When Donald Trump installed a new chairman of the Republican Party this month, he explained privately and publicly what he wanted from the GOP: a bigger focus on election-related lawsuits, a more aggressive operation to monitor voting and a vow to make “election integrity” the party’s No. 1 priority.
The party is now striking a more aggressive tone as it recruits poll observers to keep an eye on in-person voting and boasts of positioning thousands of lawyers to challenge ballots and bring lawsuits. The strategy — an outgrowth of the one it used both before the 2020 election and after, when Trump sought to overturn the result — is meant to please Trump, electrify the base and persuade judges to tighten voting rules.
“It’s an extremely high priority for the president,” said the new Republican National Committee chairman, Michael Whatley, referring to Trump.
Pennsylvania: “Push to cut 10s of thousands from Allegheny County voter rolls feeds fears”
Clara Osburg has lived in Allegheny County since 2011 and is a regular voter — including in last fall’s municipal election. So it came as a surprise when she received a letter in late January from the county: “Your Allegheny County, Pennsylvania voter registration has been challenged on the basis of residence.”
The letter did not say who challenged her registration, why they did it or what would happen as a consequence.
“At first, I thought perhaps I had done something wrong, like misfiled my taxes or something really concerning like that,” Osburg said. She hadn’t.
Osburg didn’t know it, but she was caught up in a push by local Republicans to “clean” the voter rolls of people they think may have moved out of the county.
An informal group of dozens of activists has filed more than 16,000 challenges since the 2022 election, with plans to file another 10,000 by year’s end, even as county officials from both parties say it’s misguided.
“What I’m doing right now is trying to make these public employees do what they’re required to do by their job description under state statute,” said Anthony Golembiewski, a retired PennDOT employee turned GOP committeeman who has led the effort to challenge voters.
The effort won’t remove any names from the rolls ahead of this year’s presidential election because state law requires that several years pass before inactive voters are removed from the rolls without their consent. But some observers say it could fuel bad-faith election fraud claims during a General Election that’s expected to be rife with misinformation.
“It’s just feeding into this false narrative that there’s something wrong, that Pennsylvania’s not running its elections well,” said Marian Schneider, the senior voting rights policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union Pennsylvania. “I think it’s a much greater risk that voters are illegally removed than they are left on.”…
Potential 2024 ‘Chaos’: Election Deniers Refusing to Certify Results
Election officials in eight states have delayed or refused to certify results since Trump’s 2020 loss — a likely preview of this year’s elections
BY JUSTIN GLAWE
March 18, 2024
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/election-deniers-refuse-certify-chaos-2024
Election Deniers Skirted Campaign Finance Laws in Wisconsin
Campaign loopholes and lax enforcement help election deniers drown out voters’ voices.
Mass purges are the new voter suppression
The Brennan Center for Justice
March 12, 2024
The United States still has one of the world’s most decentralized voter registration systems. We want voter rolls to be up-to-date and accurate. People move, die, change party identification, and so on. But election deniers exploit cracks in the county-by-county system. They challenge legitimate registrations, launch mass purges, and seek to weed the voter rolls of citizens they don’t like.
Let’s try to recover bipartisan agreement on how to keep voter rolls in shape. Meanwhile, we should brace for a year of efforts by election deniers to wreck what works in our system. Voting rights advocates in and out of government are getting ready to fight back in court. The ability of many of our fellow citizens to participate in this pivotal election will depend on the outcome of this fight.
The Court of Criminal Appeals upsets are much more clearly attributable to Paxton and his political allies, Jones said.
At a campaign event for Marc LaHood in San Antonio in January, Paxton asked for a show of hands of anyone in the room who could name all nine justices. Sure enough, none could.
But he explained why he was making it his mission to make sure they knew about their 2021 opinion that stopped him from unilaterally prosecuting election fraud and the names of their opponents.
Former Dallas appellate judge David Schenck and lawyers Gina Parker and Lee Finley won their races over Court of Criminal Appeals Presiding Judge Sharon Keller and Judges Barbara Parker Hervey and Michelle Slaughter, respectively.
“Activist judges have no place on our courts, and tonight’s results reflect the will of the people,” Paxton said in a statement late Tuesday night.
The judges had defended their decision by saying they were following the state Constitution, which they said was clear about the limits of Paxton’s authority.
The upsets translate to a loss of about 60 years of experience from the bench: Keller was first elected in 1994, Hervey in 2000 and Slaughter in 2018.
“‘They didn’t do it clearly enough’: SCOTUS ruling prompts worries of another Jan. 6 crisis”
The Supreme Court said Monday it was avoiding “chaos” by squashing state-level efforts to throw Donald Trump off the ballot.
Instead, the high court may have just shifted that chaos to Congress.
The decision ignited an intense debate among election experts and constitutional scholars about whether the court has opened a path to another Jan. 6 crisis four years after the attack on the Capitol.
That’s because the justices explicitly ruled that the power to determine whether Trump is eligible for another term as president — or is disqualified as an “oathbreaking insurrectionist” — lies with the House and Senate.
The five justices who fully endorsed the court’s lead opinion envisioned Congress passing “enforcement legislation” to make this call. But scholars say the 13-page opinion left room for Trump’s detractors to pursue another path if he receives a majority of electoral votes this November: They could try to throw out his electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2025, when Congress will meet to certify the winner of the 2024 election.
Such a scenario would be an extraordinary turnabout. On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump promoted bogus claims of voter fraud to lobby congressional Republicans to block the certification of Joe Biden’s victory — a push that inspired a mob to storm the Capitol and lash out violently when the effort failed. His allies relied on fringe interpretations of the 12th Amendment to push their last-ditch gambit….
“They were trying to avoid all of this. They were trying to foreclose an effort to disqualify Trump after he wins,” said Ned Foley, a constitutional law expert from Ohio State University. “But they didn’t do it clearly enough.”
The lack of clarity, he continued, has sparked a debate: “Is there power in Congress to consider the [disqualification] issue in January?”
The court’s opinion did not explicitly address that scenario. The opinion did stress that, for federal lawmakers to enforce the insurrection clause, they would have to set out criteria for who is disqualified. Congress, the court added, has not passed any legislation enforcing the provision since 1870.
Some experts say formal legislation is crucial. It would strain credulity, they said, for Trump’s opponents in Congress to attempt to unravel an Electoral College victory by the ex-president, at least without forcing them to embrace some untested theories of their own.
“I think today’s opinion will at least close the door on some of that discourse,” said Derek Muller, a constitutional scholar at the University of Notre Dame….
So far, Democrats in Congress — including two who served on the Jan. 6 select committee and concluded that Trump indeed joined an insurrection in 2021 — have expressed caution and restraint.
“It does not at first read appear that the Court indicated a viable path to implement Section 3 of the 14th Amendment absent enactment of a law outlining procedures to do so,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) in a statement on the court’s ruling. But she added that she is continuing to review the ruling and hopes to hear from legal experts on Congress’ role.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) echoed that sentiment, telling POLITICO “my initial reading of it suggests that they are saying that Congress must act … to pass a statute, but I am not certain of that and we want to explore it. So I don’t want to pronounce on that.”
Thune, No. 2 Senate Republican, endorses Trump
{Excerpt:]
Thune, who is widely considered to be a possible successor to McConnell in the Senate, had previously endorsed the presidential bid of Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), but Scott dropped out of the race in November and has endorsed Trump.
Trump, meanwhile, had called for Thune to have a primary challenger when Thune ran for reelection in 2022, calling the senator a “Republican in name only.” Trump had long attacked Thune and McConnell after the two refused to support the former president’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
MAGA’s Violent Threats Are Warping Life in America
Opinion Columnist
[Excerpt:]
Amid the constant drumbeat of sensational news stories — the scandals, the legal rulings, the wild political gambits — it’s sometimes easy to overlook the deeper trends that are shaping American life. For example, are you aware how much the constant threat of violence, principally from MAGA sources, is now warping American politics? If you wonder why so few people in red America seem to stand up directly against the MAGA movement, are you aware of the price they might pay if they did?
Late last month, I listened to a fascinating NPR interview with the journalists Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman regarding their new book, “Find Me the Votes,” about Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. They report that Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis had trouble finding lawyers willing to help prosecute her case against Trump. Even a former Georgia governor turned her down, saying, “Hypothetically speaking, do you want to have a bodyguard follow you around for the rest of your life?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/18/opinion/magas-violent-threats-are-warping-life-in-america.html
Sen. Tim Scott, a potential running mate if Donald Trump becomes the Republican presidential nominee, is treading carefully on questions about whether he would have certified the 2020 election had he been vice president at that time.
On Jan. 6, 2021, about two months after Trump lost the White House, then-Vice President Mike Pence defied his boss and refused to use his largely ceremonial role in overseeing the election certification process to block Democrat Joe Biden’s victory. Pence went forward with ratification of the Electoral College even after a violent mob of Trump supporters, some of whom chanted “Hang Mike Pence,” swarmed the U.S. Capitol, interrupting the congressional proceedings and forcing Pence, his family and staff into hiding in the complex.
Scott, a Trump rival in the 2024 race who dropped out and later endorsed the former president, declined to say in two Sunday news show interviews whether he would have acted differently as vice president.
“I’m not going to answer hypothetical questions, No. 1,” said Scott, R-S.C. He added: “You’re asking a hypothetical question that you know can never happen again.”
Scott voted in favor of certifying the 2020 results when the Senate got back to work after the siege. He also said during a presidential debate last year that Pence did the right thing when he certified the election…
Scott sidestepped questions Sunday about how he saw the vice president’s role in the certification process.
“The one thing we know about the future is that the former president, fortunately, he’ll be successful in 2024, he won’t be facing that situation again,” Scott said. “So what we should focus on is what will cause the former president, President Trump, to be the next president of the United States.”
Why Trump’s control of the Republican Party is bad for democracy
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.”
“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)
“Elon Musk Is Spreading Election Misinformation, but X’s Fact Checkers Are Long Gone”
In the spring of 2020, when President Donald J. Trump wrote messages on Twitter warning that increased reliance on mail-in ballots would lead to a “rigged election,” the platform ran a corrective, debunking his claims.
“Get the facts about mail-in voting,” a content label read. “Experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud,” the hyperlinked article declared.
This month, Elon Musk, who has since bought Twitter and rebranded it X, echoed several of Mr. Trump’s claims about the American voting system, putting forth distorted and false notions that American elections were wide open for fraud and illegal voting by noncitizens.
This time, there were no fact checks. And the X algorithm — under Mr. Musk’s direct control — helped the posts reach large audiences, in some cases drawing many millions of views.
Since taking control of the site, Mr. Musk has dismantled the platform’s system for flagging false election content, arguing it amounted to election interference.
Now, his early election-year attacks on a tried-and-true voting method are raising alarms among civil rights lawyers, election administrators and Democrats. They worry that his control over the large social media platform gives him an outsize ability to reignite the doubts about the American election system that were so prevalent in the lead-up to the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
As Mr. Trump’s victory in New Hampshire moved the race closer to general election grounds, the Biden campaign for the first time criticized Mr. Musk directly for his handling of election content on X: “It is profoundly irresponsible to spread false information and sow distrust about how our elections operate,” the Biden campaign manager, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, said this week in a statement to The New York Times.
“It’s even more dangerous coming from the owner of a social media platform,” she added.
What is angering the Biden campaign is delighting pro-Trump Republicans and others who depict the old Twitter as part of a government-controlled censorship regime that aided Mr. Biden in 2020. Under a system now in dispute at the Supreme Court, government officials alerted platforms to posts they deemed dangerous, though it was up to the companies to act or not.
“Oh, boo hoo,” Harmeet K. Dhillon, a lawyer whose firm represents Mr. Trump, said of the Democrats’ complaints. Ms. Dhillon has sued the company for suspending an election-denying client’s account after receiving a notice from the California election officials — the sort of government interplay Mr. Musk has repudiated. She noted the platform was now “a much better place for conservatives,” and said of Mr. Musk, “he’s great.”…
“Trump leans into voter fraud playbook, preparing to cry foul if he loses expected Biden rematch”
For months, Trump has been alleging that he could be the victim of fraud in November, making the same sort of explosive, groundless allegations that fueled the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and have continued to spark a wave of threats against election workers nationwide. Trump made similar allegations before the 2020 election, predicting for months there would be widespread fraud that November and contending he could only lose if the election was stolen from him.
“He’s doing it out in full view,” said David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and coauthor of “The Big Truth,” about Trump’s 2020 election lies. “If he is the Republican nominee, he has made clear that he’ll lie about an election that he’s lost.”
His continued false claims about the 2020 election have resonated with Republican voters, a majority of whom believe Biden was not legitimately elected despite all evidence to the contrary. Trump lost dozens of court challenges, his own attorney general found no evidence of widespread fraud, and reviews, audits and recounts in the battleground states where he contested his loss all affirmed Biden’s victory.
Rachel Orey of the Bipartisan Policy Center said Trump’s preemptive allegations of fraud have become built into the nation’s political culture.
“It’s been normalized. I think what in 2020 was seen as somewhat outlandish is now an anticipated part of the process,” Orey said. “And, we see more and more candidates adopting the election denial tactics that Donald Trump is using, either as a way to thrust themselves into the national spotlight or as a way to fundraise.”
Setting the stage to blame an election loss on fraud has clear consequences, Orey said, pointing to the fact that threats and harassment against election officials after 2020 were especially severe in battleground states that Trump narrowly lost.
Trump: The Political Threats Will Stop … When You Agree With My Lies
Jan. 24, 2024
“The ‘Sleeping Giant’ Case that Could Upend Jack Smith’s Prosecution of Trump”
Kimberly Wehle in Politico:
There’s been a lot of attention paid to the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision on Donald Trump’s claim of immunity from prosecution for actions taken while president, a judgment that will have big implications for the 2024 presidential campaign and special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of the former president on charges related to Jan. 6. But there’s a sleeping giant of a case also percolating in the Supreme Court that’s even more likely than the immunity issue to impact Smith’s prosecution of Trump.
The case is Joseph W. Fischer v. United States, which the court agreed to hear in December, and which doesn’t explicitly mention Trump. At issue is whether prosecutors and the Department of Justice have been improperly using a 2002 law originally aimed at curbing financial crimes to prosecute a Jan. 6 defendant named Joseph Fischer. Should the court side with Fischer, it would also call into question the use of the law against other Jan. 6 defendants — including Trump.
The U.S. Lacks What Every Democracy Needs
Mr. Hasen is the author of several books about elections and democracy, including “A Real Right to Vote: How a Constitutional Amendment Can Safeguard American Democracy.”
[Excerpt:]
The history of voting in the United States shows the high cost of living with an old Constitution, unevenly enforced by a reluctant Supreme Court.
Unlike the constitutions of many other advanced democracies, the U.S. Constitution contains no affirmative right to vote. We have nothing like Section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, providing that “every citizen of Canada has the right to vote in an election of members of the House of Commons or of a legislative assembly and to be qualified for membership therein,” or like Article 38 of the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany, which provides that when it comes to election of the Bundestag, “any person who has attained the age of 18 shall be entitled to vote.”
As we enter yet another fraught election season, it’s easy to miss that many problems we have with voting and elections in the United States can be traced to this fundamental constitutional defect. Our problems are only going to get worse until we get constitutional change.
A Weekly Election Legislation Update
January 16, 2024
Today is Tuesday, January 16. We are tracking 1,000 bills so far this session across 36 states, with 169 bills that restrict voter access or election administration and 510 bills that improve voter access or election administration. The rest are neutral, mixed, or unclear in their impact.
The Bad News: A judge in Ohio upheld the state’s strict photo ID requirement, while in Wisconsin a judge found that the use of mobile voting sites violates state law. Meanwhile, bills that would eliminate no-excuse mail voting and in-person early voting were introduced in Florida and Kentucky, respectively.
The Good News: A newly enacted bill will allow 17-year-olds in New Jersey to vote in primary elections if they will turn 18 by the corresponding general election. The New York Senate adopted a package of bills that would require the state to join ERIC, as well as allow for mail ballot drop boxes and portable early voting locations.
“Bill would allow Georgia election investigations of Raffensperger”
A Republican-sponsored bill introduced Friday would empower the State Election Board to investigate Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a response to the board’s decision last month not to open an inquiry.
The measure would also remove Raffensperger, a Republican, as a non-voting member of the State Election Board and require him to cooperate with investigations.
The legislation, Senate Bill 358, comes after the board deadlocked on whether to pursue complaints by conservative activists who blame Raffensperger for human errors in Fulton County’s manual audit of the 2020 election. The problems, including over 3,000 double-counted and misallocated votes, didn’t change the overall outcome of the statewide audit, which confirmed Democrat Joe Biden’s win over Republican Donald Trump.
“Former Maryland elections official charged in January 6 case”
A member of Maryland’s Board of Elections has resigned after being charged with taking part in the mob during the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol and jabbing an officer during the melee with a flagpole.
Carlos Ayala, a 52-year-old from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, was charged with a felony and several misdemeanors this week. He’s among more than 450 Capitol riot defendants accused of resisting or obstructing police during the attack, and a handful of elections and other public officials who have faced charges for allegedly taking part.
The Maryland Board of Elections chair Michael Summers said in a statement Thursday he “accepted the immediate resignation of Carlos Ayala. The Board is committed to maintaining the security and integrity of our elections in Maryland in a non-partisan manner.”
Ayala was one of five members appointed by the governor. He had served on the board since July 2023 following unanimous approval by Maryland’s Senate, and was set to serve a four-year term, according to state records.
“Fears grow over AI’s impact on the 2024 election”
The rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is raising concerns about how the technology could impact next year’s election as the start of 2024 primary voting nears.
AI — advanced tech that can generate text, images and audio, and even build deepfake videos — could fuel misinformation in an already polarized political landscape and further erode voter confidence in the country’s election system.
The Only Thing More Dangerous Than Authoritarianism
The forces of Christian nationalism are now ascendant both inside the Church and inside the Republican Party.
“Documents show Republican-led states struggling to clean voter rolls after leaving ERIC”
Jen Fifield at Votebeat:
Some Republican-led states are struggling to develop new ways to adequately update their voter rolls after withdrawing from a popular cross-state voter roll cleaning program that came under attack by far-right election activists, according to new documents and internal emails reviewed by Votebeat.
Virginia paid $29,000 in September to regain access to just a sliver of the data they used to obtain via the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC. Alabama and Missouri officials took months to come up with new plans for cleaning voter rolls, landing on plans that are less rigorous than ERIC. And a new system some states are considering to help with voter roll cleanup had its server attacked and temporarily brought down, according to documents obtained by left-leaning watchdog group American Oversight and exclusively shared with Votebeat.
The documents also show that senior advisors to secretaries of state in Missouri and Texas recognized that lies were being spread about ERIC, and tried to stop their states from withdrawing from what they saw as a valuable program. In addition, officials in some states such as Ohio had pushed unsuccessfully for changes to ERIC that could have kept their states from withdrawing.
“As you know, I really worked as hard as I possibly could to avoid this,” Amanda Grandjean, then the senior advisor to the Ohio secretary of state, wrote in an email to ERIC executive director Shane Hamlin after Ohio withdrew from the program in March.
(I blogged some of my reaction to the ERIC withdrawals in March here.)
Talk of a Trump Dictatorship Charges the American Political Debate
Former President Donald J. Trump and his allies are not doing much to reassure those worried about his autocratic instincts. If anything, they seem to be leaning into the predictions.
Reporting from Washington
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/09/us/politics/trump-dictatorship.html
Five Key Takeaways From Our Investigation Into Trump’s Push to Steal 2024
- Trump is determined to do ‘everything’ possible to win in 2024
Trump and his allies have been working since his 2020 defeat to game the system in his favor ahead of a third run at the White House. As Rawnsley and Suebsaeng write:
Trump has spent the past three years moaning to friends at his clubs, to conservative lawmakers, and to political advisers that Democrats will try to “cheat” again, and that the GOP must do “everything” it can to make sure liberals are “stopped,” according to four people familiar with this matter.
One key component of this effort, Rolling Stone reports, is making sure the government is stocked with allies, and that the Republican Party is wholly compliant. It has been, with the Republican National Committee, and the former president himself, calling for supporters to descend on polling places to “watch” for any suspicious activity. Republicans in several states have also been cracking down on mail-in ballots, which generally are used more by Democratic voters.
It’s all part of an effort to “hit the Democrats on all sides,” as a person close to Trump describes his thinking to Rolling Stone.
2. Trump is already auditioning lawyers to challenge the 2024 election
Trump’s crack team of election attorneys after the 2020 election included since-indicted Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis. A person close to Trump tells Rolling Stone says he is intent on assembling a “better, smarter legal team,” and that the former president has already been “auditioning” conservative lawyers who could help him challenge the 2024 results, including through post-election audits of mail-in ballots.
Cleta Mitchell — who was on the January, 2021 call on which Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes he needed to surpass Biden in the state — is a major player in Trump’s effort to tilt the scales in his direction in 2024. He’s touted her as “very important” to his election efforts as recently as September. Trump’s praise for Mitchell isn’t surprising considering her devotion to the lie that he won in 2020. She’s doing whatever she can to make sure he returns to the White House, with one Trump attorney describing her to Rolling Stone as “too militant, even for me.”
3. Team Trump has a vendetta against an election integrity organization used by both parties
Trump and his allies, including Cleta Mitchell, have been working to stop states from using data provided by Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) to spot voting irregularities and identify unregistered voters. Thirty-three Republican and Democratic states did so, but nine GOP-led states have ditched the data in the past two years — thanks in part to conspiracy theories that it is part of the nonexistent Democratic election-rigging apparatus. Trump wrote on Truth Social in March that Republican governors should “immediately pull out of ERIC,” describing it as a “terrible voter registration system that ‘pumps the rolls’ for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up.”
4. It’s bad news if states stop using data from that organization, ERIC
“ERIC is quite possibly the most valuable, useful tool that we have to strengthen election integrity,” Pennsylvania’s Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, a Republican, tells Rolling Stone.
The states Trump’s team have convinced to stop using ERIC have found themselves deprived of accurate voter data, which is not good. “The data is going to be garbage and potentially result in voters being disenfranchised,” Schmidt says. “You cannot just use, for example, name and birthday to go about taking steps to remove a voter. That will result in a terrific number of false matches.”
David Becker, one of ERIC’s founders who left the organization this year amid right-wing pressure, notes that inaccurate voter lists will create long lines on Election Day, mail-in voting issues, and general delays in determining a winner of the election. “The bigger potential damage here is that election losers — people who have lost an election or perceive themselves to be about to lose an election — will have more time and more space to create false narratives about an election being stolen,” Becker tells Rolling Stone.
5. Trump’s allies are trying to promote a MAGA version of the ERIC
Trump allies have developed EagleAI, a new tool to fill the void in the states that have ditched ERIC. It uses problematic data, however, like property-tax records, which exclude anyone living in apartments. Schmidt, Pennsylvania’s Republican Secretary of the Commonwealth, calls it “totally unreliable.”
Schmidt adds that it would likely result in “a terrific number of challenges to voters who are registered and eligible.” This could wind up overwhelming already-overwhelmed election officials with countless challenges eligibility sort, as well as potential litigation. It’s another way for Trump’s team to muddy the waters and cast doubt on election integrity.
EagleAI claims that “hundreds of individuals and county election offices in 23 states” have shown interest in using it.
“Inside Trump’s Plot To Corrupt the 2024 Election With ‘Garbage’ Data”
As recently as this summer, Trump had talked to right-leaning legal counselors about the feasibility of laying the groundwork for various post-election “audits” of mailed ballots — inspired partly by a shambolic Arizona audit following the 2020 election — in parts of the United States that have historical track records of so-called problems, two sources present for these casual discussions recall.
There are few people more central to Trump’s plans than Cleta Mitchell, the lawyer pushing the secretaries of state to pull out of ERIC at that D.C. meeting. As recently as September, Trump privately praised Mitchell’s work, saying she is going to be “very important” for the next election and beyond.
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….
A deluge of violent messages: How a surge in threats to public officials could disrupt American democracy
Voting experts warn of ‘serious threats’ for 2024 from election equipment software breaches
ATLANTA (AP) — An effort to access voting system software in several states and provide it to allies of former President Donald Trump as they sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election has raised “serious threats” ahead of next year’s presidential contest, according to a group of experts who urged federal agencies to investigate.
