VOTER SUPPRESS 3
4/19 see previous
1219 bak
see purge rolls
includes voter fraud BS
see vote by mail
veritas
see fedsoc felon voters
AN has updates
map
https://thedemlabs.org/press/map-reveals-voter-suppression-incidents-in-us-election-case-study-democracy-labs/
omfg shelby title V was hit/scalp
https://publicintegrity.org/politics/news-outlets-unearth-more-donors-trust-recipients/
donors use charity to push free-market policies in states
By Paul Abowd
February 14, 2013
Charity acts as screen for conservative foundations that feed network of state-based think tanks, media outlets.
Virginia-based charity Donors Trust has promised anonymity to donors who seek to fund “sensitive or controversial” issues.
A Center for Public Integrity report last week lifted that veil — at least partially — revealing dozens of conservative foundations that together in recent years have given tens of millions of dollars to Donors Trust .
Donors Trust, in turn, has funded a nationwide network of free-market think tanks, media outlets and university programs to the tune of nearly $400 million since 2002.
Recently, much of that funding has gone toward state-based policy efforts. For example, Donors Trust provided 95 percent of the funding for a conservative media clearinghouse called the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, which runs a network of state-based blogs.
While many of the charity’s 193 donors remain anonymous, a variety of media reports have shown where Donors Trust money ends up:
Climate change-denial
In late February, The Guardian GUK reported that 46 percent of Donors Trust grants in 2010 went to groups opposing climate science. Between 2002 and 2010, the group gave $118 million to about 100 such groups.
A detailed 2012 report published on DeSmog Blog ties Donors Trust to a vast climate science denial machine through its generous support for theHeartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank that mobilized support for the tobacco industry before shifting its focus to climate change. BUCHHOLTZ?]
An October episode of PBS Frontline said Donors Trust has become “the number one supporter” of climate denial groups like Heartland and the Koch brothers-funded Americans for Prosperity after industry giants such as ExxonMobil curtailed funding to Heartland following public protest.
Islamic radicalism
Donors Trust made its largest grant in 2007 to a New York-based group called Clarion Fund. The $17 million donation went toward the production of a documentary called “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.”
Seven weeks before the 2008 election of Barack Obama as president, Clarion distributed millions of copies of the movie, which stirred fear about Islamic radicalism, by inserting DVDs as ads in daily newspapers nationwide.
Reports later suggested that Chicago businessmanBarry Seid may have passed the $17 million through Donors Trust to Clarion. Seid and Donors Trust director Whitney Ball co-chair another foundation called Chicago Freedom Trust.
Academic coups?
In 2010, a free-market professor of economics whose research is funded through Donors Trust laid out his “Free State” plan for libertarians to migrate to and take over the state of New Hampshire.
In 2009, Donors Trust passed about $600,000 in donations to Shimer Collegewhile conservative Chicago businessmen, including Seid, attempted unsuccessfully to take control of the small liberal arts school.
‘Fair representation’
A Donors Trust subsidiary called the Project for Fair Representation has led legal challenges to affirmative action programs and, more recently, to the Voting Rights Act, according to reports by Reuters and The New York Times.
The project sought out and tapped the majority-white Shelby County, Ala., as plaintiffs in a challenge to Section 5 of the Act,which gives the U.S. Department of Justice power to approve or reject changes to electoral laws in 16 states, mostly in the south. The case will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.
trump campaign targeted 3.5 million Black voters for suppression: report
White House
David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement September 28, 2020
The Trump campaign focused its digital efforts on 3.5 million Black American voters in 2016, targeting them in an effort to deter them from voting.
A new report from the UK's Channel 4, which also helped expose how Cambridge Analytica precisely targeted voters for the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, makes the stunning revelation.
Pointing to "a vast cache of data used by Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign on almost 200 million American voters," Channel 4 reports it has obtained the data, which "reveals that 3.5 million Black Americans were categorized by Donald Trump's campaign as 'Deterrence' – voters they wanted to stay home on election day."
"In 16 key battleground states, millions of Americans were separated by an algorithm into one of eight categories, also described as 'audiences', so they could then be targeted with tailored ads on Facebook and other platforms," Channel 4 reports.
One of the categories was named 'Deterrence', which was later described publicly by Trump's chief data scientist as containing people that the campaign "hope don't show up to vote".Analysis by Channel 4 News shows Black Americans – historically a community targeted with voter suppression tactics – were disproportionately marked 'Deterrence' by the 2016 campaign.
Here's a promotional video from Channel 4, tweeted by the UK investigative journalist who exposed the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Here's video showing Channel 4 actually visiting voters in Wisconsin, and showing them what information the Trump campaign had on them.
The Trump campaign had data on voters' home address, date of birth, jobs, income, and housing status, and matched that to individual people to target them, Channel 4 revealed.
The plan worked."Overall turnout" in one Milwaukie, Wisconsin precinct, "fell from 75% in 2012, to just 56% in 2016."
In another, turnout fell from 81% to 55%.
Trump won the 2016 Electoral College by just 77,000 votes across three states. no lnx twt vid
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-campaign-targeted-3-5-million-black-voters-for-suppression-report/
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an 920
US Civil Rights Commission shelves recommendations for protecting voter rights in November
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/right-wing-christians-are-training-thousands-of-volunteers-to-help-interfere-in-the-election
religious right activists are inserting themselves into the election process by gearing up to challenge votes cast by mail and watch for suspected fraud at polling stations.
Right-wing Christians and conservatives are training thousands of volunteers to challenge the validity of some votes cast in key battlegrounds states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, reported The Guardian.
“I’m particularly concerned about mail-in voting fraud,” said Catherine Engelbrecht, co-founder of the Texas-based group True the Vote.
There’s no evidence that mail-in voting has caused widespread problems in U.S. elections, but Engelbrecht’s group has already trained about 10,000 volunteers to sniff out alleged fraud in targeted counties through handwriting analysis and other methods.
engelbrecht became especially concerned about the potential for fraud after some NBA teams offered their arenas for in-person voting to ensure Black Americans had access to the polls as the Trump administration imposed new limits on the U.S. Postal Service.
True the Vote, which has roots in the Tea Party movement, has offered training sessions with religious and conservative groups such as Intercessors for America, the Thomas More Law Center and Eagle Forum.
Engelbrecht and her allies described their work as a “spiritual battle” for “control of the world,” according to Right Wing Watch, and Intercessors president Dave Kubal says she’s been “anointed” by God to oversee the election.
But election law experts say True the Vote’s work usually involves efforts to limit minority voting through voter ID laws and voter-roll purges, and organized election observers have previously been charged with intimidation.
“True the Vote is a misnomer,” said Gerry Hebert, a voting-rights lawyer for 21 years at the Department of Justice. “They should be called Suppress the Vote.”
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aha-ish perhaps somewhat neglected b/c of indirect attacks on voting system eg
sow chaos? de-legit vote ~ mail in
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/ag-barr-repeatedly-claims-he-doesnt-know-if-its-illegal-to-vote-twice-when-confronted-with-trump-comments/
next week, our team will be in court for the voters of Pennsylvania, challenging dangerous election practices that threaten the health and safety of voters and undermine the constitutional right to vote. African American and Latino citizens, who have historically struggled for the right to participate equally in our democracy, have been disproportionately affected by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, making the risks of voting in an overcrowded polling place particularly severe and disparate for these populations. That’s why Free Speech For People, on behalf of the Pennsylvania State Conference of the NAACP, has sued Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar to challenge numerous unsafe and unequal election practices that violate the Pennsylvania Constitution’s guarantees of free and fair elections and equal protection of the law.
But this case is bigger than Pennsylvania. Last month, the Trump campaign and the RNC filed a**motion to intervene**in this case. They, along with the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Republican Party of Pennsylvania, seek to oppose the Pennsylvania NAACP in this case and to block the remedies requested to help ensure a safe and secure election in Pennsylvania this November.
prOSECUTORS AND LAWMAKERS in several states have responded to mass protests against police brutality by charging demonstrators with committing felonies, including terrorism charges. The trend of criminalizing protest has been on the uptick since the 2016 protests against the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock, during and after which numerous states upped charges for protests “near critical infrastructure” as felonies.
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Since 2016, 14 states have enacted new laws to restrict the right to peaceful assembly,**a**ccording to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, which tracks related state and federal legislation. But in the wake of the nationwide movement in support of Black lives, numerous states have increased the severity of criminal penalties for protesters along political lines and are prosecuting them more aggressively, as demonstrations continue with no sign of slowing down.
just last week, following more than 60 days of demonstrations outside the State Capitol, Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Lee signed a law that made it a felony to participate in some types of protests, including camping out overnight on state property.Charges for the same activity were previously classified as a misdemeanor. In Tennessee, people convicted of felonies lose their voting rights — making the new law a tool for disenfranchisement.
Earlier this month, police in Muscatine, Iowa, apprehended two people they say were attempting to drive a vehicle into the city Public Safety Building and got stuck on a planter. They charged both men with numerous counts, including terrorism. That follows an Oklahoma district attorney’s pursuit ofterrorism chargesagainst five young people, including three teenagers and two people in their 20s. The fourth-term prosecutor also threw felony charges at numerous other people in relation to protests and damage to local and police property in late May.
The terrorism charges reveal a “false equivalency between people who kill, and people who commit acts of property damage,” said Kate Chatfield, policy director at the Justice Collaborative, a policy and media organization focused on mass criminalization and incarceration. “Maybe not a great thing.”
“To say that the power of the state will be wielded in this way against political enemies is incredibly frightening,” Chatfield said, drawing a parallel to the post-9/11 era, when many people who had never committed an act of violence were prosecuted for terrorism. “Let’s not ignore the fact that we have a history of this in this country. A very recent history. And a continuing history, unfortunately.”
The nationwide protests prompted by George Floyd’s killing have continued through the summer, though at a lower intensity over the last month — before picking back up this week. Streets across the country swelled with demonstrators after police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot 29-year-old Jacob Blake in the back seven times, in front of his children. Blake is paralyzed from the waist down, his father told the Chicago Sun-Times on Tuesday. Protesters burned down a state Department of Corrections building on Monday. The following night, armed white members of a militia group organized counterdemonstrations to protect local property. Video footage from Kenosha shows the militia members chatting with the police. Shortly after the video was captured, one member of the militia shot and killed two protesters, and left a third in serious condition. Police arrested 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse in Illinois on Wednesday and charged him with first-degree intentional homicide.
“When you hear our president talk about Black Lives Matter as a terrorist organization, or antifa as a terrorist organization, it is the kind of thing that — his statement holds no weight in law, but it sends a message to prosecutors like this that they’ll be supported,” said Thomas Harvey, justice project director at the Advancement Project, a non-profit civil rights group. “And even more frighteningly, I think it sends a message to people like the militia members we saw in Kenosha, and gives them the state and the latitude to commit even more violence than what we see on a daily basis in this country against black and brown folks.”
IN SOME STATES where police have charged protesters en masse with felonies, prosecutors have swiftly dropped them, calling into question the reasoning behind the original charges.
In Louisville, Kentucky, police arrested 87 protesters who had staged a sit-in on the lawn of a home belonging to state Attorney General Daniel Cameron last month — part of an ongoing call for accountability in the killing of Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old EMT whom three Louisville police officers shot at least eight timesinside her home in March. (The officers were acting on a no-knock warrant in connection with a suspect who did not live at Taylor’s residence. The police department fired one of the three officers who were involved in June. Local activists including Louisville Black Lives Matter worked with Taylor’s family to develop a list of demands, including firing, charging, and convicting the three officers.) Three days later, Jefferson County Attorney Mike O’Connell dismissed the felony charges and said his office would consider misdemeanors and other violations for prosecution at a later date. On Tuesday, Louisville police arrested another 68 protesters and charged them with obstructing a highway and disorderly conduct, both misdemeanors.
Earlier this month in Washington, D.C., police arrested 41 protesters in the Adams Morgan neighborhood on charges of felony rioting and assaulting police officers. The Metropolitan Police Department said in a tweet on August 14 that it only arrested people “engaged in rioting behaviors.” Between May 30 and June 1, District police arrested more than 100 people on charges of burglary, destroying property, and violating curfew, including at least 40 charges of felony rioting.Prosecutorsdropped most of the charges in both sets of arrests.
In Salt Lake City on Friday, a judge droppedpossible life sentence charges facing protesters who poured paint, broke windows, and posted signs at the District Attorney’s Office building, reducing some charges to lower-class felonies and misdemeanors. In June, West Valley police and FBI agents arrested two men in Salt Lake who had allegedly threatened officers and were headed to protests armed with multiple weapons. Prosecutors later charged one man with terrorism.
Also in early June, police officers in Columbia, South Carolina, arrested more than 80 protesters and charged three men with instigating a riot, typically a low-level felony or misdemeanor.
Elected officials participating in the protest have also been caught in the crackdown.In Portsmouth, Virginia, on Monday, sheriff’s deputies delivered a summons charge to the vice mayor, after a resident pressed misdemeanor criminal charges against her for calling on the Portsmouth police chief to resign. Earlier this month, police brought felony charges against the Virginia State Senate pro tempore, a local school board member, local NAACP leaders, and public defenders for injury to a monument and conspiracy, in relation to the destruction of confederate statues in June.
Federal authorities have also carried out their own crackdown on demonstrations, arresting protesters in Portland, Oregon, and New York City in recent months. The FBI has opened some 300 domestic terrorism investigations since late May. Last year, according to the agency, most federal arrests for domestic terrorism involved white supremacy, though the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit has also investigated a fictional “black identity extremists” movement. The FBI has also quietly investigated white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement in recent years, The Intercept reported.
AMONG THE MOST serious recent charges against protesters are those of terrorism in Oklahoma. There,Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater charged three teenagers and two other people in their 20s with terrorism related to their alleged activity during protests in late May.
“We found it especially inappropriate — and unconstitutional — because it was made with the explicit purpose of silencing protesters who are standing up for Black lives,” American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma Staff Attorney Megan Lambert told The Intercept, regarding the recent terrorism charges. “We didn’t even see terrorism charges for the Murrah bombing,” she added, referring to the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City.
The terrorism charges, which were filed in June and July, stem from allegations that protesters set fire to a sheriff’s van and caused damage to a local bail bond business. Last month, Prater charged two other teenagers with terrorism in connection to demonstrations at the end of May, bringing the total to five. The DA also charged multiple people with rioting, assaulting officers, andat least five others for incitement to riot for painting murals in the city’s downtown area in June.
Oklahoma Democratic Party Chair Alicia Andrews, the ACLUof Oklahoma, and Oklahoma City Black Lives Matter founder and Executive Director Rev. T. Sheri Dickerson slammed Prater’s move, saying that the charges of terrorism were far too harsh. During a press conference early last month, Andrews said she didn’t condone vandalism or destruction of property but that Prater was using the charges to silence protesters. “‘Use your First Amendment right in a way that we don’t like, and we will ruin your future.’ These charges are an attempt to send a message, ‘We’re tired of hearing about Black lives,’” she said.
Prater took office in 2007 and is currently serving his fourth term as DA. His current term ends in 2023.He started his career in law enforcement at age 19 as a deputy sheriff, according to his bio. “These people are speaking out against violence that Prater himself has largely been complicit in,” Lambert said. “This is just another example in a pattern from David Prater’s office of upholding white supremacy.” Prater’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Last May, Prater declined to charge officers who killed 17-year-old Isaiah Lewis, who was in the middle of a mental health crisis when police shot him in Edmond. Over the last few months, local activists have brought renewed attention to Lewis’s killing, which has been a focus of some demonstrations in the area. Other cases have gotten less attention, Dickerson pointed out. Derrick Scott, 42, died last May after being apprehended and restrained by Oklahoma City police. In video footage of the arrest released in June, Scott tells officers he can’t breathe and asks them repeatedly to give him his medicine. An officer replies, “I don’t care.”
“The Scott family is not receiving any justice,” Dickerson said, adding that Scott’s killing was eerily similar to Floyd’s. Earlier this month, police shot 32-year-old James Harmon in the head, saying that he had a weapon in his hand (Oklahoma is an open-carry state). Harmon is still in the hospital.
“Systemic racism, institutional racism, and white supremacy is so deep-rooted,” Dickerson said, agreeing with Lambert’s characterization of Prater’s office. “There’s really nothing more Oklahoman than that.”
“This was a state that was formed basically for them to literally lump Natives and Blacks here together,” she said. “And so it has always been very intentional and deliberate, for us to be victims of what I consider state-sanctioned violence and state-targeted violence.”
For the Oklahoma City teens and young adults facing terror charges, “what’s next is they fight for their lives,” Lambert said. The statute carries a maximum of life in prison. “Many of these charged protesters are young teenagers. … So they are facing spending their entire lives in prison simply for, in some cases, attending a protest to try and hold police accountable.” Criminal defense attorneys are still working to get those charges dropped or significantly reduced.
“Some of the young people were saying, ‘We should go to Kenosha and stand with the young people there,” Dickerson said. “And I was like, ‘How do you choose?’”
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salon cdv
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/election-theft-expert-says-trump-has-a-plan-to-steal-the-election-legally-and-the-usps-isnt-the-problem
Donald Trump is interfering with the U.S. Postal Service, in an apparent attempt to steal the 2020 election. He has repeatedly and publicly confessed to this scheme. For example, Trump has said that the post office must be denied additional funding because it would help facilitate mail-in voting — which he has previously said would hurt his chances of re-election chances. Trump has also said that mail-in voting is fraudulent and must be stopped. (There is virtually no evidence of such fraud.) He has also said that mail-in ballots may not be counted for “months or years” — a gesture toward his evident desire to remain president indefinitely.
This is one of many examples when Trump has shown himself to be an authoritarian who does not respect democracy: He has threatened not to leave office if he loses the 2020 presidential election, wants to extend the number of years he can be president and has floated the idea of delaying the date of the election if he believes that will help him “win.” During his speech on Monday before the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump said again that he wants to stay in office for 12 more years. He also said that mail-in voting is one of the biggest “scams” in human history and once again suggested that the only way Joe Biden and the Democrats can defeat him is by cheating. With such wild claims Trump is, again, creating a pretext for a “Reichstag fire” event which he will try to use to nullify the 2020 Election.
Trump is also threatening to dispatch 50,000 “poll watchers” in a Jim Crow-style campaign to prevent “fraud” by intimidating and harassing Democratic Party voters — a large proportion of them Black or brown — in major cities like Detroit and Milwaukee. Trump is never subtle in his schemes: Last week he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that he would only send his “law enforcement” agents to “Democratic Party” areas.
Donald Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 presidential election by interfering with mail delivery is being orchestrated by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major Trump donor and Republican Party booster. DeJoy is also personally and financially invested in destroying the Postal Service because of his major investments in XPO, a competing delivery company. DeJoy has also previously invested in Amazon and UPS.
deJoy has ordered the removal of high-volume mail sorting machines, taken away mailboxes, ended overtime for postal workers and changed other rules and regulations which in some cases have caused weeks-long delays. His changes will cause a predictable delay in the delivery of mail-in ballots, which in many states will be discarded and not counted.
During his Senate hearing last Friday, DeJoy claimed that he would pause these disruptive damaging changes to the U.S. mail, and promised that mail-in ballots would be delivered on schedule
Like other Trump officials, DeJoy was at best being evasive and at worst lying in his testimony before Congress. Whistleblowers within the USPS as well as leaked memos indicate that he has no intentions of allowing the mail to proceed as normal in these weeks leading up to Election Day. There are also suggestions that DeJoy is targeting service delays to heavily Democratic areas, which would give Trump and even larger unfair advantage.
On Monday, DeJoy testified before the House Oversight Committee, where he proved incapable of answering basic questions about the Postal Service andadmitted to being in contact with the Trump 2020 campaign team through intermediaries. DeJoy also claimed that the damaging and disruptive changes to mail delivery began before he was appointed as postmaster general. When challenged with a chart which clearly showed that the delays corresponded with the beginning of his tenure, DeJoy had no sensible explanation.
In all, Donald Trump and his regime’s interference with the U.S. mail represents yet another crisis for the country and its failing democracy. Greg Palast, the investigative journalist and bestselling author who is one of the country’s foremost experts on vote rigging, vote fraud and election theft, believes that the Trump regime’s interference with the mail is largely a distraction from bigger problems with democracy and voting in America.
Palast is the author of several books, including “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” and “Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.” His new book is “How Trump Stole 2020: The Hunt for America’s Vanished Voters.”
In our most recent conversation, Palast warned that the Trump regime and Republican Party and their agents are implementing a massive nationwide campaign to challenge the legitimacy of votes cast in support of Joe Biden. This is part of a plan that may also include intimidation and perhaps even coordinated violence and acts of terrorism by pro-Trump paramilitaries and other forces against post offices, polling stations and other election facilities. The goal is to create national chaos and a state of emergency in which millions of votes are left uncounted and the presidential election, under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, is decided by the House of Representatives. The result of that, Palast predicts, will be the re-election of Donald Trump.
You can also listen to my conversation with Greg Palast on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below:
as usual, this interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What is actually happening with Donald Trump, the Postal Service, and his efforts to steal the 2020 election?
No. 1, we should thank Donald Trump and his postmaster general because he has woken people up to the fact that mail-in voting can be really dangerous. It is like playing Russian roulette with your voting ballot. Twenty-two percent of all mail-in votes never get counted.And that was under Barack Obama, when they were promoting mail-in voting. What is going to happen with Trump and the Republicans?
Mail-in voting has already been a disaster in America. One in 10 people who ask for absentee ballots do not get them. One in 10 people who do get their ballots and send them back have their ballots rejected, thrown out and not counted. Mail-in voting was a big problem before Trump decided to make it worse.
There have always been problems with the post office in its handling of mail-in ballots. But the post office is not the main problem with voter suppression and vote rigging in America. In many ways, focusing on Trump and the post office is a distraction.
