices and voting locations, curtailing their usefulness by limiting availability. About 1.5 million Floridians utilized ballot drop boxes in the 2020 election.
The Freedom to Vote Act
The Freedom to Vote Act would establish minimum standards for ballot drop boxes with requirements for at least one drop box per jurisdiction, which must be accessible during reasonable hours throughout early and regular voting periods. Drop boxes must be made available to voters as soon as a jurisdiction begins sending mail ballots to voters and must continue through the end of Election Day. Within each jurisdiction, at least 25 percent of drop boxes—or one, whichever is greater—must be accessible 24 hours daily.
Georgia
In March, Georgia enacted an expansive law that makes voting more difficult and opens the door to political interference in state elections. The nearly 100-page law drew nationwide criticism for its unconscionable voting restrictions and blatant partisan power grabs.
Here is what Georgia’s law does and how the Freedom to Vote Act would remedy it:
- Georgia’s new law
Georgia’s law prohibits people from providing food and water to voters waiting in line at polling places.
The Freedom to Vote Act
The Freedom to Vote Act would nullify this prohibition.
- Georgia’s new law
The state law bars election officials from mailing mail ballot applications to registered voters, which is an action some election officials took last year during the pandemic to ensure that people could vote even if they did not feel safe doing so in person.
The Freedom to Vote Act
The bill would allow Georgia election officials to treat voter registration forms as applications for mail ballots, thereby permitting them to proactively send mail ballots to registered voters opting to vote by mail without voters having to make a separate request.
- Georgia’s new law
Georgia’s law requires voters casting mail ballots to provide strict forms of identification to receive and return mail ballots. More than 1.3 million Georgians cast ballots by mail in the 2020 election.
The Freedom to Vote Act
The Freedom to Vote Act would block Georgia from requiring people to provide strict proof of eligibility to obtain or return a mail ballot.
- Georgia’s new law
Under Georgia’s law, jurisdictions may supply one ballot drop box for returning mail ballots. Additional drop boxes may be allowed, but the total number is limited to the lesser of one per every 100,000 active voters—that is, voters who cast a ballot in the most recent election—or the number of early voting locations in a county. This will reduce access for largely populated jurisdictions such as Fulton, Gwinnett, DeKalb, and Cobb counties.
The Freedom to Vote Act
The bill would require each jurisdiction to have at least one drop box per every 45,000 registered voters for any election held before 2024. For 2024 onward, jurisdictions would need to offer at least one drop box per every 45,000 registered voters or one box per every 15,000 voters who voted by mail in the most recent election, whichever is greater.
- Georgia’s new law
Georgia’s law requires all drop boxes to be located at official election offices and inside early voting locations, limiting their availability to hours when many voters are at school or work. Furthermore, drop boxes are only allowed during early voting periods.
The Freedom to Vote Act
The Freedom to Vote Act would supersede Georgia’s ballot drop box restrictions by requiring 24-hour access to at least one ballot drop box. It would also require drop boxes to be made available beginning on the first day that officials begin sending mail ballots through the time at which polls close on election night.
- Georgia’s new law
Georgia’s law limits weekday early voting to the hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Early voting hours may be extended, but in no case can they take place outside the hours of 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. In 2020, more than 2.7 million Georgians voted early in person.
The Freedom to Vote Act
The bill would require an early voting period that is at least 13 days long, including Saturdays and Sundays. Voting locations would be required to open for at least 10 hours daily, including for some period before and after business hours.
- Georgia’s new law
Under Georgia’s law, voters who mistakenly go to the wrong precinct will be turned away instead of being offered a provisional ballot in many cases. Some 44 percent of provisional ballots cast in Georgia during the 2020 election were from people who accidentally showed up at the wrong precinct.
The Freedom to Vote Act
The bill would invalidate Georgia’s strict rules on provisional voting by allowing voters who mistakenly show up at an incorrect precinct within the county where they are registered to vote to cast a provisional ballot and have it counted.
- Georgia’s new law
Georgia’s law allows the State Election Board to investigate and replace local election officials, potentially injecting political interference into local election administration.
The Freedom to Vote Act
The Freedom to Vote Act would prohibit the removal of local election officials except for “gross negligence, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
- The Freedom to Vote Act
The bill would also make it illegal to “intimidate, threaten, [or] coerce” election officials—a protection against the type of pressure that was put on Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to change the results of the last presidential election.
Texas
In September 2021, despite a hard-fought, monthslong effort by many Democratic state lawmakers seeking to block it from advancing, Texas became the latest state to adopt a sweeping anti-voting law that also gave unprecedented power to partisan poll watchers.
Here is what Texas’ law does and how the Freedom to Vote Act would remedy it:
- Texas’ new law
Texas already has one of the most restrictive mail voting programs in the country, limiting access to only a limited class of people, namely elderly people; people detained in jail or located outside the jurisdiction during the election; and certain people who are ill or have disabilities. Still, for those limited few who are eligible for mail ballots, the state’s new law requires them to provide strict forms of identification to receive or return their ballot. Almost 1 million Texans voted by mail in the 2020 election.
The Freedom to Vote Act
The bill would allow any voter to cast a ballot by mail and would block Texas from requiring mail voters to provide strict identification to obtain or return a mail ballot.
- Texas’ new law
Texas’ law makes it a felony for election officials to preemptively send mail ballot applications to registered voters. Some Texas counties tried to preemptively send mail ballot applications to elderly voters and voters with disabilities during the pandemic and when postal delays risked ballot request forms not being received on time. The state law similarly blocks officials from facilitating ballot application distribution by third-party groups, such as GOTV groups.
The Freedom to Vote Act
The Freedom to Vote Act would empower election officials to treat voter registration forms as mail ballot applications, thereby allowing them to proactively send mail ballots to voters opting to vote by mail without voters having to navigate a separate ballot application process. The bill would further allow distribution of mail voting applications by third parties.
- Texas’ new law
The new state law prohibits ballot drop boxes. Of voters nationwide who cast ballots by mail, 41 percent reported utilizing ballot drop boxes to return their ballot.
The Freedom to Vote Act
The bill would negate the state’s ballot drop box ban by requiring each jurisdiction to have at least one drop box per every 45,000 registered voters in elections occurring before 2024 and the greater of that or one box per every 15,000 voters who voted by mail in the most recent election from 2024 onward.
- Texas’ new law
Texas’ law bans curbside voting. Curbside voting was greatly relied upon in heavily populated Harris County. Curbside voting proved vital for protecting voters during the pandemic by enabling them to cast an in-person ballot without leaving their car or having to enter a crowded polling location. In Harris County, 1 in 10 in-person early voters utilized curbside voting.
The Freedom to Vote Act
The bill would bar states from banning curbside voting.
- Texas’ new law
Texas’ law allows poll watchers to have “free movement” in a polling place—potentially disrupting the voting process or violating voters’ privacy—and even goes so far as to criminalize the obstruction of a poll watcher’s view.
The Freedom to Vote Act
The bill would require election observers to stay at least 8 feet away from a voter trying to cast a ballot or from poll workers trying to process ballots. Furthermore, it would prohibit observers from challenging anyone’s eligibility to vote without personal knowledge of the grounds for ineligibility and a good faith factual basis to believe they are ineligible.
Conclusion
America’s dream of an inclusive and fair democracy stands at a pivotal point. The Freedom to Vote Act is likely Congress’ best chance to enact critical legislation to protect voting rights and election integrity as well as prevent partisan gerrymandering and reduce the outsize role of big money in politics. With multiple states enacting laws that strike at the heart of voter access and election integrity, the Senate must fulfill its constitutional duty and act expeditiously to pass the Freedom to Vote Act.