The letter sent by nearly two dozen computer scientists, election security experts and voter advocacy organizations asks for a federal probe and a risk assessment of voting machines used throughout the country, saying the software breaches have “urgent implications for the 2024 election and beyond.” The breaches affected voting equipment made by two companies that together count over 70% of the votes cast across the country, according to the letter.
“The multistate effort to unlawfully obtain copies of voting system software poses serious threats to election security and national security and constitutes a potential criminal conspiracy of enormous consequences,” the group wrote in a letter sent to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, special counsel Jack Smith, FBI Director Christopher Wray and Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. “We must protect our most sacred tenet of democracy — the security of our vote.”
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/
HOW TRUMP GETS AWAY WITH IT
If reelected, he could use the powers of the presidency to evade justice and punish his enemies.
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/
Why a Second Trump Presidency May Be More Radical Than His First
Donald Trump has long exhibited authoritarian impulses, but his policy operation is now more sophisticated, and the buffers to check him are weaker.
“In win for Cooper and Democrats, NC judges block GOP-backed elections law ahead of 2024”
A panel of judges on Thursday granted Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s request to block a new elections law before voters head to the polls in 2024.
The ruling from the three judges — two Republicans and one Democrat — was unanimous. They ruled that the law, passed by the Republican-controlled legislature last month, is likely an unconstitutional power grab. It’s just a temporary ruling pending a full trial, likely to be held in early 2024….
In addition to changing who has the power to appoint election board members, the law would also make the board have an even number of seats for both parties, instead of giving a majority to whichever party holds the governor’s office.
Republicans have said that’s needed to improve election integrity. But critics, who include Democrats as well as professional election workers and experts, say it would lead to chaos in elections administration — and possibly even spell the end of early voting and other political issues that would presumably result in tie votes and inaction….
On Cooper’s challenge to SB 749, Republican lawmakers have acknowledged that the previous law it’s based on was ruled unconstitutional.
A similar change to the elections board was also later shot down by voters when proposed as a constitutional amendment in 2018, after every living governor — Democratic and Republican — publicly campaigned against it, as well as another similar amendment proposal, as overreaching power grabs.
A lawyer for the state government agreed with Cooper in court Thursday. Senior Deputy Attorney General Amar Majmundar said blocking it from taking effect would be “not just appropriate, but necessary.”
But legislative leaders have said that since the GOP flipped control of the North Carolina Supreme Court in last year’s elections, they believe they have a better chance of winning in court this time and getting the past precedent overturned.
A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/30/trump-dictator-2024-election-robert-kagan/
[Excerpt:]
But wait until Trump returns to power and the price of opposing him becomes persecution, the loss of property and possibly the loss of freedom. Will those who balked at resisting Trump when the risk was merely political oblivion suddenly discover their courage when the cost might be the ruin of oneself and one’s family?
We are closer to that point today than we have ever been, yet we continue to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of our collective cowardice, our complacent, willful ignorance and, above all, our lack of any deep commitment to liberal democracy. As the man said, we are going out not with a bang but a whimper.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4311194-trump-signals-revenge-in-second-term/
“Why the fight to counter false election claims may be harder in 2024”
The Key to Mike Johnson’s Christian Extremism Hangs Outside His Office
“A lot of Americans embrace Trump’s authoritarianism”
CNN’s most recent polling, conducted by SSRS, shows that Trump leads Biden nationally by a 4-point margin, statistically even. Even given Trump’s response to the 2020 election, though, and the myriad criminal charges he faces, respondents were five points more likely to say they would be proud to have him as president then said the same of Biden.
CNN’s poll also asked people to measure Biden and Trump on personal characteristics. Most respondents said that they thought Biden had respect for the rule of law; only about a third said the same of Trump.
But remember: 49 percent of respondents prefer Trump over Biden. Meaning that at least 14 percent of respondents both think that Trump doesn’t respect the rule of law and want him to be president.
“Election offices are sent envelopes with fentanyl or other substances. Authorities are investigating”
Authorities were hunting Thursday for whoever sent suspicious letters — including some containing fentanyl — to elections offices in at least five states this week, delaying the counting of ballots in some local races in the latest instance of threats faced by election workers around the country.
The letters were sent to elections offices in the presidential battlegrounds of Georgia and Nevada, as well as California, Oregon and Washington, with some being intercepted before they arrived. Four of the letters contained fentanyl, the FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service reported in a statement to elections officials Thursday.
“Law enforcement is working diligently to intercept any additional letters before they are delivered,” the statement said.
The Pierce County auditor’s office in Tacoma, Washington, released images of the letter it received, showing it had been postmarked in Portland, Oregon, and read in part: “End elections now.”…
Among the offices that appeared to be targeted was Fulton County in Georgia, which includes Atlanta and is the largest voting jurisdiction in one of the nation’s most important presidential swing states. Authorities were working to intercept the letter. In the meantime, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said officials were sending the overdose-reversal drug naloxone to the office as a precaution.
“This is domestic terrorism, and it needs to be condemned by anyone that holds elected office and anyone that wants to hold elective office anywhere in America,” said Raffensperger, a Republican.
Wisconsin: “Trump pressures Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to impeach elections chief Meagan Wolfe”
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 influential Federalist 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 year to date: “14 states have enacted laws making it harder to vote, while 23 states have enacted laws making it easier.”
Voting Laws Roundup: October 2023, published by the Brennan Center, offers an overview of the trends in election law around the country. There is good news, including:
- “Nearly half of all states enacted at least one expansive voting law this year.”
- “At least four of those states — Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, and New Mexico — enacted multiple expansive voting laws or an omnibus pro-voter law in 2023.”
And there is bad news, including:
- 14 states have adopted restrictive laws.
- North Carolina legislature has passed a law restricting voting access and another “undermin[ing] election administration.”
“Republican states swore off a voting tool. Now they’re scrambling to recreate it”
NPR: Misinformation about a bipartisan, cross-state partnership known as the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, pushed several Republican legislatures to back out of it in recent months. But now, these same legislatures are scrambling to create systems to serve the same function. ERIC, however, took years to develop and relies on confidential DMV information, which is much the most accurate way to confirm that individuals with the same names in different jurisdictions are in fact the same individuals.
“These states are recreating a portion of ERIC, just with less data and less reliable information.”
The Markup
October 16, 2023
Looking Ahead: Members of Congress called for an investigation into Virginia’s improper removal of hundreds of voters from the state’s rolls. A new North Carolina law faces a legal challenge, and a lawsuit challenging Idaho’s voter ID law moved forward.
Trump as Jesus? Why he casts himself as a martyr, and why fans go along.
The former president has been saying for decades that he’s a victim and portrayed himself as a martyr. But Trump’s messianic rhetoric is mainly about feeling sorry for himself, analysts say.
[Excerpts:]“To protect his incredibly fragile ego, he needs to create this victimization,” said Cohen. “The problem can’t be him, so who else can it be? That’s where the martyrdom comes in: He has to shift the blame on someone else, and then he can say, ‘The only one standing in between them and you is me.’”
With each new charge, Trump sent out fundraising letters in which he presented himself as a perpetual victim of the authorities’ attacks. “[N]o matter what our sick and deranged political establishment throws at me, no matter what they do to me, I will endure their torment and oppression, and I will do it willingly,” he said in a fundraising appeal last fall. “Our cruel and vindictive political class is not just coming after me — they are coming after YOU.”
When Trump was arraigned in New York in April, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a Trump acolyte, said he was “joining some of the most incredible people in history” who “have been arrested and persecuted by radical corrupt governments …, including Nelson Mandela and Jesus.”
[Boldface added]
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
[Excerpt:]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.
“Exclusive: RNC plans to recruit army of poll watchers for 2024”
The Republican National Committee plans to recruit and train tens of thousands of poll workers and watchers in battleground states for the 2024 election, according to plans shared first with Axios.
Why it matters: It’s part of the RNC’s ongoing push to scrutinize suspected voter fraud and mobilize on-the-ground “election integrity directors” in crucial states ahead of the 2024 election.
- Repeated audits and reviews, including from GOP-led groups, failed to find evidence of voter fraud despite former President Trump’s claims that it was widespread during the 2020 election.
Zoom in: The RNC is continuing its expansion from a “pop-up-shop style election operation” to a year-round election integrity department this year.
“Impeachments and forced removals from office emerge as partisan weapons in the states”
Republicans in Wisconsin are threatening to impeach a recently elected state Supreme Court justice and raised the possibility of doing the same to the state’s election director.
A Georgia Republican called for impeaching the Fulton County prosecutor who brought racketeering charges against former President Donald Trump. Republicans in the Pennsylvania House have already impeached the top prosecutor in Philadelphia.
None of the targets met the bar traditionally set for impeachment — credible allegations of committing a crime while in office. Their offense: staking out positions legislative Republicans didn’t like.
As Republicans in Congress begin their impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, the process is calling attention to the increasing use of impeachment in the states as a partisan political weapon rather than as a step of last resort for officeholders believed to have committed a serious offense.
It’s not just impeachment. Over the past two years, Republicans also have sought to pry Democrats and nonpartisan executives from office through recalls, legislative maneuvers and forced removals, even when no allegations of wrongdoing have surfaced.
To some, the moves appear anti-democratic — actions that could have major implications if they become routine and supplant the ballot box as the final arbiter of an election.
Voting Rights Lab
The Markup
A Weekly Election Legislation Update
October 10, 2023
Today is Tuesday, October 10. We are tracking 1,915 bills so far this session across all 50 states, with 404 bills that restrict voter access or election administration and 908 bills that improve voter access or election administration. The rest are neutral, mixed, or unclear in their impact.
The Bad News: Earlier today, the North Carolina legislature overrode Governor Roy Cooper’s vetoes of S.B. 747 (restricting mail voting) and S.B. 749 (legislative takeover of state and county election boards). The legislature also enacted a budget bill that prohibits the state from joining ERIC.
The Good News: The Michigan House passed legislation to expand automatic voter registration in the state.
Looking Ahead: Last week, two new lawsuits were filed, challenging voting restrictions in North Carolina and Wisconsin.
Brennan Center for Justice
September 28, 2023
There is a trial underway in Texas that has big implications for the future of voting rights.
The case is LUPE v. State of Texas. It deals with the big, comprehensive voter suppression law passed by the Texas legislature several years back: Senate Bill 1. It intentionally discriminates against Black and Latino voters. It imposes new burdens on mail voting, makes it more difficult for voters who have limited English proficiency or disabilities to receive assistance with voting, takes aim at community and faith-based groups by criminalizing nonpartisan voter turnout activities as “vote harvesting,” and puts poll workers at risk of criminal prosecution if they act to stop partisan poll watchers from harassing voters.
We at the Brennan Center, working with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), are among the attorneys representing voters and officials challenging the scheme.
During the trial’s first week, there was a parade of witnesses testifying to the law’s real-world effects on voters and election officials. A former county clerk said of one provision, “I thought it criminalized a very innocent process that helped often our most vulnerable voters.” A longtime poll worker said of the law, “As long as it’s in effect, I’ll never serve again.” And another testified that he would hesitate to recommend that anyone serve because of the risk of prosecution.
S.B. 1’s rules concerning poll watchers create a culture of fear, confusion, and potential chaos at polling places. One county election administrator told the court, “We had tons of complaints that poll watchers were intrusive, and voters felt intimidated because the poll watcher would come and stand behind them as they are voting. . . . It was disturbing.” Another administrator observed that election workers were afraid of being prosecuted for performing their duties of maintaining order at the polling place and protecting voters from intimidation and violence.
In one exchange, a county clerk described the problem of voter fraud as a “unicorn,” because fraud affects at most “ones and twos out of millions of votes, and in most cases [is] unintentional.”
Showing a shaky grasp of mammalian zoology, a lawyer for the state of Texas replied, “Even though voter fraud is a unicorn, we still have to be vigilant.” The preposterous exchange highlighted the flimsiness of the state’s justifications for voter suppression laws.
In the trial’s first few weeks, the court and the nation have learned what voter suppression is truly about — and it has nothing to do with preventing phantom voter fraud. In enacting S.B. 1, Texas set out to keep certain people from voting, and it’s working. In the first election after the law’s enactment, a single provision of the law caused tens of thousands of mail ballot applications and mail ballots to be discarded, and those rejections disproportionately affected voters of color. The law is a reminder of the United States’ basest impulses. It demonstrates the need for strengthened federal protections of the franchise so that all people can participate in our democracy on equal terms.
Misinformation research is buckling under GOP legal attacks
An escalating campaign, led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Republicans, has cast a pall over programs that study political disinformation and the quality of medical information online
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/23/online-misinformation-jim-jordan/
“Judge overseeing case to remove Trump from ballot agrees to order banning threats and intimidation”
The Colorado judge overseeing the first significant lawsuit to bar former President Donald Trump from the state’s 2024 presidential ballot on Friday issued a protective order prohibiting threats and intimidation in the case, saying the safety of those involved — including herself and her staff — was necessary as the groundbreaking litigation moves forward.
“I 100% understand everybody’s concerns for the parties, the lawyers, and frankly myself and my staff based on what we’ve seen in other cases,” District Judge Sarah B. Wallace said as she agreed to the protective order.
The order prohibits parties in the case from making threatening or intimidating statements. Scott Gessler, a former Colorado secretary of state representing Trump in the case, opposed it. He said a protective order was unnecessary because threats and intimidation already are prohibited by law.
“‘Where’s Celia?’ An Arizona elections official becomes the target of a virtual manhunt by GOP activists on a public records crusade.”
Jen Fifield for Votebeat:
They started searching for her in late January.
“Where’s CELIA NABOR?” one member of the angry online mob wrote. “Find her,” another wrote. Track her phone, credit cards, social security number, and social media, others suggested. It was time for her to “face the music.” “COULD SHE BE AT HOME????” someone wrote, posting her address.
And then, that same night, after 2 a.m., someone started banging on Celia Nabor’s door.
She lay frozen in bed in her suburban Phoenix neighborhood, terrified, wondering if one of her online harassers had come to follow through on the threats. Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the pounding stopped.
Nabor never found out who knocked on her door that night. What she did know was that the trouble had started earlier that week. On Jan. 30, GOP activists began spreading false information about her, based partly on documents acquired through records requests searching for fraud in Maricopa County’s elections, where Nabor helped oversee early voting.
They said Nabor was dodging a request to answer questions, prompting others to claim she had helped the county steal the election for Democrats. But that wasn’t true.
We The People AZ Alliance — a Phoenix-based political action committee funded primarily by Patrick Byrne and his organization The America Project — employed what’s become a familiar playbook among allies of former President Donald Trump: Barrage local election offices with public records requests, then twist real records to make routine actions seem suspicious.
The organization dug into Nabor’s work, asking for copies of all of her texts and her emails. They asked for information on how she and the employees under her performed their jobs and whether they were disciplined. They wanted protocols and contractor names and contracts and more.
Extensive requests such as these are a complex piece of the ballooning number of public records requests to election offices across the country, according to Votebeat’s review of hundreds of public records requests and logs.
“Houston-area elections office dismantled as contentious Texas law takes effect”
The election administrator’s office in Texas’ most populous county – Harris County, which is home to Houston – has been dismantled to comply with a new state law passed by Republican legislators that officially takes effect Friday.
The law, known as SB 1750, shifts responsibility for elections and voter registration to the county clerk and the county tax assessor-collector. Critics have cast the measure, along with a second newly enacted law, as a power grab by Texas’ GOP-led legislature to disrupt how elections are run in an increasingly blue bastion of this traditionally red state.
The elimination of the election administrator’s position comes just weeks before the start of early voting in the race for Houston mayor and other local offices, and it marks one of several efforts by Republicans around the country to exert more control over election administration ahead of 2024’s consequential presidential and congressional contests.
A separate state law – known as SB 1933 and also passed this year – authorizes the Texas secretary of state, who is appointed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, to order “administrative oversight” of a county elections office, if complaints are filed and there’s reason to believe there’s a recurring pattern of problems with election administration.
SB 1750 and SB 1933 apply to counties with a population of more than 3.5 million and 4 million people, respectively – criteria met only by Harris County.
“An Iowa County Just Stopped An Election Denier from Overseeing 2024 Election”
Bolts reports.
In court, Trump supporter faces election official he violently threatened
Trump attorneys guided false electors in Georgia, GOP chair says
In Tuesday’s filing, Shafer underscored that the strategy was driven almost entirely by lawyers acting on Trump’s behalf. The false electors were later used by Trump allies to attempt to foment a conflict on Jan. 6, 2021 and derail the transfer of power to President Joe Biden.
Shafer is among the 18 defendants indicted in Fulton County, Georgia, alongside Trump as part of a conspiracy to subvert the 2020 election.
“Trump praises Jan. 6 crowd, repeats election lies in online interview while skipping GOP debate”
In the most inflammatory exchange, Trump seemed to indulge a suggestion from Carlson that Trump’s political opponents might try to end his life.
“They’re savage animals. They are people that are sick. Really sick. You have great people in the Democrat Party, you have great people that are Democrats,” Trump said. “But I’ve seen what they do, I’ve seen the lengths that they go to.”
The incendiary comment comes as Trump has venerated those charged with crimes for the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol and downplayed the violence that day. He repeated his praise in the interview.
“People in that crowd said it was the most beautiful day they’ve ever experienced. There was love in that crowd. There was love and unity,” Trump said of the supporters he addressed on the morning of Jan. 6, before they marched to the Capitol.
“I have never seen such spirit and such passion and such love. And I’ve also never seen, simultaneously, and from the same people, such hatred of what they’ve done to our country.”
The night before the interview was posted, Trump spoke at a fundraiser hosted at his New Jersey golf club for the Patriot Freedom Project, which supports the defendants charged for their roles in the insurrection.
FBI joins investigation of threats to grand jurors in Trump Georgia case
American democracy is cracking. These forces help explain why.
Behind the sense that the political system is broken lies a collision between forces both old and new
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/18/american-democracy-political-system-failures/
Inside the right’s effort to build a voter fraud hunting tool
“G.O.P. Contenders Feed Voter Distrust in Courts, Schools and Military”
Ron DeSantis says the military is more interested in global warming and “gender ideology” initiatives than in national security.
Tim Scott says the Justice Department “continues to hunt Republicans.”
Vivek Ramaswamy has vowed to “shut down the deep state,” borrowing former President Donald J. Trump’s conspiratorial shorthand for a federal bureaucracy he views as hostile.
As Mr. Trump escalates his attacks on American institutions, focusing his fire on the Justice Department as he faces new criminal charges, his competitors for the Republican nomination have followed his lead.
Several have adopted much of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric sowing broad suspicion about the courts, the F.B.I., the military and schools. As they vie for support in a primary dominated by Mr. Trump, they routinely blast these targets in ways that might have been considered extraordinary, not to mention unthinkably bad politics, just a few years ago.
Yet there is little doubt about the political incentives behind the statements. Polls show that Americans’ trust in their institutions has fallen to historical lows, with Republicans exhibiting more doubt across a broad swath of public life.
The proliferation of attacks has alarmed both Republicans and Democrats who worry about the long-term impact on American democracy. Public confidence in core institutions — from the justice system to voting systems — is fundamental to a durable democracy, particularly at a time of sharp political division.
A New Kind of Fascism
I’ve resisted using the word until now, but something menacing and novel is taking shape with the possibility of a second Trump term.
JULY 25, 2023
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/trump-second-term-isolationist-fascism
Close to 100,000 Voter Registrations Were Challenged in Georgia — Almost All by Just Six Right-Wing Activists
https://www.propublica.org/article/right-wing-activists-georgia-voter-challenges
“A Pair of Election Deniers Are Running To Take Over Election Offices In Washington”
Robert Sutherland and Doug Basler have a lot in common.
The two Republicans have spent the better part of the past three years sowing doubt about Washington state’s election system, filing frivolous lawsuits that questioned the mail ballot system, and running (and losing) races for office.
And now, they’re both running against avowedly nonpartisan, experienced election administrators in an attempt to take control of two of their state’s largest county election offices.
“Elections director who helped copy Georgia data given similar job”
AJC:
The South Georgia election director who allowed tech experts to copy the state’s voting software in the wake of the 2020 presidential race was hired to run a special election in another rural county soon afterward, leading investigators to confiscate its election server this spring.
The decision to hire Misty Hampton in Treutlen County has drawn scrutiny from county commissioners who question why their county manager, a Republican candidate for secretary of state last year, would employ Hampton after she was forced out from Coffee County.
Security camera video showed that Hampton permitted confidential election data to be copied by computer analysts hired by Sidney Powell, who was an attorney for Donald Trump, in January 2021. The data was later distributed through a file-sharing website to conspiracy theorists who denied the results of the presidential election, which Trump lost.
“North Dakota election official challenges mail ballot counting law in Trump-aligned group’s lawsuit”
A North Dakota county election official is suing the state’s election director to block the counting of mail-in ballots received after Election Day in a lawsuit filed by a conservative group that also brought lawsuits amid former President Donald Trump‘s false claims of election fraud in 2020.
An election law expert says the Public Interest Legal Foundation appeared to be “court-shopping” for a conservative circuit with its case, which seeks an injunction against the election director for enforcing the state’s laws.
Burleigh County Auditor Mark Splonskowski, who was elected last fall, alleges he “is harmed by instructions to accept and cast ballots received after Election Day,” and that “because federal and state law conflict on the day the ballots must be turned in, he faces an impossibility in enforcing the law,” according to a complaint filed Wednesday in federal court.
“Despite federal law assigning one day as Election Day, North Dakota law allows ballots to arrive and be counted up to 13 days after Election Day,” the complaint states….
University of California Los Angeles law professor and election law expert Rick Hasen in an interview said the lawsuit is “kind of a roundabout way of attacking not having full results on Election Day, so it very much ties into Trump’s unsupported claims about the (2020) election.”
Louisiana Argues that the District Court Considering Voting Rights Challenge to Louisiana Congressional Redistricting Should Consider if Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is No Longer Constitutional
Yup, there it is (via Hansi Lo Wang):
[The Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision in] SFFA has considerably altered the landscape of cases, such as this one, that involve state action requiring racial classifications. 2023 WL 4239254, at *12 (“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”). Indeed, the SFFA Court made clear that as statutes requiring race-based classification achieve their intended ends, they will necessarily become obsolete. See id. at *14–21 (explaining that Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 306 (2003), “made clear that race-based admissions programs eventually had to end” and that the instant facts demonstrated that the time had come). And we have seen similarly once-permissible racial classifications be held unconstitutional when the facts justifying their existence were no more—specifically in the Voting Rights Act (“VRA”) context. See Shelby Cnty. v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529, 557 (2013) (holding part of the VRA unconstitutional because “[o]ur country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions”). Consequently, the district court should be permitted to address, in the first instance, whether the facts on the ground here similarly warrant a rejection of Section 2 of the VRA, as applied, because it is no longer necessary. See id. at 536 (“[C]urrent burdens . . . must be justified by current needs.” (quoting Nw. Austin Mun. Util. Dist. No. One v. Holder, 557 U.S. 193, 203 (2009))).
Notably, this temporal argument was acknowledged by members of the Milligan Court but, because it was not properly raised, the Court did not consider it. 143 S. Ct. at 1519 (Kavanaugh, J., concurring) (“Justice Thomas notes, however, that even if Congress in 1982 could constitutionally authorize race-based redistricting under §2 for some period of time, the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future. See post, at 1543–1544 (dissenting opinion). But Alabama did not raise that temporal argument in this Court, and I therefore would not consider it at this time.”). Indeed, eight Justices in Milligan appeared to conclude that the first Gingles precondition cannot be satisfied where race is the predominant factor in the creation of an illustrative comparator. See 143 S. Ct. at 1510–12; id. at 1527 (Thomas, J., dissenting). That predominance test is essential to mitigate the problem of race-based classifications identified in SFFA, and the district court should address the interplay of these decisions, as applied to this case, in the first instance on remand.
As I wrote recently at Slate:
The first attack is a separate constitutional one from the one that failed in Milligan. In Roberts’ Milligan majority opinion, the court upheld Section 2’s constitutionality against Alabama’s claim that Congress only has the power to ban intentional discrimination, not just those voting laws with discriminatory effects. Citing earlier precedents, the court concluded that Congress had the power through the 15th Amendment to dismantle laws with racially discriminatory effects as well.