There are eight states which require a person to have a witness signature. Three states require notarizing either the ballot or the request for a mail-in ballot. This was difficult before, but in a pandemic is problematic to the extreme. Very little of this has to do with the post office. The biggest reason why people don’t get their ballots is that they are not registered voters. What happened? Many of those people have been purged from the voter rolls. Seventeen million people have been purged during the last few years.
The real theft of the 2020 presidential election is not the lack of mailboxes that will stop people from mailing in their ballots or getting them. It’s not the lack of sorting machines. It is a lack of commitment to counting ballots by both parties.
The real danger of mail-in voting is that you do not get your ballot because some political functionary has decided to slow-walk your ballot to you or has removed your registration or decided they’re not going to send it because, for example, you are one of the several million people on what are called the “inactive voter” list. The post office is not responsible for that interference and trickery.
Is Trump’s sabotage of the U.S. mail an intentional distraction? Some type of sophisticated strategy?
Donald Trump and his agents are not that strategic. What they are doing with the mail is just one more thing among many that they are doing to try to keep the American people from voting in November.
Yes, if you tear apart the United States Postal Service the problems with voting are going to get worse. There is no question of that. Overtime is being eliminated by Trump’s postmaster. There are going to be 120 million mail-in ballots. How will those ballots get processed if overtime is reduced? Trump’s postmaster is also eliminating the requirement that mail comes in and goes out the same day. That is a longstanding post office rule. So yes, what is happening with Trump and the post office is very destructive and dangerous and will make it harder for people to vote. But, again, it is not the worst part of how mail-in voting, and voting more generally, in this country is being undermined. The whole system of voting in America needs to be fixed.
Why is Donald Trump being so bold as to publicly admit that he is sabotaging the mail so that he can win the 2020 election?
It is quite brilliant. But again, it is not Donald Trump being brilliant, but rather the people around him who are directing these efforts to interfere in the 2020 presidential election. Trump’s advisers are creating a situation where they will challenge the vote in November. Mail-in ballots are going to be central to the scheme. About half of all ballots cast, about 60 million, are going to be challenged. If there are 120 million mail-in votes, 26 million of them will not be counted.
My big fear is that Donald Trump is establishing the grounds for making a claim that mail-in ballots are fraudulent. Moreover, they will focus on black people as part of that strategy. This is an old lie and stereotype in America — that black people somehow vote twice. Watch the film “Birth of a Nation” and you will see that racist stereotype’s origins.Trump has repeatedly said that people of color are going to be sending in multiple ballots.
If Trump and the Republicans cannot win by challenging all those votes because Biden is too far ahead, then we will see some version of what happened in Florida in 2000 with Gore and Bush.
Then Roger Stone led $600-an-hour consultants who went crazy in the Miami-Dade County voting officesand stopped the counting of the ballots that the machines could not read. The result was that Bush became president by 537 votes. If you had counted all those votes in Miami, George W. Bush would likely not have been elected president. This time the Republicans and their operatives are going to say, “That building is filled with fraudulent ballots. That post office building has a million ballots from Bolivia or what have you that should not be counted!”
I believe there is a good chance that right-wing paramilitaries such as the Boogaloo Boys, the Proud Boys or other similar people are going to burn down the post offices. They are going to attack county offices. The riot this time will not be consultants wearing suits, like in 2000, but instead men armed with assault rifles. I also believe there are going to be large-scale protests on Election Day because of the interference with the vote. I really believe that there is a good chance that this nation will be on fire on Election Day. If Donald Trump is behind in the vote there are going to be massive attacks on polling places.
People are not going to get their mail-in ballots. They are going to have to wait in line during a pandemic. I am worried that the lines will be attacked by right-wingers trying to protect Trump and keep him in office. I am very worried that places such as Miami, Detroit, Milwaukee and Washington, D.C., will be in flames. In that scenario for example, the Florida legislature says, “There are a million mail-in ballots stuck in the post office. We believe they are fraudulent. We are getting word that there are huge numbers of questionable signatures. We cannot finish counting the votes on time and therefore we cannot certify the vote on time.”
What happens then? Florida does not certify the vote. The Republican-controlled legislature in Michigan does not certify the vote. Wisconsin does the same. Neither Biden or Trump gets 270 votes in the Electoral College as a result. Now the election is resolved under the 12th Amendment, which says it goes to the House of Representatives where Nancy Pelosi will call for a single vote from each state. Trump will win, 30-20. In that scenario, Donald Trump will be constitutionally elected by a right-wing riot and the burning of people’s votes.
The Republican Party, Trump and the right-wing propaganda media have spent years developing and circulating the lie that there is massive “vote theft” or “fake ballots” cast by Democrats. Of course, Republicans have actually been arrested for trying to rig elections using those means. Why don’t Republican operatives simply print up their own fake ballots, mail them in, and then claim that there is massive voter fraud? Create the “crime” that you later discover.
Exactly. That is an obvious trick, where fraudulent votes are sent in by the same right-wing operatives who then claim to “discover” them. I would not put such a plot past the likes of Roger Stone. Photocopy 1,000 ballots and mail them in and then say, “Look at all these fraudulent ballots!”
Donald Trump is threatening to use his own army of 50,000 “poll watchers” against Democratic voters. Trump has said he will deploy law enforcement agents in heavily Democratic communities as a way of ensuring that there is no “voter fraud,” but will not be sending law enforcement to Republican-controlled areas. Trump and William Barr also now have a secret police force which ran amok in Portland and elsewhere, and will certainly be used against the American people on Election Day.
The 50,000 volunteers that Trump has called for are not intimidation forces. I stood in line with the Souls to the Polls for five hours. I have stood in long lines in places such as Georgia and Milwaukee. I do not believe that a single person in those lines would be intimidated by anyone, even one of Trump’s people with an AK-47. The real issue will be that Trump’s poll watchers are going to challenge every ballot. So it’s not intimidation. The issue will be that they will go in as poll watchers and challenge every ballot.
What type of America are Donald Trump, William Barr, Stephen Miller and the Republican Party as a whole trying to create? To what end is their vote-rigging, vote suppression and other means of interference in the people’s will being directed?
There is apartheid in American voting. Let’s begin with that basic premise. The votes of nonwhite people are not being fully counted. This is because of the smart people around Donald Trump who have implemented many tactics and strategies to suppress and otherwise stop Democratic voters and their ballots from even being counted.
According to the Elections Assistance Commission, in the 2016 election 1,913,369 ballots cast in person were rejected, thrown out. In addition, 925,973 people were forced to cast provisional ballots which were not counted. In other words, roughly 1 million provisional ballots cast and rejected, 2 million in-precinct ballots cast and rejected, and then 3 million mail-in ballots which were either never received or were rejected. That comes to nearly 5.9 million ballots cast and not counted. And that was 2016. That is what elected Donald Trump. Nothing has been done to protect the American people’s votes.
Why don’t the Democrats make it clear to Donald Trump and the Republicans, “We’re going to challenge every single one of your votes”?
What I would like the Democrats to do is to challenge the Republican Party’s challenges to the votes. In Michigan, and this is very important, Republicans challenged every Hillary Clinton vote. The Democrats did not challenge a single Trump vote.
In response to your question, we should not answer the Republican Party’s attack on American democracy with another attack on democracy. Every vote should be counted. Voters’ intent should count — whether it is for Trump or whomever. If Donald Trump has 50,000 Boogaloo Boys or other right-wingers challenging votes, then the Democrats need 50,000 patriots — and they do not even have to be Democrats, just people who believe in democracy who will go in and say, “No, you cannot challenge those ballots. No, you can’t say that that signature is wrong. You have no expertise in signatures. Count that ballot!”
I believe in a true “We the people” democracy. That having been said, in terms of realpolitik why don’t the Democratic Party’s leaders tell the Republicans, “Whatever you do to stop our voters we are going to do yours 10 times worse unless you play it straight and fair.”
I really do not like the idea of mass challenges of votes. I do not want anyone playing that game. It would be sufficient for the Democrats to have people to challenge the challenges. I want Democrats to go to court and say, “Count the ballots. We need those ballots counted.” We also know that the chance a ballot will be challenged is 900 percent higher if a voter is black than if they are white.
We also need to go to the courts and demand an end to that discrimination. The Republicans also try to stop young people from voting. That should be challenged in court as well. Let me tell you, we still do have a Voting Rights Act in America. It may be weakened, it may be gasping for life, but we have it and we need to start enforcing it and demanding it.
I want the Democratic Party to be ready to challenge this attack on democracy. Trump and the Republicans are going to continue suppressing the votes of nonwhite people, young people, and others who support the Democratic Party. That is going to happen regardless of how much the Democrats put into the U.S. Post Office. Yes, the Postal Service should be protected, but that cannot be the main focus of stopping the theft of the 2020 election by Donald Trump.
What should people do if they are stopped or otherwise interfered with by one of Trump’s enforcers at a polling place? Would it be viable for the Democrats and other people of conscience to have their own security — a 21st-century version of the Deacons for Defense and Justice — to stop such interference and intimidation?
The American people do not need a vigilante force. We do need people who are vigilant and organized. For example, young people, who as a group are less susceptible to the pandemic, could volunteer to be poll watchers. They need to be there to challenge Trump and the Republican Party’s efforts to interfere with people’s votes. They must also know the rules. For example, 64% of all African-,American males are asked for their voter ID even in states which prohibit asking for a voter ID. If you’re a Black man, you’re going to be asked for your ID, even though it’s illegal to ask you for your ID.
Some people lose their vote because they do not have the acceptable ID. We need people at the polls to say, “No, you may not ask for that ID.” We have to know those rules and then we have to have people who will stay after the polls close for the opening of the mail-in ballots.
These trained observers would be watching for things such as when votes are disqualified because the “wrong” color ink was used. Our poll watchers must say, “No, that vote must count.”
What is the best-case scenario on Election Day in November — and what is the worst?
The best-case scenario is that the vote is so overwhelming against Trump that the Republicans and other Trumpists cannot steal the election. The voters make it such a defeat for Trump the outcome cannot be changed. The worst-case scenario is that the United States is in flames and the vote is not certified in several key states and then Trump wins through the 12th Amendment. I am very worried about massive violence and not the shutdown of the election per se, but rather using the violence as an excuse to go to the 12th Amendment.
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https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/177013
Trump’s Claim He’ll Send Sheriffs to Polling Places is Revealing in a Lot of Unintended Ways
tags: Republican Party, voting rights, Donald Trump, Vote Suppression, voter intimidation
“Are you going to have poll watchers?” Hannity asked his friend during an interview clearly aimed at pulling viewers away from simultaneous coverage of the Democratic convention. “Are you going to have an ability to monitor, to avoid fraud and cross check whether or not these are registered voters? Whether or not there’s been identification to know that it’s a real vote from a real American?”
“We’re going to have everything,” Trump replied. “We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement, and we’re going to have hopefully, U.S. attorneys, and we’re going to have everybody, and attorney generals. But it’s very hard.”
This, understandably, raised eyebrows. The president would send law enforcement to police polling stations? It’s a scenario that seems analogous to elections conducted by Eastern European strongmen, not by an elected official in the United States.
There are a few things to keep in mind about this claim, though.
The first is that, like so many of Trump’s wild assertions, he has made it before. In August 2016, he gave a speech in Altoona, Pa., in which he pledged to combat what he presented as endemic fraud in the state.
“We have to call up law enforcement. And we have to have the sheriffs and the police chiefs and everybody watching,” he said then, later adding another familiar refrain, that “the only way they can beat [me] in my opinion — and I mean this 100 percent — is if in certain sections of the state they cheat, okay?”
When he made the claim at the time, though, there was a significant roadblock to the plan. The Republican Party had been restricted from dispatching poll watchers to precincts for more than 30 years, the result of a lawsuit filed by the Democrats in 1981. Why? Because the Republican National Committee was using “poll watchers” in an effort to intimidate non-White voters....
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an 820 Louisiana Republican wants to force people to submit a positive COVID test to vote by mail
Matthew Chapman / Raw Story August 18, 2020
According to the Daily Advertiser, Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin is proposing a rollback of voter eligibility to cast an absentee ballot ahead of the November election. “Ardoin’s new plan will…
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720 desmog
New Orleans Activists Call out Environmental Racism Alongside Police Brutality in Week of Protests
On June 3, just hours before New Orleans police tear-gassed a group protesting racial violence, Jesse Perkins, a Black veteran, called out the many shades of racism and violence his community...
READ MORE
https://theintercept.com/2020/06/25/environmental-activists-charged-terrorizing-louisiana-formosa/
TWO LEADERS OF the long-running fight for environmental justice in Louisiana turned themselves in to police in Baton Rouge Thursday morning. The activists, who work in a part of the state known as “Cancer Alley,” faced charges of “terrorizing” related to a nonviolent protest action. Civil liberties attorneys are calling the charges a dramatic escalation of a yearslong effort by the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries to criminalize efforts to halt the expansion of polluting facilities in the state — part of a nationwide trend of cracking down on dissent around climate change issues.
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The accusations against the activists, Anne Rolfes and Kate McIntosh, stem from a seemingly innocuous activist stunt carried out in December, the day after a festival designed to draw attention to the environmental misdeeds of Formosa Plastics. The Taiwanese petrochemical company plans to build a massive plastics manufacturing complex in a largely Black Louisiana community that has already suffered health problems linked to local industry. In October, Formosa agreed to a $50 million settlement for dumping pollutants, including the small pellets that form the building blocks for plastic products known as nurdles, into Texas’s Lavaca Bay — the largest settlement of a Clean Water Act lawsuit filed by private citizens.
with a key environmental permit still pending for Formosa in Louisiana, the action — dubbed “Nurdlefest” — was meant to pressure the state’s Department of Environmental Quality to scrutinize the company’s record. Boxes of the plastic pellets, used as evidence in the Texas case, were carted to the front of the agency, where around 75 people gathered in the rain.
What apparently terrorized community members, however, was a container of the pellets that appeared on the porch of an oil and gas lobbyist, with a detailed note attached, explaining what they were and their Texas origin. “We have delivered this package of nurdles as a reminder – Louisiana does not need anymore pollution, plastics or otherwise,” the letter said. “We demand that LDEQ DENY Formosa’s air emissions permit application.”
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omfg
aug 3
Inside the Project Veritas Plan to Steal the Election
James O’Keefe’s group is part of a sprawling campaign to delegitimize mail-in balloting in the fall—a campaign being led by the White House.
https://newrepublic.com/article/158622/inside-project-veritas-plan-steal-election
https://newrepublic.com/article/158622/inside-project-veritas-plan-steal-election
James O’Keefe had big plans for 2020. The founder of Project Veritas, the conspiratorial right-wing group that specializes in Fox News–friendly “stings” intended to expose supposed liberal bias and corruption in American society, was planning on getting married this past May. The wedding, to a public school teacher, was to be at an exclusive country club in upstate New York. The guest list was packed with Make America Great Again world cognoscenti: Donald Trump Jr., Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and his activist wife Ginni were all invited, as were several of O’Keefe’s most generous conservative donors, including Texas shale oil billionaire George Bishop and Bullpen Capital founder Paul Martino.
The wedding was, per an email blast, “postponed indefinitely” over the coronavirus, as the pandemic swept across the state this spring and early summer. Although O’Keefe himself declined to comment on this and many other details for this story, a well-placed frenemy is “90 percent sure they broke up.” In any event, while the pandemic may have derailed his personal life, it has only heightened the urgency of some of O’Keefe’s most lucratively funded dirty tricks.
For well over a year, Project Veritas has been secretly producing undercover stings designed to undermine the integrity of absentee and mail-in ballot counts—an endeavor codenamed “Diamond Dog,” according to documents we have obtained. Diamond Dog began as only one facet of Project Veritas’s 2020 rat-fucking strategy, but with the onset of the pandemic, which has made in-person voting a dicey proposition, it has since become one of the group’s top-line action items.
The shift reflects the Republican Party’s near-existential concerns about mail-in voting in November. Donald Trump has disingenuously railed against the practice numerous times over the past few months, betraying a deep anxiety. “Mail in ballots substantially increases the risk of crime and VOTER FRAUD!” he has tweeted. At other times he has claimed: “It will be the greatest Rigged Election in history”; “IT WILL ALSO LEAD TO THE END OF OUR GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY”; and “SCAM!” Last week, he went so far as to suggest that the election should be delayed, saying that because of “Universal Mail-in Voting,” the vote would be “INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT.”
The purpose of Diamond Dog, as one source close to the organization put it, is “literally to get Trump reelected.” This source, like other past and present Project Veritas employees who have talked to us for this article,expressed fear of reprisals from the group and would only speak under the condition of anonymity.
Last year, Project Veritas’s donor development team solicited big-ticket funders with a pitch deck—frequently tailored to a given patron’s pet ideological grievances and personal hang-ups—offering tantalizing details about the group’s undercover operations for the 2020 campaign cycle. One iteration of this Apple Keynote file was prepared for an ask meeting with a person who appears to beCognex Corporation founder Robert Shillman, a devoted funder of Islamophobic causes who was also one of O’Keefe’s would-be wedding guests. (Shillman ended up pledging to donate $50,000 to the group.) The slate of investigations in the “Dr. Bob” pitch included schemes to procure evidence of “illegal aliens voting,” mail-in ballot tampering at “nursing homes,” and “the sale of absentee ballots and voter profiles on the ‘Dark Web.’”
By the end of summer 2019, Diamond Dog had already grown to be a cross-country effort, based on internal Project Veritas memos, research notes, and other documents that we have obtained. InCalifornia and Texas, Project Veritas has tasked its operatives with unearthing supposed evidence of widespread mail-in ballot forgery. In both states, Project Veritas has worked toinfiltrate the groups of volunteers and paid canvassers who collect absentee and mail-in voter applications from low-income, elderly, and minority groups—a perfectly legal practice in most states that conservatives have tried to label as nefarious “ballot harvesting.”
In Texas, Project Veritas has also coordinated in secret with a local Republican operative named Aaron Harris, codenamed “Dragon,” currently chief of staff toRepublican congressman Lance Gooden. In turn, through the activist group he founded, Direct Action Texas, Harris has helped Project Veritas covertly strategize with a staffer working for the office of the state’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton is leading the state’s “election integrity initiative,” one of many Republican efforts nationwide to suppress the vote under the guise of rooting out the nearly non-existent threat of voter fraud.
Granted, Project Veritas, whose fervor to own the libs is matched only by its comical incompetence, is hardly likely to tip the election in Donald Trump’s favor all by itself. But it is at the vanguard of a larger underhanded approach that Republicans, starting at the very top, are taking to the 2020 cycle. If they want to win, they really have no other choice but to undermine the vote: Trump’s poll numbers are in the basement, and he appears constitutionally incapable of making appeals beyond his hardcore supporters on the right.
Republicans have all but admitted that this is their strategy. In coordination with the Republican National Committee and a raft of independent conservative groups, Trump has staked the success of his entire reelection campaign to a widespread voter suppression effort built on the pretext of preserving election integrity.The project, led by his campaign’s senior counsel Justin Clark, has worked to place operatives in at least 10 battleground states to challenge voter rolls and procedures. Between lawsuits and local advertising blitzes—all regularly relayed to Trump in the Oval Office—the effort could cost “well over $20 million,” as the RNC told The Washington Post.
Project Veritas has been among the on-the-ground organizations at the forefront of these efforts and has benefited substantially as a result. According to internal Project Veritas documents, the group’s fundraising total for 2019 leaped up to more than$13.44 million, $4.58 million more than their 2018 returns and the group’s largest reported annual revenue figure to date. The group may be comically incompetent, but in these cursed times, we all know how dangerous comical incompetence can be once enough money and clout line up behind it.
For an operation premised on conspiracy theories and fueled by raging paranoia, it will come as no surprise that the agents helping to spearhead Project Veritas’s election mischief are oddballs on the fringes of American political life. In one slide prepared for Dr. Bob, a 69-year-old Florida resident, a registered Republican named Joseph Vancheri notifies O’Keefe of his soon-to-be status as apoll worker in Broward County, likely for undercoverElection Day snooping on Project Veritas’s behalf. Vancheri, an ex-cop and die-hard Trump supporter, has routinely taken to Facebook to lash out against “all the Trump haters” and “SHEEP,” including “SHIFTY SCHIFF” and “the Idiot Warren,” using Trump’s preferred epithet “Pocohontas [sic].” A first-generation immigrant himself, Vancheri has nevertheless long harbored hardline views on immigration that echo his anxieties over the potential for illicit enfranchisement of foreigners.
In another slide, Project Veritas boasts of receiving a tip from a former broadcast meteorologist named Arch Kennedy, who found it suspicious that 300 people were all registered to vote at the address for Emory University’s Emory Muslim Student Association in Atlanta. (In all likelihood these voters, who constitute 2 percent of Emory’s total student population and .0028 percent of Georgia’s population, have their mail forwarded there.) In 2017, Arch organized one of the anti-Muslim group ACT! For America’s 28 nationwide “March Against Sharia” rallies. Held in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park, it was a sparsely attended affair but still managed to include Republican Georgia State Senator Michael Williams, then mounting a doomed primary campaign for governor. [graf]
Iit’s unclear if either Vancheri or Kennedy’s offerings matured into full-fledged stings banked for the 2020 election. Neither they nor Project Veritas responded for comment, while the Project Veritas source who supplied the “Dr. Bob” pitch deck admitted that “a lot of it was kinda BS,” another example of the group “hyping themselves up to make themselves look better” and squeeze more money out of donors.Project Veritas went back to the well this weekend, soliciting donors in a mass email Saturday afternoon that promised a major ballot harvesting investigation that needs to be “completed as soon as possible.”
But other stings outlined in the Keynote file did materialize. The presentation, forexample, teased an inside man at Pinterestwho was “increasingly worried” about the platform’s “expanding community safety restrictions.” Sure enough, two months later, an ex-Pinterest Android app developer named Eric Cochran came forward with (later debunked) allegations in a series of Project Veritas
and a *Newsweek*op-ed claiming that the platform was censoring anti-abortion Christian advertisers. The pitch deck also promised an exposé from a “CNN Insider” named Cary Poarch, a bombshell that fizzled in October 2019 when Poarch’s hidden recordings, taken while working as a freelance satellite truck operator for the news network, failed to expose more than the personal opinions of a few random employees.