Danielle Root is the director of voting rights and access to justice on the Democracy and Government Reform team at the Center for American Progress.Michael Sozan, a former chief of staff in the U.S. Senate, is a senior fellow at the Center.Alex Tausanovitch is the director of campaign finance and electoral reform on the Democracy and Government Reform teamat the Center.
The Experiences of Municipal Clerks and the Electorate in the November 2020 General Election in Wisconsin
Barry C. Burden
Professor, Department of Political Science Director, Elections Research Center University of Wisconsin-Madison
https://electionlawblog.org/wp-content/uploads/Burden-2020-Wisconsin-Election-Report.pdf
Executive Summary
Despite the many challenges that election officials and voters faced as a result of the pandemic and the spread of misinformation, surveys of both groups show that the 2020 general election in Wisconsin was a tremendous success.
The share of people voting by mail jumped to a record high, particularly among individuals concerned about the spread of the virus at polling places. The vast majority of municipal clerks procured adequate resources and sufficient numbers of poll workers to conduct the election, and they found ways to manage, albeit imperfectly, much higher volumes of absentee ballots. New resources such as grants to fund operations and National Guard members who served as poll workers helped to compensate for the greater demands on election officials managing massive increases in mail ballots and restrictions on polling place locations due to the pandemic. The vast majority of voters were served extremely well, although pockets of difficulty were experienced by some populations such as young people and voters with disabilities.
Perhaps reflecting their different experiences in 2020 and even before the pandemic, clerks disagree on some important policy proposals being considered in the wake of the election. They report sharply divergent views on whether it should be permissible to process absentee ballots before election day and whether drop boxes for collecting absentee ballots should be allowed. These opinions are strongly correlated with the sizes of the municipal populations that clerks serve. Among other differences, clerks from larger cities were much more likely to believe that misinformation about absentee voting was a serious problem and to favor some processing of absentee ballots before election day.
Despite the disruptions it caused, the 2020 experience did not alter the opinions of clerks about some election practices. Although most clerks support the right of people to vote by mail for any reason, a significant share believe, even after the pandemic experience, that absentee voting should be limited to a small group of voters who provide evidence that they cannot appear at their assigned polling places on election day.
Which Senators And Representatives Vote In Favor Of Democracy?
Filed under Democracy
Published Sep. 1, 2021
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/which-senators-and-representatives-vote-in-favor-of-democracy/
[Excerpts:]
Take Republican Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Bill Cassidy, Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse. All five of them opposed the objections to counting electoral votes in both Pennsylvania and Arizona and supported the National Commission to investigate Jan. 6 — all three of the pro-democracy bills the Senate voted on in this category, even though they differ quite a bit in the extent to which they support Biden’s agenda. Similarly, in the House, Republican Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick, Tom Reed, John Katko, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney all voted largely in favor of the pro-democracy measures in front of the House, even though Cheney rarely votes with Biden otherwise.
On the other end of the spectrum, you can see which representatives have voted against both Biden and the bare-bones pro-democracy measures Congress has taken up. For instance, Sens. Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Tommy Tuberville, Roger Marshall and Cindy Hyde-Smith have all voted against the democratic position every single time, even though Hyde-Smith tends to vote with Biden markedly more than the others. [boldfaced added]
But this bare-bones metric is, of course, a fairly narrow definition of what it means to live in a democracy, which is why I created a second metric that also includes bills that try to create a more expansive and inclusive democracy. Using legislative scorecards from organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, the government watchdog group Common Cause and the nonprofit research organization Vote Smart, I looked at all of the other bills that Congress brought to the floor this year that could also be considered key to a functioning democracy, in addition to the ones I’ve already mentioned.6 Bills that fall into this second category include:
Read More- Bills aimed at expanding civil liberties, like the rights of groups likewomen— in addition to bills focused on hate crimes, like the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act; expanding immigration rights, like the American Dream and Promise Act; increasing transparency and accountability in policing, like the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and LGBTQ equality, like the Equality Act;
- Bills that expand voting rights and access, like theFor the People Actand theJohn Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act;
- Bills addressing the historical legacy of slavery in the U.S. likemaking Juneteenth a federal holidayor removing confederate statues from the Capitol. (Groups like Vote Smart placed these bills in the “Civil Liberties and Civil Rights” and “Constitution” categories; these measures recognize the role slavery had in entrenching inequality in the U.S.)7
Interestingly, the overall picture doesn’t change thatmuch when you look at this fuller set of bills — although partisan differences are somewhat starker. While the bare-bones metric had a few Republicans on par with Democrats, this is no longer the case: There are no Republicans who are more supportive than Democrats of the more expansive definition of democracy.
. . . .
At this point, the core of democracy in the U.S. is not up for debate. “We’re fighting battles today over certain aspects of the democratic process, but not the core of it, for the most part,” Coppedge told me. But the fact that questions of democracy have become so clearly partisan is not good for the future of democracy. And given just how politically divided that fight has already become, it’s more important than ever to track how Congress votes on the matters of democracy that do make it to the floor.
Election Laws Disproportionately Disadvantaging Racial Minorities, and the Futility of Trying to Solve Today’s Problems with Yesterday’s Never Very Good Tools
Gary J. Simson
Mercer University – Walter F. George School of LawCornell University – Law School
Date Posted: 19 Aug 2021
Last Revised: 19 Aug 2021
Election Science: A Proposed NSF Convergence Accelerator
Report No.: 12
Date Published: 2021-07-21
Author(s):
Michael Alvarez, California Institute of Technology
Moon Duchin, Tufts University
Gretchen Macht, University of Rhode Island
Charles Stewart III, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
https://vote.caltech.edu/reports/12
Abstract:
Ensuring that elections throughout the United States are convenient, trustworthy, and secure is one of the nation’s most compelling challenges. Designing systems, procedures, policies, and technologies to meet these challenges inherently requires marshaling expertise, skills, and perspective from diverse and multiple sectors. The National Science Foundation (NSF) Convergence Accelerator (C-Accel) program provides a natural environment to nurture multidisciplinary teams to address many challenges currently facing American elections.
Attachment
Election Science: Proposed NSF Convergence Accelerator (Size: 4374 KB)
Accelerating Election Science
This entry was posted in Uncategorized on July 22, 2021 by Michael Alvarez.
[Excerpts:]
It’s really exciting to write that our report to the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator (NSF-CA) program, “Election Science: A Proposed NSF Convergence Accelerator” is now available. In this report, we argue that there are fourteen research challenges present critical opportunities for NSF-CA funding.
This report was produced with support from the NSF-CA, and my co-authors (or in NSF lingo, co-Principal Investigators, or “PIs”) on the project are Moon Duchin (Tufts University), Gretchen Macht (University of Rhode Island) and Charles Stewart III (MIT). It was a fun and productive experience working with Moon, Gretchen and Charles.
The fourteen challenges are:
Read More- Evaluating Tools for Election Administration
- Ensuring Usability within the Voting Experience
- Improving Access to Voting
- Communicating Effectively with the Electorate
- Detecting Anomalies in Election Management Systems
- Sharing Election Results for Research, Dissemination, and Anomaly Detection
- Visualizing Election Data
- Enhancing Voter Identity Verification
- Securing Electronic Ballot Delivery & Return
- Implementing End-to-End Verifiability
- Improving Cybersecurity for Election Administration
- Managing Election Geography
- Promoting Sustainable and Scalable Sharing of Election Technology
- Developing Next-Generation Voting Technologies
I encourage you to take a closer look at the report to learn more about why we identified each as an important research challenge.