Despite that holding, Justice Kavanaugh, writing separately, left the door open for a future constitutional challenge. Kavanaugh described that argument, raised by Justice Clarence Thomas in his dissent, that “even if Congress in 1982 could constitutionally authorize race-based redistricting under §2 for some period of time, the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.” Kavanaugh wouldn’t reach the question in his separate opinion, but left it open: “Alabama did not raise that temporal argument in this Court, and I therefore would not consider it at this time.”
This argument that a law once constitutional is no longer so because of the passage of time echoes the court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, authored by Chief Justice Roberts, reaching the same conclusion about a different part of the Voting Rights Act, Section 5. As voting rights expert Ellen Katz opined on my site, the Election Law Blog, “Justice Kavanaugh said he was declining to consider this argument ‘at this time’ because Alabama had failed to press it. But the invitation was, of course, clear: bring this claim and the Allen dissenters might just have a majority in the next case. In other words, stay tuned.”
Would Kavanaugh (or even Roberts) switch back again and pull a Shelby County in a few years? It is hard to say, but Roberts at least offered a surprisingly full-throated endorsement of current Section 2 jurisprudence, and having pronounced Section 2 constitutional without alluding to or even citing the argument in Shelby County that the passage of time could render the law now unconstitutional, it seems hard to imagine him reversing course so soon. What Kavanaugh might do should such an opportunity arise is a separate question, of course.
Trump Asked About I.R.S. Inquiry of F.B.I. Officials, Ex-Aide Says Under Oath
In a court filing, John Kelly, who was a chief of staff under Donald Trump, said the former president had asked about having the tax agency look into Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
John F. Kelly, who served as former President Donald J. Trump’s second White House chief of staff, said in a sworn statement that Mr. Trump had discussed having the Internal Revenue Service and other federal agencies investigate two F.B.I. officials involved in the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/07/us/politics/trump-kelly-irs-fbi-strozk-page.html
“Trump pressured Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey to overturn 2020 election”
In a phone call in late 2020,President Donald Trump tried to pressure Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) to overturn the state’spresidential election results, saying that if enough fraudulent votes could be found it would overcome Trump’s narrow loss in Arizona, according to three people familiar with the call.
Trump also repeatedly asked Vice President Mike Pence to call Ducey and prod him to find the evidence to substantiate Trump’s claims of fraud, according to two of these people. Pence called Ducey several times to discuss the election, they said, though he did not follow Trump’s directions to pressure the governor.
The extent of Trump’s efforts to cajole Ducey into helping him stay in power have not before been reported, even as other efforts by Trump’s lawyer and allies to pressure Arizona officials have been made public. Ducey told reporters in December 2020 that he and Trump had spoken, but he declined to disclose the contents of the call then or in the more than two years since. Although he disagreed with Trump about the outcome of the election, Ducey has sought to avoid a public battle with Trump.
Ducey described the “pressure” he was under after Trump’s loss to a prominent Republican donor over a meal in Arizona earlier this year, according to the donor, who like others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. The account was confirmed by others aware of the call. Ducey told the donor he was surprised that special counsel Jack Smith’s team had not inquired about his phone calls with Trump and Pence as part of the Justice Department’s investigation into the former president’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, the donor said.
Ducey did not record the call, people familiar with the matter said.
Now out of public office, the former governor declined through a spokesman to answer specific questions about his interactions with Trump and his administration.
“This is neither new nor is it news to anyone following this issue the last two years,” spokesman Daniel Scarpinato said in a statement. “Governor Ducey defended the results of Arizona’s 2020 election, he certified the election, and he made it clear that the certification provided a trigger for credible complaints backed by evidence to be brought forward. None were ever brought forward. The Governor stands by his action to certify the election and considers the issue to be in the rear view mirror.”
The vote — 213-209-6 — is the culmination of a week-long push led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), which was stymied last week when a band of Republicans joined Democrats in blocking a censure resolution from coming to the floor for a vote. It advanced on Wednesday after Luna made changes to the measure.
It also marked the apex of Republicans’ years-long campaign against Schiff, who emerged as a bogeyman on the right for his unrelenting criticism of Trump’s alleged ties with Russia, and was cemented as a chief GOP adversary on Capitol Hill when he led the first impeachment inquiry targeting Trump.
“Today, I wear this partisan vote as a badge of honor,” Schiff said Wednesday. “Knowing that I have lived my oath. Knowing that I have done my duty, to hold a dangerous and out of control president accountable. And knowing that I would do so again — in a heartbeat — if the circumstances should ever require it.”
“The American people do not trust Congress. The cyclical pattern of lies has worn down the credibility of every institution and every official in the United States government. You see it, I see it,” Luna said on the House floor during debate Wednesday.
“Voting rights advocates sue in federal court over NC’s felony disenfranchisement”
NC Newsline (via Electionline). “The Southern Coalition for Social Justice and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP asked the court to declare the law unconstitutional on Fourteenth Amendment grounds.” The suit cites the specific history of law, dating back to 1877 as a part of the racially discriminatory rollback of voting rights granted during Reconstruction.
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. . . .
“Scoop: YouTube reverses misinformation policy to allow U.S. election denialism”
In a reversal of its election integrity policy, YouTube will leave up content that says fraud, errors or glitches occurred in the 2020 presidential election and other U.S. elections, the company confirmed to Axios Friday.
Why it matters: YouTube established the policy in December 2020, after enough states had certified the 2020 election results. Now, the company said in a statement, leaving the policy in place may have the effect of “curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm.”
- “Two years, tens of thousands of video removals, and one election cycle later, we recognized it was time to reevaluate the effects of this policy in today’s changed landscape,” YouTube said in a statement.
- “With that in mind, and with 2024 campaigns well underway, we will stop removing content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past US Presidential elections.”
Yes, but: Asked how YouTube was specifically able to make that determination, a spokesperson pointed Axios to their statement.
- YouTube said that it “carefully deliberated this change,” but didn’t provide further examples of what factors or instances it considered when weighing its decision.
- The platform said it will provide more details about its approach to the 2024 election in the months to come.
“Texas AG Says Trump Would’ve ‘Lost’ State If It Hadn’t Blocked Mail-in Ballots Applications Being Sent Out”
From Newsweek:
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, said former President Donald Trump would have lost in Texas in the 2020 election if his office had not successfully blocked counties from mailing out applications for mail-in ballots to all registered voters.
Harris County, home to the city of Houston, wanted to mail out applications for mail-in ballots to its approximately 2.4 million registered voters due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the conservative Texas Supreme Court blocked the county from doing so after it faced litigation from Paxton’s office.
“If we’d lost Harris County—Trump won by 620,000 votes in Texas. Harris County mail-in ballots that they wanted to send out were 2.5 million, those were all illegal and we were able to stop every one of them,” Paxton told former Trump adviser Steve Bannon during the latter’s War Room podcast on Friday.
“After harassment, Arizona county official won’t run for reelection”
A sad story that exemplifies what’s been happening with election administrators in several areas around the country. From the WP:
After facing an onslaught of harassment and violent threats for certifying the results of the 2020 election, a Republican on the governing board of Arizona’s largest county will not seek reelection during the 2024 cycle.
Bill Gates, a longtime conservative and Harvard-educated attorney, told The Washington Post that he intends to serve his term through the end of 2024 and carry out the election-related duties that come with it. In an interview and prepared statement, he said he was proud of his time in office and thanked county workers….
Gates’s decision also adds a high-profile name to the exodus of local election officers across the nation who have left their posts or have passed on reelection campaigns amid attacks….
As he helps the county prepare for another election, Gates wants stronger protections for election officials and more federal funding to help them recruit and train poll workers, bolster cybersecurity measures, install security cameras and more. He is joining a bipartisan group of election workers in D.C. next week to urge the White House, members of Congress, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security to advocate for the funding and protections as part of an effort by Issue One, an organization that advocates for issues of democracy and more regulation of money in politics.
Russia’s Latest Sanctions on U.S. Officials Turn to Trump Enemies
Among the 500 people singled out for travel and financial restrictions were Americans seen as adversaries by former President Donald J. Trump.
Russia has expanded its list of sanctioned Americans in a tit-for-tat retaliation for the latest curbs imposed by the United States. But what is particularly striking is how much President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is adopting perceived enemies of former President Donald J. Trump as his own.
Among the 500 people singled out for travel and financial restrictions on Friday were Americans seen as adversaries by Mr. Trump, including Letitia James, the state attorney general of New York who has sued him for alleged fraud, and Jack Smith, the Justice Department special counsel investigating his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents after leaving office.
Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state of Georgia who rebuffed Mr. Trump’s pressure to “find” enough votes to reverse the outcome of the election, also made the list. So did Lt. Michael Byrd, the Capitol Police officer who shot the pro-Trump rioter Ashli Babbitt on Jan. 6, 2021.
None of them has anything to do with Russia policy, and the only evident reason they would have come to Moscow’s attention is because Mr. Trump has publicly assailed them. The Russian Foreign Ministry offered no specific explanation for why they would be included on the list but did say that among its targets were “those in government and law enforcement agencies who are directly involved in the persecution of dissidents in the wake of the so-called storming of the Capitol.”
As recently as this month, Mr. Trump has tried to rewrite the history of that day and has dangled pardons for convicted rioters if he is elected to a second term. He also refused to commit to supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia if he is elected president again, saying instead he would seek to mediate between Kyiv and Moscow.
Florida and Texas Go After Voters for Honest Mistakes
The hunt for nonexistent voter fraud is a pretext for efforts to intimidate eligible voters.
“False claims of a stolen election thrive unchecked on Twitter even as Musk promises otherwise”
May 16, 2023
From Robert Weissman, President of Public Citizen:
. . . with Big Tech rapidly, and recklessly, developing ever more powerful artificial intelligence technology — it could soon be impossible, even for experts, to distinguish so-called “deepfakes” from audio and video recordings that are real.
And there is currently no federal law that would outright stop political candidates, parties, or committees from using deep fakes and artificial intelligence to willfully deceive voters.
Artificial intelligence poses a significant threat to truth and democracy as we know it.
That’s not science fiction.
It’s not paranoia.
It’s the hard reality of the world we live in now.
Also, the First Amendment is no defense. Using A.I. to mislead or defraud voters goes far beyond protections for political expression, opinion, or satire. Forget about yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater — this could burn down our very democracy.
Public Citizen is formally calling on the Democratic Party and the Republican Party not to use artificial intelligence or deep fake technology to mislead or defraud the electorate.
1. Commit immediately not to use deepfake technology to deceive voters.
Thanks for taking action.
For democracy,
– Robert Weissman, President of Public Citizen
Youngkin’s election chief pulls Va. from group targeted by election deniers
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/05/12/youngkin-voter-rolls-election-deniers-eric/
Texas Republicans Push New Voting Restrictions Aimed at Houston
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/10/us/texas-election-laws-houston-harris-county.html
[Excerpt:]HOUSTON — Across Harris County, an emerging Democratic stronghold in reliably red Texas, roadside signs posted last November urged harried drivers to vote Republican. A celebrity furniture salesman, beloved by many Houstonians, cut ads with the Republican candidate for the top county administrator’s post.
The 2022 races for local judges and county leaders were among the hardest fought and most expensive yet seen in the sprawling county of 4.8 million, which includes Houston, as Republicans looked to capitalize on crime concerns to make headway in the state’s largest urban area.
But they fell short.
Now, the county is in the cross hairs of the Republican-dominated state Legislature, which is trying to exert more control over voting there. Lawmakers are pushing dozens of new election bills, including limits on polling places, felony penalties for illegal voting and a mechanism for the state to order new elections when voting problems occur in Texas counties with more than 2.7 million people, a category that includes only Harris County.
At the same time, more than a dozen election challenges have been filed by losing Republican candidates in the county who have argued that significant problems at a limited number of polling places on Election Day, including insufficient supplies of ballot paper, were enough to change the outcomes of races. While local leaders acknowledge issues, evidence has not been presented that they affected the results.
Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson
May 8, 2023
Election lawyer Marc Elias recently warned that “we cannot out-organize voter suppression” and that the myth that we can “minimizes the real world effects of repeated, targeted suppression laws. It shifts the burden from the suppressors to the voters. It suggests that victims of voter suppression simply need to be better ‘organized.’”
He notes that Ohio, Arkansas, South Dakota, Idaho, and Florida have all passed voter suppression laws this year and that the new laws put in place after 2020 have worked. Minority and youth voting have dropped significantly. Since 2008, Black voting in states dominated by Democrats has increased by 1.8 points; in Republican-dominated states it has dropped by four points. In Georgia, Black participation rates dropped from 47.8% to 43.2% between 2018 and 2022. Hispanic participation dropped from 27.6% to 25.1%, and the youth vote dropped from 33% to 26%.
Voter suppression is not “campaign tactics,” Elias warns. It is “the illegal and immoral deprivation of constitutional rights.”
Under the Radar, Right-Wing Push to Tighten Voting Laws Persists
Propelled by a new coalition of Trump allies, Republican-led legislatures have continued to pass restrictions on ballot access, including new limits to voting by mail in Ohio, a ban on ballot drop boxes in Arkansas and the shortening of early voting windows in Wyoming.
Nick Corasaniti and
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/08/us/politics/voting-laws-restrictions-republicans.html
The first recent wave of legislation tightening voting laws came in 2021, when Donald J. Trump’s false claims of voter fraud spurred Republican lawmakers to act over loud objections from Democrats. Two years later, a second wave is steadily moving ahead, but largely under the radar.
Propelled by a new coalition of Trump allies, Republican-led legislatures have continued to pass significant restrictions on access to the ballot, including new limits to voting by mail in Ohio, a ban on ballot drop boxes in Arkansas and the shortening of early voting windows in Wyoming.
Behind the efforts is a network of billionaire-backed advocacy groups that has formed a new hub of election advocacy within the Republican Party, rallying state activists, drafting model legislation and setting priorities.
The groups have largely dropped the push for expansive laws, shifting instead to a strategy one leader describes as “radical incrementalism” — a step-by-step approach intended to be more politically palatable than the broad legislation that provoked widespread protest in 2021.
“They haven’t stopped trying to change how our elections are run. They’re just doing it out of the spotlight,” said Joanna Lydgate, the chief executive of States United, a nonpartisan election group. Some of the policies being promoted today will be law in time for next year’s presidential election, she added, “and American voters will feel the impact.”
Republicans have long said their goal is “election integrity,” but a spate of recent proposals suggests clear, and sometimes strikingly specific, political aims. National Republicans recently sought to change the rules for a single race in Montana — for the U.S. Senate — to tilt the scales toward the Republican candidate. In Ohio, Republican state lawmakers are seeking to make it harder to pass a ballot initiative, just as a coalition of abortion rights groups is collecting signatures to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot.
“Arizona official targeted by election deniers now struggles with PTSD”
WaPo with a profile of Maricopa Supervisor Bill Gates, and the extraordinary pressures on local officials when grifters drive the fever dream of conspiracy viral.
“A GOP claim that Michigan purposely tried to encourage voter fraud doesn’t fit with facts”
Republicans at a recent congressional hearing accused Michigan’s chief election official of deliberately leaving tens of thousands of dead voters on the rolls in order to encourage illegal voting.
Even at a time of intense partisan conflict over election policies, it was a strikingly direct charge against a sitting official — and one made not by a Twitter activist or even on the campaign trail, but before Congress. And it comes at a time when election officials are already facing a wave of harassment and threats stemming from false claims about voting.
But a closer look at the facts makes clear the allegation that Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson knowingly kept dead people on the rolls to allow for fraud deserves extreme skepticism.
“As 2024 Campaigns Begin, States Confront Threats to Election Workers”
And yet, there’s a lot more to be done. NCSL has more on a disturbing trend that should be of concern to every single one of its members.
And good for Kansas SOS Scott Schwab for speaking up here (and about drop boxes, and about grace periods for mail, etc.).
“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.
Arizona: “Cochise County ready to hire elections director who spread false claims of 2020 election rigging”
Cochise County is close to hiring an elections director who has repeatedly shared false claims about widespread election fraud on Facebook, including claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against former President Donald Trump.
Bob Bartelsmeyer, currently the elections director in La Paz County, was chosen by Cochise County Recorder David Stevens for the spot. The county supervisors are set to appoint him at their Tuesday meeting, according to a meeting agenda posted on the county website.
“Please join me by posting ‘Trump legally won by landslide’” one post shared by Bartelsmeyer in December 2020 said. “REVEALED: ‘Simple Math’ Shows Biden Claims 13 MILLION More Votes Than There Were Eligible Voters Who Voted in 2020,” read another.
In Cochise, Bartelsmeyer would be working for a southern Arizona county where the Republican-controlled Board of Supervisors is considering GOP-backed changes to the county’s elections. Proposals include pursuing a potential plan to get rid of the county’s vote-counting machines because of false claims of vote switching that are similar to those shared by Bartelsmeyer in 2020.
Supervisor Ann English, the lone Democrat on the board, told Votebeat she was concerned that hiring Bartelsmeyer would mean no one would stand in the supervisors’ or Stevens’ way if they attempted to move forward with concerning changes to elections.
“It certainly is scary for me to think about someone coming in to take over an elections system that hasn’t had any problems, with an attitude that elections in the past haven’t been fair,” English said.
Top GOP lawyer decries ease of campus voting in private pitch to RNC
A presentation by Cleta Mitchell at a donor retreat urged tougher rules that could make it harder for college students to cast ballots
The presentation — which had more than 50 slides and was labeled “A Level Playing Field for 2024” — offered a window into a strategy that seems designed to reduce voter access and turnout among certain groups, including students and those who vote by mail, both of which tend to skew Democratic.
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
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
Trump Sings a Song of Sedition
The January 6 jail anthem was a shocking addition to his repertoire. But our national attention span is so short that we’ve already moved on.
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/03/trump-sings-a-song-of-sedition/673535/
Voting Rights Lab
The Markup: A Weekly Election Legislation Update
March 27, 2023
The Bad News: Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin ended the decade-long practice of his three immediate predecessors, members of both parties, of automatically restoring the voting rights of citizens with past felony convictions upon completion of their sentences. Arkansas and South Dakota enacted legislation prohibiting the use of drop boxes. Arkansas also criminalized the sending of mail ballot applications, imposed a 24-hour deadline on ballot counting, and prohibited non-public election funding. Mississippi criminalized ballot return by friends and neighbors. A bill creating new ID requirements for people registering to vote in Idaho is moving quickly.
“Colorado GOP selects combative, election-denying new leader”
The Colorado Republican Party on Saturday selected a combative former state representative who promised to be a “wartime” leader as its new chairman, joining several other state GOPs this year that have elected far-right figures and election conspiracy theorists to their top posts.
The move in Colorado comes as the party totters on the brink of political irrelevance in a state moving swiftly to the left.
Former State Rep. Dave Williams, who unsuccessfully tried to insert the phrase “Let’s Go Brandon” into his name on the party’s primary ballot last year and insists — incorrectly — that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election, was selected by the party’s executive committee out of a seven-person field.
Williams crossed the required 50% threshold on the third ballot after being endorsed by one of his competitors, indicted former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who had failed to surpass 10%. Peters faces seven felony charges for her alleged role in illegally accessing voting machines in her county. She has denied the allegations while becoming a prominent national figure in the election conspiracy movement.
With Trump in legal trouble, Georgia GOP targets prosecutors
Rachel Maddow looks at a new measure Georgia Republicans are pushing through the legislature that would give them the ability to remove elected prosecutors they don’t like, and notes the glaring conflict of potential charges pending against Donald Trump in Fulton County as the bill advances.
Rachel Maddow
March 6, 2023
“With unfounded fraud claims swirling, red California county dumps Dominion voting machines”
Swept up in unproven voter fraud claims, the Shasta County Board of Supervisors has upended the county’s election process, canceling its contract with Dominion Voting Systems and opting this week to pursue, among other options, the possibility of counting votes by hand.
Supervisor Kevin Crye, part of a newly empowered hard-right majority on the board, also announced at Tuesday’s board meeting that he had been in touch with MyPillow Chief Executive Mike Lindell, a prominent pro-Donald Trump election conspiracy theorist, about supporting a pilot voting system in the rural Northern California county.
On the same day, in another Republican-controlled county 400 miles south, Kern County supervisors narrowly voted to keep Dominion as the county’s voting system, but not before listening to hours of testimony from residents who were convinced the system was rigged.
Dominion is one of the largest suppliers of voting machines and software in the U.S., and currently runs voting machines in 41 of California’s 58 counties. After President Trump lost the election in 2020, his supporters spent months propagating baseless conspiracy theories about Dominion, including false accusations that the company’s machines were used to throw votes from Trump to Joe Biden and that Dominion — a company based in Colorado — was a corrupt tool with ties to the Venezuelan government. Those allegations were given heavy airing in right-wing media, including on Fox News.
It’s Sad What’s Happened to Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose
I had Secretary Frank LaRose of Ohio speak to my 2020 conference on election integrity along with Secretary Jocelyn Benson of Michigan. One Democrat, one Republican, each from a midwestern state, each fighting against the crazy and for fair election administration.
There have been much more troubling signs from LaRose in recent years.
And now this:
Secretary of State Frank LaRose, as he weighs a run for U.S. Senate, is planning a fundraiser in Washington, D.C. ahead of a scheduled Saturday appearance at a national conservative political conference to appear as the lone election official on a panel called “They Stole it From Us Legally.”
All 10 of Ohio’s Republican members of Congress are listed on the event host committee for the Wednesday afternoon fundraiser near Capitol Hill. Tickets run up to $5,000, with proceeds going to LaRose’s state candidate fund, which can’t directly be used for any federal campaign….
LaRose also has another stop on his Washington, D.C., itinerary this week. He’s a featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a major annual event for Republican candidates and right-wing activists.
He’s scheduled to speak on Saturday in a panel discussion alongside Hogan Gidley, a former campaign aide to ex-President Donald Trump who has advanced Trump’s false claims about the 2020 presidential election and now works for an elections-policy center; Abe Hamadeh, who unsuccessfully has sought to overturn the 2022 election results for his race for Arizona attorney general, which he lost; and Lee Zeldin, who lost last year’s race for governor of New York.
The event is titled “They Stole it From Us Legally.” Asked about the event’s title, a spokesman for LaRose said that’s not how the event organizers initially described it to LaRose.
The event’s initial title, according to a document obtained by cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer, was “Easy to Vote, Hard to Cheat,” a catchphrase long used by LaRose and other Ohio Republicans.
The LaRose spokesman, Rob Nichols, said LaRose does not hold the position that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Rather, he will talk about the accuracy of Ohio’s elections.
Voting Laws Roundup: February 2023
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-february-2023
So far this year, state legislators have introduced 150 restrictive voting bills, 27 election interference bills, and 274 expansive voting bills.
“Failing at polls, election deniers focus on state GOP posts”
“Election deniers who lost secretary of state races now run several state GOP operations”
Many of the election deniers who ran last year for positions that would have given them control over state elections systems lost their races. But several have found a new path to exert influence: as chair of their state Republican Party.
On Saturday, Kristina Karamo, an activist who rose to prominence for her efforts to overturn Michigan’s 2020 presidential results, was elected chair of the Michigan GOP at the party’s convention.
A week earlier, Mike Brown, a former county commissioner who has stoked fears that the 2020 election was stolen, won the same job at Kansas’ convention.
And in July, Idaho Republicans chose Dorothy Moon, a former state legislator who has said there was a “big problem” with the 2020 vote and made unfounded claims about illegal voting, as their leader.
Meanwhile, Tina Peters announced last week that she’s running for state GOP chair in Colorado. A former county election clerk, Peters is facing felony charges in connection with an alleged scheme to breach secure voting equipment in order to show that her state’s 2020 vote was rigged.
All four Republicans ran unsuccessfully last year for secretary of state, which would have made them their state’s chief election official. Karamo won the Republican nomination, then was defeated in the general election by Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat. Brown, Moon, and Peters all lost in the GOP primaries.
Trump wins CPAC straw poll in Dallas
McLaughlin announced the results from the CPAC Texas main stage about two hours before Trump’s scheduled appearance. Among the attendees who voted, 69% said they preferred Trump, with 24% saying they would prefer Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“Defiant Kari Lake carries election denier banner across Iowa amid divided GOP”
WaPo:
For two days, Kari Lake traversed this state with a clear message. She falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. She baselessly insisted that votes were rigged against her in her run for Arizona governor last year.And she warned without evidence that future races will be compromised.