Well before the pandemic drew national attention to mail-in voting, these documents show a discernible focus on “ballot harvesting” as part of the larger Republican effort to paint voting by mail as a threat to democracy. The concern stems from the party’s entrenched belief that, as Trump has tweeted, vote-by-mail “doesn’t work out well for Republicans,” since it often helps low-income people and minorities.
By late August 2019, the “Story Objective” for Diamond Dog had expanded, per one internal meeting document, to exposing “corruption within CA ballot harvesting companies and other states (TX) based on intel gains.” A Project Veritas undercover operative codenamed “Magnum” had been busy “attending local Democratic events in CA to find discussions of harvesting.” Another operative codenamed “GDog” was creating anentrapment scheme by posting “ads online looking for people to join his ballot harvesting.”
Texas has been a major theater for Project Veritas’s Diamond Dog operations, in no small measure because raw demographics have been threatening to turn the state blue for years. The sense of crisis comes from the state GOP’s failure to bring Latinos into their voting bloc. The legacy of such botched strategizing has been an assault on the state’s Latino electorate itself, with right-wing officials and political operatives raising suspicions about their very legitimacy as legal participants in the voting process.
Aaron Harris, a son of white evangelical missionaries who picked up Portuguese while growing up in Brazil and went on to become fluent in Spanish, has been relentlessly stoking paranoia over mail-in ballots since his first failed foray as a paid political consultant in 2014. Despite a sizable war chest from Dallas hotel magnate and Tea Party financier Monty Bennett, Harris’s candidates in the 2015 local election for the Tarrant Regional Water District lost. He quickly became fixated on the idea that thousands of forged mail-in ballot applications had been responsible for their defeat.
Unlike some Project Veritas associates, Harris has already managed to stir up some public alarm about alleged balloting fraud in cooperation with elected officials from the Republican Party. He has made repeated open records requests for “applications for ballot by mail” and copies of signed “ballot carrier envelopes” in Tarrant County and elsewhere in Texas, eyeballing the signatures on each for signs of fraud. (Emily J. Will, the board-certified forensic document examiner who tried to warn 60 Minutes about the dubious provenance of President George W. Bush’s supposedly doctored Air National Guard records in 2004, told us that a non-expert like Harris couldn’t be relied upon to discern a forged signature.)
In 2016, Harris sent the fruits of that labor to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, leading to four conspicuously timed indictments two years later on the eve of the 2018 midterm elections. Paxton described the four Hispanic women, paid canvassers soliciting mail-in ballot applications door-to-door, as an “organized voter fraud ring.” He named (but did not charge) a former local Democratic Party leader, Stuart Clegg, as the ringleader in the court filings.
That case, which is still ongoing, reveals the ways in which the official GOP subtly coordinates with its army of right-wing irregulars in the field. Paxton stridently enforces one of the strictest voter I.D. laws in the nation, while Harris and his political allies at Direct Action Texas and Empower Texans work to independently legitimize the attorney general’s partisan vendettas. Harris and local Republican lawyer Alex Kim, for example, inserted themselves into the prosecution’s caseby independently visiting one of the charged canvassers in prison, seemingly on their own initiative, in an effort to coerce the woman into flipping on Clegg.(A month after helping Harris sneak into the Tarrant County Jail to harass the canvasser, Kim won a local race to preside over the entire county as a judge for Texas’s 323rd District Court.)
Paxton’s office has often pursued these voter fraud cases through a prosecutorial diversion program, allowing them to juke their stats with “de minimis” cases without ever having to prove their arguments in open court or subject their methods to independent review. Their biggest confirmed conviction to date: sending a 37-year-old Mexican citizen and mother of four, Rosa Maria Ortega, to prison for eight years for the high crime of being confused that her status as a legal resident in Texas did not actually confer unto her the voting privileges of full United States citizenship. Ortega voted in five elections between 2004 and her 2017 sentencing, casting ballots for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012—and, tragically, for Ken Paxton himself in the 2014 Texas attorney general’s race.
All signs point toward Paxton getting even more aggressive in 2020, thanks to a wrecked-up and paralyzed response to the pandemic by both Trump and Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Republicans are nervous that even blood-red Texas might be in play come November. Last April, Paxton threatened felony charges for anyone who requests or advocates for mail-in ballots “based solely on fear of contracting Covid-19”—a move that was upheld by the Texas Supreme Court in May, then by the Trump-stacked U.S. Supreme Court in June. It’s now sure to set the stage for many of the alleged mail-in schemes that Project Veritas will purport to expose later this year.
One local Project Veritas operative assigned to coordinate with Aaron Harris in Texas is also a former undercover volunteer: Cassandra Spencer, codenamed “Foxtrot” and sometimes “Foxtrot Smith” internally. In 2017, Spencer became O’Keefe’s “Facebook Insider” after leaving a public information officer post with the Pflugerville, Texas, police department to join Facebook’s contingent workforce operations at BCForward in Austin as a social media content moderator.
Spencer has positioned herself at the extremely online intersection of gaming culture and the alt-right. She has described herself as a “Proud Boy’s Girl” on Medium and attended “Austin’s premier anime convention” IKKiCON in Final Fantasy X cosplay. She traveled to Washington, D.C., for the inaugural DeploraBall and operates her own Twitch stream, which she dubbed “a First Amendment zone” for her conservative followers, “not like many others.”For the 2020 Democratic primary in Iowa, Spencer posed as a volunteer for presidential hopefuls Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders as part of a Project Veritas sting then-codenamed “Gold Mine."
[graf doc]
al?ready staked out on the Texas ballot-harvesting vanguard, Aaron Harris “met with Foxtrot” in person and “gave her a lead with someone to follow,” per internal Project Veritas research notes. As Diamond Dog progressed, Harris’s ties to Project Veritas deepened to include longtime employee and recruiting director Spencer Meads, codenamed “Brady,” and possibly an undercover journalist (UCJ) codenamed “Peter Pan.” Project Veritas’s expanding pool of Texas sources was meant to be a state secret, but the document offered a huge clue about who might be involved in an all-caps and highlighted portion that read: “CANNOT MENTION ATTORNEY GENERAL.” In the same document, after listing a series of major metropolitan areas in Texas as potential sites for their “ballot harvesting” investigation,a question is proposed: “Where does the AG’s guy suggest they go?”
When pressed for comment on his apparent role in facilitating communications between the Texas attorney general’s office and Project Veritas, Harris responded via his congressional email, “Do not contact me about my previous employment on official channels. Learn to be competent at your job.” After it was pointed out to Harris that the internal Project Veritas documents were sourced in the early fall of 2019, approximately 10 months after he became Congressman Gooden’s chief of staff, Harris became belligerent. To questions reiterated via personal text message, he responded, “I’ve asked you to stop harassing me and you want to argue about it? You are an idiot. You just keep proving it.”
Spencer did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Only two principal targets, old Harris foes, were mentioned by name in the Project Veritas strategy document: Texas-based personal injury attorney Domingo Garcia, a former state representative and the president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC; and the Harvest Project Food Rescue of Dallas, a community group that Harris seems to believe is an insidious front through which the state’s left-wing operatives entice immigrant communities, with the lure of unsold fresh produce donated by local distributors, into filling out their own mail-in ballots and thus enfranchising themselves. (“I wake up usually at 4:30 in the morning, I have to go pick up the food by six,” Harvest Project co-founder Danaë Gutiérrez-Martínez said when asked about Harris’s allegations. “I don’t get home ’til eight at night, nine at night, sometimes, to get up the next day and do it again, especially right now with everything that’s happening. You know, I must be Superwoman if I have time to do anything else.”)
A long-since-ousted co-founder of the Harvest Project, Jose Barrientos was very publicly implicated in a mail-in ballot forgery scheme in 2017. But Paxton and the local district attorney ultimately indicted someone else entirely, 27-year-old Miguel Hernandez, for the felony offense. After 180 days stewing in jail, Hernandez was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor with the understanding that his sentence would be limited to time served.
The beef between Harris’s groups and LULAC has been considerably more fraught. In the fall of 2016, Garcia publicly offered a $25,000 reward, funded through LULAC, for any information leading to the conviction of individuals “trying to intimidate a senior in Fort Worth or anywhere in Texas.” The target of their bounty was pretty clear, teed-up as it was by a Texas state representative, Ramón Romero, who had called out Harris by name for his door-to-door inquisition of seniors in Fort Worth’s predominantly Hispanic north side. Later at that same press conference, a related community service nonprofit, the United Hispanic Council of Tarrant County, announced that it had filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice against Harris’s Direct Action Texas for creating “an atmosphere of fear and intimidation” in local Hispanic neighborhoods.
In January 2019, LULAC filed a lawsuit against Attorney General Paxton and the secretary of state in Texas, David Whitley, accusing them both of violating the Voting Rights Act in their haphazard attempt to purge the state’s voter rolls of non-citizens.
Whitley’s offices would quietly walk back their initial list of 95,000 suspicious voters, many of whom were discovered to be, in fact, naturalized citizens. Shortly thereafter, San Antonio federal district court Judge Fred Biery put a stop to the purge, declaring that state Republicans were trying “to ferret the infinitesimal needles out of the haystack of 15 million Texas voters.” Harris, for his part, was unrepentant, telling the*Texas Observer*, “We are changing the entire discussion on voter fraud in Texas.” He was not wrong. While Harris is now planning to run for a House seat himself, his tireless efforts there have laid the groundwork for Project Veritas and its GOP partners this election season.
When mainstream Americans think about James O’Keefe, if they think about James O’Keefe at all, it’s usually in reference to his most hilarious failures: ruining his own sting on George Soros’s Open Society Foundation by leaving a self-incriminating voicemail; failing to lure a CNN reporter onto his yacht for a detailed “faux seducing” prank; revealing his unseemly ties to the billionaire mercenary Erik Prince by posting his own vanity spy training photos on social media. If Diamond Dog follows the Project Veritas playbook, it will likely focus on goosing a few unguarded comments out of canvassers and other volunteers in the hope of netting an inflammatory sound bite or two.
A modest, practically harmless October Surprise. But it’s typically down ballot where the average Project Veritas video tends to have its most pernicious effects. Less well known than O’Keefe’s blunders on the national stage are the numerous documented instances in which his stings have been cited to justify new and more onerous voter I.D. laws or other election integrity legislation in state legislatures across the country.
In April 2012, Chris McDaniel, then Mississippi’s Senate elections committee chairman, cited a Project Veritas voter fraud video as evidence justifying the passage of the state’s “photo identification requirement” bill, which the state’s Republican Governor Phil Bryant signed that May. Despite legal challenges, this law is still on the books today.
Also that year, a Republican Minnesota state representative, Steve Drazkowski, praised a locally shot O’Keefe video—in which Project Veritas undercover operatives requested ballot applications for their friends “Timothy Tebow and Thomas Brady”—during a floor debate for his party’s own draconian voter I.D. bill. While Minnesota’s Democratic Governor Mark Dayton vetoed a strict version of that voter I.D. legislation, and Minnesota voters backed his decision in a ballot initiative later that year, the state’s Republican Party still plans to revisit the issue again this year. (“We have had a number of studies that have been completed, there’s a lot of new data on this topic, and there are court cases that have been decided,” as Minnesota GOP State Senator Scott Newman ominously put it, “none of which we had in 2012.”)
O’Keefe’s “Primary of the Living Dead” stunts during the
and
primaries in 2012—in which his operatives requested but crucially did not actually attempt to use, the ballots of deceased primary voters—aided the passage of stringent voter I.D. laws in those states. After New Hampshire enacted a law in 2018 tightening the state’s voting statutes, partly in response to a new series of Project Veritas videos, Democratic legislators made repeated attempts to repeal them, only to be thwarted by Republican Governor Chris Sununu’s veto.
O’Keefe’s wealthy donors surely remember these and other victories in vivid detail, in no small measure because they are reiterated tirelessly during O’Keefe’s paid speaking engagements and fundraising conclaves. Among Project Veritas’s 2019 contributors were several wealthy political groups, charitable foundations, and conservative billionaires with apparent interests in the outcome of Diamond Dog.
From California, a donation of at least $10,000 from a pledged $100,000 came to Veritas from Susan Groff, president of the Los Angeles-area construction equipment rental company Northwest Excavating. A prolific Republican donor along with her husband Howard, both Groffs were praised as “good friends, entrepreneurs and patriots” in a loving tribute entered into the Congressional Record by their longtime beneficiary, former GOP House Rep. Elton Gallegly.(Another $50,000 came into Project Veritas from a donor listed only as “Arnott”; the Orange County-based investment guru Robert D. Arnott, a Koch network ally and prolific Republican donor, denied responsibility when reached via email.)
In Texas, another $50,000 was passed on to Project Veritas from the Texas Free Market Fund through the group Donors Trust, the dark money “donor-advised fund” that has helped make contributions from the Kochs, the DeVos family, and others untraceable in future IRS filings. The charitable foundation of late Texas oilman Ken W. “Stinky” Davis, based like Project Veritas ally Aaron Harris in Tarrant County, also kicked in $5,000 to the group, the latest in the foundation’s influential spending spree on Republican politics in the Lone Star State and across the country.
In Florida, another donation of $50,000 came to the group through Donors Trust, this time from the free market defenders at the Thomas W. Smith Foundation.
There was also a whopping $261,000 donation from the “Smith Family.” Could it be the Smith family that has monopolized local network TV affiliates through Sinclair Broadcasting? Or is it Randall and Barbara Smith, Palm Beach residents whose vulture fund Alden Global Capital was once described by Joshua Benton, the founder of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, as “the gelatinous cube scouring the news industry’s dungeon”? Neither Smith families responded to requests for clarification on this issue.
Many additional hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of contributions to Project Veritas were attributed solely to “DT” on the group’s quarterly financial meeting documents. The initials may refer to Donors Trust or to the constellation of corporate and (ostensibly) philanthropic organizations tied to President DonaldTrump himself. While Trump is a well-known past donor to Project Veritas—a framed photo of him and O’Keefe rests prominently on a bookshelf at Project Veritas headquarters in Mamaroneck, New York—many other donors were evidently so secret that they were listed simply as “anonymous” even on the group’s own internal documents.
Cash matters, but O’Keefe’s personal connectionsare where the depth and seamlessness of this coordination with the Republican Party become truly apparent. They also offer a glimpse into the vast network that has formed to suppress the vote this fall—a network years in the making, of which Project Veritas is but a humble node.
Take litigator William Consovoy, the legal point man on many of the conservative-funded election integrity cases pursued during the Trump era. He is, like O’Keefe, a New Jersey native with a long history in local Republican politics. A former law clerk for Clarence Thomas, Consovoy is also reportedly a friend of Federalist Society Executive Vice President Leonard Leo, whose nephew David Maxham has been a friend of O’Keefe’s since their undergraduate years at Rutgers. (Maxham, naturally, was also invited to O’Keefe’s wedding.)
This year, Leonard Leo has stepped aside from day-to-day management of the Federalist Society to run a new conservative donor group, CRC Advisors, that is pouring money into Consovoy’s legal challenges in key battleground states across the country. CRC has been steering money into something called the “Honest Elections Project,” a fictitious name filed in Virginia for Leo’s old group the Judicial Education Project,now officially called the 85 Fund. As The Guardian reported, 99 percent of the Judicial Education Project’s funding in 2018 was a single $7.8 million donation funneled through Donors Trust.guk?
With generous assistance from the Honest Elections Project and the RNC, Consovoy’s firm Consovoy McCarthy PLLC has recently brought cases against the re-enfranchising of felons in Florida and sued to block California’s plans to deliver absentee ballots to all of the state’s registered voters. Consovoy has contributed to related motions filed in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan, and Texas, where Ken Paxton’s victory against mail-in voting in May earned praise from President Trump on Twitter.
If you strain to look beyond the lonely partisan kitsch of James O’Keefe’s bungled scams and harebrained hoaxes, it’s plain to see the march of a whole battalion of Diamond Dog operatives and lawyers turned loose on the integrity of the ballot in key battleground states.
Liz Farkas, a New York state–licensed private investigator, provided additional reporting and research for this article.
Matthew Phelan has written for Chemical Engineering, New York, Jacobin, and Gawker, where he founded the conspiracy vertical Black Bag in 2014.
Jesse Hicks is a journalist whose work has appeared in Vice, Politico, Harper’s, and elsewhere.
Read More:
The Soapbox, Politics, Election 2020, Donald Trump, Project Veritas, James O'Keefe, Clarence Thomas, Donald Trump Jr., Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity, FOX News, Texas, California, Republican Party, Federalist Society, Ken Paxton, Greg Abbott, Aaron Harris, George Soros, Erik Prince, Voting Rights
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// palast, let's pray hyperbolic:
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trumps-election-chaos-may-not-be-a-strategy-but-a-kamikaze-mission/
no lnx
As election 2020 draws ever closer, the flawed, easily gamed nature of the American quasi-democracy becomes increasingly visible, thanks, of course to Donald Trump, our Fluhrer wannabe, who sees no need to hide his contempt for any result in November other than his own victory.
Election theft could well be looming, in a number of ways, and it’s crucial to look at them. But first, I feel the need to point out that the theft is already well underway. Indeed, Part 1 is already finished. Have you noticed? There’s no candidate with a progressive vision in the race, even though public demand for such a candidate — Bernie Sanders, maybe someone else — has been swelling.
But once again, thanks to the centrist, corporate-owned Democratic Party and their paid media bouncers, this year’s election pits a well-financed, pro-war, don’t-rock-the-boat centrist (a.k.a., a wimp) against a pro-war, well-financed, right-wing extremist, who this year also happens to be a be a racist sociopath. Once again, voters who want something more — eco-sanity, an end to police violence, the elimination of poverty, a slashing of the bloated defense budget — have no actual candidate, just “the lesser evil,” who if elected will make sure any change is minimal.
This is the reluctant democracy bequeathed us by our slave-owning founders, who created an illusory, idealism-haunted democracy. Should a wave of idealism prevail among the public with too much enormity, they added the Electoral College to the mix, which would protect the state against . . . you know, the popular vote. Somehow it didn’t protect the state against Trump.
Which brings us to Election Theft Part 2. As Harvey Wasserman points out, if voting were as revered as we pretend that it is — which is to say, revered for all people, whatever their skin color, ancestry, age or gender — first of all: “Election Day should be a local, state and national holiday, and the voting centers should be kept open from the Saturday prior to Nov. 3 Election Day or even longer if possible.”
The fact that Election Day is not a national day off — after all, it has far more significance than, say, the Fourth of July — is one sign that this is, at best, a reluctant, cautious, cringing democracy.
Beyond that overlooked detail, we have America’s long, long history of voter suppression: Only white. male property owners get to vote. Black people, i.e., slaves, count as three-fifths of a human. Women voting? Give me a break. Over the course of two hundred years, the idealistic public toppled these decrees of the ruling class, but because democracy remains such an inconvenience to those in power, they have continued to find ways to minimize (i.e., steal) the national vote. Election Theft Part 2 is now underway and essentially in the hands of the Republican Party.
“Trump and his Republican enablers are putting voter suppression front and center — fear-mongering about voting by mail, escalating their Election Day poll watching and so-called ballot-security operations, and blocking funding to prepare the country for a pandemic-era election,” Andy Kroll writes at Rolling Stone.
Wasserman puts it this way: “To stop Donald Trump from becoming President for Life, democracy activists must win this fall’s election protection ‘trifecta’ — restore the voter registration rolls, make it possible for everyone to vote by mail and guarantee a fair and accurate ballot count.”
A big part of the Election Theft game is finding ways to kick problematic (likely non-Republican) voters off the voting rolls. This used to be done by such techniques as selective literacy tests (“spell Albuquerque”) and other straight-forward Jim Crow actions meant to intimidate people. Convoluted voter ID requirements are currently popular.
Greg Palast, noting the mysterious drop in voting in certain areas of Wisconsin in the 2016 election, points out:
“They didn’t need to drag the local lakes to find the missing students and Black voters. They were disappeared in plain sight by the Republican legislature under laws crafted by Wisconsin’s radical-right governor, Scott Walker.
“One new law required a government photo ID to vote. But the photo ID issued by the state to its 182,000 University of Wisconsin students did not qualify them for voting nor for registration.
“How brilliant is that? Gun permits could be used to vote; but not student ID. Carry a weapon, good. Carry a book, forget it.”
And now mail-in voting — a crucial part of the 2020 election thanks to the pandemic — is up for grabs, as Palast points out, noting that during the primary election this year, approximately one in ten voters who requested a mail-in ballot either didn’t receive the ballot or got it too late to submit it in time to be counted. And just when the U.S. Postal Service is desperately needed to deliver ballots, the Trump administration, according to Slate, is “sabotaging” it with pernicious cost-cutting.
And if these efforts are not sufficient to do the job in November, well . . . “It’s possible,” Kroll writes, “that voter suppression isn’t the only goal—it’s also about creating chaos and confusion before, on, and after Election Day. Perhaps Trump’s assault on voting in our pandemic election year isn’t a ‘strategy’ at all but rather a kamikaze mission aimed at the heart of American democracy.”
Combine this with some other Trump actions, from reopening the country too quickly and guaranteeing the spread of Covid-19 to sending federal troops to American cities to “fight terrorism,” and what do we have?
“Could this be part of a deranged strategy to sow so much chaos in the country that he will then be able to make a case that elections can’t be held, or that if they are, they’re illegitimate?” asks Ted Glick. “Could he have in his warped and sick mind a plan for what can only be called a coup? Is there any possibility that he could succeed?”
This is America’s reluctant democracy. It demands a lot more of us than we’re taught to believe. Yes, voting is important (if you can), but claiming the right to vote and have your vote counted — and being able to vote for more than simply the lesser evil and the maintenance of the status quo—requires continual struggle in the face of lies and teargas.
Election season never ends.
Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.
links
...“Trump and his Republican enablers are putting voter suppression front and center — fear-mongering about voting by mail, escalating their Election Day poll watching and so-called ballot-security operations, and blocking funding to prepare the country for a pandemic-era election,” Andy Kroll writes at Rolling Stone.
Wasserman puts it this way: “To stop Donald Trump from becoming President for Life, democracy activists must win this fall’s election protection ‘trifecta’ — restore the voter registration rolls, make it possible for everyone to vote by mail and guarantee a fair and accurate ballot count.”
A big part of the Election Theft game is finding ways to kick problematic (likely non-Republican) voters off the voting rolls. This used to be done by such techniques as selective literacy tests (“spell Albuquerque”) and other straight-forward Jim Crow actions meant to intimidate people. Convoluted voter ID requirements are currently popular.
Greg Palast, noting the mysterious drop in voting in certain areas of Wisconsin in the 2016 election, points out:...
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omfg , could they be that evil? smart?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-has-promised-to-stop-evictions-but-the-gop-has-a-powerful-and-horrifying-incentive-to-restart-them/
...At the behest of Democrats, the CARES Act included a 120-day moratorium on evictions for tenants living in rental housing covered under the Violence Against Women Act, which includes Section 8 public housing, the rural housing voucher program, and anyone renting in buildings with federally backed mortgages. Some states and cities also issued their own individual eviction moratoriums, but around 30 of those moratoriums have expired since May, according to The _{Eviction Lab at Princeton University}_. Renters now have as little as 30 days after the expiration of the resolution to repay back rent or face eviction. The CARES Act protections for renters specifically ended on July 25 and now renters in areas with no local protections are poised to be booted from their homes in the middle of a pandemic and ahead of the largest vote-by-mail effort in U.S. history. Successful voting by mail, after all, depends on voters with known mailing addresses who are registered well in advance of the election.
This potential wave of mass voter disenfranchisement comes as new voter registration has already dropped dramatically amid the coronavirus pandemic, largely because most state DMV offices shut their doors and voter contact programs paused. The number of new voters registered across 11 states in April 2020 decreased by 70% compared with April 2016, according to a report from the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research. Swing states like Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and Arizona have seen at least a 50% voter registration reduction, compared to four years ago.
By withholding eviction protection from their proposed package, Republicans in Congress appear to be attempting to use the next round of pandemic relief as their latest voter suppression vehicle, adding disenfranchisement to the host of life-altering problems faced by thousands of newly-houseless Americans.
...
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trump fundraiser runs PO into ground, then problem cited as reason not to do mail vote:
https://www.mediamatters.org/voter-fraud-and-suppression/help-stephen-miller-fox-friends-uses-trumps-delay-election-tweet-lie
fox News continued Friday morning to provide cover for President Donald Trump’s tweet from Thursday, which suggested that America might “Delay the Election” rather than allow it to take place with expanded mail-in voting.
Previously, Fox News personalities ridiculed comments by Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, who said in April that Trump might attempt to put off the election. At the time, Fox News commentators called such accusations a “bizarre conspiracy theory,” “so dumb,” “an attempt to frighten people,” “a conjuring,” and other terms of derision.
But on Friday’s edition of Fox & Friends, the co-hosts used Trump’s tweet suggesting Election Day should be postponed as a springboard to attack the concept of mail-in voting itself, and insisted that Trump was really just trying to highlight such concerns in the first place.In so doing, they not only helped to spread further lies about the voting process, but they also suggested it would be unreliable because of budget measures that have been put in place by the Trump administration itself.
“Well, a lot of Americans don't trust the U.S. postal system, because they’ve had budget cuts, they’ve had so many problems in the past, you know, decade or whatever, however long it’s been,” said co-host Ainsley Earhardt. “And everyone knows if you go in-person to vote, you know your vote is counted. But if you try to mail something in, there’s a big chance that it's not going to get to the folks who are counting these ballots.”
Not mentioned, of course, is that the Trump administration has opposed measures to shore up the Postal Service’s finances during the pandemic, and it has also put in place new measures to slow down mail delivery. It is these acts that have election officials worried about potential problems with mail-in voting — but which Fox News and other conservative media will use as a reason to oppose the expansion of voting, rather than work to counter those harmful obstacles that have been put in place.
[pix?]
co-host Brian Kilmeade also invoked a scenario he has pitched before, imagining family dynamics resulting in voter fraud or coercion and urging viewers to “just use logic” about it.
“You sit in your house, there’s five ballots for your family. Three of your kids, 18 to 21, ‘I'm not going to vote, you can vote for me, you could send it in. When I get around to doing it, you click the box,’” Kilmeade said. “Domineering parent tells the kids how they’re going to vote. Or some kids will grab their parents' ballot and send it. Can't we just have this one moment to vote for one candidate every four years, and show up and put a ballot in without licking an envelope or pressing on a stamp? If you can shop for food, if you can buy liquor, you can vote once every four years.”
Later on, the program hosted White House senior adviser Stephen Miller to help spread false claims about mail-in voting.
Co-host Pete Hegseth — who in Fox’s earlier coverage helped to lay the groundwork for a reinterpretation that Trump was really intended to bring attention to the alleged problems with mail-in voting — asked Miller a softball question: “He took to the podium to use that reaction, to explain about the many problems we’ve seen with absentee ballots not being counted on time, fraud with mail-in ballots. Explain what the White House is attempting to do to ensure election integrity on November 3?”
“Here’s a shocking thing for your audience to consider. Nobody who mails in a ballot has their identity confirmed — nobody checks to see if they’re even a U.S. citizen,” Miller responded. “Think about that. Any foreign national — talk about foreign election interference — can mail in a ballot, and nobody even verifies if they're a citizen of the United States of America. Now, this would be happening on a scale of potentially millions of people.”
As pointed out by Bloomberg’s Ryan Beckwith, this claim from Miller is false and media outlets should not be reporting on it without that disclaimer.
“What can be done at the White House to pressure states to actually do validated, in-person voting,” Hegseth asked, “as opposed to allowing secretaries of states to say, ’Hey, we’re going to mail this one in?’”
“Well, one of the things that we need to do, first of all, is raise awareness, so that citizens in every state can put pressure on their local leaders and their governors to fight universal balloting,” Miller proclaimed boldly. “That's a critical issue. Obviously, the Department of Justice has a responsibility to look at all issues relating to voter fraud in this country.”
“But you want to talk about voter suppression, you want to talk about denying people their franchise — that's what universal mail-in ballots are all about,” Miller claimed. “Universal mail-in ballots are an attempt to dilute the vote of your viewers. It's an attempt to dilute the vote of Americans who want to have their identities verified, by allowing for massive, endemic fraud. That is scandalous.”
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/outright-lies-how-voting-misinformation-flourishes-on-facebook/
ProPublica
On April 3, Terrence K. Williams, a politically conservative actor and comedian who’s been
by President Donald Trump, assured his nearly 3 million followers on Facebook that Democrats would light ballots on fire or throw them away. Wearing a red “Keep America Great” hat, Williams declared, “If you mail in your vote, your vote will be in Barack Obama’s fireplace.” The video has been viewed more than 350,000 times.
On May 8, Peggy Hubbard, a Navy veteran and police officer who this year sought the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois, warned on Facebook that the country was heading toward civil war. “Your democracy, your freedom is being stripped away from you, and if you allow that then everything this country stood for, fought for, bled for is all in vain.” The cause? California’s recent expansion of voting by mail: “The only way you will be able to vote in the upcoming election in November is by mail only,” Hubbard said. The video has attracted more than 209,000 views.
On June 27, Pamela Geller, an anti-Muslim activist with nearly 1.3 million followers, weighed in. “Mail-in ballots guarantee that the Democrats will commit voter fraud,” she said on Facebook.
There’s no evidence for any of these statements. While California will mail absentee ballots to all registered voters, polling places will also be available. Voter fraud is exceedingly rare, including with mail-in ballots. A recent Washington Post analysis analyzed three states with all-mail elections — Colorado, Oregon and Washington — and found just 372 potential irregularities among 14.6 million votes, or 0.0025%.
Facebook’s community standards ban “misrepresentation of who can vote, qualifications for voting, whether a vote will be counted, and what information and/or materials must be provided in order to vote.” But an analysis by ProPublica and First Draft, a global nonprofit that researches misinformation, shows that Facebook is rife with false or misleading claims about voting, particularly regarding voting by mail, which is the safest way of casting a ballot during the pandemic.Many of these falsehoods appear to violate Facebook’s standards yet have not been taken down or labeled as inaccurate. Some of them, generalizing from one or two cases, portrayed people of color as the face of voter fraud.
The false claims, including conspiracy theories about stolen elections or outright misrepresentations about voting by mail by Trump and prominent conservative outlets, are often among the most popular posts about voting on Facebook, according to a review of engagement data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned analytics tool.
On Facebook, interactions — the number of comments, likes, reactions and shares that a post attracts — are a proxy for popularity. Of the top 50 posts, ranked by total interactions, that mentioned voting by mail since April 1, 22 contained false or substantially misleading claims about voting, particularly about mail-in ballots.
“We have a long history in this country of voter suppression that goes all the way back to our founding,” said Jessica Gonzalez, the co-CEO of Free Press, an advocacy group focused on media and technology. “This is a new way to suppress the vote, and I don’t know why Facebook wants any part of it.”
In an email, Geller said that “what I wrote was factual and accurate” and that the contention that voter fraud is rare “is ridiculous on its face.” She added: “You’re trying to deceive your readers into not believing what they see with their own eyes.”
Hubbard and Williams did not respond to questions. After ProPublica flagged their posts to Facebook, it deleted them.
A Facebook spokesperson said that the company is “running the largest voting information campaign in American history,” including aiming to register 4 million voters. It plans to create a Voting Information Center — a box on top of user feeds — “to connect people with authoritative information about the elections” and add labels that link voting-related posts to official election information.
“Making sure people have accurate information about voting is especially critical during the COVID crisis,” the spokesperson said.
From March to May 2020, Facebook removed more than 100,000 pieces of content from Facebook and Instagram for violating its policies against voter suppression, according to the company’s website. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last month that he stands against “anything that incites violence or suppresses voting.”
ProPublica and First Draft tracked Facebook posts using voting-related keywords — including the terms “vote by mail,” “mail-in ballots,” “voter fraud” and “stolen elections” — since early April, when Trump began attacking voting by mail. Mentions of these voting-related terms nearly tripled on Facebook, with interest in the topic spiking after Twitter attached a fact-checking label to Trump’s false tweets and directed users to a fact-check page on May 26. Twitter’s intervention prompted Trump to claim that Twitter is “interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election” and “stifling FREE SPEECH.” Facebook has refused to take down Trump’s false claims about voting by mail.
Facebook’s inaction on Trump’s posts spurred pushback over misinformation on the site. Gonzalez helped organize an advertising boycott of Facebook that now includes more than 1,000 companies and some of the platform’s biggest advertisers. Among other demands, they’re calling on Facebook to remove voting misinformation.
In a long-awaited assessment of its civil rights record, Facebook was faulted last week for being “far too reluctant to adopt strong rules to limit misinformation and voter suppression.” Also last week, civil rights groups met with Facebook executives, including Zuckerberg, to push their demands and came away disappointed.
“It was all talk, no action,” Gonzalez said. “We hear words like ‘We know we need to do better’ and ‘We’re working on this,’ and yet misinformation still seems to be quite pervasive on the site.”
Facebook expects to meet one of the groups’ demands by hiring a vice president to coordinate civil rights issues internally, according to the company.
The posts identified by ProPublica and First Draft offer outright false claims about voting, blend opinion and factual errors, or mislead users about the reliability of voting methods. Facebook has said it is committed to both free speech and to providing reliable information about voting, but those goals may sometimes conflict.
Facebook has removed more than 90% of false posts referred to it by VoteSure, a 2018 initiative by the state of California to educate voters and flag misinformation, Secretary of State Alex Padilla said. In VoteSure’s first election, the 2018 midterms, 272 of 276 posts and tweets reported to social media platforms were taken down.
Still, VoteSure only identifies a small portion of misinformation, and Facebook needs to do more, Padilla said. The platform, he said, has made progress but still has “baseless outright lies, claims about massive voter fraud, and posts that are clearly wrong, or clearly erroneous.”
Trump’s false attacks on voting by mail had a total of 3.8 million interactions on Facebook. Among them, a Trump post that falsely claimed Nevada had illegally sent out ballots had the most interactions of any post that has mentioned vote by mail in the last 12 months in the U.S. Trump’s false claim that California is sending ballots to “anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there” drew the third most interactions of any post that mentioned voting over the same period, ranking behind a post from Obama and a pro-Trump meme.
In recent months, Trump has also claimed on Facebook that “mail-in ballots will lead to a “RIGGED ELECTION!” and falsely said they are “substantially fraudulent”; he made false statements about the legality of actions taken by election officials in Michigan and Nevada; and he misrepresented his own power to deny funding to states that expand vote by mail. Trump continued those false claims last week, arguing a debunked distinction between mail-in voting and absentee voting.
“What is frustrating is that Trump can post or tweet whatever he wants without the proper checks and balances,” Padilla said. “What keeps me up at night is that he’s clearly setting the stage to question election results that he might not like in November.”
Breitbart, a conservative website that has long championed Trump, has had more engagement on its voting-related stories than any other publisher from April until July 1, according to our analysis. In fact, voting-related stories on Breitbart have garnered more interactions since April than equivalent articles by The Washington Post, The New York Times and NBC News combined. Many of the Breitbart posts are misleading at best. “Obama ratchets up Democrats’ Cheat-by-Mail scheme!” read one post, linking to a story that misleadingly framed how often voter fraud occurs. Another post declared: “Flooding the nation with ballots that can be stolen, sold, discarded, and forged—THAT’s the path to Leftist victory in November.”
In a video by Fox Nation, Fox News’ streaming service, that has been viewed nearly 500,000 times, host Tomi Lahren said, “I firmly believe the only way Donald Trump loses in November is because of voter fraud.” In the video, Lahren falsely claims that voter fraud is rampant in California. “You think coronavirus is a crisis, wait till you see the voter fraud epidemic we have here in California. And mark my words it’s heading to your state like a diseased bat out of hell.” (There’s no evidence that voter fraud is rampant in California, or in any other state.)
“This is an editorial video, not a news report, which is very clear to any Fox Nation viewer,” said John Finley, executive vice president of development for Fox News Media. The White House, the Trump campaign and Breitbart did not respond to requests for comment.
In a Facebook group dedicated to fans of Candace Owens, a conservative commentator, one post circulated a 2016 video that describes a widely debunked conspiracy theory linking billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros to “rigged” voting machines. The post has received more than 16,000 shares. Soros’ Open Society Foundations donate to ProPublica.
Claims of “stolen elections” were common across the political spectrum. A post by the left-leaning page Ridin’ With Biden contended that Trump and Kanye West were trying to steal the election. A clip of Joe Biden saying that his “single greatest concern” is that Trump would try to “steal the election” was touted as evidence of a conspiracy by Republicans. Other claims of stolen elections have come from Secure America Now, quoting Newt Gingrich; Trump’s former White House doctor Ronny Jackson, now running for Congress; and liberal accounts like StandWithMueller and Occupy Democrats.
Facebook is reportedly considering banning political ads in the days before the election. But our review showed that misinformation or false claims about voting by mail on Facebook are rarer in paid political ads than in posts. The vast majority of ads that used voting-related terms were factual and promoted voter participation broadly, including ads from Democratic and Republican groups, nonpartisan voting organizations and state election offices. However, we did find a handful of ads that pushed questionable claims about voting by mail.
A group called Morning in Nevada PAC, created by supporters of Adam Laxalt, the state’s former Republican attorney general, has launched a handful of ads attacking voting by mail, spending between $14,800 and $20,998 this year, according to a search of Facebook’s political ad library. Some of these ads make unsubstantiated claims that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is trying to fix the election using mail-in voting.
A similar ad from the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs describes absentee ballots as the “‘tool of choice’ for those who are engaging in election fraud.”
Several posts identified by ProPublica and First Draft seized on isolated incidents to link people of color to voter fraud, a tactic reminiscent of the 1988 George H.W. Bush campaign ad that featured mug shots of Willie Horton, a Black felon who committed a rape while on a weekend furlough, to paint Michael Dukakis as weak on crime. One meme-like post has appeared on at least 136 Facebook pages and groups, including Hubbard’s, as well as groups like “2nd Amendment Hotties” and “Dullards for Trump,” which have produced 100,838 interactions. The post features a headshot of Sherikia Hawkins, a former Southfield, Michigan, clerk. Text on the image reads:
“THE DEMOCRAT CLERK OF SOUTHFIELD, MICHIGAN IS FACING TRIAL ON 6 FELONY COUNTS OF VOTER FRAUD FOR EDITING HUNDREDS OF BALLOTS. PRESIDENT TRUMP HAS BEEN RIGHT ALL ALONG ABOUT DEMOCRATS’ ELECTION TAMPERING AND VOTER FRAUD.”
The post is inaccurate. Hawkins was not charged with editing ballots themselves. She was charged in state court with altering voter records used to track ballots. No voters were disenfranchised. Hawkins, who has not yet entered a plea, is expected to face trial this year.
In June, a Patterson, New Jersey, city councilman and a councilman-elect, along with two other men, were charged with illegally collecting ballots from voters and delivering them to an election office. New Jersey prohibits anyone from delivering more than three ballots on behalf of voters. The case is pending, and the councilman and councilman-elect have said they will plead not guilty. On Facebook, Breitbart and several other conservative pages have displayed mugshots of the defendants, all of whom are people of color, to suggest that voter fraud is rampant.
“There is already a sense in the Black community that our votes will be lost and that the election won’t be fair,” said Brandi Collins-Dexter, a senior campaign director at Color of Change, a civil rights group organizing the ad boycott. “What this stuff does is just confuse people and sow distrust.”
Though vote by mail was less controversial before the pandemic, misinformation about other aspects of voting also plagued Facebook in 2016. Before Rhode Island’s presidential primary that year, Bernie Sanders supporters wrongly accused its secretary of state, Nellie Gorbea, on social media of suppressing turnout, based on a news report that the number of open polling places would be considerably less than in a November general election.
However, it’s common for states to have fewer polling locations during a primary, when turnout is lower. Rhode Island actually had 15 more locations available than in the 2012 presidential primary. In any case, the state Board of Elections, not Gorbea, was in charge of polling places.
“In 24 hours, we received thousands of comments on Facebook and Twitter,” Gorbea said. “Nothing would quell it.” Her office received angry messages from 36 states and three countries, but just one message from a Rhode Island constituent. Her office has since hired a full-time employee to monitor social media.
Exaggerating the prevalence of voting fraud can backfire. In a study released in June, researchers showed respondents a series of tweets. Some were actual 2018 tweets by Trump, Florida Gov. Rick Scott and Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio that put forth unfounded claims of voter fraud; others were more generic “placebo” tweets. The false claims reduced confidence in elections for everyone, the researchers found, especially Republicans and those who approve of Trump. Those groups “reported significantly lower confidence in elections after exposure to a low dose of voter fraud allegations even when those claims were countered by fact-checks.”
As a result, Trump’s rhetoric may cause fewer Republicans to vote by mail than Democrats, said Brendan Nyhan, one of the authors of the study and a political scientist at Dartmouth College. Still, Nyhan is worried about broader effects of misinformation. “The problem has clearly gotten worse in terms of elite rhetoric,” Nyhan said. “We’ve seen what happens in other countries when there isn’t a shared trust in the rules of the game in democracy and it’s not good.”
For now, misinformation may be difficult to stop before it goes viral. On July 13, conservatives on Facebook pounced on a video in which an unidentified Trump supporter said she was denied the right to vote, apparently in Louisiana. Many of these pages framed it as evidence of voter fraud and a Democratic plot to steal the election. By the time the post was deemed false by PolitiFact, a Facebook fact-checking partner, it had received more than 3.7 million views and been shared more than 170,000 times.
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alec bigtime
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) held an “exclusive call” for members on mail-in voting with Honest Elections Project and a “former FEC official” on June 9, 2020. Honest Elections Project is a a dark money voter suppression group formed in February 2020 that is a project of Leonard Leo’s 85 Fund. The invitation was obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy.
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720 cmd also bradley
aLEC Legislator Introduces Bill to Suppress the Vote in Ohio
by Alex Kotch | June 4th, 2020
State Rep. Cindy Abrams proposed a bill on Monday that would make vote-by-mail more difficult and add headaches on Election Day.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/voting-rights-roundup-court-axes-florida-gops-poll-tax-restoring-voting-rights-to-roughly-775000/
kos
lorida: In a historic victory against Republican voter suppression, a federal district court struck down a law that Republicans passed to impose a modern-day poll tax that disenfranchised would-be voters who had served their felony sentences but still owed court fines and fees. The judge ruled that the law established a “tax by any other name” in violation of the 24th Amendment’s ban on disenfranchising voters “by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.” The court’s decision means that hundreds of thousands of disproportionately Black voters will regain the right to vote.
Republicans passed their law last year after voters amended Florida’s constitution in 2018 to end lifetime voter disenfranchisement for up to 1.4 million people who had served out sentences for all but the most serious crimes. An expert witness for the plaintiffs estimated that 775,000 citizens would be unable to pay the poll tax, in large part because Florida levies onerous fines to fund its court system. The court noted, for instance, that one county charges a minimum of $668 for a public defender—and $548 even for defendants who forgo one. Furthermore, 43% of the disenfranchised are Black, roughly three times the African American share of the state’s overall adult population.
Before voters passed the 2018 initiative, Florida disenfranchised 1 in 10 adults, the highest proportion of any state, including 1 in 5 Black adults—five times the rate of white adults in Florida. This racial discrimination was no accident, either, since Florida’s lifetime voting ban was a product of the Jim Crow era.