So what happens next? Our report is now being reviewed by the NSF-CA, along with the reports from a number of other NSF-CA initiatives that they supported in this year’s cycle of studies. We hope that the NSF-CA decides that supporting these research challenges in the near future is an important priority, and if they do, that our initiative will move to the next stage of development at the NSF-CA.
THE VIRUS AND THE VOTE: ADMINISTERING THE 2020 ELECTION IN A PANDEMIC
STANFORD-MIT HEALTHY ELECTIONS
July 1, 2020
https://pacscenter.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/The-Virus-And-The-Vote.pdf
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Read More THE VIRUS AND THE VOTE: ADMINISTERING THE 2020 ELECTION IN A PANDEMIC INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………………………………………………………. 1 CHAPTER 1: THE 2020 PRIMARIES……………………………………………………………………..25 CHAPTER 2: 2020 ELECTION STATE PROFILES …………………………………………………..51 CHAPTER 3: IN-PERSON VOTING………………………………………………………………..230 CHAPTER 4: MAIL VOTING ………………………………………………………………………… 335 CHAPTER 5: VOTE COUNTS AND ELECTION CHALLENGES…………………………….548 CHAPTER 6: TECHNOLOGY PLATFORMS AND MISINFORMATION …………………744 The Partisanship Spectrum 55 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1787 (2014) Loyola-LA Legal Studies Paper No. 2012-13 83 Pages Posted: 26 Mar 2013 Last revised: 21 May 2014 Loyola Law School Los Angeles Date Written: January 24, 2014 Abstract In a polarized political environment, allegations of excessive partisanship by public actors are ubiquitous. Commentators, courts, and activists levy and process these allegations daily. But with remarkable consistency, they do so as if “partisanship” described a single phenomenon. This piece recognizes, for the first time, that the default mode of understanding is a descriptive and diagnostic failure, with meaningful consequences. Partisanship is not an “it,” but a “those.” Without a robust conceptualization of partisanship, it is difficult to treat pathologies of partisan governance. Indeed, it is difficult to distinguish the features from the bugs in our political system. Moreover, the failure to understand the multifarious nature of partisanship impairs our ability to assess how to best confront the partisanship we care about most, particularly in electoral regulation. In particular, most observers attempt to further or constrain partisanship through substantive rules and structural design. But parsing the spectrum of partisanship shows that these tools are neither necessary nor sufficient to address partisanship in its most disparaged forms. Conversely, analysts have failed to appreciate the power of strong situational norms to accomplish these ends. Because norms are socially constructed, our discourse about partisanship matters — and we are likely getting the discourse very wrong. This piece attempts to flesh out the distinctions that have been heretofore elided. It develops a typology of partisanship, and then engages that conceptual structure to assess the various tools by which forms of partisanship — including the most pernicious portions of the partisan structure — may be addressed. Keywords: partisan, partisanship, situational ethics, role morality, nonpartisan, election law, electoral regulation Suggested Citation: Levitt, Justin, The Partisanship Spectrum (January 24, 2014). 55 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1787 (2014), Loyola-LA Legal Studies Paper No. 2012-13, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2239491or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2239491 What’s on the Horizon for Remote Voter Identity Verification? By Rachel Orey and Collier Ferneckes July 13, 2021 https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/remote-voter-id/ [Excerpt:] The 2020 election was the most secure in our nation’s history. Yet in response to false claims of rampant voter fraud, some state legislatures have introduced strict identification requirements for mail voting. These identification requirements too often hamper voter access without addresssing the most pressing security threats facing our elections system: sustained underfunding and outdated cybersecurity. Our desire to explore identification measures in this paper is born out of a desire to expand voters’ access to the ballot while protecting against ever-evolving future threats. An election system which is free, fair, and accessible must not be static; an election system that truly meets voters’ needs must be flexible and responsive. This paper is just the beginning of scoping out what a modernized remote voter identity verification system might look like. As the nation trends towards a wider reliance on convenience voting methods, this report explores how states and localities can ensure that their voter verification policies achieve the nexus of accuracy, accessibility, equity, and practical feasibility. This paper is not intended to provide specific recommendations about how election officials should be conducting identity verification. Rather, it provides a survey of the major benefits and drawbacks of the policy alternatives in use today, as well as the methods that might gain traction down the road The Big Lie of Election and Voter Fraud is largely the invention of conservative “think tank” and Heritage’s own Hans Von Spakosky. Heritage Action, Heritage’s political arm, has recently joined forces with the RNC and the Republican State Leadership Council, to spawn over a hundred laws in over 14 states and counting. Each is premised on the Big Lie and the “electoral” concerns the Big Lie engenders in constituents of these Trump Republican-led legislatures. Each bill and law aims at denying minority and other voters who opposed Trump’s anti-democratic behaviors in 2020 the unfettered right to vote and be counted in future elections, including especially the upcoming 2022 midterm elections. First embraced in 2012 by Reince Priebus, then chair of the Republican National Committee and future first chief of staff to Donald Trump, it became the alter ego of candidate and then President Trump. Although the claims of work of Heritage and Von Spakosky have been debunked, the Big Lie has taken root in the American psyche of an estimated __% or American voters. To dissuade anyone of strongly held beliefs requires patience and trust-building dialogue. Strong beliefs do not preclude discussion of facts but do require an understanding of the emotional nature of the beliefs. Before addressing the fact-finding refuting the work of Heritage, it’s important first to address its effect – the manipulation of constituent emotions. The classic dog whistle employed by political parties is the one that engenders the fight or flight response. As political propaganda, it undermines respect for the other. It denigrates the other’s hopes, motives and behavior. It fundamentally changes one’s sense of reality. The Big Lie is classic political propaganda, a dog whistle prompting an “attack” response. It may solicit yet another $5 or $25 contribution or, more dangerously, be n invitation to march on the U.S. Capitol. In every case, this dog whistle calls its listeners to commit to action even before thinking things through. Trust building, on the other hand, is essential in order to open one’s minds to the other’s point of view, to find common ground, to move ahead as a Nation. These readings are offered to see that possibility more clearly. First, see the links to two documents of The Heritage Foundation that have been more damaging to public trust in our electoral system than perhaps any others. The Heritage Foundation’s “data base of election fraud” identifies a mere total of 1,328 alleged instances of election and voter fraud spanning several decades. Heritage, however, presents them as a “sampling”, falsely suggesting there are more examples to back up its false and misleading claims. The second document, styled as a “Factsheet”, is actually a blueprint for Republican-led states quickly to prepare legislative bills aimed at suppressing the vote of minorities and others whom they fear will not in upcoming elections vote for their party’s slate of candidates. The leadership of Heritage Action, the political arm of The Heritage Foundation, has acknowledged that intent and hundreds of such state laws proposed have been enacted in the first six months of 2021 alone. The “Factsheet” lists dozens of requirements, all styled as :best practices”, to deter the vote of opponents. IN this way, Heritage, the RNC and the RSLC have jointly deployed the Big Lie deny the future votes of ordinary citizens – minority and others – who simply chose to vote against the anti-democratic agenda of Trump and his enablers The Tagline of the Big Lie “The public must have trust in the outcome of our elections. That goal is elusive in large part because of the vulnerabilities that currently exist.” https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity-facts The Heritage Foundation Voter Fraud Data Base “The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database shows that election fraud does occur in American elections. Errors, omissions, and mistakes by election officials and careless, shoddy election practices and procedures or lack of training can cause and have caused problems for voters and candidates. While there is no accurate information on the extent of these problems, the number of instances in which such issues have occurred and are occurring demonstrates