“If you lose, lose with dignity. You shake the other person’s hand and walk away,” she told a crowd of approximately 200 at a reception hall on Friday, describing advice from her father on how to gracefully accept defeat. “I didn’t lose, so I’m not doing that.”
Lake, who lost in November by more than 17,000 votes to now-Gov. Katie Hobbs (D), is waging a new campaign without conceding the last one. The former television news anchor is traveling the country as one of the most vocal standard-bearers of an animated if wounded election denialism movement as she weighs a run for U.S. Senate and hears encouragement from some to set her sights on national office.
That movement has persisted in some quarters of the Republican Party despite candidates such as Lake experiencing pivotal losses in last year’s midterms after running openly on denying the results of the 2020 election.
“Trump VP,” Lake said, speaking of the former president, who in his third run for the White House has continued to make false claims about his 2020 election defeat. “I love President Trump. I will do everything in my power to get that man elected.”
Arizona Republicans exempt lawmakers from the state’s open-records law
After Ginni Thomas’s emails and the work of the Cyber Ninjas go public, GOP legislators retreat into secrecy
States Push for New Voting Laws With an Eye Toward 2024
Republicans are focused on voter ID rules and making it harder to cast mail ballots, while Democrats are seeking to expand access through automatic voter registration.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/20/us/politics/voting-rights-laws-states.html
“New details emerge in Houston A/C repairman’s 2020 assault over Hotze voter fraud conspiracy”
More than two years after Steven Hotze bankrolled a private voter fraud investigation that led to an armed confrontation with an innocent repairman, the Houston doctor was back in court earlier this month reiterating claims that Harris County Democrats are engaged in a massive election conspiracy.
Hotze, a Republican megadonor and fierce supporter of the debunked theory that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election, faces felony charges related to the episode and separately is being sued by the repairman. His lawyers this month accused the Democrat-led District Attorney’s office of retaliating against him for exposing the election-rigging, even though no substantive evidence of such a scheme has ever emerged.
The criminal case against Hotze, who runs a lucrative health clinic in Katy and a vitamin retail business, isn’t likely to go to trial anytime soon in the county’s overburdened court system; Hotze faces charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and unlawful restraint, as does Mark Aguirre, the investigator Hotze hired.
But a Houston Chronicle examination of documents in the civil proceeding reveals new details about the bizarre October 2020 attack – one that became a nationally known example of how an election fraud theory could put an unsuspecting civilian in danger.
The documents include extensive comments from that civilian, a Mexican immigrant named David Lopez who has worked fixing air conditioning systems in Houston for more than five years. He said he continues to fear for his life ever since Aguirre allegedly crashed his SUV into his box truck and pointed a gun at him, all under the false pretense that Lopez’s truck contained hundreds of thousands of fraudulent ballots.
“I am afraid because the people who did this to me are very powerful. I have no power,” Lopez said. “I do not know why they attacked me. These people did not find what they were looking for so I am afraid they will attack me again. I don’t know what they are looking for.”
The documents also show that Hotze and his attorneys continue to insist that Lopez could have been a main perpetrator of voter fraud and that he received payments from Harris County Democratic officials. “We’ve got the goods,” Hotze said in a 2022 deposition. “It’s so complicated I can’t – I can’t comment on it right now, but we do.”
“Allen announces withdrawal from voter registration group”
Alabama’s new secretary of state announced the state’s withdrawal Tuesday from a 32-state voter registration partnership, a data-sharing effort that was designed to maintain accurate voter rolls but has sometimes become the target of conservative ire and conspiracy theories.
A day after being sworn in, Allen sent a letter to the Electronic Registration Information Center, a non-profit linking 32 states and the District of Columbia, saying the state will no longer participate in the sharing of voter registration data.
“I made a promise to the people of Alabama that ending our state’s relationship with the ERIC organization would be my first official act as Secretary of State,” Allen said in a statement. The letter said that Alabama would immediately cease transmitting data.
The Republican, who had pledged during his campaign to withdraw from ERIC, cited privacy concerns Tuesday for the decision.
“Providing the private information of Alabama citizens, including underage minors, to an out of state organization is troubling to me and to people that I heard from as I traveled the state for the last 20 months,” Allen said.
The database was created as a tool to maintain accurate voter rolls and combat fraud by allowing states to know when someone moves, dies or registers elsewhere, but has sometimes been targeted by critics.
In November, former Secretary of State John Merrill criticized Allen’s intent to withdraw. He said then that ERIC provides information that Alabama couldn’t otherwise access — such as other states’ voter registration and motorist driver’s license records — and has been a crucial tool for maintaining voting rolls.
“I trust he has evaluated this situation and is making the decision based on what he believes to be in the best interest of the state of Alabama,” Merrill said on Tuesday.
Republicans have already filed dozens of bills to restrict voting in 2023
Kira Lerner
January 17, 2023
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/17/voting-rights-republicans-texas-restrictions
Measures in Texas would raise criminal penalties and create voting-focused law enforcement unit
Republican lawmakers across the country have already filed dozens of bills that would restrict voting, including proposals in Texas that would increase criminal penalties on people who violate voting laws and enact a new law enforcement unit to prosecute election crimes.
The 2023 legislative session comes in the wake of an election that was described by many voting rights advocates as a triumph of democracy, despite the restrictive voting laws that were in place in 20 states for the first time last year.
Before this session, at least 26 states enacted, expanded or increased the severity of 120 election-related criminal penalties.
This year, Republican-controlled legislatures plan to continue pressing for laws that they say would help prevent widespread voter fraud, a problem that voting advocates say does not exist but nonetheless continues to be alleged by Donald Trump and his allies. Several pre-filed bills would further criminalize voters and election officials, a trend that has been occurring across the US in the past few years.
“We started seeing states introducing and moving and passing legislation that creates new criminal penalties or expands existing penalties for election-related crimes, in particular against election officials,” said Liz Avore, senior adviser with the Voting Rights Lab, which tracks new legislation. “A lot of these bills would criminalize good-faith errors by election officials. In other cases, they criminalize conduct that was previously legal or otherwise encouraged
In Texas, where the legislature meets every other year and convened on 10 January, lawmakers pre-filed 14 bills that would restrict voter access or election administration, according to the Voting Rights Lab. The Texas Republican party has made election security one of its legislative priorities this session.
At least five pre-filed bills in Texas would raise the penalty for illegal voting from a class A misdemeanor to a second-degree felony, punishable by up to two years in prison. The bills come after SB1, Texas’s omnibus voting law passed in 2021, decreased the penalty for illegal voting to a misdemeanor from a felony, partly in response to the arrest and conviction of Crystal Mason for illegally voting. Mason was sentenced to five years in prison despite the fact that she said she did not know that voting while she was on supervised release meant that she was violating the law.
The Texas representative Bryan Slaton, one of the Republican lawmakers to introduce a bill to raise the penalty to a felony, said he had not known that the amendment to reduce the penalty had been slipped into SB1, and he wanted to reverse the change. He said the penalty should be strict given the importance of the voting process.
“If someone is attempting to cheat or does cheat, I think that that needs to be prioritized and investigated and if it’s a misdemeanor, it has a hard time getting attention from law enforcement,” he said.
Avore said that increasing criminal penalties was “a proposal that I expect to move very quickly in 2023”.
Under pre-filed bills in both chambers, Texas would also launch an election police force similar to the one created by Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, which has so far come up short of producing convictions or any evidence of widespread voting offenses. Texas’s law enforcement unit, led by state “election marshals”, would be dedicated to prosecuting election and voting crimes.
Under the proposed legislation, the top election marshal would report to the secretary of state and would appoint election marshals to represent different regions. Election marshals who investigate a violation of Texas voting law could issue warrants and file criminal charges. They could also “impound election records and equipment”.
Other bills in Texas would expand the attorney general’s authority to prosecute election crimes. One bill would allow the attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor for criminal voting cases, and another would allow the attorney general to issue civil penalties to local prosecutors who do not investigate voting crimes. The office of the state attorney general, Ken Paxton, has in the past tried to prosecute voting crimes, but his voter fraud unit closed just 16 minor cases in 2020, according to the Houston Chronicle.
The highest criminal court in Texas put a damper on Paxton’s efforts in 2021 when it ruled that it was unconstitutional for the attorney general to unilaterally prosecute election cases, but “we’re seeing legislation now that’s testing the boundaries of that ruling,” Avore said.
Other pre-filed bills in Texas would impose an address confirmation process that could lead to voters’ registrations being canceled if they have not voted in more than two years before a general election. Another would prohibit counties from operating polling places in elementary or secondary schools, a proposal that responds to concerns about school safety but could introduce confusion as polling places are moved and fewer buildings are available for elections.
Though the majority of already-filed bills are in Texas, Republicans in a few other states are also indicating their priorities when it comes to restricting voting this session. In Virginia, a pre-filed bill would require all in-person voters to show photo ID. The state currently allows voters to show some forms of non-photo ID and to sign an affidavit in lieu of showing ID.
In South Carolina, a Republican lawmaker pre-filed a bill that would require voting systems that allow voters to hand-mark paper ballots and would require all paper ballots to be hand counted, prohibiting tabulators.
While Democratic-sponsored bills to protect voting are unlikely to pass in Texas, where the legislature is controlled by Republicans, there is at least one proposal in the state that has bipartisan support. In the past, both Democrats and Republicans have voted for legislation to allow voters to register online.
And across the country, far more bills have also been introduced to expand voting rights. As of Wednesday, Voting Rights Lab is tracking 162 bills that would improve voter access or election administration.
In Missouri, for example, a proposed bill with bipartisan support would restore voting rights to people with felony convictions upon their release from prison, allowing them to cast ballots while on parole or probation. Another Missouri bill would require that voters be notified of errors on their mail ballot envelopes and given an opportunity to correct those errors so their ballots can be counted.
Bills introduced in New York, Texas and New Jersey would all allow same-day voter registration, which is currently permitted in 22 states and Washington DC.
“Another ‘radical’ change to the Voting Rights Act could reach the Supreme Court”
Tierney Sneed for CNN:
A case that could further shrink the scope of the Voting Rights Act is before a federal appeals court Wednesday, with the appellate panel considering whether private entities – and not just the US Justice Department – can bring lawsuits under a key provision of the law.
If those seeking a narrowing of the VRA are successful, it would significantly diminish the use of the law to challenge ballot regulations and redistricting maps that are said to be racially discriminatory.
A vast majority of the cases that are brought under the Voting Rights Act – which prohibits election rules that have the intent or effect of discriminating on the basis of race – are brought by private plaintiffs, with the Justice Department facing strained resources and other considerations that limit the number of VRA cases it files to, at most, a few each year.
Last year, however, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Arkansas – running counter to decades of legal practice – said that private parties do not have the ability to sue under the relevant VRA provision, known as Section 2.
The US 8th Circuit Court of Appeals – with a three-judge panel made up of all GOP-appointees – will be considering whether to uphold that finding, setting up the potential for another Supreme Court showdown on voting rights.
“DOJ, no matter how staffed up it is, no matter how many resources they apply to this particular endeavor, is simply not going to be able to do the same amount as it could do with the partnership of private plaintiffs here,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, a top American Civil Liberties Union voting rights attorney who is arguing in favor of a private cause of action in the 8th Circuit case.
Republicans filed record number of anti-voting lawsuits in 2022 – report
Efforts challenging election results and attacking voting rights peaked last year, but courts ruled against the majority of them
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/09/republicans-anti-voting-lawsuits-2022
Last year, Republican party groups filed 23 democracy-related lawsuits, according to a new report by Democracy Docket, a progressive media platform that tracks voting litigation. The lawsuits included efforts to challenge election results, attacks on mail-in voting and attempts to undermine the administration of elections. The Democratic party, the report found, filed only six voting lawsuits in 2022 and all sought to protect or expand the right to vote.
The almost two dozen lawsuits filed by the GOP is an increase from 20 in 2020, the year of the presidential election in which Donald Trump’s loss was contested in courts for months. There were no new lawsuits by the Republican party in 2021, when there was no major election.
“Evidently, the GOP establishment is becoming more litigious than ever and is turning to courts to achieve its anti-voting and anti-democracy ends,” the report says.
As Republicans inch away from election denialism, one activist digs in
Harry Wait ordered ballots in the names of others to show voter fraud is possible. Now facing up to 13 years in prison, he is undaunted in his crusade to change Wisconsin’s voting laws.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/22/wisconsin-election-denial-activist/
“How Colorado executes its signature-match requirement for ballots disenfranchises many voters, a lawsuit claims”
From Colorado Public Radio:
Lawful votes are unconstitutionally discarded in Colorado, often because a voter’s signature doesn’t match what’s on file, according to a lawsuit filed in Denver District Court late last week.
The signature match requirement is meant to prevent voter fraud, since mail or at-home voting takes place away from a polling site. But, the lawsuit said, fraud is extremely rare, and ballot rejections disproportionately impact diverse communities, disabled people and the youngest and oldest voters.
“For the vast majority of Colorado voters who vote by mail this fundamental right is contingent on an arbitrary, deeply flawed signature matching process,” read the lawsuit. “While ostensibly deployed to verify voter identity, signature matching is election integrity theater: it disenfranchises qualified voters by the tens of thousands, all for the appearance — but not the reality — of election integrity.”
The lawsuit notes that actual voter fraud is exceedingly rare.
A similar lawsuit was filed last month in Washington. Both were filed in state court, on state law grounds (to avoid federal questions that may tee up review in the United States Supreme Court). I’ll be watching these in the months ahead.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-termination-us-constitution/
In early December 2022, former U.S. President Donald Trump continued his election denialism push and called for the termination of the Constitution, among other “rules and regulations,” in order to reinstate him to power. Trump’s controversial comments were posted on Truth Social on Dec. 3, after a report came out detailing Twitter’s deliberations leading up to its decision to suppress links to a 2020 article in the New York Post describing emails allegedly found on a laptop computer belonging to Hunter Biden, then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son.
In a post made on his verified Truth Social account, Trump wrote:
So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great “Founders” did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!
Following Trump’s statement, numerous politicians across both parties criticized him, but many Republicans continued to express loyalty towards Trump, who had announced in November that he would make another bid for the presidency in 2024. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy had not commented on Trump’s statement as of this writing.
“Attacking the Constitution and all it stands for is anathema to the soul of our nation and should be universally condemned,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said.
Republican Rep. Liz Cheney wrote on Twitter: “Donald Trump believes we should terminate ‘all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution’ to overturn the 2020 election. That was his view on 1/6 and remains his view today. No honest person can now deny that Trump is an enemy of the Constitution.”
‘Citizen Integrity’ Teams’ Efforts Could Be Groundwork for Next False Claims About Election Results
Election denier groups are using defective “research” practices to gather material that could become false claims of fraud in the midterms.
Republican Secretaries of State Walk a Minefield of Election Lies
Once viewed as neutral administrators, these state officials are under growing pressure to pick sides, dividing one of the last bastions of bipartisanship.
They Were Trying to Help Run Elections. Then They Got Criminally Investigated.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton hasn’t just been pursuing supposed voter fraud. His office has also criminally investigated at least 10 election workers, in a harbinger of potential post-midterm turmoil.
Big Donors Working to Overturn the 2020 Election Are Backing Election Denial Candidates in 2022
A handful of donors have spent over $71 million supporting federal and state candidates who cast doubt on the 2020 presidential election, including races for key election administration positions like secretary of state and governor.
They Were Trying to Help Run Elections. Then They Got Criminally Investigated.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton hasn’t just been pursuing supposed voter fraud. His office has also criminally investigated at least 10 election workers, in a harbinger of potential post-midterm turmoil.
Remarks by President Biden on Standing up for Democracy
Nov. 2, 2022
Election deniers aren’t the only threats to democracy this year
[CNN] Editor’s Note: Joshua A. Douglas is a law professor at the University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law. He is the author of “Vote for US: How to Take Back Our Elections and Change the Future of Voting.” Find him at www.joshuaadouglas.com and on Twitter @JoshuaADouglas. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion on CNN.
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.
“Stop the Steal” conspiracy theories are coming for swing state ballot boxes
Election-denying poll watchers are casting a shadow on the 2022 midterms.
Pro-Trump Republicans court election volunteers to ‘challenge any vote’
See how your votes aren’t equal
A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
How ‘Stop the Steal’ Became ‘Watch the Polls’
https://time.com/6223820/poll-watchers-stop-the-steal-2022-midterms/
Trump, Reacting to Pending Jan. 6 Subpoena, Repeats Election Lies in Letter
In a rambling, 14-page restatement of false claims and conspiracy theories, the former president did not indicate whether he would testify before the House panel investigating the Capitol riot.
Luke Broadwater and
‘Stop the steal’ supporters train thousands of U.S. poll observers
Letters from an American, Heather Scott RichardsonOct. 7, 2022The Republican Party’s shift toward authoritarianism is clear in the refusal of a majority of the party’s nominees for office this fall to agree that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Amy Gardner of the Washington Post ran the numbers and found that 299 Republican candidates for the House, Senate, and important state offices are election deniers, and that 174 of them are running in districts that are safely Republican. If Republicans win the House in November, election deniers will form a strong voting bloc that will affect the choice of the next speaker; some are already complaining that House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is too moderate. Many of those elected in states will oversee state elections.The Republican narrative that Democrats can win only by cheating began back in 1994, after the Democrats made registering to vote easier with the 1993 so-called Motor Voter Act. In 1994, losing Republican candidates complained their opponents had cheated, and congressional Republicans kept that narrative alive with congressional investigations. Over time, “voter fraud” became the way Republicans explained away the unpopularity of their ideas.
Trump’s continuing insistence that he won the 2020 election, and the Republican Party’s embrace of that lie despite the fact that Biden won by more than 7 million votes in the popular vote and by 306 to 232 in the Electoral College, says that they will never again consider the election of a Democrat legitimate.
In Arizona, where the Republican nominee for governor, Kari Lake, has said that Biden is an illegitimate president and the Republican nominee for secretary of state, Mark Finchem, has said that he would not have certified the true 2020 election results in Arizona, Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) last night at an event at Arizona State University urged Arizona voters to elect Democrats.
“If you care about democracy and you care about the survival of our republic, then you need to understand—we all have to understand—that we cannot give people power who have told us that they will not honor elections,” Cheney said.
The 3 Types of Election-Denying Republicans Running for Secretary of State
Mr. Geidner is a journalist who writes about the law and politics.
Around a dozen election-denying Republican candidates secured their party’s nomination for secretary of state this fall. This is the reality, two years on, that Donald Trump’s election lies have created.
There are three types of election-denying candidates, and each one poses distinct problems for civic integrity. There are the swing-state candidates getting lots of justified attention, running in places like Arizona and Michigan, because their elections could have pivotal, clear national implications in the 2024 presidential campaign.
There are candidates like Chuck Gray in Wyoming, who is all but certain to take office in January, as Democrats didn’t field an opponent. Election-denying candidates in very red states aren’t getting as much attention now, but they likely will come January, when they are officeholders. They will help set policies in their states — many of which will also have Republican-led legislatures and governors — where extremist ideas could become law.
And there are people like Dominic Rapini, Connecticut’s Republican secretary of state nominee, who are running in blue states and unlikely to win. Their campaigns, though, will have critical fallout effects. By virtue of their statewide platforms, even losing candidates can further damage the discourse — in their states and nationally — and increase the risks to our democracy. Election deniers in blue states can uniquely exacerbate Mr. Trump’s undermining of faith in our elections, and they, like their winning counterparts in red states, can set the stage for local election-denying candidates to win now or in the future.
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.
The Slow-Motion Coup
What has Donald Trump taken from our democracy?
Mark Danner
Oct. 6, 2022 edition
“CNN Exclusive: DHS rejects plan to protect election officials from harassment as midterms loom”
CNN:
The Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency this summer turned down a multimillion-dollar proposal to protect election officials from harassment ahead of the midterm elections, multiple people familiar with the matter told CNN.
The plan’s rejection comes as some DHS and cyber officials have expressed concern about their work to stem disinformation being cast as “partisan,” according to multiple people familiar with DHS policy discussions. Last month, DHS shut down its high-profile Disinformation Governance Board after Republicans criticized the expert chosen to lead the board as being overly partisan.
“DHS got very spooked after the failed rollout of the Disinformation Governance Board, even though the message [from administration officials] was clear that we can’t back down, we can’t be bullied by the right,” a senior US official told CNN.
The proposal, which was made by a federally funded nonprofit, also included plans to track foreign influence activity and modestly increase resources for reporting domestic mis- and disinformation related to voting.
DHS officials had legal concerns about the plan’s scope and whether it could be in place for November, the people said. But the decision not to adopt the anti-harassment part of the proposal has drawn frustration from at least two election officials as their colleagues nationwide continue to face an unprecedented wave of violent threats often inspired by online misinformation.
New Voting Restrictions Could Make It Harder for 1 in 5 Americans to Vote
Across the country, from California to Georgia, people like Olivia Coley-Pearson and Faye Combs are working through stigma and increased restrictions as they help people who struggle to read exercise their right to vote.
For all the recent focus on voting rights, little attention has been paid to one of the most sustained and brazen suppression campaigns in America: the effort to block help at the voting booth for people who struggle to read — a group that now amounts to about 48 million Americans, or more than a fifth of the adult population.
While new voting restrictions in states like Florida, Texas and Georgia do not all target voters who struggle to read, they make it especially challenging for these voters to get help casting ballots.
ProPublica analyzed the voter turnout in 3,000 counties and found that places with lower estimated literacy rates tended to also have lower turnout.
Trump backers flood election offices with requests as 2022 vote nears
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/11/trump-election-deniers-voting/
The requests for records related to the 2020 election have complicated preparations for November, which some officials say may be the point
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/11/trump-election-deniers-voting/
Republicans in key battleground races refuse to say they will accept results
Of the 19 GOP candidates questioned by The Washington Post, a dozen declined to answer or refused to commit. Democrats overwhelmingly said they would respect the results.
“Michigan Republicans Stumble in Dress Rehearsal for Overturning Future Elections”
Ever since allies of Donald Trump in Michigan failed to stall the certification of Joe Biden’s win in 2020, they have pursued a methodical purge of election officials who affirmed the results, replacing them with new canvassers who wanted to overturn the election—and who could thwart the will of voters in the future.
Conservatives put their cards on the table sooner than expected. With Trump’s possible comeback bid still two years away, Republican members of Michigan’s State Board of Canvassers last week blocked two proposed constitutional amendments regarding abortion rights and voting rights. They flouted the usually-decisive recommendation of the state’s Bureau of Elections, which had determined that both measures received more than enough signatures to appear on the November ballot.
The state Supreme Court intervened on Thursday in a pair of 5-2 decisions that will put both amendments on the Nov. 8 ballot, meaning Michiganders will decide whether to codify the right to access abortion in the state constitution and whether to expand ballot access by strengthening a slate of voting procedures like mail-in voting.
But this also marks a failure for Michigan Republicans’ trial balloon for subverting future elections, whether the 2024 presidential race or the midterms. Once again, GOP canvassers weaponized their role in the long chain of custody over election processes, and this time they stayed unified long enough to halt routine procedures. But a majority on the high court did not blink, signaling that they are willing to act as a backstop—and could again in the future.
Read More“It was dangerous for democracy when Canvassers in Michigan said they would refuse to certify the election results in 2020,” Josh Douglas, a University of Kentucky professor specialized in election law, told Bolts. “The Michigan Supreme Court’s decision on both of these initiatives show that refusing to put these issues on the ballot was the same kind of overreach.”For Leah Litman, a professor of law at the University of Michigan, the sequence of events at least establishes a precedent for how the state’s high court could intervene after the 2022 or 2024 elections if GOP canvassers similarly attempt to block results.
But that road map would only work “if the court stays the same,” she added.
Two justices on the Michigan Supreme Court are running for re-election in November—Democrat Richard Bernstein, who voted with the majority on Thursday, and Republican Brian Zahra, one of the dissenters. The GOP would flip the seven-member court if it sweeps both seats. On the one hand, that would not have been enough to change Thursday’s rulings since Republican Elizabeth Clement voted with the four Democrats. Four of the justices who voted to restore the amendments on Thursday—enough for a majority—have terms that are meant to last through the end of 2026.