In striking down the poll tax, the court’s ruling means that it’s unconstitutional to condition voting rights upon the payment of court fees and costs. While requiring the payment of fines and restitution to victims can be constitutional in certain instances, the court said, it’s unconstitutional when applied to citizens who are genuinely unable to pay the costs or who owe an amount that cannot be determined.
indeed, the state effectively makes it impossible for many voters to even find out the exact amount owed because Florida lacks adequate records. In light of that situation, the court ordered Florida officials to tell all of the affected citizens whether they’re eligible to vote. Would-be voters can request an advisory opinion on their eligibility from the secretary of state that must detail the exact amount owed, and they must be allowed to register in the meantime if they don’t hear back within 21 days. Voters also won’t face perjury charges for registering through this process, something that had chilled registration drives before the court ruling.
Florida Republicans have vowed to appeal to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, but they may not have much success: The 11th Circuit refused to reverse the lower court’s previous ruling that had blocked the poll tax from being enforced on the particular plaintiffs party to the case, a decision that relied on reasoning similar to this latest one. However, it appears likely that this litigation will ultimately end up before the U.S. Supreme Court, particularly since 10 states have similar financial requirements and 30 states impose such requirements in at least some cases.
Furthermore, Florida’s conservative-dominated state Supreme Court issued an advisory opinionin January holding that the constitutional amendment does in fact require the payment of fines and fees, even though its text makes no mention of them. While that ruling is not binding, it could be a signal that the state court could strike down the entire amendment if the federal court ruling limiting the new requirement survives.
BALLOT MEASURES
● Missouri: Activists hoping to expand voting access in Missouri have failed to turn in enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot. The comprehensive proposal would have enacted automatic voter registration; established early voting; removed the excuse requirement to vote absentee; allowed voters to permanently sign up to automatically receive a mail ballot in every election; enshrined the right to cast a provisional ballot even if voting at the wrong polling place; let 16- and 17-year-olds “pre-register” to vote so that they’re automatically added to the voter rolls when they turn 18; required routine audits of election results; and extended the time allowed for military votes to be received and counted.
REDISTRICTING
● California: The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear a case brought by conservatives attacking the constitutionality of the California Voting Rights Act, which makes it easier for plaintiffs to challenge the use of at-large elections in municipal races. The law has provided an easier path for cities to shift to district-based elections, which give Latinos and Asian-Americans a better chance of winning seats.
The suit unsuccessfully argued that the law required illegal gerrymandering based on race. It was supported by infamous voting rights opponent Ed Blum, who was behind the case that saw the Supreme Court strike down a critical part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and has been a leading foe of affirmative action.
● Missouri: Supporters of redistricting reform have filed a lawsuit in state court challenging the ballot summary language of a constitutional amendment Republicans recently put on the ballot to gut a 2018 constitutional amendment that voters passed to make legislative redistricting fairer.
Activists argue it’s misleading because the repeal amendment elides the fact that the position of nonpartisan demographer would be eliminated, as well as the fact that the original amendment’s requirements that districts be drawn with partisan fairness and competitiveness in mind would become, as the GOP intends, the “least important factors.” The plaintiffs want the court to order Republicans to rewrite the summary or accept an alternative of their own.
FELONY DISENFRANCHISEMENT
● Alabama: The Campaign Legal Center has filed a federal lawsuit challenging Alabama’s de facto poll tax that prevents voters convicted of a disqualifying felony from regaining their voting rights following the completion of their sentences if they owe court fines or fees. The plaintiffs want the court to block the repayment requirement for citizens who are unable to pay their court costs, noting that the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals declined to overturn a ruling in a similar case where the CLC prevailed in Florida.
The plaintiffs estimate that of the 136,000 Alabamians convicted of a disqualifying felony between 1993 and 2019, up to 100,000 still owe court costs and therefore cannot vote. They conclude that a majority owe $1,500 or more and at least 20,000 people owe in excess of $10,000.
Before Alabama’s Republican-led state government passed a law reforming felony disenfranchisement in 2017, a Sentencing Project report found that Alabama disenfranchised Black voters at three times the rate of white voters. A significant racial disparity likely remains today even after the 2017 reforms made it clearer and less arbitrary which crimes counted as disqualifying felonies.
VOTER SUPPRESSION
● Montana: A state court has temporarily blocked a statute that restricts who can turn in another person’s completed mail ballot, siding with the Native American activists who sued in March by arguing that the law violated the state constitution.
The law in question was approved by voters in 2018 after Republican legislators placed it on the ballot to circumvent a veto from Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock. It makes it a felony to turn in someone else’s absentee ballot unless the person doing so is the voter’s family member, caregiver, household member, or acquaintance, and even those individuals may turn in no more than six others’ absentee ballots. Only postal workers and election officials are fully exempt.
Montana is one of a few states that lets voters opt into permanently receiving an absentee mail ballot in all elections, which is intended to make it easier to vote. In addition, most voters already voted by mail even before the pandemic prompted the state to mail every voter a ballot for the June 2 primary. However, because many Native Americans living on remote reservations lack reliable postal service and access to transportation, many ask others who do not face such barriers to turn in their ballots for them.
● New Hampshire: The ACLU and the New Hampshire Democratic Party have withdrawn a federal lawsuit challenging a voter residency restriction passed by Republicans in 2018 following a clarification from the state Supreme Court that made it unlikely for the plaintiffs to succeed in federal court.
As we’ve previously detailed, the law in question requires New Hampshire voters to establish legal “residency” in the state and not just simply make it their “domicile,” or the place where they live day to day. Becoming a resident under the new legal definition, however, requires actions like registering a car in-state and obtaining an in-state driver’s license. Effectively, this new requirement serves as a poll tax on Democratic-leaning college students from other states, who are less likely to go to the expense and trouble of becoming legal residents even if they live in New Hampshire full-time but don’t intend to remain there indefinitely.
The plaintiffs chose to abandon their suit after the state Supreme Court told the federal court that the new law meant that there was no longer any statutory difference between being a resident and being domiciled within the state. The state court said that anyone who lives in the state for more than six months a year is deemed a legal resident and is required to switch out-of-state driver’s licenses and car registrations, if they have them, to in-state versions.
While the Supreme Court’s ruling means that obtaining resident status—and therefore the right to vote—is automatic, it’s possible that voters who cast a ballot and fail to exchange their out-of-state documentation could face penalties, even though their votes cannot be challenged. The plaintiffs had unsuccessfully challenged this possibility as potentially risking voter intimidation.
ELECTION CHANGES
● Arkansas: A federal district court has issued a preliminary injunction that temporarily eases the task of gathering signatures that reformers need in order to put an initiative on the November ballot to create an independent redistricting commission. The court stopped short of allowing fully electronic signatures but instead waived a requirement that signatures be witnessed or notarized, meaning that voters will be able to sign paper forms at home and mail them in.
However, the court refused to extend the July 3 deadline to submit signatures, nor did it reduce the number required, which is about 89,000. Nevertheless, initiative supporters have said they are confident that they will be able to get onto the ballot after this ruling. Republican officials have not indicated whether they will appeal while the case proceeds on the merits.
● Colorado: Democratic Gov. Jared Polis has issued an executive order to temporarily make it easier to gather voter signatures needed for initiatives to qualify for the November ballot by waiving a requirement that voter petition signatures be witnessed, enabling voters to submit their signatures by mail or email.
● New York: Advocates for voters with disabilities have filed a federal lawsuit challenging New York’s absentee ballot procedures for making it impossible to cast a secret ballot safely when in-person voting with accessible machines is unavailable. The plaintiffs note that military and overseas voters already have the option of filling out their ballot online, printing it out, and mailing it in, and ask that such an alternative be available for voters with disabilities.
● Ohio: The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is dominated by Republican appointees, has stayed a recent lower court ruling and reinstated a prohibition on gathering voter signatures electronically for ballot initiatives while the case proceeds on the merits. This ruling may make it impossible for the ACLU to obtain enough signatures to put a constitutional amendment on November’s ballot to enact automatic and same-day voter registration and several other voting reforms. The plaintiffs have not yet indicated if they will appeal.
● Pennsylvania: A federal district court has ordered Pennsylvania to let voters with visual impairments use an absentee voting method that allows them tofill out their ballot online and print it out to mail it in. This same system is available to military and overseas voters, and similar lawsuits in several other states have succeeded in recent weeks
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Three top Texas GOP officials who oppose expanding mail-in voting have each used it
Three of Texas’ top Republican leaders are vigorously fighting efforts to expand mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic, arguing it will lead to increased voter fraud, yet all three have…
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:{facebook is letting the Trump campaign publish at least 529 ads with false claims of voter fraud:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/maga-extremists-worried-about-mail-in-voting-and-obamagate-as-michigan-is-battered-by-coronavirus-unemployment-and-severe-flooding/
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has had a lot to deal with this week, from the coronavirus pandemic and job losses to severe flooding in parts of her state. But where there are real problems, there are also far-right extremists and diehard MAGA voters obsessing over non-issues — and journalist Tim Alberta, in an article for Politico, examines some of the things they have been focusing on in that key battleground state.
On May 21, President Donald Trump visited Michigan — where he hasn’t been shy about offering political red meat for his MAGA base.
“Just 24 hours before he arrived in Michigan,” Alberta notes, “the president launched a dangerous disinformation campaign, accusing the secretary of state of going ‘rogue’ by illegally sending absentee ballots to every Michigan voter. He threatened to block funding to Michigan — a state beleaguered by multiple converging disasters, including one that was unfolding just as the tweet was sent: ‘if they want to go down this Voter Fraud path!’”
At a time when coronavirus and flooding are a double whammy in Michigan, Trump and his hardcore MAGA base are worried about mail-in ballots being a source of voter fraud in the state. But truth be told, voting by mail is something that Republicans have a long history of supporting. And as Alberta explains, Trump is promoting fear over a problem that doesn’t exist.
In Michigan, Alberta writes, “Voters were sent applications to vote absentee, a practice consistent with a newly adopted Michigan law — a law that exists in other states, red and blue alike. The Michigan GOP has itself sent out applications. There is nothing sordid or illegitimate going on; both parties here understand the rules of the game and are attempting to master them before November. But Trump is playing his own game.”
Politico interviewed an abundance of MAGA voters in Michigan on May 21, and found that they bought into Trump’s bogus voter fraud claims.
“In conversation after conversation with voters here Thursday,” Alberta reports, “Trump supporters repeatedly — and completely unsolicited — say Democrats are attempting to steal the election from the president.”
Michigan is also where far-right wingnuts have been holding raucous anti-shutdown rallies, declaring that Whitmer’s stay-at-home order is an anti-Trump conspiracy and that she is exaggerating the dangers of coronavirus. “Obamagate” is another non-issue MAGA voters are buying into.
But according to polls, most Michigan residents approve of the way Whitmer has handled the coronavirus crisis.
A statewide poll by the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce, released May 20, found that 86% of Michigan voters believe that COVID-19 is a threat to public health — not a hoax. The poll also found that 69% of Michigan voters believe that the recent anti-shutdown protests in Lansing sent the wrong message and that only 11% of Michigan voters refuse to wear a mask in public when they go out.
The poll found 64% approval for Whitmer’s coronavirus response; that figure includes voters in general, but the number leaps to 96% approval among Democrats. Among independents, the number was 65%.
Recent polls have also found Trump trailing former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, in Michigan by 6% (Public Policy Polling), 3% (Change Research) or 8% (Redfield & Wilton Strategie
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/voting-rights-roundup-court-upholds-ruling-blocking-kansas-voting-restriction-backed-by-kris-kobach/
Kansas: The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a lower court ruling that blocked Kansas from enforcing a requirement in violation of federal law that voters provide documents proving they are citizens when registering to vote, dealing a blow to notorious voter suppression crusader Kris Kobach. The 1993 National Voter Registration Act, best known as the Motor Voter law, bars states from requiring such documents for registering to vote in federal elections. Instead, it only requires voters to swear under penalty of perjury that they are citizens and therefore eligible to vote.
Kobach, who is running in the GOP primary for Senate this year, had championed Kansas’ law while serving as secretary of state in the 2010s. The measure had led to one in seven new voter registrations being suspended for lack of documentation, affecting 30,000 would-be registrants in total—a group that was disproportionately young and Latino. The requirement also made it impossible to conduct voter registration drives because few citizens carry around documents like a passport day-to-day.
A federal court had suspended the law for the 2016 elections ahead of trial, which took place in 2018 and saw Kobach’s case completely fall to shambles and thoroughly discredit his voter fraud zealotry after his embarrassing attempt to represent himself in court. The presiding judge ended up reprimanding Kobach for failing to follow basic procedures, ordering him to complete six hours of legal education courses and holding him in contempt of court for refusing to stop enforcing the documentation requirement.
Kobach said in 2018 that he would appeal all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary, but it’s unclear whether his successor as secretary of state, Republican Scott Schwab, shares that position. Schwab and GOP Attorney General Derek Schmidt have said they are considering their next move.
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VOTER SUPPRESSION
● North Dakota: A federal judge overseeing a lawsuit challenging North Dakota Republicans’ voter ID law has approved a settlement between Republican Secretary of State Al Jaeger and Native American voting rights advocates. The agreement will help protect voting access for Native voters who don’t have a residential street address to ensure that they can still vote.
At issue was the law’s requirement that voters have a home address on their ID in order for it to be valid. But because many Native Americans living on remote rural reservations lack postal service and therefore don’t have a traditional address, a large number of IDs issued by the tribes would have been disqualified. Since many reservation residents also don’t drive, they don’t have driver’s licenses, either.
As part of the settlement, Jaeger’s office has agreed to work with the state Department of Transportation to help voters on reservations obtain a free non-driver ID within 30 days of future statewide elections. Native voters will also be able to mark their residence on a map and therefore shift the burden of verifying their address to the state. Officials will further be required to work to educate the public and train poll workers properly.
● Wisconsin: As he had signaled earlier in April, conservative state Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly has reversed his recusal in a lawsuit seeking to require Wisconsin to promptly purge more than 200,000 voter registrations, a case that Kelly had previously withdrawn from because he was up for election on April 7.
That election was marred by Republican efforts to suppress the vote by making voters choose between protecting their health and casting a ballot. That effort failed badly, as Kelly went down to a double-digit loss, but he’s nonetheless repaying his party the favor before his lame-duck tenure ends this summer.
Thanks to Kelly’s earlier recusal, the state Supreme Court had rejected plaintiffs’ request for an expedited review after one of the four other conservative justices sided with the court’s two liberals, resulting in a deadlock. Now, though, Kelly is likely to give conservatives a majority in the case.
At issue in this litigation is a GOP-backed law that requires voters to be removed from the rolls if anyone suspected of moving fails to respond within 30 days to a single mailing. Opponents have argued that the mailing was inadequate, that new notices should be sent to instruct those voters how to stay registered, and that no purge should take place until after November.
BALLOT MEASURES
● Michigan: A Republican appeal of a state appellate court ruling blocking the restrictions on ballot initiatives that the GOP approved during a 2018 lame-duck session remains pending after the Michigan Supreme Court heard arguments in the case in March. After voters used initiatives in 2018 to ban gerrymandering and expand voting rights, Republicans passed the law in question to make it harder for progressives to put initiatives on the ballot but not conservatives.
The invalidated law would have required those gathering petition signatures to disclose whether they were paid or volunteers in both an affidavit and on the petition itself. Another provision that was also struck down would have prevented any group seeking to get on the ballot from gathering more than 15% of petition signatures from any of the state’s 14 congressional districts. Because Republicans gerrymandered the map by packing Democrats into a few lopsided districts, the law would have made it disproportionately harder to put progressive measures on the ballot than conservative ones.
Republicans hold a 4-3 majority on the state Supreme Court, but Republican Justice Elizabeth Clement has broken with her fellow conservatives on high-profile issues such as allowing the redistricting reform measure to appear on the ballot in the first place. Her vote is therefore likely to decide the outcome of the case.
● North Dakota: Republican Secretary of State Al Jaeger has approved a ballot initiative petition for circulation that would reform legislative redistricting and change North Dakota’s electoral system to a “top-four” primary with an instant-runoff general election. Supporters now have the green light to begin gathering the necessary 27,000 signatures to put their constitutional amendment on the November ballot, but it’s unclear how feasible that will be given the disruption of in-person canvassing due to the coronavirus pandemic.
As we’ve previously explained, this amendment would transfer control over redistricting from North Dakota’s heavily Republican legislature to its bipartisan Ethics Commission, giving Democratic lawmakers a say in who draws the lines, and it would also implement several nonpartisan criteria for how any new maps must be drawn. The electoral prong, meanwhile, seeks to give voters more choices than the existing two-party system and also avoid the “spoiler” problem of minor candidates splitting the vote and affecting election outcomes.
CAMPAIGN FINANCE
● Florida: One important measure that failed to pass before Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature adjourned in March was a constitutional amendmentto repeal the state’s public financing system for statewide elections. Republicans and most Democratsvoted for the amendment in the state House, but lawmakers failed to advance it out of committee in the state Senate.
Consequently, the current law remains in effect. Candidates for state office who raise qualifying contributions (at least $150,000 for governor and $100,000 for other offices) in increments of up to $250 receive public funding at a two-to-one matching rate. In return, they must agree to abide by expenditure limits of $2 per registered voter for governor or $1 per voter in other races, which in 2018 came out to $27 million and $13.5 million, respectively. Multiple candidates took advantage of this system in 2018, including both parties’ candidates for governor.
BALLOT ACCESS
● Florida: The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned a district court ruling that struck down a decades-old Florida law that gives the governor’s party the first-listed spot on the ballot for all partisan races. The appellate court heldthat the Democratic Party organizations lacked standing to bring their case because they didn’t demonstrate that they had been harmed by the law. The district court had found that the first-listed party enjoyed a modest but meaningful boost in support, something that likely matters most in lower-profile downballot races.
Lawmakers passed this law in 1951, and it has favored Republicans for the past two decades because they have held the governor’s office since 1999. Democrats have yet to say whether they will appeal the ruling. It’s also possible that a different plaintiff could sue in the hopes of overcoming the standing issue that led to the court rejecting Democrats’ case.
ELECTION SECURITY
● Delaware, New Jersey: Both Delaware and New Jersey will let voters with disabilities vote via the internet beginning with their primaries this year. While both states have implemented this approach to make voting more accessible for voters with disabilities,, election security experts have repeatedly warned that any voting method that relies on the internet is vulnerable to hacking.
● Pennsylvania: A federal court has rejected a lawsuit backed by 2016 Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein to decertify Philadelphia’s new voting machines ahead of the June primary over her claim that they present security vulnerabilities that threaten voters’ rights. In a sharply worded opinion, Judge Paul Diamond concluded that Stein presented “no credible evidence” and called her arguments were “daft” and “ill-considered.” Diamond ruled that granting her request would have disenfranchised voters.
Stein had previously sued the state over its laws that prevented her from being able to request a recount of the 2016 election, and she contended that the certification of these machines violated the settlement reached with state officials in 2018 in that suit. Stein in her latest case had argued that the new machines were insecure because they print out a barcode paper ballot that counts as the official record instead of a human-readable record that voters themselves can verify.
However, the court was unconvinced by Stein’s arguments, and Diamond berated her for seeking “to promote only herself” instead of election integrity. Stein has not said whether or not she will appeal.
ELECTION CHANGES
The following states have recently postponed elections:
**South Carolina**: from May 5 and May 12 to an undetermined future date (local)
**Virginia**: from May 5 local elections to May 19 (local)
You can stay on top of all changes to statewide primary dates by bookmarking our 2020 calendar.
● California: The Board of Supervisors in Los Angeles County, which is the largest county in the nation, has voted to mail a ballot to every voter for the November general election. The county is home to more than 10 million people and has more than 5.5 million registered voters. While voting by mail is very popular in California, it’s been less so in Los Angeles: 45% of L.A. voters cast ballots by mail in 2018, compared to 72% in the rest of the state.
This move comes after California’s March primary saw long voting lines because new voting equipment failed to work properly. Democratic lawmakers had also previously signaled support for legislation to require a full vote-by-mail system be used for November. California as a whole is in the process of transitioning to mail voting statewide over the next few years, but only some counties have made the switch so far.
Meanwhile, the state GOP has filed a lawsuit in state court seeking to block third-party collection of mail ballots where voters can give their ballots to a community member or campaign worker to turn in for them, a practice Republicans such as Donald Trump have derided as “ballot harvesting” even though California Republicans had been preparing their own ballot-collection campaign operation for 2020 until now. Republicans argue that practice violates the statewide shelter-in-place order and shouldn’t be allowed for the 25th Congressional District special election on May 12.
● Connecticut: Democratic Secretary of State Denise Merrill says she’s considering sending absentee ballot applications to all registered Democrats and Republicans ahead of Connecticut’s Aug. 11 primaries (the state only allows party members to vote in primaries). Merrill had previously planned to send ballot applications to voters for the state’s presidential primary, but that election was postponed from June 2 to Aug. 11 and consolidated with Connecticut’s downballot primaries.
Because the state currently requires voters to present an excuse to request an absentee ballot, Merrill has encouraged Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont to issue an executive order allowing all voters to cite the coronavirus pandemic as an acceptable excuse. On Friday, Lamont refused to say whether he would sign such an order, saying only, “We’re working on that right now as we speak.” Three weeks ago, Lamont’s top counsel said the governor’s office was researching whether the excuse requirement could be relaxed.
● Georgia: A federal judge has rejected a request by voting rights advocates that Georgia officials be required to provide pre-paid postage for absentee ballots and ballot applications. However, the judge emphasized that her ruling only pertained to the state’s June 9 primary and held out the possibility that she could reach a different conclusion regarding the Aug. 11 runoff or the November general elections.
● Indiana: A group of Indiana voters and a local voting rights organization have filed a federal lawsuit asking that all voters be allowed to cast absentee ballots in the November general election. Last month, officials waived the state’s requirement that voters present an excuse to vote absentee for the state’s June 2 primaries but did not include the November elections in that order.
Meanwhile, Republican Secretary of State Connie Lawson has unveiled a new online portal for applying for absentee mail ballots in the primary, further easing the process for that election only.
● Kentucky: Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear and Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams have issued new regulations expanding voting access for the June 23 primary, including prepaid postage for absentee mail ballots along with other changes we detailed in last week’s Roundup.