clearly the vulnerabilities in our current patchwork system across the states. “ https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity-facts The Heritage Foundation Fact Sheet “The following recommendations of best practices have been developed by Heritage Foundation experts based on long experience in the area of election integrity. These recommendations are intended principally for state legislatures, which under our federal system have the primary responsibility for administering elections.” Political Cover for the Big Lie: “The U.S. Supreme Court said in 2008 in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board that the “flagrant examples of [voter] fraud [that] have been documented throughout this Nation’s history by respected historians and journalists…demonstrate that not only is the risk of voter fraud real but that it could affect the outcome of a close election.” “As The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database shows, election fraud does occur in American elections.” [Yep, 1,328 alleged times over decades, many not verifiable] https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity-facts Trump White House aide was secret author of report used to push ‘big lie’ Report on Dominion voting machines produced after 2020 election was not the work of volunteer in Trump’s post-election legal team By Hugo Lowell March 17, 2022 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/16/trump-white-house-aide-secret-author-dominion-report Weeks after the 2020 election, at least one Trump White House aide was named as secretly producing a report that alleged Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden because of Dominion Voting Systems – research that formed the basis of the former president’s wider efforts to overturn the election. The Dominion report, subtitled “OVERVIEW 12/2/20 – History, Executives, Vote Manipulation Ability and Design, Foreign Ties”, was initially prepared so that it could be sent to legislatures in states where the Trump White House was trying to have Biden’s win reversed. But top Trump officials would also use the research that stemmed from the White House aide-produced report to weigh other options to return Trump to the presidency, including having the former president sign off on executive orders to authorize sweeping emergency powers. The previously unreported involvement of the Trump White House aide in the preparation of the Dominion report raises the extraordinary situation of at least one administration official being among the original sources of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The publicly available version of the Dominion report, which first surfaced in early December 2020 on the conservative outlet the Gateway Pundit, names on the cover and in metadata as its author Katherine Friess, a volunteer on the Trump post-election legal team. But the Dominion report was in fact produced by the senior Trump White House policy aide Joanna Miller, according to the original version of the document reviewed by the Guardian and a source familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The original version of the Dominion report named Miller – who worked for the senior Trump adviser Peter Navarro – as the author on the cover page, until her name was abruptly replaced with that of Friess before the document was to be released publicly, the source said. The involvement of a number of other Trump White House aides who worked in Navarro’s office was also scrubbed around that time, the source said. Friess has told the Daily Beast that she had nothing to do with the report and did not know how her name came to be on the document. It was not clear why Miller’s name was removed from the report, which was sent to Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani on 29 November 2020, or why the White House aide’s involvement was obfuscated in the final 2 December version. Miller did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Dominion report made a number of unsubstantiated allegations that claimed Dominion Voting Systems corruptly ensured there could be “technology glitches which resulted in thousands of votes being added to Joe Biden’s total ballot count”. Citing unnamed Venezuelan officials, the report also pushed the conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems used software from the election company Smartmatic and had ties to “state-run Venezuelan software and telecommunications companies”. After the Dominion report became public, Navarro incorporated the claims into his own three-part report, produced with assistance from his aides at the White House, including Miller and another policy aide, Garrett Ziegler, the source said. Ziegler has also said on a rightwing podcast that he and others in Navarro’s office – seemingly referring to Trump White House aides Christopher Abbott and Hannah Robertson – started working on Navarro’s report about two weeks before the 2020 election took place. “Two weeks before the election, we were doing those reports hoping that we would pepper the swing states with those,” Ziegler said of the three-part Navarro report in an appearance last July on The Professor’s Record with David K Clements. The research in the Dominion report also formed the backbone of foreign election interference claims by the former Trump lawyer and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, who argued Trump could, as a result, assume emergency presidential powers and suspend normal law. That included Trump’s executive order 13848, which authorized sweeping powers in the event of foreign election interference, as well as a draft executive order that would have authorized the seizure of voting machines, the Guardian has previously reported. The claims about Venezuela in the Dominion report appear to have spurred Powell to ask Trump at a 18 December 2020 meeting at the White House – coincidentally facilitated by Ziegler – that she be appointed special counsel to investigate election fraud. Miller’s authorship of the Dominion report was not the last time the Trump White House, or individuals in the administration, prepared materials to advance the former president’s claims about a stolen election and efforts to return himself to office. The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack revealed last year it had found evidence the White House Communications Agency produced a letter for the Trump justice department official Jeffrey Clark to use to pressure states to decertify Biden’s election win. Wilkinson on GOP Voter Fraud Claims Francis Wilkinson in Bloomberg: “[A]rguably the most pervasive evidence of the GOP assault on democracy remains the party’s multi-front war on the franchise. The House of Representatives passed a bill last week that makes noncitizen voting illegal and requires proof of citizenship to register to vote. Since noncitizen voting is already illegal, and the Senate is well aware of that fact, the legislation will not go far. It’s what’s known as a messaging bill. The message: Do not trust democracy.“ “GOP colleagues sneer at Rep. Good’s election complaints” Rep. Bob Good‘s (R-Va.) efforts to sow doubts about the results of his too-close-to-call GOP primary are being met with eye rolls from many of his House Republican colleagues. Why it matters: The House Freedom Caucus chair is tapping into a strain of election denialism common in Donald Trump’s Republican Party – but without the widespread GOP support Trump enjoyed. Our Amicus Brief in United States v. Mackey: Lying About When, Where or How People Vote Violates Federal Law (18 USC 241) and Prosecution is Consistent with the First Amendment Protect Democracy and the Yale Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic filed this Second Circuit amicus brief (with me as client and co-counsel) in United States v. Mackey. Mackey was convicted “under 18 U.S.C. § 241 for conspiring “to use Twitter to trick American citizens into thinking they could vote by text and stay at home on Election Day—thereby suppressing and injuring those citizens’ right to vote.” Gov’t Br. 2. Mackey has argued that section 241 does not cover such a scheme and that the law is facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment because it punishes too much protected speech. In our brief, we explain that the statute, properly construed, both bars lies about when, where or how people vote intended to deprive people of their right to vote and that limiting section 241 to such empirically verifiable false speech assures that the law does not violate the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has already stated that the government “may prohibit messages intended to mislead voters about voting requirements and procedures” consistent with the First Amendment. Minn. Voters All. v. Mansky, 138 S. Ct. 1876, 1889 n.4 (2018). Further, as explained in Protect Democracy’s blog post on the filing: The primary question before the Second Circuit in Mackey’s appeal is whether the federal civil rights statute he was convicted under – which bans conspiring to “injure” any person in their exercise of federal rights – actually bars conspiracies to circulate false information about voting mechanisms and procedures. Professor Hasen’s amicus brief explains why intentionally false statements about voting mechanisms and procedures violate federal law, and why such speech can be punished without running afoul of the First Amendment’s protections. In particular, to establish the applicability