Still, the two rulings were handed down almost along party lines and Clement did not write an opinion in either, leaving some uncertainty over how a higher-profile partisan confrontation over a presidential election would unfold. The next two years could also bring an unforeseen vacancy on the court, which would be filled by whomever wins November’s governor’s race between Democratic incumbent Gretchen Whitmer and Republican Tudor Dixon, who is endorsed by Trump and has falsely said the 2020 election was stolen.
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
The Election Official Who Tried to Prove “Stop the Steal”
Cameras, Plexiglass, Fireproofing: Election Officials Beef Up Security
In another bellwether area, Maricopa County, Ariz., where beleaguered election workers had to be escorted through a scrum of election deniers to reach their cars in 2020, a security fence was added to protect the perimeter of a vote tabulation center.
And in Colorado, the state’s top election official, Jena Griswold, the secretary of state and a Democrat, resorted to paying for private security out of her budget after a stream of threats.
At a right-wing group’s gathering in Colorado earlier this year, she said, a prominent election denier with militia ties suggested that she should be killed. That was when she concluded that her part-time security detail provided by the Colorado State Patrol wasn’t enough.
“They called for me to be hung,” said Ms. Griswold, who is running for re-election. “It’s a long weekend. I’m home alone, and I only get seven hours of State Patrol coverage.”
Even in places where there was never a shadow of a doubt about the political leanings of the electorate, election officials have found themselves under threat. In a Texas county that President Donald J. Trump won by 59 percentage points in 2020, all three election officials recently resigned, with at least one citing repeated death threats and stalking.
One in five local election officials who responded to a survey earlier this year by the Brennan Center for Justice said that they were “very” or “somewhat unlikely” to continue serving through 2024.
The collective angst is a recurring theme at workshops and conferences attended by election officials, who say it is not unusual for them to exchange anecdotes about threatening messages or harassment at the grocery store. The discussions have turned at times to testing drop boxes — a focus of right-wing attacks on mail-in voting — to see if they can withstand being set on fire.
Benjamin Hovland, a member of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, described the intimidation campaign as pervasive.
“This isn’t a red-state issue or a blue-state issue,” Mr. Hovland said in a recent interview. “This is a national issue, where the professional public servants that run our elections have been subjected to an unprecedented level of threats, harassment and intimidating behavior.”
In guidance issued in June, the Election Assistance Commission allowed for federal election grants to be used for physical security services and to monitor threats on social media.
In Wisconsin’s Dane County, which includes Madison, partisan poll watchers and a brigade of lawyers with the Trump campaign descended in 2020 to dispute the election results. County officials recently budgeted $95,000 to start designing a new and more secure election center.
The move came after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security conducted a risk assessment in April on the current election offices for the county and city, which are housed in the same building.
“It’s kind of a sieve,” Scott McDonell, a Democrat and the county’s clerk for the past decade, said in an interview.
But with a new center likely to be a long way from fruition, more immediate steps were taken. In the past six months, security cameras and plexiglass were installed, according to Mr. McDonell, 53.
But those measures are just a “stopgap,” Mr. McDonell said, recalling the April episode when a masked man tried to enter several restricted areas during local elections.
“He’s all in camo, shaking on doors, trying to get into spaces and filming everything,” Mr. McDonell said. “That would never happen in a properly secured, laid-out building that was designed for elections.”
The emphasis on security has extended to the municipal level, with Dane County training local clerks for the first time last month on de-escalation techniques and how to respond to an active shooter, Mr. McDonell said.
Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, which includes Phoenix, was a nexus of efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The security fence erected around the county’s tabulation and elections center last year is 10 feet tall. Its purpose: to prevent a repeat of November 2020, when election workers were surrounded by a crowd of Trump loyalists, some of them armed, as the workers tried to get to their cars.
The security buildup didn’t end there. The county added new security cameras, including 23 with livestreaming capability, installed glass walls around a computer server and hired private security patrols to augment its own guards, said Scott Jarrett, the nonpartisan co-director of the county’s elections department.
A layer of protective film was also applied to all of the building’s windows to make them harder to break and to obscure employees’ faces, especially at night.
“Even someone with a hammer who was banging against it, I think the manufacturer said that someone could be doing that for a consistent five minutes, and it’s not going to break,” Mr. Jarrett said.
The county even built a vault with a fire-suppression system to hold ballots, according to Mr. Jarrett.
“There’s not an election official probably in the country right now who doesn’t have some concerns,” he said of the stressful working conditions for election workers. “Democracy, I think, is coming under assault.”
Michigan’s top election official, Jocelyn Benson, 44, who is a Democrat, has a security detail from the state when she needs it. In an interview, she described a time in December 2020 when a group gathered outside her Detroit home to call for her to overturn the victory of Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Michigan. Some of them were armed.
“I was about to put my son to bed, and dozens of individuals descended on our home,” Ms. Benson said. A neighborhood security guard initially was the only one separating the home from the crowd, which shouted obscenities that she said woke up her neighbors.
“It was a very haunting moment,” said Ms. Benson, who was interviewed about the confrontation as part of the congressional inquiry into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. “What it has created is an omnipresent feeling of anxiety and dread that permeates our daily lives.”
Michigan received $8 million in federal election funds that Ms. Benson said local election officials could spend on physical security and efforts to tamp down misinformation.Still, in testimony last month before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Ms. Benson urged the federal government to set aside more money for security.
“To protect democracy, we must protect election officials,” Ms. Benson, who is running for re-election, said on Thursday.
In Colorado, Mr. Trump’s allies have frequently tussled over election oversight with Ms. Griswold, who said that her office had compiled a 60-page PDF detailing the hundreds of threats that she had received.
On two occasions, the threats have led to criminal charges: one man was arrested in July over a threatening phone call, and in June, a Nebraska man pleaded guilty to threatening Ms. Griswold on Instagram. It was the first conviction resulting from the work of a Justice Department task force focused on the intimidation of election officials.
Ms. Griswold drew a comparison between those making violent threats toward election officials and the people who took part in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.“We have to take threats of violence seriously,” Ms. Griswold said. “We have to dis-incentivize it.”
Election deniers repeatedly visited Ga. county office at center of criminal probe, video shows
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/09/06/coffee-county-georgia-breach-logan/
US election conspiracies find fertile ground in conferences
Biden warns U.S. faces powerful threat from anti-democratic forces
Biden, in prime-time address, says Trump and “MAGA Republicans” are mounting a dangerous attack on the country’s values, and Americans must fight back
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/01/biden-democracy-republican-extremists-trump
“Response to Trump Search Highlights Violent Rhetoric From the Right”
One week after a team of F.B.I. agents descended on his private club and residence in Florida, former President Donald J. Trump warned that his followers were enraged by the search — and that things could get out of hand if the Justice Department kept the heat on him.
“People are so angry at what is taking place,” Mr. Trump told Fox News. “Whatever we can do to help because the temperature has to be brought down in the country. If it isn’t, terrible things are going to happen.”
This week, one of Mr. Trump’s closest allies, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, issued a similar warning that Mr. Trump quickly reposted on his social media platform. Mr. Graham, in a Fox News appearance on Sunday, predicted that if the search of Mar-a-Lago led to a prosecution of the former president, there would be “riots in the streets.”
The assessments by both men were worded carefully enough that they could be defended as efforts to spare the nation unnecessary strife, and on Monday, Mr. Graham tried to walk back his remarks, saying, “I reject violence.”
But the statements could also be perceived as fanning the same flames of outrage they claimed to be trying to avert. They carried a distinct echo of Mr. Trump’s calls after the 2020 election to do what was needed to keep him in office, signals that contributed to the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol soon after he urged his supporters to “fight like hell.”
In a broader sense, the F.B.I.’s search of Mar-a-Lago has emerged as the latest rallying cry for those on the right who have long been suspicious that the powers of the federal government could be turned against them. It has prompted calls to dismantle or defund the F.B.I. and furious denunciations of what far-right supporters of Mr. Trump increasingly portray as an overreaching national security apparatus.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump spent much of the morning reposting messages from known purveyors of the QAnon conspiracy theory and from 4chan, an anonymous message platform where threats of violence often blossom. Some were outright provocations, such as a photograph of President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker Nancy Pelosi with their faces obscured by the words, “Your enemy is not in Russia.”
Over the past several years, intimations of violence have become more common in the Republican Party, a trend fueled in large part by Mr. Trump’s lies about his election loss. Threats of violent responses from the right have also shown up around policy changes such as the recent gun legislation signed into law by Mr. Biden and surrounding hot-button social issues like transgender rights and the teaching of antiracism themes in schools.
Now the response by Mr. Trump and some of his allies to the search at Mar-a-Lago — including statements laced with fury at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. — is underscoring yet again the degree to which threatening undertones are creeping into Republican political speech, raising concern about words spilling over into violent action.
“Trump shares barrage of QAnon content and other conspiracy theories on his social media platform”
Former President Donald Trump spent Tuesday morning posting inflammatory messages on social media, including many explicitly promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory.
While Trump has in the past promoted QAnon-inspired accounts and theories, the posts on his Truth Social account were his most explicit, unobscured, QAnon-promoting and QAnon-baiting posts to date.
In one, he reposted the QAnon slogan — “Where We Go One We Go All.” In another, he re-posted a 2017 message from “Q” that’s critical of the intelligence community. The QAnon conspiracy theory was built around Q, an anonymous account that posts periodically on 8kun, often with vague or symbolic language that is then interpreted by followers. The account claims to document a secret battle being waged by Trump against the Democratic Party, which followers of the theory contend is run by satanic, child-eating cannibals who run a pedophile ring filled with celebrities and political elites who have been covertly running the United States government for decades. None of the posts’ concrete predictions have come to fruition.
Users of QAnon forums rejoiced at Trump’s apparent endorsement of the conspiracy theory and its mythology. The top response on the most visited QAnon forum to one of Trump’s posts about the conspiracy theory read simply, “Wipe them out sir.” Others pleaded with Trump to “nuke them from orbit” and to “sir, please finish them off,” referring to QAnon enemies such as Hillary Clinton and President Joe Biden.
In addition to the QAnon-adjacent posts, Trump shared several conspiracy theories Tuesday on his Truth Social site and he re-posted a picture of Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with the words “Your enemy is not in Russia” written in black bars over their eyes.
The posting spree comes one day after Trump posted a message that he should be reinstated as president — “Declare the rightful winner, or hold a new Election, NOW!” — and as he’s come under increased scrutiny from federal investigators who executed a search warrant at his Florida resort earlier this month and recovered troves of classified documents.
Trump Acted as Though the Military Swore an Oath to Him Personally
https://www.thebulwark.com/trump-acted-as-though-the-military-swore-an-oath-to-him-personally
How Team Trump Breached the Election System
https://www.thebulwark.com/how-team-trump-breached-the-election-system
Election officials brace for onslaught of poll watchers
Surge in observers during the primary, along with tensions and disruptions, leads to NC rule tightening.
North Carolina’s May primary was “one of the worst elections I’ve ever worked,” said Karen Hebb, the elections director in Henderson County. “It was worse than COVID.”
In addition to long conversations with skeptical voters bringing her misinformation they read on the Internet, Hebb said she and her staff were blindsided by the sheer number of election observers who wanted to watch voting during the primary. There were at least 20 from the Republican Party alone, she said, compared with five or six observers total in the past. “We’ve never had that before,” she said.
Hebb stresses she’s fine with having observers. But some of the people watching the primary were disruptive, endlessly questioning workers and demanding to approach tabulators to verify totals, she reported to state officials in a post-election survey. Become a Votebeat sponsor
And in one alarming case, Hebb said in an interview with Votebeat, an observer followed an election worker from a voting site to the elections office “to make sure that they actually brought the ballots.”
In the wake of the primary, Hebb is one of many local election officials nationwide worried about an onslaught of election observers. She called a special meeting with election workers to discuss the issues that came up during the primary. …
For its part, the North Carolina State Board of Elections last week unanimously approved the temporary changes to the rules governing election observers. The changes were an attempt to clean up existing rules that the state board’s associate general counsel, Paul Cox, described as “not models of clarity.” The state’s Rules Review commission must still approve the changes. Become a Votebeat sponsorhttps://c9fd74df8a7908a89d77c6f35c957354.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
The new rules more clearly spell out where observers are permitted to be. For example, the new rules specify that observers cannot be “so close to a tabulator, laptop, pollbook[,] or other official [voting] document” that they are able to view confidential voter information. They may not use doors restricted to election workers only, unless authorized by the polling place judge, but do not have to stand in line with voters to enter.
Multiple people spoke at public hearings in July and August about the proposed changes to the relatively obscure rules. Among them: Cleta Mitchell, a conservative election attorney who featured in Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and has been spearheading conservative efforts to train election observers. Mitchell, who said she now resides in Pinehurst, NC, a nationally renowned golf destination, said the state board was improperly using the temporary rulemaking process “for the purpose of curbing the enthusiastic interest that many citizens of North Carolina have expressed in making sure that the elections conducted in our state are transparent and that they are following the law.”
The state board, which has three Democratic members and two Republicans, also received hundreds of public comments about the proposed changes, a sign of just how charged the issue of election observers is right now.
“At this time of increasing incivility and openly egregious attacks on our democracy and voting rights, it is more important than ever to establish some ground rules and expectations for a safe, secure, and non-threatening electoral process.” one email in favor read.
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.
MIDTERM ELECTIONS 2022
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]
“DeSantis announces arrests in Florida for voting fraud”
Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the arrests of 20 people across Florida — spanning five counties, including Miami-Dade and Broward — on charges of voting illegally, the conclusion of a two-month investigation spearheaded by the governor’s newly-created state agency tasked with investigating election crimes.
DeSantis, in making the announcement Thursday afternoon in a courtroom at the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, said there would be other arrests for people who cast ballots but were not eligible to vote in Florida for other reasons, including voters he said were non-citizens.
“If there are certain rules and regulations in place, if people don’t think that those are going to be enforced, you’re going to have more violations,’‘ he said. “That’s just the way it goes.”
Florida Department of Law Enforcement Acting Commissioner Mark Glass said that officers from FDLE made arrests Thursday in the Tampa, Orlando and Miami areas. FDLE spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger told the Herald that 17 people have been arrested so far: two in Miami-Dade, three in Broward, three in Palm Beach, four in Orange and five in Hillsborough. The suspects span ages 43 to 72. There was no immediate explanation for the discrepancy between the number of arrests DeSantis cited and the number of arrests provided by FDLE.
Plessinger did not provide the arrest affidavits for each person but said they were each being charged with one count of false affirmation in relation to voting or elections and one count of voting as an unqualified elector. She said they all voted in the 2020 election but did not provide the dates the alleged crimes were committed. DeSantis said the people arrested were disqualified from voting because they had been convicted of either murder or sexual assault and they do not have the right to vote. He said their rights were not automatically restored under Amendment 4, which excluded people that have been convicted of sexual assault and homicide from having their rights automatically restored.
The Guardian:
The governor released few other details about the charges, and indictments and warrants weren’t immediately available. That lack of detail is significant. The rules around voting with a felony are incredibly complex around the country, Florida included, and many people with felonies can be confused about their eligibility. There have been several examples, including in Florida, of illegal voting cases involving people who had been convicted of felonies that turn out to be people who were confused. People with felonies can make easy targets for prosecutors looking to make a voter fraud case since they are already being monitored.
GOP Candidate Backed by Party Leadership Said Merrick Garland Should ‘Probably Be Executed’
“Rightwing sheriffs’ groups ramp up drives to monitor US midterm elections”
Two groups of rightwing sheriffs that echo some of Donald Trump’s false claims about widespread voting fraud in 2020 are ramping up drives to monitor this year’s elections for potential voting and election fraud.
The two Arizona-led groups together boast over 350 sheriffs as members nationwide, and have forged various ties with Texas-based True the Vote, which has a history of making unverified claims of voting fraud, spurring watchdogs and law enforcement veterans to voice alarms of looming threats to voting rights and election workers.
The burgeoning sheriffs’ drive to investigate so-called voting fraud was evident at a secretive Arizona meeting on 13 August that drew a crowd of some 200 allies, including former sheriff Richard Mack and current sheriff Mark Lamb, who each lead sheriffs’ groups. The True the Vote chief, Catherine Engelbrecht, arranged the event, Mack told the Guardian.
The gathering lasted about seven and a half hours and featured talks by Engelbrecht and Lamb, the sheriff of Pinal county, Arizona, who teamed up in June to create ProtectAmerica.Vote. to promote a larger role for sheriffs in election monitoring, said Mack.
“I totally support what they’re doing,” said Mack, who leads the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which has thousands of members around the country, including hundreds of sheriffs.
The event, to which Mack invited several of his staff and two former law enforcement officials, provided “more evidence of quite extensive election fraud”, said Mack. “There’s no way anyone in this country should be trusting computers to tabulate votes.” The meeting, which was covered live by the conservative Right Side Broadcasting Network, was held at a venue “ that was very surreptitious”, added Mack, former sheriff of Graham county, Arizona.
|
Big Tech braces for “big lie” in 2022 midterms |
| By Sara Fischer, author of Axios Media Trends |
| https://www.axios.com/2022/08/18/tech-big-lie-2022-midterms-misinformation |
| The FBI’s raid of former President Trump’s home in Mar-A-Lago has set off another wave of online rage among his supporters, putting tech giants on high alert for new efforts to undermine the legitimacy of U.S. elections, Axios’ Sara Fischer reports.
Why it matters: Tech companies were caught flat-footed by the deluge of disinformation aimed at delegitimizing the election process and outcome in 2020. Now, amid intense regulatory scrutiny, they are trying to get ahead of a repeat. Details: Several Big Tech firms debuted new midterm-election policies in the past week, designed to give political campaigns time to adapt to the changes as campaigns ramp up. TikTok on Wednesday doubled down on its ban on paid political ads, including paid influencer content.
Meta on Tuesday vowed to remove any misinformation about voting and said it will reject ads encouraging people not to vote or calling into question the legitimacy of the election.
Twitter last week said it would beginning enforcing its civic integrity policy, which bans the most common types of misinformation about elections and civic events.
Yes, but: The media landscape has become so fragmented in recent years that even the most careful defensive tactics by the most popular social media firms won’t be able to halt the spread of election misinformation — including the “big lie” that Trump won in 2020, a claim supported by no credible evidence.
The big picture: The shift in election misinformation online from mostly Russian, state-backed campaigns in 2016 to more domestic, fringe networks now presents social media firms with a difficult free speech challenge.
What to watch: More companies are putting resources towards combatting election and voting misinformation in languages other than English, following revelations over the past year of election misinformation campaigns targeting Spanish-language voters.
Go deeper: How the “big lie” spread |
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
The New Era of Political Violence Is Here
The danger is not organized civil war but individual Americans with deep resentments and delusions.
August 15, 2022
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/08/the-new-era-of-political-violence-is-here
[Excerpt:]There is no single principle that unites these Americans in their violence against their fellow citizens. They will tell you that they are for “liberty” and “freedom,” but these are merely code words for personal grudges, racial and class resentments, and a generalized paranoia that dark forces are manipulating their lives. These are not people who are going to take up the flag of a state or of a deeper cause; they have already taken up the flag of a failed president, and their causes are a farrago of conspiracy theories and pulpy science-fiction plots.
What makes this situation worse is that there is no remedy for it. When people are driven by fantasies, by resentment, by an internalized sense of inferiority, there is no redemption in anything. Winning elections, burning effigies, even shooting at other citizens does not soothe their anger but instead deepens the spiritual and moral void that haunts them.
“Doug Mastriano Plans to Use His Secretary of State Pick to Disrupt Pennsylvania Elections”
Doug Mastriano is a Donald Trump loyalist, and an ardent proponent of the former president’s baseless conspiracies about the 2020 election. He was outside the capitol on Jan. 6th, brought supporters to D.C. that day, and has been subpoenaed by the congressional committee investigating the riots. Now, Mastriano is also the GOP nominee in Pennsylvania’s governor’s race in November. His victory would hand over control of a large swing state to a hard right election denier in the lead-up to the next presidential race.
“He has revealed the Deceit, Corruption, and outright Theft of the 2020 Presidential Election, and will do something about it,” Trump said of Mastriano when he endorsed him in May.
A centerpiece of Mastriano’s promise to revamp the state’s election system is to flex the governor’s authority to choose Pennsylvania’s secretary of state.
“As governor, I get to appoint the secretary of state. And I have a voting reform-minded individual who’s been traveling the nation and knows voting reform extremely well,” Mastriano told Steve Bannon, former chief strategist for Trump, in an April interview. “That individual has agreed to be my secretary of state.”
Read MoreMastriano rarely talks to the news media and mostly conducts interviews in far right venues, where his narrative about the 2020 election will not be questioned. As such, he has not publicly named the person he would name for secretary of state, though reporting from HuffPost and the Philadelphia Inquirer revealed some possible contenders among his like-minded allies. Mastriano’s campaign did not respond to an interview request for this article.
He has made it clear he would use many of the levers at his disposal to change rules he portrays as rife with corruption. “I saw better elections in Afghanistan than in Pennsylvania,” Mastriano, who spent much of his career in the U.S. Army, said during his campaign. He could work with the legislature, for instance, to pass new voting restrictions like rolling back mail-in voting or adopting harsh voter ID laws, measures he has promoted in the past. He has also proposed forcing voters to re-register and has said he could decertify all election machines in the state.
The ability to reshape the secretary of state position gives him more options than he might have in a state where the position is an elected office.
Herrera Beutler’s loss underscores risk to GOP of crossing Trump
Michigan Officials Detail a Brazen Voting Machine Scheme by Trump Supporters
Revelations of possible meddling have set off a political tsunami in a critical battleground state, as the attorney general seeks an independent inquiry into her likely rival on the ballot this fall.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/08/us/politics/matthew-deperno-dana-nessel-michigan
DeSantis stokes culture wars as 2024 profile grows
A Harvard CAPS-Harris poll released this week found that, without Trump on the ballot, DeSantis would lead his closest rival, former Vice President Mike Pence, by a 15-point margin.
“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 . . . .”
State Legislatures Are Torching Democracy
Letters from an American, Heather Scott Richardson
August 3, 2022
The January 6 insurrection relied on the Big Lie that Donald Trump had won the 2020 election, a lie that has dramatically destabilized our country. Republicans have only deepened their commitment to that lie since January 6. After yesterday’s Republican primaries, in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, all key states for 2024, election deniers have clinched the Republican nomination for secretary of state—the person in charge of elections—or the governor who would appoint that officer.
In Arizona, Republican candidate for governor Kari Lake claimed there was fraud in her election, without evidence and even before the votes had been counted. “I’m gonna go supernova radioactive,” she told supporters. “We’re not gonna let them steal an election.” (Lake’s election is still unresolved as ballots are being counted.)
The mini-Trumps are as big a threat to democracy as Trump is
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/02/gop-anti-democracy-movement/
The ‘Stop the Steal’ Zealots Gaining Ground in This GOP Primary
Candidates in this GOP primary seem to be having a lot of success by messaging on a stolen election.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-stop-the-steal-zealots-flexing-hard-in-this-gop-michigan-primary
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.”
Trump Just Told Us His Master Plan
If he gets in next time, he won’t be dislodged by any means.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/trumps-america-first-speech-revealed-a-plan-for-power/670963/[Excerpt:]
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 effort by Trump advisers and January 6 supporters is an extraordinary investment in sustaining and bolstering the false narrative of widespread voter fraud.
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.
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.
“It’s striking how many people who played these key roles in efforts to overturn the election are now involved with CPI,” said Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance legal expert and deputy executive director of the watchdog group Documented. His group has examined at least 11 organizations claiming CPI’s address, 300 Independence Ave., as their home.
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 andholds meetings at the brownstone. The Senate Conservatives Fund also calls the building home. Thegroup 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 promotedvote 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]
Disinformation Has Become Another Untouchable Problem in Washington
Numerous federal agencies agree that widely promoted falsehoods threaten the nation’s security. Doing something about them is another matter.
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.
Elections investigation focuses on alleged breach in South Georgia
The following story is (behind a paywall) at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
Subpoenas sent this month are seeking evidence of whether election conspiracy theorists gained unauthorized access to Georgia voting equipment and copied sensitive files in Coffee County after the 2020 election.
The Strange Tale of Tina Peters
The county clerk has been consumed by election conspiracy theories, lionized by a movement and indicted in a bizarre scheme. Will Republicans nominate her to run elections in Colorado?