● Louisiana: Both chambers of Louisiana’s Republican-run legislature have approved modest expansions to mail voting for the state’s July 11 primaries and Aug. 15 runoffs for local elections. The measure now goes to Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, who has said he supports the legislation. The bill allows the following groups of people to request absentee ballots:
- those at “higher risk of severe illness from COVID-19 due to serious underlying medical conditions”;
- those under a “a medically necessary quarantine or isolation order as a result of COVID-19”;
- those “advised by a health care provider to self-quarantine due to COVID-19 concerns”;
- those “experiencing symptoms of COVID-19 and seeking a medical diagnosis”; and
- those “caring for an identified individual who is subject to a medically necessary quarantine.”
Voters who may be asymptomatic or who are concerned about contracting or spreading the coronavirus are not permitted to ask for an absentee ballot. Lawmakers voted on the bill remotely, via ballots they received and returned by email.
● Massachusetts: The state Supreme Court has issued a judgment agreed to by Democratic Secretary of State Bill Galvin to allow ballot initiative campaigns to gather signatures electronically. That should make it much easier for initiatives to get onto the November ballot, including one to adopt instant-runoff voting in congressional and state elections
Supporters of that measure already turned in more enough valid signatures late last year for the initiative to go before the Democratic-run state legislature, which has the power to pass it into law in lieu of it appearing on the ballot. However, if legislators don’t pass it by May 6 as appears likely, initiative supporters need to obtain another 13,000 signatures by July 1 to qualify for the November ballot.
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Galvin says that if lawmakers want to conduct the state’s Sept. 1 primaries by mail, they will need to pass a bill by June 2, which is the deadline by which candidates must file with state officials and when the secretary’s office begins preparations for printing ballots. Galvin previously said he would release his own proposal for an all-mail primary in May. At least one vote-by-mail bill is already pending before the legislature.
● Michigan: Blind voters have filed a federal lawsuit challenging Michigan’s absentee voting procedures for being inaccessible to them and infringing upon their right to vote safely. The plaintiffs are asking the court to adopt a method for accessible absentee voting ahead of May 5 local elections, pointing out that other states such as Ohio enable blind people to vote from home using screen-reading software. Normally, blind voters would have access to voting machines that can be used by people with visual impairments, but those machines are typically only available at polling places.
● Missouri: Republican State House Speaker Elijah Haahr says he supports relaxing Missouri’s excuse requirement to vote absentee and says that the legislature will hold a hearing on election-related issues sometime during its session over the next three weeks. Many county clerks have advocated for waiving the requirement, but Republican Gov. Mike Parson has opposed the idea. A lawsuit seeking to allow voters to cite the coronavirus pandemic as a valid excuse is pending in state court.
● Nevada: A federal judge has rejected a lawsuit brought by a conservative group that sought to prevent Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske from conducting Nevada’s June 9 primary by mail. The judge ruled that the plaintiffs had failed to show they would be harmed by Cegavske’s plan, but even had they been able to, he concluded that their worries about voter fraud were “without any factual basis.”
● New Jersey: Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy is reportedly considering implementing a plan for the July 7 primary to automatically send out mail ballots to all registered Democrats and Republicans while offering a limited number of in-person polling places for unaffiliated voters or major-party voters who prefer voting that way. However, Phil Murphy says publicly that he still has not made a decision.
● New York: New York’s Board of Elections, a bipartisan panel whose members are all appointed by Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, has canceled the state’s June 23 presidential primary, prompting former presidential candidate Andrew Yang to file a lawsuitin federal court asking that the presidential primary be reinstated. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders had asked that the Democratic primary go forward, but a Democratic board member, Douglas Kellner, said, “What the Sanders campaign wanted is essentially a beauty contest that, given the situation with the public health emergency, seems to be unnecessary and, indeed, frivolous.”
However, the state’s downballot primaries, which are taking place the same day, will proceed as planned, meaning the only way public safety might be enhanced is if turnout is lower as a result. According to the New York Times, about one third of New York counties have no other races on the ballot and therefore will not hold an election. However, it is not clear what proportion of the state’s actual electorate would be affected, since New York’s population is heavily concentrated in just a handful of its 62 counties.
For the primaries that remain scheduled for June, the New York City Board of Elections has launched an online portal letting voters request an absentee mail ballot. Cuomo recently issued a pair of executive orders that will mail absentee ballot applications to all voters and waive the excuse requirement, but state officials have yet to provide all voters with an online request option.
● Ohio: A state judge has rejected a request to issue a preliminary injunction allowing ballot initiative supporters to gather signatures electronically. The plaintiffs had also sought to extend the deadline to submit signatures and lower the number of signatures required. However, Judge David Young, a Democrat, ruled that the Ohio constitution precluded him from altering the established process.
This ruling could doom an effort to put a constitutional amendment to expand voting rights on the November ballot. The proposed measure would enact automatic and same-day voter registration, protect access to early voting, bar future restrictions on acceptable voter ID, and require routine audits of election results. Plaintiffs have said they are assessing their options about whether to appeal or potentially file a federal lawsuit instead.
● Pennsylvania: Voting rights advocates have filed a second lawsuit asking that absentee ballots be counted in Pennsylvania’s June 2 primaries and November general election, so long as they are postmarked by Election Day and received within seven days. Under current law, ballots must be received by Election Day. The suit was filed directly with the state Supreme Court. A separate case filed last week by different plaintiffs was brought in an intermediate appellate court; it also seeks an extension to the absentee receipt deadline as well as several other measures that would make mail voting easier.
● Rhode Island: Democratic Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea says every voter will be sent an absentee ballot application for Rhode Island’s June 2 presidential primary. The effort does not appear to apply to the state’s downballot primaries, which will not take place until Sept. 8.
● Texas: A group of Texas voters, supported by the National Redistricting Foundation, have filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that the state’s practice of allowing all voters 65 or older to cast absentee ballots without an excuse while requiring an excuse for anyone younger violates the Constitution. Specifically, the suit charges that the law in question violates the 26th Amendment, which guarantees that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.” Six other conservative states have similar provisions in place, all but one of which is also located in the South.
Two other cases on the issue of Texas’ excuse requirement are still pending. In one, filed in state court, a judge ruled that all voters can cite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic to request an absentee ballot, though Republicans have said they will appeal. A second similar case in federal court awaits a ruling.
Separately, commissioners in Harris County have allocated $12 million in new election funds, which would allow the county to mail ballots to every voter for the November general election. Harris is home to Houston and is the largest county in the state, with more than 2.3 million registered voters.
● Virginia: The Virginia Republican Party has filed to intervene in a federal lawsuit over absentee mail voting requirements. Republicans are trying to stop Democratic state Attorney General Mark Herring from implementing an agreement with the plaintiffs announced on Tuesday to waive the requirement that absentee voters have a witness sign their ballot envelope, which is more burdensome than usual due to social distancing precautions.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/critics-say-expanding-the-supreme-court-might-cause-a-death-spiral-of-democracy-guess-what-thats-already-here/
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Critics say expanding the Supreme Court might cause a ‘death spiral’ of democracy. Guess what? That’s already here
Written by Salon April 26, 2020
Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court interfered in an election in Wisconsin in yet another 5-4 decision meant to secure an electoral advantage for the Republican Party. Amidst the coronavirus pandemic, a federal district court had granted a one-week extension to Wisconsin’s mail-in ballot deadline. The election included not only Wisconsin’s presidential primary, but also a crucial judicial general election that threatened the GOP’s hold on the state’s highest court. But the Supreme Court overruled the lower court, tossing out thousands of absentee ballots and forcing Wisconsin voters and poll workers to risk exposure to coronavirus. The irony: the justices made their votes in the case remotely.
The Court reasoned that lower federal courts “should not ordinarily alter the election rules on the eve of an election.” This ignored, of course, that a pandemic made the election in question anything but ordinary. Milwaukee, a city of 600,000 people, ordinarily has 180 polling places, but there were just five open on Election Day. Madison, a city of 255,000 people, ordinarily does not experience half of its poll workers missing, as it did that Tuesday. (It was surely not lost on the Court’s conservative majority that these cities ordinarily vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.) And, of course, Wisconsinites do not ordinarily have to choose between risking viral infection or staying home and forgoing their sacred right to vote.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court’s hostility towards democracy has become ordinary.
Our democracy has been under assault for the past two decades, and the Supreme Court has dealt many of the sharpest blows. Since 2000, the court has ordered the state of Florida to stop counting ballots and handed the presidential election to a Republican who lost the popular vote, gutted the Voting Rights Act, upheld racist voter ID laws in Indiana, allowed a torrent of dark money to flow into our electoral process, and authorized racially biased voter purges in Ohio.
It is time we do something about the Roberts court’s assault on democracy. Expanding the Supreme Court is our only option.
Despite substantial evidence that the Roberts Court and democracy cannot coexist, some are hesitant to embrace “court expansion” — increasing the number of seats on the Supreme Court the next time Democrats control the Presidency, House, and Senate — as a solution. They fear it would cause a “death spiral” in which Republicans would simply expand the court again should they retake unified control. (This, of course, ignores that the Republicans have already altered the size of the court before — in 2016, when the Senate reduced the size of the court to eight for an entire year rather than seat Merrick Garland, Barack Obama’s nominee to replace the late Antonin Scalia. Republicans paid the steep political price of winning the presidency, House, and Senate that fall.)
But court expansion would not cause a death spiral of democracy. That death spiral is already here. And it will only get worse if we do nothing.
The Roberts court — with a majority of five conservative justices, four of whom were appointed by Republican presidents who took office after losing the popular vote — has made it unnecessarily difficult for all voters, especially Democratic voters, to cast their ballot. Justice Roberts famously declared that “things have changed in the South” in his decision striking down key provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Five years later, Georgia’s then-Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, stole an election from Stacey Abrams, a Democrat, by engaging in the exact form of black voter suppression the Voting Rights Act was meant to check. Thanks to the Roberts court, the affront to democracy we saw in Georgia — more than over 1.5 million mostly black voters purged, dozens of majority-black precincts closed, defective voting machines, and four-hour lines to vote in majority-black neighborhoods — was legal for the first time since the era of Jim Crow.
The Supreme Court’s antidemocratic streak reverberates far beyond voting. Thanks to the Roberts Court, our campaign finance system operates so that, overwhelmingly, the candidates who make it onto the ballot and win elections are captured by corporate interests and wealthy donors. This is true of both Democrats and Republicans. These candidates hold views that are out of step with those of the average American, many of whom choose to stay home rather than vote for candidates who are more responsive to their donors than their constituents.
Even if Democrats overcome these hurdles to get more votes, they will be met with structural barriers that will keep them out of power. Thanks to the GOP’s aggressive partisan gerrymandering, Democrats have to routinely produce historic turnout to win House majorities. In 2018, the Democrats’ seven-point win resulted in a 36-seat majority; in contrast, the GOP’s seven-point win in 2010 produced a 49-seat majority. The Senate is even more undemocratic, and only getting worse: Democrats won the Senate popular vote by 9 million in 2018 and lost seats.By 2040, 30% of Americans, people from disproportionately white and rural states, will be represented by 70% of U.S. senators.
Do not expect the Roberts court to level this horribly uneven playing field. It has refused to address even the most blatant examples of partisan gerrymandering: in 2018, the conservative majority declined to intervene against Wisconsin’s state-level gerrymander, which enabled Republicans to win 63 of the 99 state assembly seats with only 44.8% of the vote. Worse yet, it held that partisan gerrymandering was a political question that no federal court is allowed to touch in the future. The court is also likely to rule against measures that would make the Senate less undemocratic, such as granting statehood to Washington, D.C.
Democrats have a bold plan to restore democracy, but it may not pass muster with a hostile Supreme Court. In 2019, House Democrats passed the For the People Act (H.R. 1) to counteract a decades-long conservative assault on democracy. It includes measures like automatic voter registration to add nearly 50 million voters to the rolls, campaign finance reform to reduce the outsize influence of big money, independent redistricting to end partisan gerrymandering, and prohibitions on voter suppression.
But the Roberts court cannot be trusted to faithfully interpret that law. In Husted v. Randolph Institute (2018), the court manipulated the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, a statute meant to expand voter registration, to allow Ohio to purge one million voters, a disproportionate number of whom are black.Given that recent precedent, and the Court’s general antipathy toward democracy, there is every reason to believe that the Roberts court will come up with pretextual reasons to strike down crucial provisions of the For the People Act, which would both bolster our democracy and threaten unified Republican control.
Make no mistake, Democrats want to compete for the support of the American people. Unfortunately, Republicans have shown that their strategy for winning is to cheat. Very recently, President Trump admitted that when more people vote, Republicans lose.
We cannot restore democracy without fixing the Supreme Court. That is precisely why court expansion is so urgently necessary.
Practically speaking, a plan that pairs court expansion with legislation to restore our democracy will naturally provide a bulwark against Republican retaliation. With 50 million voters added to the rolls and fair congressional maps, it would be exceptionally difficult for Republicans to recapture unified control of the political branches and pass their own court expansion bill.
We live in a time of crisis. Aside from the coronavirus pandemic, we have 10 years left to prevent irreversible climate catastrophe. Income inequality is the highest it has been in a century. More than 30 million Americans do not have health insurance, a number that is growing. A woman’s right to choose is constantly being undermined; the Supreme Court could overturn Roe v. Wade tomorrow. More than 2.3 million Americans are incarcerated, while 12 million undocumented people in this country live without legal protection. Millions of LGBTQ people live without protection from employment discrimination under federal law. At least 33,000 people in the United States die each year from gun violence.
Our ability to respond to these crises depends on enfranchising the 53 million eligible voters who cannot or will not participate in our democracy — exactly the sort of measure the Roberts court will not allow.
We face a choice: allow these crises to worsen, or expand the court.
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voting Rights Roundup: VA Dems expand voting access and reform redistricting in historic session
https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/new-2020-battlefronts-are-emerging-in-the-struggle-for-voting-rights-in-key-swing-states/
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New 2020 battlefronts are emerging in the struggle for voting rights in key swing states
Written by Steven Rosenfeld / Independent Media Institute April 17, 2020
When the 2020 election season resumes in Ohio on April 28 and continues in nearly half of the states through July, Americans will see if new voting regimens instituted in response to the pandemic will help voters or preview state-by-state partisan battles over voter turnout.
Already there are troubling signs that the past decade’s voter suppression battles will continue and accelerate in battleground states. Wisconsin’s April 7 primary, the month’s only presidential contest that was not postponed by the pandemic, is exhibit A. However, as 24 states and territories will hold primaries and caucuses in coming weeks, and other elections this summer, Republicans in some states are already tilting the rules and means of voting to favor their base in the fall.
“We know that primaries help us see voter suppression in early forms,because voter suppression is systemic,” said Stacey Abrams, founder of Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group now working in 18 battleground states. “What we have seen over the past few months is it is happening in almost every state where we are working.”
The partisan moves come as states like Ohio, Georgia, Nevada and others are reconfiguring voting options in the pandemic. The emerging policies include uneven outreach to voters about voting by mail, hurdles to obtain an absentee ballot, and few opportunities for in-person voting. These changes and others, including whether voters can fix problems if ballots are rejected, break from long-held voting habits. Taken together, they will be deeply disruptive and disenfranchising, according to advocates like Abrams and Democratic Party attorneys whose teams have begun to challenge them in court.
“What we are seeing is an unprecedented effort to prevent people from voting,” said Marc Elias, the Democratic National Committee’s top voting rights lawyer. “This predates [COVID-19]. We know that for the last several years, we have seen legislature after legislature controlled by Republicans simply make voting harder. And they don’t make voting harder for everybody. They make voting harder for minority voters and young voters.”
Elias has fought GOP-led voter suppression for decades. In a Friday media briefing with Abrams, he cited prior federal court rulings against Republicans—throwing out laws in North Carolina that targeted blacks with “surgical precision” and laws in Arizona that he said were driven by “racist tropes” to stop community groups from helping Native Americans to vote.
What unfolded in early April in Wisconsin after the pandemic broke was as dark as any of these past power plays, he said.
Wisconsin’s Warning
In Wisconsin, Republican legislators and the Republican National Committee, aided by conservative majorities on the highest state and federal courts, ignored Democrats’ concerns about public health, voting rights and election logistics. The fights between a Democratic governor and GOP-led legislature over postponing the election, last-minute court rulings ordering it to continue, and postal service delays with delivering ballots impacted turnout—even as hundreds of thousands of people voted by mail for the first time. Thousands more voters braved health risks and waited for hours to vote in person, as many polls were closed due to shortages of poll workers, especially in communities of color.
The starkest figure attesting to the ensuing voter suppression was that 1.3 million voters across the state had requested absentee ballots, but only 1.1 million ballots were returned by an April 13 deadline. The ballots had to be postmarked by April 7 to be counted. In 2016, Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 22,748 votes in Wisconsin. Trump’s margin was less than an eighth of the 197,489 voters who this April wanted, but failed, to vote absentee.
Before the pandemic, a senior Trump campaign lawyer declared that Trump would not be reelected without winning Wisconsin in November.
“Wisconsin is the tipping point to 270 Electoral College votes,” Justin Clark told a Republican National Lawyers Associationmeeting in the state last November, where he also said Republicans have “always been” the (modern) party of voter suppression. “If we don’t win Wisconsin, he’s done.”
More recently, the Republican National Committee and Trump campaign said that they would allocate $10 million to fight Democrats on voting rights in 2020.
Ironically, the effort by Wisconsin and national Republicans to tilt the April 7 election partly failed, when a wide majority of voters elected a liberal justice to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The reason that Republican legislators resisted postponing the election was to try to finesse a court majority, Wisconsin’s leading conservative pundit explained before the vote.
What happened in Wisconsin has many takeaways. Among those, it suggests that states with Democratic governors and Republican legislatures will disagree on the means and rules for voting in 2020—even in a pandemic.
That tension can be seen in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Kentucky, where decisions have yet to be made about the extent to which the states will shift to voting early or voting by mail in upcoming primaries, and the details of how those elections will be run.
In Nevada, tensions between Democrats (including the governor) and the Republican secretary of state over voter outreach and voting options in its June primary led Elias to sue on April 16 on behalf of state and national Democrats.
Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske wanted to send absentee ballot applications only to longtime voters and restrict in-person voting to one site in each county—including Las Vegas. The suit says those factors, atop state laws that ban volunteers from helping others to vote and allowing officials to disqualify ballots based on how signatures look, would “cause extensive disenfranchisement” on par with Wisconsin.
“Eighty-seven percent of the population of the state will have two voting locations,” said Elias, referring to Las Vegas and Reno. “In addition, when we talk about vote by mail and automatic vote by mail, the question is, ‘Who gets a ballot?’ ‘Who are those ballots automatically mailed to?’ So in the case of Nevada, they’re sending ballots only to what they refer to as ‘active’ voters. In Nevada, because it is a highly transient population… there were 50,000 ‘inactive’ voters in 2016 and 2018, who in fact voted. So those 50,000 voters wouldn’t get a ballot.”
Wisconsin’s primary was a mess. But it revealed little about the best ways to run the primaries that will soon be held and elections this summer and fall. Before the pandemic delayed spring primaries, some were likely to be chaotic anyway for reasons that have nothing to do with partisan voter suppression.
In states like Pennsylvania that have yet to hold primaries or caucuses, election officials planned to debut new voting technology. Earlier this year, introducing new systems in states such as Iowa, Nevada, South Carolina and California contributed to hours-long waits for voters, scrambled registration records, voting machinery failures and uncertain outcomes. But technical snafus were not the only cause.
Another factor was voters’ habits. In Los Angeles, the nation’s largest election district, officials assumed that voters would take advantage of 10 days of newly instituted early voting. But most L.A. voters did not, which contributed to long delays on Super Tuesday. People tend to vote in the ways that they are familiar with—whether early, at polls, by mail, etc. That was another reason why the Democrats sued Nevada, Elias said.
“In Nevada, for example, 93 percent of the population voted in person in the last election,” he said. “This is a state with a strong culture of in-person voting. They have in-person vote-anywhere centers. Throughout counties, people vote early over an extended early voting period… So, against that backdrop, the Republican secretary of state announced that they were going to close all but one polling location in every county.”
Since the pandemic broke, the nationwide response—by governors, secretaries of state, state election directors, election boards, and county officials—has generally been to look to more absentee voting and less in-person voting. While the state-by-state details of how that will work are starting to surface, some trends are emerging.
Upcoming Primaries and Elections
States with histories of partisan voting rights fights are still seeing this tension. These states are not necessarily the presidential swing states, but increasingly purple states like Texas and Georgia. Even though Republicans hold the most powerful state posts, not all high-ranking GOP officials agree about how far election managers should go to facilitate voting by mail.
In Georgia, where there will be a contested Democratic U.S. Senate primary in June, the Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is sending absentee ballot applications to 6.9 million “active voters,” meaning any resident who has voted or contacted the state in the past five years. But 300,000 infrequent but still registered voters will not get one. Raffensperger’s decision drew criticism from both sides of the aisle. (Republican secretaries in Iowa and Nevada also are only sending absentee ballot applications to active voters.)
Georgia’s House Speaker told a radio host that Republicans could not win in high turnout elections—criticizing Raffensperger, who replied that this outreach was only for the primary. Days later, the secretary created an absentee ballot fraud task force, which Abrams said was intended to strike fear in voters. A decade ago, the state’s current governor, ex-Secretary of State Brain Kemp, “put 12 people in jail, facing 120 felonies, on false accusations of absentee ballot fraud,” Abrams said.
“That [task force] was designed to have a chilling effect on participation,” Abrams said. “We know that heading into this election, it is not simply the actions that are taken at the ballot box that will stop people from voting; it’s also creating a miasma of fear that tries… to target black, Latino, Native American voters, but also young voters, and scare people to not take advantage of these opportunities” to vote.
Georgia was not the only state with Republican disagreements.