of Reconstruction-era civil rights protection to internet memes, the brief tracks the history of legal actions protecting the right to vote back to England in 1703. That history shows, among other things, a three-century-long recognition among judges that an intentional deprivation of the right to vote constitutes an “injury” for which the law provides a remedy. As a result, the brief argues, Mackey’s conduct clearly constituted a conspiracy to “injure” under long-recognized legal principles, even if the Reconstruction Congress would have had no idea what an internet meme is. You can find the introduction to our brief below the fold, which relies heavily on common law tort principles protecting the right to vote and its explanation in the Restatement (2d) Torts section 865. This case concerns the criminal conviction of Douglas Mackey under 18 U.S.C. § 241 for conspiring “to use Twitter to trick American citizens into thinking they could vote by text and stay at home on Election Day—thereby suppressing and injuring those citizens’ right to Section 241 properly construed does punish purposeful lies about when, where, or how people vote and is not overbroad. It prohibits, among other things, conspiracies to “injure . . . any person . . . in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” 18 U.S.C. § 241. Its prohibition on conspiracies to “injure” proscribes purposeful lies about the mechanics of voting in federal elections because that conduct inflicts an “injury” redressable under tort law dating back over three hundred years. See Restatement (Second) of Torts § 865 (Am. L. Inst. 1979); Restatement (First) of Torts § 865 (Am. L. Inst. 1939). Construing conspiracies to “injure” to encompass conspiracies to engage in conduct recognized as tortious at common law preserves Section 241’s important protection of the right to vote while avoiding the First Amendment overbreadth concerns that would arise from an open-ended reading of the statute to criminalize deceptive, but not tortious, political speech. A unanimous Supreme Court in an opinion by Chief JusticeRehnquis t took just this approach in construing the almost contemporaneously enacted Enforcement Act of 1871. See Haddle v. Garrison, 525 U.S. 121, 124 (1998). The Haddle Court concluded that a plaintiff is “injured” under Section 2 of the 1871 Act when the plaintiff suffers “a compensable injury under tort law.” 525 U.S. at 126. In parallel fashion, Section 241’s proscription of conspiracies “to injure” someone in their exercise of a federal right extends to conspiracies to infringe the right to vote through knowing lies about “voting requirements and procedures,” Mansky, 138 S. Ct. at 1889 n.4, because intentional interference with the right to vote is a compensable injury under tort law. Haddle’s conclusion that the injuries recognized by Section 2 of the Enforcement Act of 1871 are those cognizable under the common law of torts applies to Section 241, which derives in relevant part from Section 6 of the Enforcement Act of 1870. The same term used in two laws passed within a year of each other should be construed consistently, particularly where both laws addressed a common subject and sought a common objective—ending resistance to Reconstruction. Indeed, the Supreme Court recognizes the two statutes to be “close[] . . . analogue[s].” Griffin v. Breckenridge, 403 U.S. 88, 98 (1971). Applying Haddle’s interpretation that a conspiracy to “injure” under Section 241 means a conspiracy to undertake conduct recognized as tortious at common law does not mean that every conspiracy to commit a tort violates Section 241. That would transgress the Supreme Private tortious conspiracies thus violate Section 241 only when they seek to (i) infringe a constitutional right secured against private actors, see, e.g., United States v. Kozminski, 487 U.S. 931, 940 (1988) (Thirteenth Amendment); United States v. Guest, 383 U.S. 745, 757-60 (1966) (right to travel), or (ii) infringe a right created by a federal law enforceable against private parties, Price, 383 U.S. at 798. For example, while the common law imposes liability for burglaries and muggings, a conspiracy to commit these torts is not punishable under Section 241 unless the tortious conduct is undertaken for the purpose of interfering with a federally protected right. See United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542, 549 (1875); cf. Bray v. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic, 506 U.S. 263, 278 (1993) (“A burglar does not violate the Fourth Amendment . . . nor does a mugger violate the Fourteenth.”). Applying the Haddle definition of “injure” to Section 241 has three implications relevant to this appeal: First, a conspiracy to deny the right to vote by intentionally misleading voters about voting mechanisms and procedures in a federal election constitutes a conspiracy “to injure” because the common law of torts has long recognized liability for interference with the right to vote. Second, construing conspiracies “to injure” within Section 241 to encompass conspiracies to commit this tort avoids constitutional conflict with the First Amendment. There is no First Amendment right to spread knowingly false information about voting mechanisms and procedures in a federal election with the intent to disenfranchise voters. See Mansky, 138 S. Ct. at 1889 n.4. Applying the Haddle definition also avoids any “substantial” overbreadth in the scope of Section 241 relative to its “plainly legitimate applications” as would be necessary to justify facial invalidation. Virginia v. Hicks, 539 U.S. 113, 120 (2003). The supposed potential for an explosion of prosecutions for protected speech that troubles Defendant Mackey and his amici is dispelled by the Haddle construction of “injure” because most of their proffered examples do not impose a harm cognizable under tort law and thus would not fall within the ambit of conspiracies to “injure” under Section 241. Third, a conspiracy undertaken to deny the right to vote in a presidential election, as alleged here, violates Section 241 because thetortious conspiracy would infringe multiple federal rights securedagainst both private parties and state actors: It violates the Article I, Section 2 right to vote for members of Congress, see Ex Parte Yarbrough, 110 U.S. 651, 663-64 (1884), because disseminating lies about the mechanics of voting to disenfranchise voters in a presidential election necessarily disenfranchises voters in simultaneous congressional elections; It violates the “right[] and privilege[] . . . secured to citizens of the United States by the Constitution” for voters eligible under state law “to vote for presidential electors,” In re Quarles, 158U.S. 532, 535 (1895); and It violates the federal right to engage in support or advocacy for presidential candidates free from injury guaranteed by 42 U.S.C. § 1985(3). The Government correctly contends that Section 241 prohibits conspiracies to disseminate knowingly false information about the time,place, and manner of a presidential election to mislead voters. Enforcement of this prohibition is particularly needed given the ease with which false information can be spread today by bad actors, and the growing loss of confidence in the integrity of our elections. See generally Nathaniel Persily & Charles Stewart III, The Miracle and Tragedy of the 2020 U.S. Election, 32 J. Democracy 159 (2021). “Scholars unmask Trump election lawyers’ use of falsified evidence” Beadles’ reward wasn’t real. Nor was his purported evidence. But this stunt, and especially its use of irrelevant statistics to appear authoritative and smear elections, is common in Trump circles. A working paper by two Stanford University scholars, the Hoover Institution’s Justin Grimmer and the Democracy and Polarization Lab’s Abhinav Ramaswamy, underscores just how widespread these fabrications are. They are not just cooked up for propagandizing in the press. These bundles of bogus claims, erroneous assumptions, and alleged evidence — especially statistics like those cited by Beadles — were also centerpieces in scores of lawsuits to push judges to overturn the last presidential election. It was all hype, smoke and mirrors. “Regardless of the reason why, every claim we analyze fails to provide evidence of illegality or fraud,” the scholars wrote near the start of their comprehensive 85-page paper. “We document that the supposed evidence of fraud that Trump relies upon is riddled with basic statistical misunderstandings and errors, confusion about how to use voter files or absentee voter history to analyze turnout and registration, and invented statistical techniques based on the impressions of what happens in a ‘normal’ election from ‘experts’ who never previously analyzed election data and provide no argument to justify their procedures. At no point did Trump or his allies present even remotely plausible evidence of consequential fraud or illegality.” Updated Democracy Crisis in the Making Report From States United, Protect Democracy and Law Forward: As the 2024 election approaches, state legislatures continue to propose and enact laws that expose our election system to partisan disruption and manipulation. These laws ultimately increase the risk of subversion — that is, a declared outcome that does not reflect the true choice of the voters. They also abandon long-standing principles of nonpartisan election administration and instead allow for — or even encourage — dysfunction, misinformation, confusion, or