Nick Corasaniti and
This article is part of our Midterms 2022 Daily Briefing
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/26/us/politics/tina-peters-election-conspiracy-theories
“Man Pleads Guilty to Threatening Election Official”
A Nebraska man pleaded guilty today to making multiple threatening posts on an Instagram page associated with an election official.
According to court documents, Travis Ford, 42, of Lincoln, made multiple threats in August 2021 toward the election official, specifically: “Do you feel safe? You shouldn’t. Do you think Soros will/can protect you?” and “Your security detail is far too thin and incompetent to protect you. This world is unpredictable these days….anything can happen to anyone.”
“The Justice Department will not tolerate illegal threats of violence against public officials,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “Threats of violence against election officials are dangerous for people’s safety and dangerous for our democracy, and we will use every resource at our disposal to disrupt and investigate those threats and hold perpetrators accountable.”
“Threatening violence against election workers in an attempt to intimidate them while in performance of their duties will not be tolerated,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray. “Threats to election workers have no place in our society, and today’s plea demonstrates the success of our collaborative efforts to ensure the safety of the workers we entrust to effectuate the democratic process.”
“Far-Right Republicans Press Closer to Power Over Future Elections”
Following yesterday’s Washington Post piece along the same lines, the New York Times has an analysis of the extent to which election denialists have won GOP primaries. Jim Marchant’s apparent victory in yesterday’s Republican primary for Nevada’s Secretary of State (called by AP with 80% of the votes counted) is the new leading example.
The Times has further analysis on yesterday’s primaries with this headline: “G.O.P. primary victories in Nevada set the stage for Trump-centered battles in the fall.” A couple of quotes:
“The South Carolina contests had their own dynamics — Mr. Rice was defiant and contemptuous of Mr. Trump to the end, while Ms. Mace tried hard to regain the good graces of Trump administration officials if not Mr. Trump himself. The outcomes of both races could hold deep meaning to the party as it considers whether to renominate the former president for another White House run.”
“But it was Mr. Marchant, a former state assemblyman, who worries many Democrats the most. … As it has been in the past several elections, Nevada promises to be a battleground in the 2024 presidential campaign, and the person running the election will either be Mr. Marchant or Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat and former aide to the late Senate majority leader Harry Reid.”
Also, these 5 takeaways. And Politico has its own 5 takeaways.
Political Playbook PM
By Eli Okun
June 14, 2022
TRACKING THE ‘BIG LIE’ — Across more than 170 GOP primaries for statewide or federal office so far, a whopping 108 victors have campaigned on repeating Trump’s lies about 2020 and election fraud, WaPo’s Amy Gardner and Isaac Arnsdorf tally. Dozens more have emphasized voting restrictions. The lie is now a central animating force of the Republican Party. The stakes: “Many will hold positions with the power to interfere in the outcomes of future contests — to block the certification of election results, to change the rules around the awarding of their states’ electoral votes or to acquiesce to litigation attempting to set aside the popular vote.”
DHS bulletin warns US could see more volatile threats fueled by election misinformation and upcoming Supreme Court abortion ruling
In Races to Run Elections, Candidates Are Backed by Key 2020 Deniers
The origin story behind a slate of Republican candidates for secretary of state features a QAnon figure and several promoters of 2020 conspiracies.
Key figures in the effort to subvert the 2020 presidential election have thrown their weight behind a slate of Republican candidates for secretary of state across the country, injecting specious theories about voting machines, foreign hacking and voter fraud into campaigns that will determine who controls elections in several battleground states.
The America First slate comprises more than a dozen candidates who falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen from Donald J. Trump. It grew out of meetings held by a conspiracy-mongering QAnon leader and a Nevada politician, and has quietly gained support from influential people in the election denier movement — including Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder, and Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com executive who has financed public forums that promote the candidates and theories about election vulnerabilities.
Members of the slate have won party endorsements or are competitive candidates for the Republican nomination in several states, including three — Michigan, Arizona and Nevada — where a relatively small number of ballots have decided presidential victories. And in Pennsylvania, where the governor appoints the secretary of state, State Senator Doug Mastriano, who is aligned with the group, easily won his primary for governor last month.
Election deniers seek election jobs
From poll workers up to statewide candidates, people who believe the 2020 election was stolen want a role in the election process.
June 3, 2022
https://arizonaagenda.substack.com/
‘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. The focus will be on unfounded rumors and lies about voting and election fraud. Connecticut “plans to spend nearly $2 million on marketing to share factual information about voting, and to create its first-ever position for an expert in combating misinformation” whose job will be to “to comb fringe sites like 4chan, far-right social networks like Gettr and Rumble and mainstream social media sites to root out early misinformation narratives about voting before they go viral, and then urge the companies to remove or flag the posts that contain false information.” Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, and Oregon are working on similar initiatives.
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
- Kandiss Taylor received just 3.4% of the vote in the GOP’s primary for Georgia governor.
- She came third, losing to incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp by more than 70 points.
- Despite her poor showing, Taylor is refusing to concede defeat and claims the election was rigged.
“Canadian intelligence experts are worried about the polarized, unpredictable US”
From Quartz:
A new report by Canadian national intelligence experts says that country faces new threats from a once unlikely source: the United States.
The paper, published by a task force that includes two former directors of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (Canada’s counterpart to the CIA), former national security advisors to Canada’s prime minister, academics, and other ex-diplomats and ministers, raises concerns about the effects of polarization and a “less predictable partner” in the US….
But a section about the threat to democracy from domestic sources in Canada looks specifically at the US influence on that growing problem, such as during the month-long truck convoy protest in Ottawa earlier this year, and related blockades of the US-Canada border. The convoys were “a disturbing taste of the harm a small group of determined protestors could inflict on people and the economy,” the authors write.
During the protests, which were sparked as a response to pandemic restrictions but became a general anti-government display, some supporters reportedly called for an attacklike that seen at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. About half of the international funding raised for the protests came from the US, and Americans both crossed the border to join the protest and help jam Ottawa’s 911 lines, according to Politico.
It “quickly became apparent that there were ties between far-right extremists in Canada and the United States,” the new report says, specifically naming open support for the convoy from “conservative media, including Fox News,” as part of the problem.
The authors also urge Canada’s national security agencies to contend with far-right groups at home that have built ties with like-minded political groups in the US. “Whether anti-government, antisemitic, Islamophobic, anti-Asian, or misogynistic in nature, these groups reflect global trends that must be addressed at their roots,” the report says.
Thomas Juneau, co-director of the task force and associate professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, which spearheaded the report, reiterated some of the same points in an interview with CBC news, saying that there are “serious risks of democratic backsliding in the U.S.” that are “not theoretical” and could make Canada’s democratic institutions less secure.
Midterm Stakes Grow Clearer: Election Deniers Will Be on Many Ballots
Republican voters in this week’s primary races demonstrated a willingness to nominate candidates who parrot Donald J. Trump’s election lies and who appear intent on exerting extraordinary political control over voting systems. The results make clear that the November midterms may well affect the fate of free and fair elections in the country.
In Pennsylvania, Republican voters united behind a nominee for governor, Doug Mastriano, who helped lead the brazen effort to overturn the state’s 2020 election and chartered buses to the rally before the Capitol riot, and who has since promoted a constitutionally impossible effort to decertify President Biden’s victory in his state.
In North Carolina, voters chose a G.O.P. Senate nominee, Representative Ted Budd, who voted in Congress against certifying the 2020 results and who continues to refuse to say that Mr. Biden was legitimately elected.
And in Idaho, which Mr. Trump won overwhelmingly in 2020, 57 percent of voters backed two Republican candidates for secretary of state who pushed election falsehoods, though they lost a three-way race to a rival who accepts Mr. Biden as president.
The strong showings on Tuesday by election deniers, who have counterparts running competitively in primaries across the country over the coming months, were an early signal of the threat posed by the Trump-inspired movement.
“It’s a big problem,” said former Representative Charlie Dent, a Pennsylvania Republican, who added that the G.O.P. needs “to show an alternative vision for the party. I don’t think we’re seeing enough of that right now.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-loyalist-kandiss-taylor-georgia-primary-vote-wont-concede-2022-5?r=US&IR=T
The Time to Prevent the Next Coup Attempt Is Now
Trump’s Former Aides and Advisers on the Peril He Poses
Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper agreed with an interviewer that President Trump posed “a threat to democracy.” Other former administration officials have expressed similar concerns.
In his new book “A Sacred Oath,” released earlier this week, Mark T. Esper, the former defense secretary, revealed that President Donald J. Trump in 2020 had floated the idea of launching missiles into Mexico to “destroy the drug labs” and asked why the military could not “just shoot” racial justice protesters in Washington in the legs.
Mr. Esper also described his concerns that Mr. Trump might misuse the military during the 2020 election, for example by asking soldiers to seize ballot boxes. [Boldface added]
On Monday, when a Fox News host asked if he thought President Trump “was a threat to democracy,” Mr. Esper was blunt.
“I think that given the events of Jan. 6, given how he has undermined the election results, he incited people to come to D.C., stirred them up that morning and failed to call them off, to me that threatens our democracy,” he said.
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.”
“Jail is the new threat facing election workers”
“GOP donor described botched vote fraud probe in recording, prosecutors say”
Score One For ItalyGate: Kansas To Investigate Trump 2020 Win
In March, the Kansas legislature’s Committee on Federal and State Affairs heard a wild tale: the 2020 election was compromised, and Italy was responsible.
It was a massive, elaborate heist, carried out by satellites that zapped voting machines across the country, part of an intricate conspiracy in which none other than Barack Obama had ferried pallets of cash to the Italian Prime Minister via Dubai in an effort to secure Biden’s 2020 victory.
Maria Zack, a GOP activist who had pushed the “ItalyGate” conspiracy theory to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in the days after the 2020 election, delivered the March 15 presentation, imploring legislators to take her seriously and investigate the state’s own 2020 federal election.
Apparently, a number of them they did.
It’s a story that has unfolded repeatedly since November 2020: a conservative election truther urges a state legislature to recount (and recount, and recount) its 2020 ballots to expose the fraud that they contend put Biden in the White House.
But Kansas is a little different than the many states that have earned Trump-inspired audits, however: In Kansas, Trump won.
Kansas is the “‘first Trump elector state’ to conduct an audit of the 2020 election,” Zack’s group, Nations in Action, said in an April statement, thanking State Sen. Dennis Pyle (R) for his “stealth actions keeping everything quiet to bypass the swamp and win the day.”
Zack, along with her nonprofit Nations in Action, played a key role after the 2020 election in boosting the ItalyGate theory, TPM reported last year. Hans von Spakovsky, a prominent voter fraud alarmist, had been on the Nations in Actions’ board, but removed himself after Jan. 6. [Note: von Spakovsky, Heritage Foundation’s voter fraud advocate].
The process by which Zack appears to have gotten Kansas to audit Trump’s 2020 victory mirrors that which has consumed the effort to subvert the 2020 election from the start: wild accusations given an official imprimatur, leading to an unclear result other than elections themselves being discredited.
Zack recounted to the Kansas senators the details of the conspiracy theory, which holds that CIA agents at the U.S. Embassy in Rome allegedly directed an Italian defense contractor named Leonardo to use satellite transmissions to zap millions of Trump votes into Biden ones, thereby snatching victory away from Trump.
Leading Trump officials seized on the theory in the weeks before the insurrection. Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows received texts from Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) about it, and shared a YouTube video with acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donohue that outlined the allegations.
“Pure insanity,” Donohue wrote in a message forwarding Meadows’ email to acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen.
With no evidence, Rebecca Kleefisch, Wisconsin candidate for governor, says 2020 election was ‘rigged’
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. Read More 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.
U.S. judges are narrowing voting protections. Some fear lasting damage
February 25, 2022
[Excerpts:]The nation’s premier tool to protect voting rights is in mortal danger, threatened on multiple fronts by the Supreme Court and lower-ranking federal judges, scholars and civil rights advocates say.
The latest blow to the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 came this week in Arkansas, where a federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump dismissed a case over new statehouse maps. The NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union argued that the maps diluted the power of Black voters. But the judge said he found no way for the outside advocates to proceed.
“Only the Attorney General of the United States can bring a case like this one,” wrote Judge Lee Rudofsky.
The ACLU said the decision flouts decades of precedent and vowed to appeal.
“We Asked All 143 Texas GOP Congressional Candidates About Biden’s Win. Only 13 Called It Legitimate”
The Houston Chronicle reports.
Rudy Giuliani, oversaw fake electors plot in 7 states
December 4, 2021
Still, while there is increasing focus on the attempt to overturn the 2020 election and keep former president Trump in power, there has been little discussion of what the destabilization of our democracy means for the economy. This is no small thing, because since the late nineteenth century, it has been the stability of our nation that has attracted investment. That investment, in turn, has built our economy.
An October 27 article by Courtney Fingar, Ben van der Merwe, and Sebastian Shehadi in Investment Monitor warns that “efforts to undermine the integrity of US elections carry a heavy cost for businesses and could weaken investment in the country.”
Read More The authors put a price tag on U.S. political strife. Drawing on a study by Texas-based economic analysts The Perryman Group, they estimate that Texas’s voter suppression measures will cost the state $14.7 billion in annual gross product by 2025 and $1.5 trillion over the next 25 years. The Perryman Group’s study itself warned that Texas would lose 73,249 jobs by 2025 as businesses and investment flee the state and as voter suppression is correlated to declining wages. “For the first time since the Cold War, there is now concern about medium and long-term political stability of the US business environment,” Jonathan Wood, lead analyst for North America at global political risk consultancy Control Risks, told the reporters. “And what we are seeing in voter suppression acts and political gerrymandering, etc, is undermining that perception of the US as a very predictable and stable environment.” Dr Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on authoritarianism, explains that when the rule of law, which treats every business equally, has been replaced by the whims of a dictator, success depends on closeness to the leader rather than on quality. “One of the biggest myths of authoritarianism is that it is ‘good for business,’” she said. “[Russian President Vladimir] Putin has jailed over 100,000 business people on trumped-up charges of tax evasion, financial irregularities, etc. Anyone with a profitable enterprise becomes a target, regardless of their political sentiments. This practice goes on in Hungary and Turkey too. Business people should know that this can happen anywhere, to anyone, if autocrats take power.” The Perryman Group concluded: “While there are many other important advantages to, and compelling reasons for, encouraging political participation by all eligible citizens, the economic ramifications are substantial and worthy of significant attention as restrictions on voter access are considered.”
“Virginia AG presses GOP senator for proof of claims of fraud in statewide elections”
Washington Post:
Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring’s office Thursday pressed a surrogate of Republican gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin to share evidence supporting her claims that Democrats are trying to “steal” Tuesday’s election — allegations Herring (D), who is running for reelection, called a ploy to undermine voters’ confidence in the outcome before the results are in.2021 Election: Complete coverage and analysis
State Sen. Amanda F. Chase (R-Chesterfield), who has been working to rally the state’s conservative Trump-aligned voter base on behalf of Youngkin, recently told conservative talk radio host John Fredericks that she has shared evidence of a Democratic voting-fraud scheme with the Youngkin campaign….
The claims by Chase — a conservative provocateur in Richmond who was censured by the Senate after calling the Jan. 6 insurrectionists “patriots” — are part of a broader narrative promoted by Republicans, including Youngkin, that there is cause to be concerned about election integrity in Tuesday’s election.
In recent weeks, GOP poll watchers have camped out at early-voting sites and local elections offices to review voter rolls and monitor how officials are conducting the election.
Herring, a two-term incumbent who is running against state Del. Jason S. Miyares (R-Virginia Beach), said Chase’s claims, if unfounded, go beyond such efforts for more transparency.
“Let’s be clear: these kinds of baseless, false claims are simply designed to undermine confidence in our democracy and our elections,” Herring said in a news release about the letter sent to Chase. “If Sen. Chase has any evidence of cheating or voter fraud then she has an obligation to bring it to the attention of authorities who can do something about it rather than secretively sharing this supposed ‘evidence’ with political allies.”
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
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/joe-manchins-deep-corporate-ties
[Excerpts:]
But an underexamined aspect of Manchin’s history is his early membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council, or alec, which brings together lobbyists, state legislators, and representatives of conservative think tanks to draft and disseminate model bills. Since its founding in 1973, the organization’s work has laid the foundation for thousands of laws passed by state legislatures that have weakened labor unions, redirected public-school funding to private schools, hobbled the welfare state, restricted voting rights, and blocked or reshaped environmental regulations in favor of business interests. “ALEC is unique in the sense that it puts legislators and companies together and they create policy collectively,” Scott Pruitt, a former alec leader and President Trump’s head of the E.P.A., explained to Governing magazine, in 2003.
alec still lists Manchin on its alumni page, where he’s the only Democrat among thirteen senators.
“One of the most deleterious aspects of alec is how it normalizes this idea that corporations should have an equal voice and vote with state legislators on policy measures before they’re introduced in statehouses,” Lisa Graves, the executive director of True North Research, a nonpartisan corporate-watchdog group, told me. “When you looked at who had a leadership role in alec, it was almost entirely Republican.”
GOP uses voters to push election reforms in unlikely states
Marc Levy
Associated Press
October 23, 2021
Harrisburg, Pa. – Republicans have succeeded this year in passing a range of voting restrictions in states they control politically, from Georgia to Iowa to Texas. They’re not stopping there.
Republicans in at least four states where Democrats control the governor’s office, the legislature or both – California, Massachusetts, Michigan and Pennsylvania – are pursuing statewide ballot initiatives or veto-proof proposals to enact voter ID restrictions and other changes to election law.
In another state, Nebraska, Republicans control the governor’s office and have a majority in the single-house Legislature, but are pushing a voter ID ballot measure because they have been unable to get enough lawmakers on board.
Republicans say they are pursuing the changes in the name of “election integrity,” and repeat similar slogans – “easier to vote, harder to cheat.” Democrats dismiss it as the GOP following former President Donald Trump’s false claims that widespread fraud cost him the election. They say Republicans have tried to whip up distrust in elections for political gain and are passing restrictions designed to keep Democratic-leaning voters from registering or casting a ballot.
Read More “It’s depressing that this is the way that (the Trump) wing of the Republican Party thinks they have to win, instead of trying to win on issues or beliefs,” said Gus Bickford, the Democratic Party chairman in Massachusetts. “They just want to suppress the vote.” A common thread among the Republican proposals is toughening voter identification requirements, both for in-person and mail voting. In Michigan and Pennsylvania, Republicans are trying to get around Democratic governors who wield the veto pen. Wisconsin Republicans say they also are considering such a strategy. In California and Massachusetts, Republicans are a minority in both houses of the Legislature. In Republican-controlled Nebraska, the hang-up is an officially nonpartisan Legislature where more liberal lawmakers can derail legislation that enjoys broad conservative support. The road to gain voter approval is uphill in California and Massachusetts, but there’s a clearer path to success in the other states. The leader of the California effort, Carl DeMaio of Reform California, said his organization is pursuing a ballot initiative because Democratic lawmakers will never take up his group’s proposals. “That would mean they’re validating Donald Trump, and they have so much hatred for Donald Trump that they don’t even want to acknowledge that there’s even a problem here,” DeMaio said. Trump’s baseless election fraud claims aside, DeMaio said Trump’s message is resonating with people who have had doubts about the election system based on their own experience, such as getting duplicate ballots mailed to them at home. Voter fraud is exceedingly rare, and when it’s attempted is typically caught by local election offices. In any case, Democrats say voter ID laws will do nothing to prevent the little fraud that exists. Rather, it will serve only to force the elderly, poor and disabled to go to unnecessary lengths to get proper government-issued identification cards they may not have, they say. Despite Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, his own Justice Department and scores of recounts have debunked them, and courts up to the U.S. Supreme Court have swept aside such assertions. The government’s own cybersecurity agency declared the 2020 presidential election the most secure in U.S. history. No state Legislature has produced evidence of widespread election fraud. Even so, at least 10 Republican-controlled states have enacted laws so far this year that toughen voter ID or signature requirements or pare back opportunities to register to vote or cast a ballot. Putting voter-related matters to a statewide vote is nothing new. In recent years, for example, voters in California and Florida restored felons’ right to vote. In 2018, Michigan voters approved a constitutional amendment allowing people to register on Election Day and request absentee ballots without having to give a reason. The difference this year is Republicans using the process in an attempt to enact restrictions they couldn’t pass otherwise. In California, Massachusetts and Nebraska, Republicans are trying to gather enough signatures to get their proposals on ballots in next year’s general election. In Michigan, Republicans are using an unusual provision in the state constitution to gather enough petition signatures so the GOP-controlled Legislature can pass a veto-proof voter ID bill. Among other things, the Michigan initiative would prohibit sending mail-in ballot applications to people who did not request them, with backers saying it sowed confusion and mistrust in 2020. “Democratic leadership is out of step with their voters,” said Jamie Roe, a Republican campaign consultant and strategist with the Secure MI Vote initiative. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, is preparing to veto similar legislation on her desk, telling reporters this month that there was not one “scintilla” of evidence of widespread voting fraud in last year’s election and that Republicans are simply unhappy over Trump’s loss. “Our elections work. You don’t like the outcome? Well, then you run in the next election and try to win and earn people’s votes – not cut out a segment of people that cast their ballot as Americans and have a right to do that,” Whitmer said. In Pennsylvania, which allows no direct access to the ballot for citizen initiatives, the earliest the Republican-controlled Legislature could put its election changes on the ballot – through a proposed constitutional amendment – is 2023. The Pennsylvania proposal is among several that would go beyond changes to voter ID. As Trump allies go state to state, pushing partisan reviews of last year’s presidential election, the measure in Pennsylvania would require election results to be audited by the state’s auditor general. It would require paper ballots to bear a watermark and be open to “public inspection” after an election is certified. The measure is awaiting a vote in the state House, perhaps as early as next week, before it can go to the Senate. Its sponsor, Republican Rep. Jeff Wheeland, said it will “give back to the voters surety” that their elections are safe and secure. Another Republican, Rep. Eric Nelson, said it would let voters ”address what many feel is a frenzy of mistrust in our current election system.” Democratic Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, referring to Trump’s loss in the battleground state, said the only reason the measure is coming up “is because some are disappointed in the result of the election.” Under the proposed initiative in California, counties would be required to do more to clean up voter registration rolls, evaluate wait times for in-person voting in every election and show how they will fix “unreasonably long” waits. In Nebraska, groups including Black Votes Matter and the League of Women Voters have joined forces to oppose the Republican-backed ballot initiative. John Cartier, director of voting rights for Civic Nebraska, said the initiative would violate Nebraska’s constitutional protections for voting access. He said there has never been a single conviction for voter impersonation fraud in the state’s history. Besides, he said, states such as Arizona and Georgia already have tough voter ID laws “and people don’t really trust the system there,” Cartier said. “So passage of a voter ID law doesn’t do anything for trust. If anything, it hurts it.”
Hill: Trump reelection would spur ‘one constitutional crisis after another’
BY MORGAN CHALFANT – 10/20/21 06:00 AM EDT
[Excerpt:]
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.
In an interview with The Hill, Hill accused her former boss of staging a “slow-moving coup” and said that if he were to win election again, his victory would be built “on the back of a big lie.”
“He could win again. And it will be — if he does, it will be on the back of a big lie and on an awful lot of efforts to suppress the vote and the turnout,” said Hill. “And, you know, I’m sure that any election or electoral count that doesn’t go his way is challenged.”
What is Tommy Tuberville doing here?
The college football coach turned U.S. senator objected to Biden’s victory on Jan. 6. He’s not looking back. “I have no regrets,” he says.
By Ben Terris
Oct. 19, 2021
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/10/19/tommy-tuberville-senator-coach/
[Excerpt:]
Jan. 6 is something that has stuck, not just to Tuberville but the whole Republican Party. Far from moving on, Trump’s obsession seems to have deepened: Last week, he referred to solving “the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020” as the “single most important thing for Republicans to do.” Mike Lindell, the founder of MyPillow, has been barnstorming the country holding rallies for “Stop the Steal” crowds. And after Republicans in Arizona spent months conducting a dubious “audit” of the last election in Maricopa County (which affirmed Biden’s win there, despite everything), similar efforts are taking shape in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Texas. More than 6 in 10 Republicans believe Biden’s win was fraudulent, according to multiple polls, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
“The fact that it’s being swept under the rug and treated as another political moment is incredibly dangerous,” Rick Hasen, the election law expert, said about the insurrection and its aftermath. “You could see this as a low point in American politics, or you could see it as a dress rehearsal for what’s to come.” (Boldface added)
Judge Bars Conspiratorial Colorado Clerk From Election Administration After Suspicious Leak
Tina Peters at Mike Lindell’s cyber symposium (Screenshot/Rumble, 2021CyberSymposium)
By Matt Shuham
October 14, 2021 2:46 p.m.