In Texas, where negotiations between the state Democratic Party and Republicans broke down over the details of contacting voters and obtaining an absentee ballot, the Republican attorney general said that he did not consider the virus as an excuse to obtain an absentee ballot. The Republican secretary of state wanted to accept applications from any registered voter.
One-third of states require voters to declare an excuse to obtain an absentee ballot. Since March, however, many states have suspended that rule. This includes states where Republicans have governed for years, but these are not swing states. In these instances, the response to the pandemic has not followed the partisan cliché, where Republicans seek a smaller electorate while Democrats seek the opposite.
According to a detailed tally by Ballotpedia.org, at least a dozen top Republican state officials have used their authority to expand absentee voting in upcoming elections, with some saying that those steps may continue next fall. They are ignoring Trump’s rants about voter fraud and the need to suppress Democratic voting blocs—at least in their less nationally competitive states.
“There are Republicans who are quietly, with little fanfare and appreciation from liberals, who are very quietly ignoring what the president has been tweeting and are doing the right thing—because it is right for their voters,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former Department of Justice Voting Section attorney.
“Are they doing everything that liberals want them to do? Absolutely not,” he said. “Is it reasonable to expect the secretary of state, of the state that voted with the largest margin for Trump, West Virginia, to be a liberal Democrat? No. But is he [Mac Warner] making things worse or better with his actions with regard to what’s going on with the coronavirus? The answer is unquestionably better.”
Warner, like Republican secretaries of state or governors in Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Dakota, North Dakota and Vermont, has taken steps since mid-March to expand voting by mail, according to Ballotpedia. West Virginia, like half of these states, will send any voter an absentee application. Michigan, with Democratic statewide officeholders and a Republican-majority legislature, is taking the same approach for its upcoming elections.
Ohio: The Next Red Flag
Ironically, 2020’s next primary—Ohio on April 28—has also fallen victim to partisan power plays—inside the state GOP and with Democrats.
After Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and Secretary of State Frank LaRose won a court ruling to delay the March 17 primary due to the pandemic, LaRose wanted to hold it on June 2 to have more time to prepare for voting by mail. But Ohio’s Republican-majority legislature pre-empted LaRose.
It passed a bill to hold the primary on April 28. The legislation also did not extend voter registration deadlines and required voters to apply for an absentee ballot. Additionally, it said that only voters with disabilities or who could not receive mail could vote in person. Those conditions led a coalition of voting rights groups to sue, claiming that multitudes “of Ohioans will not get to vote through no fault of their own.”
Their lawsuit demanded the state extend voter registration, mail every voter a ballot, pay for the return postage, allow voters who do not get ballots to vote at county offices, and delay the primary. In early April, a federal court rejected the lawsuit, saying the legislature had the authority to make these changes. (The U.S. Supreme Court issued a similar ruling several days later that upheld the Wisconsin legislature’s decision to hold its April 7 election.)
However, LaRose, Ohio county election officials and the civil rights groups were somewhat in agreement about what would be needed to successfully transition to voting by mail—considering that only 21 percent of Ohioans voted that way in 2018. They did not agree on all points, but all said that more planning, outreach and logistics were needed. Instead, what is likely to unfold is many voters will be frustrated or disenfranchised, as they are not used to the new rules.
“I’m really concerned about the Ohio primary on April 28 and the fact that there are no meaningful ways to vote in person,” Becker said. “If they had moved it to June 2, as the secretary had requested, there would have been meaningful opportunities.”
Whether 2020’s remaining primaries and summer elections are deftly or clumsily managed remains to be seen. The details of how officials restructure the means and rules of voting will translate into which voters and voting blocs turn out. At best, voters will be empowered in a pandemic. But if drastic changes are imposed, the result could be state-by-state battles over voter turnout and voter suppression.
“It will be interesting to watch the upcoming primaries and see with more preparation what ends up happening,” Becker said. “My guess is more people vote in person than officials expect. It’s not magic that everyone just decides I’m a mail-in voter now.”
Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.
This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/tucker-carlson-attacks-michelle-obama-for-trying-to-make-it-easier-to-vote
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/investigative-reporter-breaks-down-the-real-reason-republicans-threw-a-fit-in-wisconsin-trumps-gop-is-canceling-the-american-peoples-right-to-vote/
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Investigative reporter breaks down the real reason Republicans ‘threw a fit in Wisconsin’: Trump’s GOP is ‘canceling the American people’s right to vote’
President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence walk with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Senator Roy Blunt, R-Mo., Tuesday, March 10, 2020, upon their arrival to the U.S. Capitol for a Senate Republican policy lunch. (Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen)
Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon April 12, 2020
Encouraged by the pain, suffering, misery and distraction caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump is continuing his assault on American democracy and the rule of law.
His most recent move: removing at least seven inspectors general who provide independent oversight within various departments of the United States government.
Trump is a malignant narcissist with authoritarian tendencies and may well be a sociopath. Like a Mafia boss, he views personal loyalty as more important than loyalty to the Constitution and the rule of law. Aided by Attorney General William Barr, Trump appears poised to loot the coronavirus relief funds passed by Congress, harass and silence his political enemies, speed up the country’s downward slide into failed democracy, and unleash more cruelty against those Americans he deems to be insufficiently loyal or otherwise “undesirable.”
On Twitter, Walter Shaub, former director of the Office of Government Ethics, summarized recent developments:
A last line of defense in this war on ethics and law is the Inspector General community. They’re the eyes of the American people, objective investigators traditionally freed to pursue accountability by the safeguard of bipartisan congressional protection.
What began with the fall of the ethics program is entering the end game with the potential fall of the Inspector General community. The government is failing us, safeguards that took two centuries to build have crumbled, and fascism is eyeing this republic like lunch.
Shaub is perhaps being optimistic: Donald Trump and his allies, both foreign and domestic, are already gorging on democracy. Trump makes no effort to hide his contempt for American democracy. He is obvious and unapologetic.
Last week, Trump admitted that “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again” if Americans were universally permitted to vote by mail.
Trump is just channeling a belief that has long been expressed both in private and in public by Republicans and other members of the right-wing movement. On this, Trump and the Republicans are correct: According to public opinion polls and other research, the American people overwhelmingly reject their policies and goals.
Because democracy is antithetical to today’s Republican Party, Donald Trump has repeatedly condemned voting by mail because he believes it will be disadvantageous to his chances of winning another presidential term in 2020. In the final analysis, Republicans want to make voting more difficult even if it means more Americans will fall ill and die from COVID-19.
Last Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed Trump and the Republicans’ ongoing assault on American democracy. In a 5-4 decision, the court’s “conservative” majority ordered that Wisconsin’s primary election could not be delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic, and no extension would be allowed for mail-in ballots. This decision forced the people of Wisconsin — most notably nonwhite people, students, young people, and other Democratic Party’s base in cities like Milwaukee and Madison — to choose between their lives and their constitutionally guaranteed right to vote.
The Democratic Party’s leaders have apparently decided that expanded mail-in voting is a necessary measure, and the best way to defeat Donald Trump in the context of the coronavirus pandemic.
In reality, matters are not so simple.
Greg Palast is an investigative journalist whose work has been featured by the BBC, the Guardian, the Nation, Rolling Stone, as well as on Salon.
He is the author of the bestselling books “Billionaires & Ballot Bandits” and “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.” Palast is one of the country’s foremost experts on voter fraud and how elections are rigged to suppress and otherwise interfere with the will of the people in a democracy.
He warns that mail-in voting as it currently exists is likely to guarantee Donald Trump’s victory in the 2020 election. Palast also explains how the Supreme Court decision on the Wisconsin primary election was really about purging nonwhite voters in order to maximize Trump’s chances of winning that key battleground state.
Palast says, however, that the Democratic Party’s new mail-in voting proposals can be improved so that the will of the American people can be fully realized at the ballot box — which will likely ensure Trump’s defeat in November.
You can also listen to my conversation with Greg Palast on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
What is democracy? What does it mean to you?
To me, it’s very simple: Every citizen gets to vote, and every vote gets counted. If you don’t have those two things, you don’t have a democracy.
Donald Trump has repeatedly said that he opposes mail-in ballots and if mail-in ballots are allowed that no Republican will ever get elected in the United States again. What were your thoughts when you heard the president of the United States making such bold and obvious threats against the country’s democracy?
Of course, it shows Donald Trump’s totalitarian mindset. My second thought is that the Democrats are making a mistake by thinking, “Well, if Trump says mail-in ballots are a bad idea, then let’s make sure all Americans mail in their ballots.”
Just the logic of it. Donald Trump says, “I hate mail-in ballots,” and the Democrats are saying we must have expanded mail-in ballots because of the coronavirus. But how do we work through the puzzle that the Republican Party actually does much better with mail-in voting? Shouldn’t Trump be encouraging that way of voting, because Republicans have great experience in suppressing votes and other ways of rigging elections?
Republicans know that they can just throw out the mail-in ballots.
Remember, when a person fills out a mail-in ballot it is not the simple task of just picking a candidate, sealing the envelope and then mailing it. You must have the right envelope. You have to answer questions on the outside of the envelope. You have to have the correct postage. You have to have all this information. In many states there has to be a witness or a notary, which is not easy to do. The mail-in ballots in many states are not postage-paid. This is a big problem because, for example, Ohio has a little square where it says, “Put your stamp here.” Well, that envelope requires two stamps. But if you were to look at the envelope, most people would assume it is just one stamp.
There is no question that Republicans do much better with mail-in voting than the Democrats. Republicans are better with mail-in voting because more of them do it. So there is a practical advantage with experience. Ultimately, there should not have been in-person voting and elections held in Wisconsin on Tuesday. To do such a thing is insane. There have to be other and better ways to vote, especially given the coronavirus. These solutions include early in-person voting and improved mail-in voting.
For example, in Hollywood there is drive-up voting where a person does not have to leave their car. There should also be drop-off boxes and other ways to get a ballot other than waiting for a card that a person may never even see or get. The Republicans are using this trope where mail-in voting is a bad thing — if it benefits Democrats. Do not forget that Republicans actually use mail-in voting more and they are defeating the Democrats using it.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the coronavirus pandemic does not constitute an emergency sufficient enough to delay voting in Wisconsin and that people should not be given more time to mail in their ballots. To a reasonable observer the court’s decision makes no sense and is obviously endangering the lives of voters. What was the real motivation here?
The basic logic is there are five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court who can tell the other justices “Screw you! Case closed!”
Here is their real argument: “We’re Republicans. This is what we want. Period.”
Consider what happened several weeks ago. Mike DeWine, the Republican governor of Ohio, did not want the vote to take place. The Democrats sued to force him to hold the primary. Being the governor, he said, “Screw you. I’m not holding the election.” He shut it down.
When the Republicans decide to delay or not have an election it is fine with the U.S. Supreme Court. The Democrats could not even get a hearing with the court about what DeWine did in Ohio. But when the Republicans wants to stop a delay in Wisconsin, the Supreme Court intervened.
The big picture: Why is this all happening? What is this fight really about? The Republicans do not care about Bernie Sanders versus Joe Biden. That is a settled issue, it’s over. The Republicans threw a fit in Wisconsin because the real issue is the Wisconsin State Supreme Court.
The Republican legislature voted that the state must remove 232,000 voters, who they claim have moved. That is not true, of course. Those voters have not moved. Most of the people on that list have never moved anywhere. They have not moved out of their county. The governor and lieutenant governor are Democrats and they are not going to purge those voters. The Republicans then went to court to force the Democrats to make those voters ineligible. Tuesday was also the general election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. That was the real issue.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court is controlled by the Republicans, and the Democrats were trying to take it away from them. With the decision about the coronavirus and mail-in ballots, the Republican Party’s control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court is not locked in. The Republicans will be able to remove a quarter million people from the voting rolls — voters who are more likely to support the Democrats.
Donald Trump supposedly won Wisconsin by 22,000 votes in 2016. Now 10 times that number will be purged by Republicans. That will give Donald Trump the state of Wisconsin in 2020. That is what the controversy and the U.S. Supreme Court decision is really about.
This is all part of a much larger strategy where Republicans rig elections. In urban and predominantly black and brown areas of Wisconsin there were almost no voting machines. People were waiting in long lines and risking their lives because of the coronavirus pandemic.
In rural areas of Wisconsin, where the virus has not yet hit in a real way, there is in-person voting. Republicans are more likely to mail in their ballots than Democrats and so they’ve already voted. Rural areas are also not as crowded at the polls. That makes it safer. Poll workers are older and they’re high-risk. They are also not reckless. There was a problem getting a sufficient number of polling officials and workers for Milwaukee. As such, the number of polling stations was reduced from 180 to three.
Because many people do not have cars, even getting to the polls in more populated urban areas during the coronavirus is dangerous. And there is the risk of going on mass transit as well. Tuesday’s election was a total fix by the Republicans. It was a joke of an election. The Republicans loved it. They do not want to expand mail-in voting.
On mail-in voting, make note of how Trump complained about the Democrats’ proposals. He was not complaining about mail-in voting in general. He was specifically condemning the Democrats’ proposals for mail-in voting. Trump knows that if instituted, the Democrats’ mail-in voting plan will wipe out the Republicans.
The Democrats want to make mail-in voting really work, and they want to extend early voting to a three-week period. That would also include evening voting. If the public is allowed to vote at different times, it will make it easier to keep a safe distance during the coronavirus epidemic. Voting will be much safer. What the Democrats want to implement about mail-in voting and other such changes is excellent.
But if there is mail-in voting as it is currently implemented in most states, Donald Trump cannot lose. The mail-in voting system as it exists will almost guarantee Trump and the Republican Party’s victory. Mail-in voting is a disaster for Democrats and it has always been a total disaster.
But Trump does have one thing right: If every eligible American votes then the Republicans are screwed.
If the Democrats know that they are heading for a mail-in election in 2020 because of the coronavirus, however, then they can improve the process and also have time to educate the public about this new and better system.
There is this hopelessly naïve and in many ways pathetic narrative being circulated by too many journalists and other political observers that any talk about Donald Trump canceling the 2020 presidential election is somehow ridiculous, that such a thing cannot happen in the United States. But many such people have zero credibility given that they also said that Donald Trump could not possibly be elected president. How do you evaluate these concerns?
What we are heading for in America is not Donald Trump canceling the 2020 presidential election but just canceling the American people’s right to vote.
Donald Trump can just hold a pretend election. America has a great deal of experience with doing such a thing. There is a massive system in place to purge voters. Many Americans will never receive their mail-in ballots. Ballots will never get counted. They also get disqualified for ridiculous reasons.
Every time there is an impediment to voting and registration in America it targets young people, black people and brown people. Low-income people are targeted. This is another version of Jim Crow racially segregated voter suppression and vote theft. Trump and the Republicans have many ways of holding an election and pretending that he was legitimately elected when, of course, he was not.
What are some specific tactics and strategies the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s agents can use to amplify their interference in the American people’s right to vote — and have their vote properly counted — in the 2020 election?
A study from MIT puts the loss of mail-in ballots at 22 percent. That is 25 million ballots if the United States goes to an 80 percent mail-in voting system.
The Republicans would not need to bring in new people or ramp up their voter suppression oppression. With the Electoral College, it is easy to steal an election. Stealing an election is much easier because in that system all one has to do is target the “battleground states” such as Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Places that we don’t think of as “swing states” — North Carolina and Georgia, for example — are gradually becoming “minority majority.” The Republicans know they are in trouble in Georgia. How do they keep control of the South? They manipulate the vote by purges, gerrymandering, tricks with mail-in voting and other techniques. The Republicans have many ways of keeping people from having their vote counted. Again, if the Democrats fix the system, they can lessen the impact of Republican Party interference and thus make sure that votes in support of the Democratic Party are fully counted.
What is the role of the coronavirus pandemic in the 2020 presidential election?
The coronavirus is voting for Donald Trump. If in-person, in-precinct voting is required and the coronavirus is present in that community, then people are going to be afraid.
There may be lingering fear of the coronavirus even if it is “officially” gone because no one trusts Donald Trump and his administration. That fear of the coronavirus is going to massively hurt the urban vote for the Democrats. If that happens, Trump wins again in 2020. If the United States continues with the mail-in system it currently has, then Donald Trump wins again in 2020. The coronavirus votes for Donald Trump. It is really that simple. The vote won’t even be close.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/rnc-chairwoman-claims-all-mail-ballots-proposal-would-vastly-expand-opportunities-for-fraud-as-experts-say-dems-benefit-from-early-voting-opportunities/
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/justice-ginsburg-sends-out-dire-warning-about-the-new-supreme-court-ruling-in-wisconsin-election-case/
https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/were-witnessing-the-most-illegitimate-election-in-modern-u-s-history/
no lnx
We’re witnessing the most illegitimate election in modern US history
Written by Martin Longman / Washington Monthly April 7, 2020
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/were-witnessing-the-most-illegitimate-election-in-modern-u-s-history/
no lnx
We’re witnessing the most illegitimate election in modern US history
Written by Martin Longman / Washington Monthly April 7, 2020
Does it seem like a bad idea to you to hold an election where people are expected to show up the polls in the midst of global pandemic that has most of the world sheltered in place? It seemed like a bad idea to the Democratic governor of Wisconsin, too, but as Ian Millhiser explains at Vox, he wasn’t able to call off or delay Tuesday’s election:
Last week, Gov. [Tony] Evers called the state legislature into session and asked it to delay the election. But the Republican-controlled legislature ended that session just seconds after it was convened. After Evers acted on his own authority to delay the election, the state’s Supreme Court voted along partisan lines to rescind Evers’s order. Republicans also rejected Evers’s proposal to automatically mail ballots to every voter in the state.
Of course, just because the Republicans insist on having this election on schedule, doesn’t mean that you can convince people to show up to vote. In fact, they can’t even convince poll workers to show up:
The April 7 election is shaping up to be a trainwreck. Most poll workers have refused to work the election, out of fear of catching the coronavirus, which forced Gov. Tony Evers (D) to call up the National Guard in order to keep polls open. But even this measure appears woefully inadequate. In Milwaukee, election officials announced that the state only has enough election workers to open five poll locations — when the city would normally have 180 polling places.
It seems inevitable that Milwaukee will have an immensely reduced turnout, which is tantamount to handing the Republicans victory in every statewide contested election on the ballot. But it gets worse.
Once the Democrats understood that the election would go forward, they went to court to try to make sure that absentee ballots could serve as an alternative, and they convinced an Obama-appointed federal judge to extend the deadline for submitting an absentee ballot from 8 pm April 7 to 4 pm on April 13. The judge reasoned that this was reasonable because the state had received 1.2 million ballot requests and was struggling to get them mailed out in time for voters to receive them.
But the Republicans appealed this decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. On Monday, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 along completely partisan lines to rescind the lower court’s decision and uphold the 8 pm April 7 deadline for receiving an absentee ballot. Predictably, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg was incensed:
As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg notes in her dissent, “the presidential primaries, a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, three seats on the Wisconsin Court of Appeals, over 100 other judgeships, over 500 school board seats, and several thousand other positions” are at stake in the Wisconsin election…
…Again, many voters are not expected to receive their ballots until after this April 7 deadline. As Justice Ginsburg notes, “as of Sunday morning, 12,000 ballots reportedly had not yet been mailed out…”
Now, the most egregious thing here is that the Republicans are defying their governor and putting people’s lives at risk. But it’s almost equally offensive that they’re using this crisis to guarantee themselves a slew of easy victories in what are actually competitive elections. And this is all possible because Republican-controlled legislatures and courts are willing to go to any length to help their party electorally, even if it destroys the bench’s reputation for impartiality, and even if it annihilates any respect for the outcome of elections. How can anyone argue that you can have a fair election when Milwaukee can only produce five polling locations rather than the 180 that are needed? How can they say they’re not disenfranchising people when folks have to choose between possible death if they go out in public to vote or not voting at all because they didn’t receive an absentee ballot in time to mail it in by Tuesday night’s deadline?
I’ve seen a lot of things in my time, but I’ve never seen anything on a par with this.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/republicans-arent-just-trying-to-cheat-at-elections-its-much-worse-than-that/
voter suppress
no lnx
Republicans aren’t just trying to cheat at elections — it’s much worse than that
Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon April 8, 2020
The Wisconsin Republican Party has been at the cutting edge of the efforts to make sure few, if any, Democratic voters ever make it to the polls again. Under the guidance of former Republican governor Scott Walker, a stalwart opponent of food having flavor, the state enacted a dizzying program of voter suppression, requiring people to have updated government-issued IDs while simultaneously making those IDs much harder to get, especially for people of color. They also suppressed the college student vote by banning most student IDs as a legitimate form of identification.
From the beginning of this war on voters, which has been spread out across the country, it’s been understood primarily as a partisan power grab, an attempt to keep certain constituencies from voting because they tend to vote for Democrats. Even Donald Trump, always saying the quiet parts out loud, said recently that if voting by mail becomes widespread, “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
This partisan understanding has, unfortunately, effectively muted both press coverage of this widespread voter suppression and public outrage. Covering this story necessarily requires portraying Republicans as villains and Democrats as victims, since that’s the truth. Unfortunately, mainstream journalists, always wary of being seen as “biased,” have almost universally reacted by underplaying this story, leaving it instead to left-leaning outlets like Mother Jones. Many Americans, drunk on the myth that all politicians are corrupt and always looking for an angle, tune out Democratic complaints about voter suppression as more partisan sniping.
But what’s happening in Wisconsin this week defies the usual partisan understanding of voter suppression. Wisconsin Republicans are exploiting the coronavirus to keep everyone from voting. It’s a preview not just of the way Republicans will use this crisis to shut down voting in particular instances, but an expansion of their anti-voting views in general.It’s starting to look like the Republican war on voting isn’t just about partisan gain, but even more about a deep hostility to democracy itself, and an objection to very idea of letting the people choose their leaders.
On Monday, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, signed an executive order delaying the election scheduled for April 7 until June. His reason was simple enough: People can’t maintain state-mandated social distancing and also vote. In addition, the majority of poll volunteers are over 60 and in a high-risk group and can’t come out at all. Many polling locations had already been closed due to staffing shortages, which ensures that crowds will be even thicker at the ones that remain open, leading to more danger of spreading the coronavirus.