manipulation by partisan actors. Our organizations have been tracking this trend for three years, since the 2020 election. In that time, state legislatures have introduced more than 600 of these bills, and 62 have become law in 28 states. As we noted in our Report earlier this year, the 2022 elections were largely successful and free of serious subversion efforts. But we remain concerned that recently enacted laws could help precipitate a crisis — particularly in an election involving a candidate at the top of the ticket who has already attempted to subvert an election. At the very least, these laws will make it harder for professional election administrators, who already face a rise in unjustified suspicion and unprecedented levels of harassment, to do their jobs on behalf of our democracy. This year-end update to our June 2023 Report reviews some of the major developments that we have seen this year. Some states warrant particular attention. In North Carolina, a legislative supermajority has engineered a host of changes in election oversight that could open the door to partisan interference, confusion at the polls, gridlock during the certification process, or doubt about the results, in addition to disinformation at each of those steps. In Texas, two laws enacted this year targeted the state’s most populous and diverse county, abolishing the county election office and empowering the state to take control over election procedures under flimsy pretexts and with partisan motives. In Wisconsin, some legislators, relying in part on baseless conspiracy theories, have repeatedly sought to remove the state’s top nonpartisan election official, so far without success…. Jenna Ellis Pleads Guilty in Georgia to 2020 Attempted Election Subversion Attorney Jenna Ellis on Tuesday became the fourth defendant in the Fulton County election interference case to strike a deal with prosecutors. In exchange for her cooperation, Ellis pleaded guilty to one count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings. The count stems from her testimony before a Georgia Senate subcommittee in late 2020. Along with co-defendants Rudy Giuliani and Ray Smith, Ellis “knowingly, willingly, and unlawfully” made false statements about election fraud in Georgia, according to her new charging document. he plea agreement cites numerous false statements Ellis, Rudy Giuliani and Smith made during a Dec. 3, 2020, legislative hearing in Atlanta. Among other things, they claimed at least 96,000 fraudulent absentee ballots were cast in the election, 2,506 felons voted, 66,248 underage voters cast ballots and 10,315 dead people voted. None of those claims were true — and Ellis acknowledged as much as part of her plea agreement. Ellis also took the unusual step of addressing Fulton Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, who is presiding over the case, from behind the defense table. With tears streaming down her face, Ellis said, “if I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Trump in these post-election challenges.” “I look back on this experience with deep remorse,” she said. Ellis told McAfee that she endeavored to represent Trump to the best of her ability. But in doing so, she relied on more senior attorneys “to provide me with true and reliable” information, particularly as she took on a more public role speaking before the media and state legislators. “In the frenetic pace of attempting to raise challenges to the elections in several states, including Georgia, I failed to do my due diligence,” she said. The former president faces multiple charges related to his lies about the 2020 election. Here’s a look at some of his most repeated falsehoods.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/us/politics/trump-election-lies-fact-check Republican says no one has produced evidence of fraud in court of law despite ex-president’s vow to present ‘irrefutable’ proof Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, insisted on Tuesday that the 2020 presidential election in his state “was not stolen” in an apparent defense of the latest criminal indictment of Donald Trump. Kemp, who has clashed frequently with the former president over his false claim the election was rigged, responded on Twitter to an earlier post on Truth Social from Trump announcing a press conference next week at which he promised to present “irrefutable” evidence of fraud. “The 2020 election in Georgia was not stolen. For nearly three years now, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward – under oath – and prove anything in a court of law,” Kemp wrote in his tweet. “Our elections in Georgia are secure, accessible, and fair and will continue to be as long as I am governor. The future of our country is at stake in 2024 and that must be our focus.” The Justice Department unveiled an indictment on Tuesday charging former President Donald J. Trump with four criminal counts. They relate to Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which culminated in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters. The New York Times annotated the document. https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2023/08/trump-indictment.pdf Former President Donald J. Trump was charged with four counts in connection with his efforts to subvert the will of voters in 2020. “Despite having lost, the defendant was determined to remain in power,” prosecutors wrote. The special counsel is scrutinizing the dismissal of Christopher Krebs, who contradicted baseless claims by the former president that the 2020 election was marred by fraud. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/31/us/politics/trump-aides-subpoenaed-special-counsel.html The special counsel investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election has subpoenaed staff members from the Trump White House who may have been involved in firing the government cybersecurity official whose agency judged the election “the most secure in American history,” according to two people briefed on the matter. The team led by the special counsel, Jack Smith, has been asking witnesses about the events surrounding the firing of Christopher Krebs, who was the Trump administration’s top cybersecurity official during the 2020 election. Mr. Krebs’s assessment that the election was secure was at odds with Mr. Trump’s baseless assertions that it was a “fraud on the American public.” Mr. Smith’s team is also seeking information about how White House officials, including in the Presidential Personnel Office, approached the Justice Department, which Mr. Trump turned to after his election loss as a way to try to stay in power, people familiar with the questions said. The investigators appear focused on Mr. Trump’s state of mind around the firing of Mr. Krebs, as well as on establishing a timeline of events leading up to the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021. The latest subpoenas, issued roughly two weeks ago, went to officials in the personnel office, according to the two people familiar with the matter. https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/11/politics/transcript-cnn-town-hall-trump/index.html [Excerpt:]
Why should Americans put you back in the White House? TRUMP: Because we did fantastically. We got 12 million more votes than we had in – as you know, in 2016. I actually say we did far better in that election, got the most that anybody’s ever gotten as a sitting president of the United States. I think that, when you look at that result and when you look at what happened during that election, unless you’re a very stupid person, you see what happens. A lot of the people – a lot of the people in this audience and perhaps maybe a couple that don’t, but most people understand what happened. That was a rigged election, and it’s a shame that we had to go through it. It’s very bad for our country. All over the world, they looked at it, and they saw exactly what everyone else saw. And you look – even if you just look recently with the 51 intelligence agents, that made a 16-point difference. If you look at the FBI… COLLINS: But, Mr. President… TRUMP: If you look at the FBI and Twitter – they call it Twitter Files – made a big difference. If you look at True the Vote… COLLINS: Mr. President, back to what you just said there, though, it was not a rigged election. It was not a stolen election. You and your supporters lost more than 60 court cases on the election. And it’s been nearly two-and-a-half years. Can you publicly acknowledge that you did lose the 2020 election? TRUMP: Now, let me – let me just go on. If you look at True the Vote, they found millions of votes on camera, on government cameras, where they were stuffing ballot boxes. So, with all of that, I think it’s a shame that – what happened. I think it’s a very sad thing for our country. I think it’s a very sad thing, frankly, for the world, because, if you look at what’s gone to our country, our country has gone to hell. Our borders are bad. Our military has been bad. You look at the taxes, you look at inflation, what’s happened to inflation, it’s just destroying our country. We have really become, in many ways, a Third World country. And it’s very sad what’s happened in this administration. And it’s something that we will turn around on day one. We were energy-independent. Now energy is at a level that we have never had to pay before. We – nobody can afford to continue to pay what’s happening with energy. But we were energy-independent. And