From The New Yorker: Who’s the Trumpiest?
A CNN poll last month indicated that, nationally, seventy-eight per cent of Republicans believe that Joe Biden was not legitimately elected President. Who’s the Trumpiest?
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
Even before he lost his reelection bid, former President Donald Trump has been obsessed with challenging and changing election laws. Should he find himself back in the White House, his allies are hoping to turn that obsession into legislative action.
Trump is expected to mount another bid for president in 2024. And as talk of such a campaign has grown more concrete, so too has speculation over what type of agenda he’d actually pursue.
Some answers can be found in the work being done by America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank stacked with former Trump administration officials. Among the group’s 20 main policy priorities, which include trade, immigration and education, is promoting more comprehensive voter restrictions in the name of election integrity. Officials describe it as a priority.
Read More“One hundred percent yes,” AFPI President and former Trump White House Domestic Policy Council Director Brooke Rollins said of having legislation on a set of issues ready to go should Trump prevail in a 2024 election. “If we do our job right we will have a package of model legislation for the federal government and the state governments where they align.”
Rollins said she hoped Trump wouldn’t need to push election legislation because states would have done so themselves. But she left open the door for him to fill that void. “We have the fall, spring state legislative sessions,” Rollins said. “We have many shots at getting it right before the next presidential election.”
What precise election-related legislation Trump would push in Congress is unclear. AFPI has launched a Center for Election Integrity, led by former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell and former Trump campaign spokesperson Hogan Gidley, to promote voter ID, clean out voter rolls, require ballots be returned by Election Day and stop the practice of ballot harvesting. But those efforts have been state-oriented and Republicans have balked at federalizing the election system. Already this year, 19 states have enacted 33 laws making it more difficult to vote.
Trump has embraced the concept of national voter ID laws, as have other prominent Republicans. Early in his first term in office, he put together a commission on suspected voter fraud and placed it under the purview of one of the country’s most aggressive advocates of restrictive voting laws, former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. That ended in failure, however, after lawsuits were filed and states pushed back on voter data requests.
Trump has made no secret that his No. 1 priority is relitigating the 2020 election. He’s encouraged key states to conduct “audits” on the results and to overhaul election laws he claims promote voter fraud, even though there is no evidence of widespread irregularities and officials have called the 2020 election the most secure in American history.
His focus has come despite the consternation of some Republicans, who would prefer that the midterm elections be made a referendum on President Joe Biden’s record and who privately fear Trump’s efforts are undermining trust in American democracy. But in recent rallies, statements and comments at private events, Trump has only amplified his insistence that his theories of election fraud be at the center of the Republican Party’s platform.
It’s had an impact, according to John McLaughlin, a Trump pollster. McLaughlin said a “majority” of Republican voters he has polled now say voter fraud is a top concern.
“When you talk about Republicans and Trump voters who are going to vote in primaries it is definitely among the top issues,” McLaughlin said. “They want to make sure the results are honest and fair.”
Any push to enact restrictive election laws on the national level would face fierce opposition from Democrats. To date, they have been advocating their own legislative changes to voting laws, primarily by trying to open up avenues for early voting and voting by mail. But they’ve had no success moving bills through an evenly divided Senate, where many Republicans have railed against the idea of federalizing the U.S. election system.
Trump has led the charge to defeat Democrats’ efforts, in part by injecting paranoia and disinformation into the political bloodstream. On Wednesday, he upped the ante even further, insisting that Republican voters would refrain from voting in the upcoming elections unless GOP lawmakers “solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020.”
The statement brought immediate concerns from Republican operatives that Trump could — as he did in the run up to the Georgia special Senate elections in January — suppress voter turnout by convincing his own supporters to stay home.
“We’ve seen this movie before in January’s Georgia Senate run offs, which ended with a Democratic controlled Senate,” said Colin Reed, a Republican political strategist. “Re-litigating the results of the last election has become a litmus test in contested GOP primaries, and can potentially hurt our ability to win future contests, which is a real shame.”
Liz Harrington, a spokesperson for Trump, later clarified the statement and addressed Republican fears on Twitter.
“President Trump did not say don’t vote. He pointed out the obvious consequence of not fixing fraud and holding those who broke laws accountable will be Republicans sitting out,” Harrington wrote. “If we don’t fix our elections, many voters will think their vote won’t count.”
Still, Trump says his talk of a rigged election is a winning message. Over the weekend in Iowa, he spent the biggest chunk of his time at the podium complaining about the 2020 results.
“I’m telling you the single biggest issue, as bad as the border is and it’s horrible, horrible what they’re doing, they’re destroying our country, but as bad as that is, the single biggest issue, the issue that gets the most pull, the most respect, the biggest cheers is talking about the election fraud of the 2020 presidential election,” Trump said.
In interviews at that Iowa rally, Trump’s supporters said other issues were top of mind, including immigration, the economy and inflation. But they also echoed Trump’s lies about the election.
“I don’t see there’s any way [Trump] didn’t get 81 million votes,” Chris Findley of Quincy, Illinois, said. “[Democrats] changed the voting rules,” Findley said, adding that he wants there to be voting ID, voting in person, and no mail-in ballots unless someone is in the military.
Jeannette Cooley of Indianola, Iowa, said Trump should focus on two things: “Election integrity and the border.”
Hanging over these comments and Trump’s statements is the ghost of the Georgia special election. According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, more than 752,000 Georgians who voted in the presidential election did not turn out to pick the state’s new senators in a heated runoff, and over half were white and lived in rural Republican constituencies. The numbers suggest that they internalized Trump’s insistence that their votes were immaterial since the elections were being rigged.
“Tactically I don’t know how this makes sense for him,” said another Republican operative. “Now if they don’t do well, the narrative will be that Trump told them not to vote. He got blamed for Georgia. A lot of times he does things that selfishly make sense for him, but this doesn’t make sense for him. What’s the upside?”
The Threats to American Democracy and the Need for National Voting and Election Administration Standards
June 1, 2021
We, the undersigned, are scholars of democracy who have watched the recent deterioration of U.S. elections and liberal democracy with growing alarm. Specifically, we have watched with deep concern as Republican-led state legislatures across the country have in recent months proposed or implemented what we consider radical changes to core electoral procedures in response to unproven and intentionally destructive allegations of a stolen election. Collectively, these initiatives are transforming several states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections. Hence, our entire democracy is now at risk.
When democracy breaks down, it typically takes many years, often decades, to reverse the downward spiral. In the process, violence and corruption typically flourish, and talent and wealth flee to more stable countries, undermining national prosperity. It is not just our venerated institutions and norms that are at risk—it is our future national standing, strength, and ability to compete globally.
Statutory changes in large key electoral battleground states are dangerously politicizing the process of electoral administration, with Republican-controlled legislatures giving themselves the power to override electoral outcomes on unproven allegations should Democrats win more votes. They are seeking to restrict access to the ballot, the most basic principle underlying the right of all adult American citizens to participate in our democracy. They are also putting in place criminal sentences and fines meant to intimidate and scare away poll workers and nonpartisan administrators. State legislatures have advanced initiatives that curtail voting methods now preferred by Democratic-leaning constituencies, such as early voting and mail voting. Republican lawmakers have openly talked about ensuring the “purity” and “quality” of the vote, echoing arguments widely used across the Jim Crow South as reasons for restricting the Black vote.
State legislators supporting these changes have cited the urgency of “electoral integrity” and the need to ensure that elections are secure and free of fraud. But by multiple expert judgments, the 2020 election was extremely secure and free of fraud. The reason that Republican voters have concerns is because many Republican officials, led by former President Donald Trump, have manufactured false claims of fraud, claims that have been repeatedly rejected by courts of law, and which Trump’s own lawyers have acknowledged were mere speculation when they testified about them before judges.
In future elections, these laws politicizing the administration and certification of elections could enable some state legislatures or partisan election officials to do what they failed to do in 2020: reverse the outcome of a free and fair election. Further, these laws could entrench extended minority rule, violating the basic and longstanding democratic principle that parties that get the most votes should win elections.
Democracy rests on certain elemental institutional and normative conditions. Elections must be neutrally and fairly administered. They must be free of manipulation. Every citizen who is qualified must have an equal right to vote, unhindered by obstruction. And when they lose elections, political parties and their candidates and supporters must be willing to accept defeat and acknowledge the legitimacy of the outcome. The refusal of prominent Republicans to accept the outcome of the 2020 election, and the anti-democratic laws adopted (or approaching adoption) in Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Montana and Texas—and under serious consideration in other Republican-controlled states—violate these principles. More profoundly, these actions call into question whether the United States will remain a democracy. As scholars of democracy, we condemn these actions in the strongest possible terms as a betrayal of our precious democratic heritage.
The most effective remedy for these anti-democratic laws at the state level is federal action to protect equal access of all citizens to the ballot and to guarantee free and fair elections. Just as it ultimately took federal voting rights law to put an end to state-led voter suppression laws throughout the South, so federal law must once again ensure that American citizens’ voting rights do not depend on which party or faction happens to be dominant in their state legislature, and that votes are cast and counted equally, regardless of the state or jurisdiction in which a citizen happens to live. This is widely recognized as a fundamental principle of electoral integrity in democracies around the world.
A new voting rights law (such as that proposed in the John Lewis Voting Rights Act) is essential but alone is not enough. True electoral integrity demands a comprehensive set of national standards that ensure the sanctity and independence of election administration, guarantee that all voters can freely exercise their right to vote, prevent partisan gerrymandering from giving dominant parties in the states an unfair advantage in the process of drawing congressional districts, and regulate ethics and money in politics.
It is always far better for major democracy reforms to be bipartisan, to give change the broadest possible legitimacy. However, in the current hyper-polarized political context such broad bipartisan support is sadly lacking. Elected Republican leaders have had numerous opportunities to repudiate Trump and his “Stop the Steal” crusade, which led to the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Each time, they have sidestepped the truth and enabled the lie to spread.
We urge members of Congress to do whatever is necessary—including suspending the filibuster—in order to pass national voting and election administration standards that both guarantee the vote to all Americans equally, and prevent state legislatures from manipulating the rules in order to manufacture the result they want. Our democracy is fundamentally at stake. History will judge what we do at this moment.
See link below for current list of signatories.
https://www.newamerica.org/political-reform/statements/statement-of-concern/
State Voting Laws Roundup
Voting Rights Lab
The Markup
A Weekly Election Legislation Update
October 10, 2023
Today is Tuesday, October 10. We are tracking 1,915 bills so far this session across all 50 states, with 404 bills that restrict voter access or election administration and 908 bills that improve voter access or election administration. The rest are neutral, mixed, or unclear in their impact.
The Bad News: Earlier today, the North Carolina legislature overrode Governor Roy Cooper’s vetoes of S.B. 747 (restricting mail voting) and S.B. 749 (legislative takeover of state and county election boards). The legislature also enacted a budget bill that prohibits the state from joining ERIC.
The Good News: The Michigan House passed legislation to expand automatic voter registration in the state.
Looking Ahead: Last week, two new lawsuits were filed, challenging voting restrictions in North Carolina and Wisconsin.
Voting Laws Roundup: June 2023
State legislatures have passed a near-record number of new restrictive voting laws so far this year, while a pro-democracy movement presses on.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-june-2023
The state legislative push to restrict voting and undermine faith in elections has moved at a near-record pace this year, driven by a still-active election denier movement. At the same time, the pro-democracy movement has continued to press for legislation to boost voting access.
Thus far, more expansive laws have passed than restrictive and election interference laws. The geographical divide of previous years persists, with expansive legislation tending to pass in some states while restrictive legislation tends to pass in other states.
Just under a third of state legislatures are still in session this year. Between January 1 and May 29, 2023, the following voting legislation has passed:
- At least 11 states enacted 13 restrictive laws.footnote1_8aqg2lp1 Two more restrictive bills in two states were passed by both chambers of the legislature and are awaiting the governors’ approval.footnote2_kd8ky1s2 Legislation is categorized as restrictive if it contains one or more provisions that would make it harder for eligible Americans to register, stay on the voter rolls, or cast a ballot as compared to existing state law.
- At least four states enacted five election interference laws.footnote3_i5aao0k3 An additional bill in Texas was passed by the legislature and is awaiting the governor’s signature.footnote4_2nan3d64 Legislation is categorized as election interference if it either threatens the people and processes that make elections work or increases opportunities for partisan interference in election administration or outcomes.
- At least 13 states enacted 19 expansive laws.footnote5_igacms95 An additional four bills in two states were passed by the legislature and are awaiting the governors’ approval.footnote6_ekgol5e6 Legislation is categorized as expansive if it contains one or more provisions that would make it easier for eligible Americans to register, stay on the rolls, or cast a ballot as compared to existing state law.
One troubling development: lawmakers have begun to target direct democracy, aiming to limit ways that voters can pass ballot measures. Another notable trend in voting legislation this year is a continued push to criminalize election-related activities. And in Texas, the legislature has considered multiple bills that would hamper election administration in Harris County, a trend that is unusual in its targeting of one particular county.
Meanwhile, several states have taken steps to provide legal protections for election workers as they face increased threats to their safety.
Voting Laws Roundup: May 2022
This year, state lawmakers have focused on enacting election interference legislation, with six states already passing nine laws that threaten to undermine voters’ confidence in the security of elections.
This year, state lawmakers, who spent 2021 passing laws that made it harder to vote, have focused more intently on election interference, passing nine laws that could lead to tampering with how elections are run and how results are determined.
Election interference laws do two primary things. They open the door to partisan interference in elections, or they threaten the people and processes that make elections work. In many cases, these efforts are being justified as measures to combat baseless claims of widespread voter fraud and a stolen 2020 election.
Between January 1 and May 4, six state legislatures — Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, and Oklahoma — have passed nine election interference laws. As of May 4, at least 17 such bills introduced this year are still moving through five state legislatures. Moving bills are those that have passed at least one chamber of the state legislature or have had some sort of committee action (e.g., a hearing since the beginning of 2022, an amendment, or a committee vote). In total, lawmakers in 27 states have proposed at least 148 election interference bills.
In many of the same state legislatures, lawmakers have continued to introduce or enact laws that restrict access to the vote. Legislation is categorized as restrictive if it would make it harder for eligible Americans to register, stay on the rolls, and/or vote as compared to existing state law. In addition to two such laws enacted in Arizona and Mississippi, a restrictive ballot initiative in Arizona passed both houses and will be placed on the ballot for voters in the November general election.
As of May 4, at least 34 bills with restrictive provisions are moving through 11 state legislatures. Overall, lawmakers in 39 states have considered at least 393 restrictive bills for the 2022 legislative session. Since the beginning of 2021, 18 states have passed 34 restrictive voting laws, which can disproportionately affect voters of color.
At the same time, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, and Oregon enacted five laws that expand access to the vote. Legislation is categorized as expansive if it would make it easier for eligible Americans to register, stay on the rolls, and/or vote as compared to existing state law. As of May 4, at least 48 bills with expansive provisions are moving through 16 state legislatures and the DC City Council. Overall, lawmakers in 44 states and Washington, DC, have considered at least 596 expansive bills for the 2022 legislative session.
Almost half of the state legislatures meeting in 2022 have now ended their legislative sessions.footnote2_tyfm7wc2 Legislatures are in the second year of their two-year sessions, when they generally tend to pass fewer laws than in the first year. This year follows that trend.
Election Interference Legislation
Between January 1 and May 4, six states (Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, and Oklahoma) have enacted nine election interference laws. As of May 4, at least 17 election interference bills are moving through five state legislatures. Overall, lawmakers in 27 states have introduced at least 148 election interference bills in the 2022 legislative session.
This legislation is fueled by election denialism and falsehoods about voter fraud. The passage of election interference legislation is part of an alarming trend that emerged in state legislatures in 2021 and represents a direct legislative attack on fair election administration.
Enacted Election Interference Legislation
The nine enacted election interference laws permit partisan actors to interfere with elections operations or overturn election results, direct new resources toward prosecuting election crimes, and threaten election officials with criminal penalties. Seven of these laws will be in place for the 2022 midterm elections
Voting Laws Roundup: May 2021
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-may-2021
Across the country, the effort to restrict the vote continues, with a wave of bills moving through state legislatures and becoming law.
Between January 1 and May 14, 2021, at least 19 states enacted 33 new laws that restrict access to the vote. The United States is on track to far exceed its most recent period of significant voter suppression — 2011. By October of that year, 19 restrictive laws were enacted in 14 states. This year, the country has already reached that level, and it’s only May.
More restrictions on the vote are likely to become law, as roughly one-third of legislatures are still in session. Indeed, at least 61 bills with restrictive provisions are moving through 18 state legislatures. More specifically, 31 have passed at least one chamber, while another 30 have had some sort of committee action (e.g., a hearing, an amendment, or a committee vote). Overall, lawmakers have introduced at least 389 restrictive bills in 48 states in the 2021 legislative sessions.
The restrictive laws from 2011 were enacted after the 2010 elections brought a significant shift in political control over statehouses — and as the country confronted backlash to the election of its first Black president. Today’s attacks on the vote come from similar sources: the racist voter fraud allegations behind the Big Lie and a desire to prevent future elections from achieving the historic turnout seen in 2020.
Americans’ access to the vote is in unprecedented peril. But Congress can protect it. The For the People Act, passed by the House and now awaiting action in the Senate, would block many of the state-level restrictions that have been or may soon be enacted into law.
At the same time, at least 880 bills with expansive provisions have been introduced in 49 states. Of these, at least 28 bills with expansive provisions have been signed into law in 14 states. At least 115 bills with expansive provisions are moving in 25 states: 45 have passed at least one chamber, and 70 have had some sort of committee action.
You can find a resource listing restrictive and expansive state voting legislation by bill number here.
Report: Election Officials Under Attack
Texas AG Ken Paxton Successfully Targeted Elected Judges Who Held He Did Not Have Authority to Prosecute Election Fraud
The Court of Criminal Appeals upsets are much more clearly attributable to Paxton and his political allies, Jones said.
At a campaign event for Marc LaHood in San Antonio in January, Paxton asked for a show of hands of anyone in the room who could name all nine justices. Sure enough, none could.
But he explained why he was making it his mission to make sure they knew about their 2021 opinion that stopped him from unilaterally prosecuting election fraud and the names of their opponents.
Former Dallas appellate judge David Schenck and lawyers Gina Parker and Lee Finley won their races over Court of Criminal Appeals Presiding Judge Sharon Keller and Judges Barbara Parker Hervey and Michelle Slaughter, respectively.
“Activist judges have no place on our courts, and tonight’s results reflect the will of the people,” Paxton said in a statement late Tuesday night.
The judges had defended their decision by saying they were following the state Constitution, which they said was clear about the limits of Paxton’s authority.
The upsets translate to a loss of about 60 years of experience from the bench: Keller was first elected in 1994, Hervey in 2000 and Slaughter in 2018.
“Impeachments and forced removals from office emerge as partisan weapons in the states”
Republicans in Wisconsin are threatening to impeach a recently elected state Supreme Court justice and raised the possibility of doing the same to the state’s election director.
A Georgia Republican called for impeaching the Fulton County prosecutor who brought racketeering charges against former President Donald Trump. Republicans in the Pennsylvania House have already impeached the top prosecutor in Philadelphia.
None of the targets met the bar traditionally set for impeachment — credible allegations of committing a crime while in office. Their offense: staking out positions legislative Republicans didn’t like.
As Republicans in Congress begin their impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, the process is calling attention to the increasing use of impeachment in the states as a partisan political weapon rather than as a step of last resort for officeholders believed to have committed a serious offense.
It’s not just impeachment. Over the past two years, Republicans also have sought to pry Democrats and nonpartisan executives from office through recalls, legislative maneuvers and forced removals, even when no allegations of wrongdoing have surfaced.
To some, the moves appear anti-democratic — actions that could have major implications if they become routine and supplant the ballot box as the final arbiter of an election.
Wisconsin Republicans vote to fire elections director, who sues to keep her job
The vote creates a dispute over who is in charge of overseeing elections in a state that is expected to play a critical role in next year’s presidential campaign
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/09/14/wisconsin-republicans-fire-election-director
“‘Where’s Celia?’ An Arizona elections official becomes the target of a virtual manhunt by GOP activists on a public records crusade.”
Jen Fifield for Votebeat:
They started searching for her in late January.
“Where’s CELIA NABOR?” one member of the angry online mob wrote. “Find her,” another wrote. Track her phone, credit cards, social security number, and social media, others suggested. It was time for her to “face the music.” “COULD SHE BE AT HOME????” someone wrote, posting her address.
And then, that same night, after 2 a.m., someone started banging on Celia Nabor’s door.
She lay frozen in bed in her suburban Phoenix neighborhood, terrified, wondering if one of her online harassers had come to follow through on the threats. Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the pounding stopped.
Nabor never found out who knocked on her door that night. What she did know was that the trouble had started earlier that week. On Jan. 30, GOP activists began spreading false information about her, based partly on documents acquired through records requests searching for fraud in Maricopa County’s elections, where Nabor helped oversee early voting.
They said Nabor was dodging a request to answer questions, prompting others to claim she had helped the county steal the election for Democrats. But that wasn’t true.
We The People AZ Alliance — a Phoenix-based political action committee funded primarily by Patrick Byrne and his organization The America Project — employed what’s become a familiar playbook among allies of former President Donald Trump: Barrage local election offices with public records requests, then twist real records to make routine actions seem suspicious.
The organization dug into Nabor’s work, asking for copies of all of her texts and her emails. They asked for information on how she and the employees under her performed their jobs and whether they were disciplined. They wanted protocols and contractor names and contracts and more.
Extensive requests such as these are a complex piece of the ballooning number of public records requests to election offices across the country, according to Votebeat’s review of hundreds of public records requests and logs.
“Man Pleads Guilty to Threatening Election Official”
A Nebraska man pleaded guilty today to making multiple threatening posts on an Instagram page associated with an election official.
According to court documents, Travis Ford, 42, of Lincoln, made multiple threats in August 2021 toward the election official, specifically: “Do you feel safe? You shouldn’t. Do you think Soros will/can protect you?” and “Your security detail is far too thin and incompetent to protect you. This world is unpredictable these days….anything can happen to anyone.”
“The Justice Department will not tolerate illegal threats of violence against public officials,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “Threats of violence against election officials are dangerous for people’s safety and dangerous for our democracy, and we will use every resource at our disposal to disrupt and investigate those threats and hold perpetrators accountable.”
“Threatening violence against election workers in an attempt to intimidate them while in performance of their duties will not be tolerated,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray. “Threats to election workers have no place in our society, and today’s plea demonstrates the success of our collaborative efforts to ensure the safety of the workers we entrust to effectuate the democratic process.”
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.
Dean Knudson, a former state lawmaker who helped design the commission in 2015, said he was leaving the commission because it has become clear “I cannot be effective in my role representing Republicans on the commission.”
His announced departure pushed the commissioners to delay the election of their next chair.
“I’ll put my conservative record up against anyone in the state of Wisconsin, and yet, now I’ve been branded a RINO,” Knudson said at a meeting Wednesday, referring to an acronym that represents “Republicans In Name Only” — a nickname applied by 2020 election deniers to Republicans who acknowledge Trump lost to President Joe Biden.
“Two of my core values are to practice service above self and to display personal integrity. And to me, that integrity demands acknowledging the truth even when the truth is painful. In this case, the painful truth is that President Trump lost the election in 2020 — lost the election in Wisconsin in 2020. And the loss was not due to election fraud.”
Knudson said instances of voter fraud occur in every election but not at a large scale.
Knudson said he would leave the commission as soon as Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, who appointed Knudson in 2017, named his replacement. A spokeswoman for Vos did not answer questions about the process.
Vos has called for the resignation of the Wisconsin Elections Commission director and has claimed widespread voter fraud manipulated the outcome of the 2020 election.