we were getting out of Afghanistan with strength and with dignity. And, instead, we got out, we looked like fools… COLLINS: And, Mr. President… TRUMP: … probably the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country. COLLINS: We have a lot of questions about the economy and foreign policy tonight. TRUMP: Good. COLLINS: But what you just said there, Republican officials debunked those claims about fraudulent ballots. We want to give you a chance tonight… TRUMP: Who? Who? COLLINS: Republican officials in Georgia… TRUMP: Who? COLLINS: … and every single state. There is no – your own election officials, Mr. President. So, we wanted to give you a chance… TRUMP: Look, people were afraid to take on the issue. But we have a big problem in this country. We have elections… COLLINS: Well, we wanted to give you a chance to acknowledge the results. TRUMP: We have elections that were horrible. If you look at what happened in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, if you look at what happened in Detroit, Michigan, if you look at what happened in Atlanta, millions of votes, and all you have to do is take a look at government cameras. You will see them, people going to 28 different voting booths to vote, to put in seven ballots apiece. I mean, and they’re all on camera. COLLINS: But, Mr. President, I have to stop you there, because – because there is no evidence of that. Your own election officials testified to that and have said that. Republicans in these states did this. In Georgia, there were multiple recounts, including a hand recount. We have questions about the claims that you’re making tonight from voters on this topic. I want to bring in Scott Dustin from Concord. He works in insurance litigation. He is an undeclared voter. That’s what they call independents here in New Hampshire, as you know. TRUMP: OK. COLLINS: He did vote for you in 2020. Scott, what’s your question for the president? SCOTT DUSTIN, WORKS IN INSURANCE LITIGATION: Hi, President Trump. TRUMP: Hi, Scott. DUSTIN: And welcome back to New Hampshire. TRUMP: Thank you. DUSTIN: Will you suspend polarizing talk of election fraud during your run for president? TRUMP: Will I suspend – excuse me? What? DUSTIN: Will you suspend polarizing talk of election fraud during your run for president? TRUMP: Yes, unless I see election fraud. If I see election fraud, I think I have an obligation to say it. And what we went through a short while ago has really put our country in a big problem. I hope to do that. I hope we’re going to have very honest elections. We should have voter I.D. We should have one-day elections. We should have paper ballots, instead of these mail-in votes. But the answer is yes. And I hope that it’s going to be very straight-up, because, if it’s going to be straight-up, we’re going to win the election. Thank you. COLLINS: So you will suspend talk, to his question, about the 2020 election on the campaign trail? TRUMP: Well, I guess we’re going to just win. We’re at a point now. We’re getting so close. Let’s just win it again and straighten out our country. COLLINS: One other question on this. COLLINS: When you – when you have talked about the 2020 election results in the past, you once suggested terminating the Constitution. Do you stand by those comments? TRUMP: No, no. You are able to do certain things. I’m not talking about terminating the Constitution. I’m talking about cherishing the Constitution. The Constitution says that we’re supposed to have legal and well-maintained and well-looked-at elections. And we didn’t have that. I cherish our Constitution, but we have to live up to the Constitution. We weren’t living up to the Constitution. COLLINS: I would just say that there’s no evidence of that election fraud. You did once tweet… TRUMP: I know you’re supposed to say that, but – you know, I’m glad you say that. But, look… COLLINS: It’s the truth, Mr. President. TRUMP: … that was a horrible election. TRUMP: That was a horrible election. And unless somebody is very stupid – and I know you very well. You’re not stupid at all. But you perhaps are given an agenda, or you have an agenda. March 16, 2023 heathercoxrichardson@substack.com [Excerpt:] Yesterday, Tamar Hallerman and Bill Rankin of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the special grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, investigating the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election in that state, heard yet another recording of former president Trump pushing a key lawmaker—in this case, Georgia House speaker David Ralston—to convene a special session of the legislature to overturn Biden’s victory. One juror recalled that Ralston “basically cut the president off. He said, ‘I will do everything in my power that I think is appropriate.’ … He just basically took the wind out of the sails.” Ralston, who died last November, did not call a special session. This is the third such recorded call. One was with Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, and another was with the lead investigator in Raffensperger’s office. Ralston had reported the call, but it was not public knowledge that there was a recording of it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2023/03/10/fox-news-lawsuit-key-players/ An outside firm’s work was never released publicly after researchers uncovered no evidence that the election had been rigged for Joe Biden The campaign paid researchers from Berkeley Research Group, the people said, to study 2020 election results in six states, looking for fraud and irregularities to highlight in public and in the courts. Among the areas examined were voter machine malfunctions, instances of dead people voting and any evidence that could help Trump show he won, the people said. None of the findings were presented to the public or in court. MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A newly released audio recording offers a behind-the-scenes look at how former President Donald Trump’s campaign team in a pivotal battleground state knew they had been outflanked by Democrats in the 2020 presidential election. But even as they acknowledged defeat, they pivoted to allegations of widespread fraud that were ultimately debunked — repeatedly — by elections officials and the courts. The audio from Nov. 5, 2020, two days after the election, is surfacing as Trump again seeks the White House while continuing to lie about the legitimacy of the outcome and Democrat Joe Biden’s win. The Wisconsin political operatives in the strategy session even praised Democratic turnout efforts in the state’s largest counties and appeared to joke about their efforts to engage Black voters, according to the recording obtained Thursday by The Associated Press. The audio centers on Andrew Iverson, who was the head of Trump’s campaign in the state. “Here’s the drill: Comms is going to continue to fan the flame and get the word out about Democrats trying to steal this election. We’ll do whatever they need (inaudible) help with. Just be on standby in case there’s any stunts we need to pull,” Iverson said. Iverson is now the Midwest regional director for the Republican National Committee. He deferred questions about the meeting to the RNC, whose spokesperson, Keith Schipper, declined comment because he had not heard the recording. The former campaign official and Republican operative who provided a copy of the recording to the AP was in the meeting and recorded it. The operative is not authorized to speak publicly about what was discussed and did not want to be identified out of concern for personal and professional retaliation, but said they came forward because Trump is mounting a third attempt for the White House. In response to questions about the audio, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said: “The 2024 campaign is focused on competing in every state and winning in a dominating fashion. That is why President Trump is leading by wide margins in poll after poll.” Wisconsin was a big part of Trump’s victory in 2016, when he smashed through the Democrats’ so-called “Blue Wall” in the upper Midwest, and his campaign fought hard to keep the swing state in his column four years later before his loss to Biden. Biden defeated Trump by nearly 21,000 votes in Wisconsin in 2020, a result that has withstood independent and partisan audits and reviews, as well as lawsuits and recounts in the state’s two largest and Democratic-leaning counties. Yet, two days after the election, there was no discussion of Trump having won the state during the meeting of Republican campaign operatives. Instead, parts of the meeting focus on discussions about packing up campaign offices and writing final reports about how the campaign unfolded. At one point on the recording, Iverson is heard praising the GOP’s efforts while admitting the margin of Trump’s defeat in the state. “At the end of the day, this operation received more votes than any other Republican in Wisconsin history,” Iverson said. “Say what you want, our operation turned out Republican or DJT supporters. Democrats just got 20,000 more than us, out of Dane County and other shenanigans in Milwaukee, Green Bay and Dane. There’s a lot that people can learn from this campaign.” The meeting showcases another juxtaposition of what Republican officials knew about the election results and what Trump and his closest allies were saying publicly as they pushed the lie of a stolen election. Trump was told by his own attorney general there was no sign of widespread fraud, and many within his own administration told the former president there was no substance to various claims of fraud or manipulation — advice Trump repeatedly ignored. In the weeks after the election, Trump and his allies would file dozens of lawsuits, convene fake electors and pressure election officials in an attempt to overturn the will of the voters and keep Trump in office. It’s unclear whether the staff in Wisconsin coordinated their message directly with campaign officials in Washington. Parts of the Nov. 5 meeting also center on Republican outreach efforts to the state’s Black community. At one point, the operatives laugh over needing “more Black voices for Trump.” Iverson also references their efforts to engage with Black voters. “We ever talk to Black people before? I don’t think so,” he said, eliciting laughter from others in the room. The 990 tax filing was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with the Guardian. It points to the pivotal role that Heritage Action is increasingly playing in shaping the rules that govern US democracy. The efforts help explain the unprecedented tidal wave of restrictive voting laws that spread across Republican-controlled states in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. The Brennan Center reported that more voter suppression laws were passed in 2021 than in any year since it began monitoring voting legislation more than a decade ago. The expenditures also signal a dramatic increase in Heritage Action’s advocacy activities. In 2020, Heritage Action had reported no spending at all on outside lobbying. Heritage Action, whose board includes the Republican mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, is set up as a 501(c)4 under the US tax code which exempts it from paying federal taxes. It operates as a “dark money” group, avoiding disclosing the sources of its total annual revenue of over $18m. In the past two years the organization through its public messaging has echoed Donald Trump’s lie that US elections are marked by rampant fraud. A private plan prepared by Heritage Action last year set out a two-year, $24m “election integrity” strategy. The plan, obtained by Documented, proposed a two-pronged approach that would work to block moves by Democrats in Congress to bolster voting rights while at the same time pressing Republican-controlled states to impose restrictions on access to the ballot box. It said: “Where Democrats hold power, we must defend against bad policy. Where conservatives and our allies are in power, we must advance changes that protect the lawful votes of Americans.” The Heritage Action plan, which was first reported by the New York Times, is being published by the Guardian for the first time. Part of Heritage Action’s two-year strategy is to promote what it calls “model election laws”, focusing initially on eight battleground states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Texas and Wisconsin. In a private meeting with donors in Tucson, Arizona, in 2021, the group’s executive director, Jessica Anderson, boasted about the role Heritage Action had played in pressing Republican-controlled legislatures to impose strict restrictions on voting, including limits on mail-in voting and early voting days. In a video of that meeting obtained by Documented, Anderson told the donors that the group acted “quickly and quietly”, bragging that “honestly nobody noticed” their behind-the-scenes influence. Heritage Action staff have registered to lobby in at least two dozen states. The laser-like focus on key swing states like Georgia appears to have had an impact. The New York Times found that one-third of the 68 voting bills filed in Georgia in 2021 contained policy measures and language that aligned closely with proposals from Heritage Action. The group has publicly claimed that it had a hand in advancing 11 voting bills in at least eight states in 2021, though in some cases legislation was passed in only one chamber or went on to be vetoed by the state’s governor. Heritage Foundation, under the auspices of its elections supremo Hans von Spakovsky, curates an “election fraud database”. It claims to expose the errors, omissions and mistakes made by election officials, but it presents incomplete and misleading information and underscores how exceptionally rare fraud is within the US system. Committed to the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union and ordered to be printed. December 22, 2022. How rural Coffee County, Ga., became an early target in the multistate search for purported evidence of fraud after the 2020 election By Emma Brown and Jon Swaine October 28, 2022 https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/10/28/coffee-county-georgia-voting-trump/ The Post examination shows how unfounded suspicions in Coffee County spiraled into an alleged breach that was organized in part by pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and paid for by her nonprofit, which at the time counted former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn among its directors. This account is based on interviews and documents obtained through public-records requests as well as surveillance video, text messages, and depositions and other records that were gathered by the plaintiffs in the long-running lawsuit, who contend that Georgia’s elections are not secure. In response to a request for comment, Powell referred The Post to her testimony before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. That testimony is not public. Flynn did not respond to similar inquiries. In a statement, Dominion said, “No credible evidence has ever been presented to any court or authority that voting machines did anything other than count votes accurately and reliably in all states.” Here are some of the main falsehoods and rumors that have spread on social media in the lead-up to Election Day.
https://www.axios.com/2021/11/20/trump-2020-election-fraud-misinformation Donald Trump’s “big lie” playbook — the collection of falsehoods alleging that the 2020 election was stolen through voting fraud — mirrors the tactics used by sophisticated spreaders of disinformation. The big picture: Research from the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center shows there’s a typical cycle that people use to manipulate the media and spread disinformation. Trump’s dissemination of false claims of a stolen election demonstrates how the cycle works. How it works: Disinformation spreaders typically start by planning their narratives early and seeding their lies online, where they can spread quickly, reaching people faster than critics can counter the disinformation. “The main and most effective way the cycle gets broken is in that they never jump from Stage 2 to Stage 3″ and “something just sputters out in Stage 2,” says Emily Dreyfuss, senior editor at the Shorenstein Center. The Flawed Database Undergirding the Big Lie
The Origin of the Big Lie of Election Fraud
The Big Lie Debunked (Again and Again and Again)
vote.” Gov’t Br. 2. All parties agree that the government “may prohibit messages intended to mislead voters about voting requirements and procedures” consistent with the First Amendment. Minn. Voters All. v. Mansky, 138 S. Ct. 1876, 1889 n.4 (2018). The primary legal questions before this Court are whether Section 241 prohibits such intentionally misleading statements and whether it does so without being substantially overbroad in violation of the Constitution.
Court’s instruction that Reconstruction laws should not be interpreted as “open-ended federal tort law applicable to all tortious, conspiratorial interferences with the rights of others.” Kush v. Rutledge, 460 U.S. 719, 725-26 (1983) (emphasis added) (cleaned up). Instead, Section 241 more narrowly prohibits conspiracies to commit a tort only when the tortious act is committed for the purpose of infringing a right protected by “the Constitution or laws of the United States.” 18 U.S.C. § 241; see United States v. Price, 383 U.S. 787, 800-01, 806 (1966).
One who undertakes a consciously wrongful act (including fraud) that (i) intentionally deprives another of the right to vote or (ii) seriously interferes with the right to vote inflicts a legally cognizable injury for which a remedy is available in tort. See Restatement (Second) of Torts
§ 865; Restatement (First) of Torts § 865.
Fact-Checking the Breadth of Trump’s Election Lies
Governor Brian Kemp tells Trump Georgia’s 2020 election ‘was not stolen’
DeSantis Finally Admits Trump’s Election Fraud Claims Are BS
The Trump Jan. 6 Indictment, Annotated
The Trump Jan. 6 indictment (unannotated):
Trump Indictment: Jan. 6 Riot Was ‘Fueled by Lies’ From Trump, Special Counsel Says
Trump White House Aides Subpoenaed in Firing of Election Security Expert
READ: Transcript of CNN’s town hall with former President Donald Trump
Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson
What key players at Fox News said about the network and its viewers
Trump campaign paid researchers to prove 2020 fraud but kept findings secret
Trump campaign staff on 2020 election lies: ‘fan the flame’
New Documents Show Heritage Actions Activities to Make Voting and Registration Harder
Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol
Inside the secretive effort by Trump allies to access voting machines
5 Unfounded Claims About Voting in the Midterm Elections
“Unraveling the unfounded conspiracies about Dominion Voting Systems”
How the “big lie” spread