In 2021, he hired former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman to begin a $676,000 taxpayer-funded review of the 2020 election that has focused heavily on WEC practices and suggesting foul play without evidence.
Now, as the commission has become a symbol of baseless claims of fraud to Republicans who deny Trump’s legitimate election loss, all four Republican candidates for governor want to abolish the commission altogether and most want to put its duties in a partisan office.
“My message to Republicans today is simple. If you’re a candidate focus on the issues that affect Wisconsin families and their pocketbooks. It’s time to pivot away from conspiracy theories to kitchen table issues,” Knudson said.
“‘Gutted’: What happened when a Georgia elections office was targeted for takeover by those who claim the 2020 election was a fraud”
WaPo:
Any thought they’d had that the atmosphere might calm down was gone. What amounted to a grass-roots uprising had gained momentum, become more organized and started coming after the election office.
New people had been showing up for the county commission meetings — not the old-guard Floyd County Republicans but the Greene wing that had all but taken over the party. They accused the election board of being corrupt and controlled by Democrats. They unearthed a private photo of the election board chairwoman holding a Trump mug in one hand and raising a middle finger in the other, blew it up poster-size and displayed it at a meeting as evidence that she was biased. They demanded a state review of the election office, and when nothing happened, one of them contacted the owner of a bus plastered with photos of Trump and the words, “Ready for Round 3 2021,” who drove it to Rome, parking outside the yellow brick building in a show of force. Increasingly, they zeroed in on Waddell.
“Any background checks done on Vanessa Waddell,” read an open-records request.
“Any and all available job applications for Vanessa Waddell,” read another.
She listened as a man claimed she had committed more than 150 violations related to the Jan. 5 Senate election. She sat there as others questioned whether her high school diploma was fake and whether her college degree was legitimate. A man said that he was “disgusted” by her handling of the election. A woman complained that she had been “staring” at her during meetings. “I began to be concerned about her intent,” the woman told the commissioners. “I asked two individuals to keep an eye on the situation.”
Then one morning, three people who’d been among the most vocal at the meetings showed up at the plexiglass window of the election office.
One of them began taking a cellphone video. The two others went down the hallway to a small room where the voting equipment was stored, wedged open the door, and took more videos as Spurlin, terrified, told them they had to leave. Waddell alerted county officials, who called the police, who showed up after the three were gone, took a report and told her there was nothing else they could do.
After that, the office in the basement had felt like a bunker. Spurlin began carrying pepper spray. Mosley bought a stun gun and began checking the hands of people who showed up in the plexiglass window. Waddell considered bringing her gun to work.
When she went upstairs for the meetings, she began sitting against the wall for security, thinking that she’d eventually hear some sort of reassurance from the county commissioners. But on a Tuesday in November, what she heard was that the governor had signed a bill remaking election administration in Floyd County. Instead of a three- member nonpartisan board, she would now have to answer to a new five-member board that was explicitly partisan — two Democrats and three Republicans, including one she recognized as a leading critic of her office and two others she worried held the same views.
By the end of the month, the old election board was dissolved. Two weeks after that, the county commission unanimously approved the new board. And after that, county officials told Waddell with little explanation that she would be reverting to her old job in voter registration. It was unclear whether anyone in the election office would have jobs once the new board was sworn in, because they’d all have to reapply. The word they kept hearing was “gutted.”
“That’s what somebody upstairs said,” Mosley was saying. “This whole office needs to be gutted.”
Local election officials are exhausted, under threat and thinking about quitting
A new poll of election administrators showed nearly 8 in 10 think threats against them are on the rise.
03/10/2022
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/10/election-officials-exhausted-under-threat-00015850
Texas Man Charged With Threatening to Kill Georgia Election Officials
January 21, 2022
Wisconsin: “Ex-GOP Official Who Told People to ‘Prepare for War’ Will Be a Hudson Election Worker”
Wow:
The man who stepped down as chair of the St. Croix County Republican Party after urging people to “prepare for war” will get to serve as an election judge in Hudson—and a council member who criticized the move has been forced to apologize.
John Kraft resigned a year ago as local Republican Party leader amid pressure from his own political party after making a series of social media posts in which he urged people to “prepare for war” against political opponents in the months leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol. Council member Joyce Hall issued an apology to Kraft during Tuesday’s City Council meeting rather than face censure.
But one day after apologizing, Joyce told UpNorthNews she “did the right thing” by raising questions about Kraft despite the resulting controversy.
Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson
December 3, 2021
And today, two election workers from Fulton County, Georgia, the county on which Trump focused his attention in his quest to overturn the 2020 election there, sued the right-wing website The Gateway Pundit, along with publishers James and Joe Hoft, for repeatedly lying that the two women had helped to “steal” the election. The workers were forced to flee their homes for their own safety.
Defamed Georgia Election Workers Sue The Gateway Pundit Over Ballot Fraud Disinformation
Defamed Georgia Election Workers Sue The Gateway Pundit Over Ballot Fraud Disinformation
GOP targets Wisconsin elections system, nonpartisan director
MADISON, Wis. — Wisconsin Republicans are working to discredit the bipartisan system they created to run elections in the state after President Joe Biden narrowly won last year’s presidential race, making the political battleground the latest front in the national push by the GOP to exert more control over elections.
Wednesday will bring a flurry of election-related developments in the state, with both the Wisconsin Elections Commission and a partisan legislative panel dissecting the 2020 presidential election. At the same time, Republican lawmakers are continuing to attack the state’s well-regarded election administrator in a pressure campaign to have her resign, an apparent attempt to install a GOP partisan in the position ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
“This is really just the politics of fear and vengeance,” said Kevin Kennedy, who was Wisconsin’s top elections official for 34 years before retiring in 2016. “This is not about ideas. … They have effigies they want to burn and that’s it.”
More than a year after the 2020 presidential election, former President Donald Trump and his allies continue to push his false claims that Democrats stole a second term from him. This has manifested in costly and timely partisan election reviews in a handful of states as well as new laws pushed by Republicans adding restrictions to mail voting, which was hugely popular amid the pandemic and embraced by voters of both parties.
Current and former election officials also have warned that the unrelenting attempts to discredit Biden’s win have led to an erosion of public confidence in elections and threats of physical violence against election workers. They worry that longtime election officials will be driven from their jobs, creating a vacuum of experience that in some cases could be filled by partisan actors.
Read More In Wisconsin, elections are overseen by a bipartisan elections commission comprised of an equal number of Republicans and Democrats. The commission administrator is a nonpartisan position currently held by Meagan Wolfe, a 10-year veteran of the agency and its predecessor. Wolfe was appointed director by the commission in 2019 and confirmed unanimously by the Republican-controlled Senate for a term ending in the middle of 2023. When efforts to overturn Trump’s loss in Wisconsin failed through lawsuits and recounts, Republicans repositioned their attacks to the commission and Wolfe. At least 10 Republican lawmakers have called for the resignations of her or one or more commissioners. If Wolfe were to resign, the Republican-controlled Senate would likely name her successor. That person plays a significant role in determining what guidance is issued to the state’s more than 1,800 local election clerks who actually run elections. Wolfe on Tuesday called the attacks against her “baseless” and said she was more determined than ever not to resign. “I really think the calls are based on folks being upset that I’m not willing to change my behavior; I’m not willing to engage in partisan politics,” she told The Associated Press. “The public recognizes politics when they see it. I think they’re smart enough to understand a lot of the rhetoric around this is motivated by partisan politics.” A bipartisan group of more than 50 election experts from across the country came to Wolfe’s defense, sending a letter to Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos calling Wolfe “one of the most highly-skilled election administrators in the country.” Wolfe serves as chair of the national Electronic Registration Information Center and in February will become president of the National Association of State Election Directors. The attacks against Wolfe and the integrity of the 2020 election make Wisconsin “ground zero for the anti-democratic movement,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research. Becker said election workers and civil servants such as Wolfe are being used as scapegoats “because leaders do not have the political courage to tell their supporters the truth of the election. And the truth is that it was objectively the most secure, transparent, verified and scrutinized election in American history by any measure.” Republican lawmakers ratcheted up their criticism of Wolfe and the commission after a nonpartisan audit recommended dozens of changes in how elections should be run and detailed ways the elections commission didn’t follow some state laws during the pandemic in 2020. The audit did not find any widespread fraud or abuse and did not call into question Biden’s victory in the state. A Trump-supporting sheriff in Racine County recommended felony charges against five of the six commission members for their decision not to send special voting deputies into nursing homes, as required by law, during the pandemic.
TRUMP’S CAPACITY TO STEAL THE 2024 ELECTION IS ONLY GROWING
Ahead of his likely reelection run in 2024, Donald Trump is building an infrastructure for insurrection. The “fraud” cries on social media, the desperate begging of administrators to “find” votes for him, the blustery calls for his supporters to “fight” for him—all that may be so last year. Now, he and his allies are trying to lay the foundation to allow him to undermine democracy without resorting to such overt measures.
For all the coy euphemisms about “election security” Trump and his acolytes put forth about their efforts, the premise of all this is simple: He won’t need to break through the guardrails of democracy if those guardrails are not there. “The attacks right now are no longer about 2020,” Colorado Secretary Jena Griswold told the Post. “They’re about 2022 and 2024. It’s about chipping away at confidence and chipping away at the reality of safe and secure elections. And the next time there’s a close election, it will be easier to achieve their goals. That’s what this is all about.”
American democracy narrowly passed the stress test Trump put it through in 2020. But his relentless, multi-pronged pressure campaign also underscored major vulnerabilities in the system. Among them: That system is highly dependent on officials up and down the line performing their jobs in good faith.
Though Raffensperger is hardly a model for the promotion of democracy, as he’s backed the anti-voting legislation Republicans in the state enacted based on Trump’s lies, he still refused to manufacture enough votes to lift Trump over Biden in Georgia. In standing up to the former president in the fraught, frenzied weeks between the election in November and the inauguration in January, he at least showed there were limits to what he would do. Trump, who is making louder and louder noises about a 2024 bid, seems to be supporting challengers who have no such limits.
“This is a great big flashing red warning sign,” as former Michigan Republican Party chair Jeff Timmer, a critic of the former president, put it to the Post. “The officials who fulfilled their legal duty after the election are now being replaced by people who are pledging to throw a wrench in the gears of the next election. It tells you that they are planning nothing but chaos and that they have a strategy to disrupt the certification of the next election.”
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Wisconsin Republicans Have Their Sights Set On State Election Officials
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Reuters Found Out Who’s Threatening Election Workers. Why Can’t Police?
Reuters on Tuesday published an incredible report: Using public records requests and plenty of stick-to-it-ness, they tracked down nine people who acknowledged sending threats or other hostile messages to election workers.
In short: Not only did the people Reuters reached acknowledge sending the threats, they were also mostly unapologetic about it. One Vermont man “grew agitated, peppering two Reuters reporters with 137 texts and voicemails over the past month, threatening the journalists and describing his election conspiracy theories.”
Though that same man telephoned the secretary of state’s office and said, “You guys are a bunch of f‑‑‑‑‑‑ clowns, and all you dirty c‑‑‑suckers are about to get f‑‑‑‑‑‑ popped,” state police have declined to pursue the case. Apparently “popped” isn’t a clear enough reference to shooting someone, and instead “could be a reference to someone being arrested,” a state police spokesperson told Reuters. The state’s attorneys office agreed that the message represented protected speech.
The harassment takes a toll.
“The sentiment I hear more than any is, they don’t pay me enough for this,” Jennifer Morrell, a former elections official who now works as a consultant in the field, told me. “I’ve heard from professionals that have been in the business for a long time, contemplating how to move up their retirement dates, because they’re just like, ‘I can’t deal with this anymore.’”
A long list of former national security figures called on Congress and the FBI to address these threats this week because, they wrote, “If this playbook of undermining and subverting our elections is left unchecked, the campaigns to do so will become increasingly more sophisticated and difficult to rebuff, making it increasingly likely that a majority of Americans will no longer trust election results.”
Embattled election chief in Fulton County resigns
The 2020 vote and its aftermath have left many election workers beleaguered
Georgia secretary of state: Trump ‘had no idea how elections work’
BY REID WILSON – 11/02/21
“Wisconsin elections commissioner says fellow Republicans are looking for a scapegoat after Trump’s loss”
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How to Protect Administrators and Safeguard Democracy
By the Brennan Center for Justice and the Bipartisan Policy Center
PUBLISHED JUNE 16, 2021
Around the country, election officials have been under attack in the last year. Long used to staying in the background, they have now found themselves cast as villains, scapegoated for election outcomes that some politicians and voters did not like. A survey of election officials commissioned by the Brennan Center and conducted by Benenson Strategy Group found that one in three election officials feel unsafe because of their job, and nearly one in five listed threats to their lives as a job-related concern. A new Brennan Center report outlines concrete steps that lawmakers, administrators, and internet companies can take to protect election workers. //READ MORE
https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/2021-06/BCJ-129%20ElectionOfficials_v7.pdf
Factsheet: Election Officials Under Attack
“GOP to massively step up 2022 poll watching efforts in Michigan and across U.S.”
By Rick Hasen, September 25, 2021
Detroit Free Press: The GOP will massively increase its poll watching and election litigation efforts in 2022 and beyond after so far failing to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election through a series of lawsuits and audits, a… Continue reading
The federal government, state lawmakers, election administrators, and internet companies must act to protect the stewards of American democracy.
PUBLISHED JUNE 16, 2021
Special Report: Backers of Trump’s false fraud claims seek to control next elections
By Tim Reid and Nathan Layne, Jason Lange
September 22, 2021
[Excerpts:]Reuters examined all 15 Republican candidates for secretary of state in five battlegrounds. Ten still question whether Trump lost the 2020 election.
Nearly all of the Republican contenders have stressed a need to curb mail-in voting, to limit ballot drop boxes and to take other steps to curtail ballot access. A majority said they backed a Republican push for more audits or other investigations of the 2020 vote, despite dozens of audits, recounts and court rulings that confirmed Biden’s victory.
Boris Epshteyn, a former special assistant to Trump, said the party is focused on secretary-of-state elections. So is Trump, who has endorsed candidates in three states: Hice in Georgia; Finchem in Arizona; and Kristina Karamo, a Michigan educator he praised for parroting his false claims of winning that state.
“It’s vital they have the right ideals,” Epshteyn said of Republican secretary-of-state candidates. “That includes, first and foremost, getting to the bottom of the 2020 election as well as making sure widespread voter fraud doesn’t happen going forward.”
The false voter-fraud claims by Trump and his allies have inspired hundreds of threats of hanging, firing squads, bombs and other violence against election officials and their families, Reuters has reported this year. A Reuters investigation this month revealed that U.S. law enforcement has held almost no one accountable for the barrage of threats and intimidation of election administrators. read more
In Georgia, Trump allies are eager to unseat incumbent Republican Raffensperger after he rebuffed Trump’s request to “find” just enough votes to reverse Trump’s Georgia loss.
David Becker, an election expert and former Justice Department voting-rights attorney, said Raffensperger and other secretaries of state last year formed a bulwark to protect democracy under extreme pressure from Trump and his allies. The prospect of those allies running elections, he said, “should chill all of us.”
“If one of these con artists became Secretary of State, and President Trump tried to make the call he made to Secretary Raffensperger – to someone with less integrity, who denies democracy – what happens if that person takes that call?”
The survival of U.S. democracy may hinge on this decision by Pa.’s next governor | Will Bunch
Despite that embarrassing Arizona fake “audit,” the Trump war on election integrity is accelerating. Pa.’s gubernatorial race will play a key role for 2024.
by Will Bunch | Columnist
Published Sept. 26, 2021
To millions of Americans, what just happened in Arizona’s largest county was a laughingstock, a bad joke that blew up in the face of Donald Trump and his cultists like some exploding cigar from a 1940s cartoon. A GOP-approved hijacking of voting records and machines from the 2020 election — do not dare call it an “audit” — conducted by a scammy-is-too-good-a-word contractor called the Cyber Ninjas that dragged on through much of 2021 ultimately claimed that any miscounted votes actually expanded President Biden’s win in Maricopa County. The cackling on left-leaning Twitter and MSNBC Friday night could be heard from Key West to Kalamazoo.
But one man — a Michigan carpetbagger turned Arizona politico named Mark Finchem — had a very different interpretation of what the conspiracy-minded voting sleuths had uncovered with official Republican support. “I call for decertification of the Arizona election, arrest of those involved in tampering with election systems, and an audit of Pima County (in northern Arizona) as a next step,” Finchem tweeted Friday.
The crazy part is that Finchem’s minority viewpoints on Donald Trump and his invisible claims of election fraud may matter a heck of a lot more than yours or mine come the 2024 vote counting. Last week, the disgraced 45th president (and would-be 47th) officially endorsed Finchem, now a state lawmaker, in his 2022 GOP primary bid to become Arizona’s next secretary of state. Trump’s imprimatur makes Finchem the instant primary favorite, in a midterm election in which both history and newfangled voter suppression favors Republicans.
That means Finchem — not just a garden-variety Trumpist but a member of the extremist Oath Keepers who was on the Capitol grounds during the Jan. 6 insurrection — could be Arizona’s chief vote counter if and when the bleats of voter fraud and a stolen election again emerge from Mar-a-Lago in three years.
Be very afraid.
Read MoreIn this May 2018 photo, Republican Rep. Mark Finchem argues against an amendment to the state budget proposed by minority Democrats at the Capitol in Phoenix. Former President Donald Trump last week backed Finchem in his bid to become Arizona’s secretary of state.Read moreBob Christie / AP
For the millions eager to preserve some semblance of democracy in the United States, the autumn of 2021 arrived with a best-of-times respite — the seeming implosion, at least to rational human beings, of the Arizona scam that many dubbed “the fraudit” — in what otherwise feels like a worst-of-times moment for the American Experiment. There have been shocking new revelations about both how close we came to the abyss in 2020-21, and apocalyptic scenarios for 2024 that are coming into sharper focus.
The sense of urgency and angst was nailed this weekend in a truly remarkable Washington Post essay by Robert Kagan — hardly a man of the left, but rather an infuriatingly wrongheaded neocon advocate for 2003′s Iraq War — that pulled no punches in portraying American democracy as possibly on the brink of a total meltdown. Writing that Trump — barring ill health — has already locked down the 2024 GOP nomination and that a scheme to empower Trump-besotted vote counters is well underway. Kagan wrote there’s “a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.”
“All right-wing authoritarian movements always do this — it’s how they come to power,” Steve Schmidt, the former Republican who advised John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Friday night. “They drive chaos through policies of cynicism [and] nihilism, and then they promise to restore order with easy scapegoats.”
Partially driving the new waves of concern have been a stream of major new revelations about how close the plotting around a Trump-led coup to keep him in office came to succeeding. Specifically, there was the discovery and leaking of the so-called Eastman memo — developed by conservative lawyer and Federalist Society member John Eastman — that spelled out a point-by-point plan for how Vice President Mike Pence could push to not certify valid Electoral College results at the Jan. 6 proceedings and either declare Trump the winner or throw the contest into the House, which would likely elect Trump with its arcane 18th-century rules.
Rioters climb the west wall of the the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6. A House committee investigating the insurrection has requested that telecommunications and social media companies preserve the personal communications of hundreds of people who may have somehow been connected to the attack.Read moreJose Luis Magana / AP
New reporting shows that Pence didn’t necessarily reject this ridiculous advice out of hand, but was talked down by Establishment Republicans including the most unlikeliest of heroes (or “heros”), Indiana’s former GOP veep Dan Quayle. We’re also learning a lot more about a supposed-to-be-secret Jan. 5 meeting of key Trump allies at the Willard Hotel, and about communications between pro-coup Trumpists and the then-president. The growing sense is that 2020 was less spontaneous chaos than a trial run for the next time. And what Trump’s neo-fascists learned is that an American election can be stolen — but only if wild-eyed loyalists can position themselves inside the sweet spots of the judiciary, state legislative leadership, and the key vote-counting roles, especially the all-important secretary of state position.
So the Trumpian strategy for 2024 seems to have two prongs. One is to createa continuous four-year cloud of uncertainty — at least for loyalists who only consume news on Fox or Facebook — about Biden’s 2020 victory. In other words, the outcome of these bogus investigations like Arizona’s not-really-an-audit isn’t what matters as much as keeping the plates of baseless accusation spinning. That’s why on Friday night, just moments after the Arizona alleged findings were released, the Republican secretary of state in Texas — which, you’ll recall, Trump actually won in 2020 — announced a new audit of four counties there. This series of “rolling ‘fraudits’” will keep the conversation on your uncle’s Facebook page for the next 26 months.
Equally significant in Texas is the presence of a Republican secretary of state. Key to Biden’s tenuous victory in the Electoral College in 2020, on the other hand, was the presence of pro-democracy officials in these key posts, from Democrats in Arizona and Pennsylvania to a pro-facts Republican in Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger. So the critical goal of Team Trump is to change all of that for 2024.
Supporters of Donald Trump gather outside the Pennsylvania State Capitol on Dec. 14, 2020, in Harrisburg.Michael M. Santiago / MCT
A stunning report last week by the Reuters news service found that 10 of the 15 top Republicans running for secretary of state in five key battleground states — where the post, unlike Pennsylvania, is an elected position — “have either declared that the 2020 election was stolen or called for their state’s results to be invalidated or further investigated.” Several of these candidates have already been Trump-endorsed, including Arizona’s Finchem but also Georgia Congressman Jody Hice, who is running to get rid of Raffensperger and called Jan. 6 “our 1776 moment.”
Pennsylvania — the closest battleground state with the most electoral votes, where the election was called for Biden last November — is a powerful example of exactly what the Trump scheme to unwind American democracy looks like. In Harrisburg, Republican legislative leaders — after weeks of lobbying and browbeating by Trump himself — are plowing ahead with their unpopular plan to yet again review (definitely NOT an audit) the 2020 outcome, which involves handing over my personal data and that of 9 million other voters to an unknown but probably dodgy vendor. Again, the medium — creating chaos — is the message.
The Democratic state attorney general, Josh Shapiro, has seized on this abuse of personal data in filing a lawsuit seeking to stop the GOP probe before it gets off the ground. That’s the right thing to do on Shapiro’s part, but it’s not the most important thing the Montgomery County politico can do to save democracy, in either America or its Keystone State. Shapiro is also the presumed front-runner to become his party’s nominee for governor. If he wins, he will pick the next secretary of state — and thwart a key element of Trump’s scheme.
If the GOP wins Pennsylvania’s open 2022 gubernatorial race to replace term-limited Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf — and the governor’s mansion has flipped parties without fail since the 1960s — then the secretary of state pick will be made by a Republican who will surely have to curry favor with Trump to get through a crowded primary. One of the front-runners is a mirror image of Arizona’s Finchem — State Sen. Doug Mastriano, who organized buses to Capitol Hill on Jan. 6 and was photographed near the insurrection. If Mastriano or one of several other Trump-crazed candidates wins the general election, it’s a lock that Pennsylvania’s 48th governor will name a secretary of state who will work feverishly to restrict voting rights in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, and — if Trump gets fewer votes, again — cast doubt on the outcome, or work to simply ignore the results, as would be expected in a dictatorship.
So while, yes, Pennsylvania’s governor’s race will be important for the usual reasons like education funding or the fate of fracking, this time around voters are essentially tasked with preserving America’s 245-year experience with democracy … or not. We need to listen with great care to what former conservatives like Robert Kagan or Steve Schmidt are trying to tell us. The future of the United States, and its vital yet imperfect promises of liberty, are at the edge of a cliff, looking over the edge. We must seize this moment to pull it back.
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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/
Bauer and Ginsberg on 60 Minutes Overtime: “Helping election officials who are threatened”
“Democrats urge DOJ to address ‘insider threats’ from candidates who deny 2020 results”
More than a dozen House Democrats are urging the Department of Justice (DOJ) to address “insider threats to election systems,” which they say are posed by candidates who are running to fill local election positions motivated by former President Trump‘s false claims about the 2020 presidential election.
In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland dated Wednesday, the democratic lawmakers said they are worried that those candidates may attempt to influence the outcomes of future races if they are installed as election officials.
“Unfortunately, many of the candidates seeking to fill newly vacated state and local election posts support former President Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen,” the lawmakers wrote. “We are concerned that this new cohort of election officials may be inclined to abuse their authority to directly influence the results of future elections.”
The elections police are coming