Republicans in the state sued to end Evers’ order, and the conservative-controlled state Supreme Court sided with them, so now the election will go forward as originally scheduled. In addition, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that absentee ballots have to be postmarked today — even though many voters haven’t even gotten their ballots yet.
This decision will “disenfranchise untold thousands of Wisconsin voters and consign an unknown number of Wisconsinites to their deaths,” Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, said in a statement.
But what’s particularly strange about the Republican insistence on holding election today, in a naked bid to reduce the Badger State turnout to practically nothing, is that it’s not at all clear this will benefit Republicans in the short term.
It’s true that, typically, higher voter turnout tends to benefit Democrats over Republicans. That’s because Democratic-leaning voters significantly outnumber Republicans, but Democrats tend to be younger and less well-to-do on average, and therefore are more likely to skip voting. That’s why voter suppression techniques typically focus on making it hard for younger or poorer people to vote.
But no one can be sure that the coronavirus voter suppression will work the same way, because the people at most risk tend to be older — and therefore more likely to vote Republican. And while there are some general election races on the ballot, including important judicial contests, the most high-profile race is still the Democratic presidential primary, which could create more incentive for Democrats to risk coming out while Republicans sit at home.
That fact hasn’t slowed down Wisconsin Republicans one bit, however. It’s not hard to grasp the reason: This isn’t just about winning elections by cheating, as it’s commonly understood. It’s also about a deep loathing among conservatives for the very idea of democracy, and a compulsive need to shut as many people as possible out of the process of choosing their own leaders.
This is also true on a national scale. There’s increasing pressure, in the wake of the coronavirus, to make mail-in ballots the norm across the country, as it is in states like California and Oregon. Republicans, however, have made no bones about the fact that they will fight any and all such measures until the end of time.
That makes sense as a partisan move in normal times, because the evidence is clear that Democrats fare well in states with mail-in ballots. But in the age of the coronavirus, the most obvious beneficiaries of universal mail-in ballots would voters over 65, a demographic in which Trump won 52% of the vote in 2016. Meanwhile, the group that would feel the least fear about showing up to the polls, because they’re far less likely to face serious complications from COVID-19, is voters aged 18 to 29, most of whom voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Ultimately, it seems that taking a stand against democracy itself matters more to Republicans than worrying about how the coronavirus crisis has shifted partisan incentives.
This fits an overall pattern of Republicans instinctively choosing authoritarianism over democracy at every turn.Attorney General Bill Barr, for instance, has spent his career pushing for a virtually unlimited level of presidential power and a deep hostility toward allowing Congress to hold the president accountable — even though such unlimited powers would be held by the next Democratic president as well. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s single-minded focus on packing the judiciary with conservative judges is about his desire to monopolize power, of course, but it also bespeaks an enthusiasm for the fact that federal judges don’t have to answer to the public and can rewrite the law without fear of losing an election.
The rise of authoritarianism on the right has coincided with conservatives’ growing realization that Republicans can’t win elections fair and square anymore. But it’s also true that for the right authoritarianism is a reward in and of itself, so much so that Republicans are willing to risk short-term electoral losses for the long-term goal of whittling down democracy into nothingness.
The Republican war on voting, therefore, shouldn’t be understood purely through the lens of electoral gamemanship. That allows both journalists and ordinary voters to treat voter suppression less seriously, as another form of politics as usual. Instead, it’s important to understand that Republican politicians see fewer people voting as an important goal, in and of itself. They’ve largely focused on keeping Democrats from voting up till now, but it sure looks like they’d be just fine with a situation where barely anyone, of any party, voted at all.
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see scotus, roberts, covid
https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/why-the-supreme-court-and-the-coronavirus-could-be-a-lethal-combination-for-the-right-to-vote/
https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/how-the-war-against-voting-rights-became-a-pillar-of-the-conservative-agenda/
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4/20 WI election pushed tho pandemic cf prev voter suppress; state scotus 5-2 one of worst guys (appt?) by walker vs smart dem woman
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/why-judges-will-likely-play-a-crucial-role-deciding-how-2020-elections-are-run-during-the-pandemic/
why judges will likely play a crucial role deciding how 2020 elections are run during the pandemic
Steven Rosenfeld / Independent Media InstituteApril 3, 2020
no lnx
Why judges will likely play a crucial role deciding how 2020 elections are run during the pandemic
Written by Steven Rosenfeld / Independent Media Institute April 3, 2020
The jaw-dropping conclusion of a federal court hearing on April 1 about Wisconsin’s statewide elections on April 7 was no April Fools’ joke. U.S. District Judge William Conley said the state’s Democratic governor and Republican-led legislature had failed to put their citizenry’s health first by not postponing the statewide election in a pandemic.
“There’s a hurricane coming!” Conley fumed from the bench, interrupting Douglas M. Poland, a lawyer representing the Wisconsin Alliance for Retired Americans, League of Women Voters of Wisconsin and four citizens who sued the state. “You can’t even give me a case where a federal judge stopped a state from stupidly holding an election when most of the voters were not going to go to the polls because there’s a hurricane coming!”
“You expect the state of Wisconsin to realize that this is a hurricane and for them to stop it for public health reasons,” Conley continued. “But you don’t get to go to a federal judge and say it is contingent on voting rights, so you get to stop a statewide election. The reason you can’t cite me a case is because it’s not appropriate. I’m sorry that that’s what the situation is. But this is a public health crisis that the state legislature and the governor have refused to accept as severe enough to stop this statewide election.”
It is not very often that a federal judge slams a state’s executive and legislative branches from the bench before issuing a ruling. But below theheadline-grabbing pronouncement are equally serious concerns that will resurface in federal and state courts between now and the 2020 general election. Those concerns are how far can a court go—federal or state—to change the means and rules of voting.
Wisconsin was the only state of 11 slated to hold statewide elections in April that did not change its plans. That decision, in part due to Republican legislators wanting to boost the GOP’s odds of winning a state Supreme Court race, sparked three lawsuits. One sought to postpone the election. A second sought to ensure that all absentee ballots that were postmarked by April 7, but arrived in the mail days later, would be counted. The third sought to suspend a state law requiring all absentee voters to have a witness sign their ballot.
Judge Conley’s eruption from the bench concerned Wisconsin political leadership’s irresponsibility for not postponing an election in an unforeseen public health crisis, where the first wave of coronavirus cases is cresting on Election Day and its aftermath—where more than 1.1 million paper absentee ballots have to be authenticated, duplicates removed and counted.
But the other two lawsuits before the court are more relevant for the rest of the 2020 election cycle, as the issues they raise dig into the fine print of policies that state legislatures have adopted and voting procedures that government election bureaucracies subsequently have issued concerning voters and voting by mail.
“What is emerging is a hodgepodge of rules and procedures that will almost guarantee different levels of voter participation depending upon how easy states make it to vote by mail,” said Chris Sautter, an election attorney specializing in recounts and an adjunct professor of government at American University.
Wisconsin’s next election, which is poised to become 2020’s latest problem-plagued exercise, ironically comes in a state that has a reputation for well-run elections. It was the only state of three in 2016 to complete a presidential recount. In 2018, only 6 percent of its 3.44 million registered voters cast absentee ballots. On April 7, nearly six times that volume may vote by absentee ballot. Two of the lawsuits before Judge Conley concerned state policies and rules: what technicalities must be followed for those absentee ballots to count.
During the April 1 hearing, Judge Conley pointedly asked the attorneys representing national and state Democratic Party organizations, voting rights groups, senior citizens and Wisconsin voters what he could do to fix concrete problems that were emerging now—as opposed to speculation about what would implode on Election Day. If problems arose, Conley said he would deal with those issues then. For example, could he issue an order to people who could not find a witness, such as seniors living alone, to have their ballot count? Could he extend the day by which mail-in ballots would still be accepted and be counted, as local officials were still mailing them out and postal delivery was known to be slow?
This posture—respecting a state legislature’s laws and state election bureaucracy’s rules—is the heart of federalism and required by the U.S. Constitution, the judge said from the bench, as he rejected arguments to postpone the April 7 election but struggled to identify remedies that he could order to facilitate voting.
Why these frames matter in 2020 is that there is a spectrum of unevenlaws and rules that currently surround absentee voters, voting by mail and counting those ballots in state after state. These include: how registered voters are notified about voting by mail—or not; how voters apply to vote absentee; ID requirements to get a mail-in ballot; whether additional affidavits or witnesses are required to submit an absentee ballot; whether helping someone to fill out and return a ballot is a crime; whether the state will pay for the postage to return ballots; what voter signatures on file with the state are used to verify or reject the signatures on ballot envelopes; the signature verification standards used; when absentee ballots must be received to count; how long local boards have to do all the processing; and more.
Many of these issues are the subject of pending and possible litigation in state after state, where judges—not legislatures—will decide how 2020’s elections are run during a pandemic. Why not legislatures? Because most 2020 legislative sessions have been suspended, postponed or adjourneddue to the pandemic, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Meanwhile, what has emerged are varying and evolving responses. Lawyers for Democratic Party organizations and voting rights groups are seeking the most sweeping changes to boost participation. Some state election regulators and some governors are taking steps to open up the process, but generally are not going as far as Democrats and voting rights activists would like. And Republicans—especially in states where they hold legislative majorities, like Wisconsin—have been rejecting those efforts, leaving newly identified barriers in place.
The politics behind these decisions and actions are clear. Voting by mail tends to have a higher turnout among middle- and upper-income voters, which favors the GOP. Lower-income people and students often have less reliable and accessible mailboxes. Thus Democrats are seeking to expand participation and remove any barriers. This reality was affirmed by President Trump criticizing the election reforms in the House’s latest relief bill on Fox News on March 31, when he said, “The things they had in there were crazy. They had levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
Where this landscape comes full circle in Judge Conley’s courtroom is the federal judge is looking for narrow remedies that he can order to cure problems that have presented themselves. This is the same framework that U.S. District Court Judge Mark Walker used in November 2018, when Florida was conducting three simultaneous statewide recounts. Walker ordered the state to let voters fix problematic signatures on ballot envelopes so their vote would count.
Meanwhile, voting rights lawyers kept presenting the latest developments to Conley, such as more than 100 Wisconsin municipalities lacking enough poll workers to open polling places (a minimum of three are required) on April 7. (Democratic Governor Tony Evers will deploy National Guard members.) Or reports that 1,100 absentee ballot requests by seniors in Madison could not be processed because the county clerk did not have the voters’ IDs in their files.
“This is Republican voter suppression in action,” tweeted Marc Elias, a voting rights lawyer who is the lead attorney on two-dozen lawsuits filed by the Democratic Party and allies across the country, referring to the voter ID issue. “This is exactly why we are suing WI [Wisconsin] to extend the deadline for counting those ballots,” he said, in an April 1tweet, referring to the litigation before Judge Conley.
Outside Wisconsin
Judge Conley signaled from the bench that he would not postpone Wisconsin’s April 7 statewide election but would issue orders as evidence of concrete problems and remedies was proposed. On April 2, he issued an order that kept the election but extended the ballot return deadline from April 7 to April 13. He also suspended the witness requirement, saying that voters could include a note with their returned ballots that they could not get a witness.
Elsewhere in the country, it is possible to see the spectrum of conflicting issues and responses that concern absentee voting, some of which have already sparked lawsuits and some of which are likely to end up in state or federal court.
For example, in the 15 states where Elias has sued on behalf of Democrats, two of them—Louisiana and Michigan—have existing laws where first-time voters cannot use absentee ballots and are required to vote in person at a polling place.
On March 27, Michigan’s Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed an executive order “to provide absentee ballots directly to new registrants” and told local election officials to pay for the postage on ballot return envelopes. Her order, however, did not address issues in suits that Elias filed earlier this year, such as seeking uniform standards for reviewing signatures on absentee ballot envelopes or nullifying a 1950s law that criminalizes helping others with absentee ballots.
Louisiana election officials did not respond when asked about their latest updates in absentee voting rules after they postponed their April 4 primary until June 20.
Among the states targeted by Democratic Party suits are four others (in addition to Wisconsin) where witnesses or notaries must sign absentee ballot envelopes. Those states are Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and North Carolina.
In North Carolina, a political standoff is developing over whether absentee voting should be accompanied by technicalities such as the witness requirement, which could deter voters. On March 26, the executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections (BOE) sent a detailed letter to Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and Republican legislative leadership with more than a dozen recommendations to make absentee voting easier—including reducing or eliminating the witness requirement, establishing an online portal to request absentee ballots and the state paying for the return postage. (The memo did not address a 2019 law criminalizing individuals and organizations from helping voters fill out absentee ballots, which Elias has sued to overturn.)
The North Carolina state board also announced it was expanding online tools for voters to update their registration information. But Patrick Gannon, the board’s spokesman, said that only the state’s General Assembly and governor had the authority to change most of the absentee voting rules. On April 1, the state’s top Republican lawmaker opposed the BOE director’s suggestions, saying, “Some progressive, liberal Democratic groups would like to roll that back and put us where we were. I’m afraid that’s where the election director would take us with her proposals.”
There are similar controversies simmering in Georgia, where Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, is sending absentee ballot request forms to 6.9 million “active voters” for the upcoming May 19 presidential primary. That move drew praise from the Democratic Party of Georgia, which still added that the state should do more and pay for return postage. Other advocates criticized Raffensperger because the state’s voter rolls also have “inactive voters,” which means that not every eligible voter would be notified.
However, Raffensperger’s steps went too far for some Georgia Republicans. David Ralson, Speaker of the Georgia House, on April 1 told an interviewer, “This [potential precedent] will be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia … This will certainly drive up turnout.” A day later, on April 2, Raffensperger issued a press release, “Fighting Fake News in Georgia,” which said, “the Secretary of State is only sending ballot request forms to active voters in Georgia for the upcoming May election only… The Secretary of State is not implementing statewide mail-in voting.”
These political fights and their details are a harbinger of what is to come later in 2020 as the pandemic unfolds and government officials react. Whether absentee voting will be made easier is a political decision that will unfurl state by state.
Very few states are following the example of New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat, who wants “to conduct an all-mail 2020 Primary Election” in June, where “an absentee ballot will be mailed to every eligible major party voter in the state,” as a March 31 release said. But Toulouse Oliver must first get the permission of New Mexico’s Supreme Court to do so. New Mexico’s 2020 legislative session has been suspended.
Thus, it will be up to the judiciary more so than legislators, and possibly more than governors, to referee the means and rules for voting in 2020 in the pandemic. In a sense, the courtroom fights over voting in 2020 have barely begun.
“We continue to look at all aspects of state voting laws to ensure every eligible voter has an opportunity to vote and have their vote counted accurately,” Elias said. “I expect to have to file additional lawsuits in the coming weeks and months to protect the right to vote.”
This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/how-the-war-against-voting-rights-became-a-pillar-of-the-conservative-agenda/
no lnx
How the war against voting rights became a pillar of the conservative agenda
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly April 1, 2020
Included in the stimulus bill put together by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats was a provision that established “a national requirement for both 15 days of early voting and no-excuse absentee vote-by-mail.” That one apparently got under Trump’s skin.
Trump openly admitting if we made voting easier in America, Republicans wouldn’t win elections
Trump: “The things they had in there were crazy. They had levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” pic.twitter.com/x5HmX6uogo
— Lis Power (@LisPower1) March 30, 2020
Trump basically admitted that if more people voted, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” A lot of people assume that he said the quiet parts out loud when it comes to Republican efforts to suppress the vote. But just as Trump represents the culmination of many of the foundational principles on which the modern-day GOP was founded, the party has demonstrated over time that they aren’t particularly fond of democracy.
As Katherine Stewart documented in her book, The Power Worshippers, Paul Weyrich is often credited as the founder of the modern-day conservative movement. Even though he was not a particularly religious man, he developed a coalition between Goldwater Republicans and the religious right, which became the base that has elected every Republican president from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.
Here is something Weyrich said at a gathering of religious leaders back in 1980.
Weyrich clearly stated that he didn’t want everyone to vote. He went on to say that, for Republicans, “our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.” That was basically an admission that the majority of Americans don’t support Republican principles.
As far back as 1980, the whole idea of a so-called “moral majority” was a lie—and people like Weyrich knew it. Rather than attempt to reflect the will of voters, Republicans simply decided that, as Zachary Roth put it, “being outnumbered doesn’t have to mean losing.” Voter suppression was therefore embraced as a conservative principle.
More recently, Ari Berman documented the decades-long battle against the Voting Rights Act that was waged by our current Chief Justice of the Supreme Court—John Roberts.The seeds of that battle were planted while Roberts served as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, as well as his time in the Reagan Justice Department. It culminated in the Shelby vs Holder case when the Court overturned key elements of the Voting Rights Act, leading to a new wave of voter suppression efforts in the states.
Last year, when House Democrats passed a bill that included democratic reforms to campaign finance, ethics and voting rights, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the quiet parts out loud when he called them a “Democrat Politician Protection Act.” Once again, the inference is that, if more people vote, Democrats will be elected.
Those are just a few examples from the last forty years. But since our founding, rich white men have tried to limit the franchise to themselves. Here’s what Roth wrote about Alexander Hamilton’s only major speech at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
Hamilton said the system should allow the “rich and the well born” to maintain their supremacy, since they would oppose radical change pushed by “the many.” The goal, he said, was to “check the imprudence of democracy.”
It is only through the blood, sweat, and tears of various movements that voting rights have been expanded in this country as a foundational principle of democracy. Obviously, that battle still rages on.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/political-parties-eye-online-voting-for-upcoming-elections-introducing-new-risks/
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aN 320
no lnx
How Democrats are trying to save the right to vote in a pandemic — and fight GOP suppression tactics
Written by Stephen Young / Religion Dispatches March 25, 2020
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The Democrat-led House’s massive pandemic bill seeks to counter years of Republican voter suppression tactics that have shadowed swing states, a contrast to a more circumspect proposal from Senate Democrats who are seeking to expand voting by mail without specifying additional reforms.
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Pages 856 to 918 of the House bill produced under Speaker Nancy Pelosi would not just expand early and absentee voting as part of creating emergency voting rules in a natural disaster or pandemic. It would replace many suppressive rules, procedures and technicalities that have emerged in recent years in red-run states with specific steps to encourage participation and make the process easier.
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The House reforms include requiring all states to offer early in-person voting at accessible locations, beginning 15 days before an election. The bill removes paperwork requirements—such as affidavits, witness signatures and additional ID—when applying for absentee ballots. The reforms include being able to apply online in any state for an absentee ballot, requiring all states to offer online voter registration, and requiring all states to offer in-person Election Day voter registration.
The House bill also seeks to pull back the curtain around red-state technicalities that have been used to reject absentee ballot applications and ballot envelopes. It requires states to establish standards to verify signatures on envelopes. Absentee ballots would be tracked so voters could follow their progress. Voters would be notified, including by email, if problems arise and given time to resolve them.
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The House bill’s proponents include national voting rights advocates who have been litigating red-state policies for years, such as the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, and seek national election laws and fairer voting procedures.
But the authors of a Senate proposal to expand absentee voting in 2020, Sens. Ron Wyden, D-OR, and Amy Klobuchar, D-MN, seem to recognize the constitutional decree that states will run elections means that Democrats would lose Republican support if the pandemic bill imposed additional specific election reforms.
“It’s either going to be vote-by-mail or nothing if we have to deal with a worst-case scenario,” Wyden said in a March 23 conference call with reporters.
While this difference has yet to be bridged, state election officials are scrambling to bolster voting by mail, starting with 2020’s remaining primaries. Consider this March 24 tweet from Craig Gilbert, Washington bureau chief for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, about Wisconsin’s upcoming presidential primary:
“coronavirus effects: absentee ballot requests now up to 554,116 for WI April 7 election & prez primary. we were at 135,000 8 days ago. never happened before. can WI’s system handle it? can mail partly or mostly ‘replace’ election day voting in this case?”
Wisconsin’s scramble is not unique, according to media reports from other states. However, whether states with recent histories of recent GOP-led voter suppression will be free to impose complicated new absentee ballot rules in 2020, which the House election reform proposal seeks to prevent, remains an open question.
Before the pandemic, Marc Elias, the Democrat Party’s legal point man for voting rights litigation, had already filed two-dozen lawsuits. Their goals were removing potential voting barriers, such as antiquated penalties for helping people to vote absentee (by turning in their ballots), requiring those voters to submit additional paperwork, or an absence of signature matching standards.
The House proposal seeks to address nuts and bolts barriers—such as requiring the government to pay for postage for absentee ballots, barring states from rejecting ballots postmarked before Election Day, or rejecting a ballot due to the size or weight of the paper or envelope used. Such specifics address arcane rules that have become barriers to voting in purple but red-run presidential swing states.
Consider Florida’s recent track record. In 2018, a federal court chastised the state’s rules for processing absentee ballots, including giving voters no chance to correct mistakes that led to their ballots being rejected. Two years earlier, the same judge told Florida officials that they must offer voters a “cure” to address these issues. The House bill’s specifics seek to prevent this pattern from recurring in 2020.
Should election reforms pass in a pandemic bill, it will change the legal landscape for the 2020 election. If the House version prevails, which seems doubtful given uniform Republican resistance, it remains to be seen if red-run states would do what the law requires. Before the pandemic, Democrats sued Kansas because its election officials would not implement legislative reforms in 2020.
And should the Senate proposal prevail, empowering the expansion of absentee balloting without further preconditions, that scenario suggests that there would likely be a different set of legal battles that will unfold in 2020. The tension is between states acting to include or exclude voters, even in a pandemic.
Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.
This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/elite-media-dismiss-voter-suppression-on-grounds-that-its-complicated
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Elite media dismiss voter suppression on grounds that it’s ‘complicated’
Written by Julie Hollar / FAIR March 14, 2020
Some voters—disproportionately black and brown ones—waited in line for several hours on Super Tuesday to cast their ballots in the Democratic primary, and media paid attention. But their love for a good visual doesn’t always correspond with a love for connecting the dots, and so most of the coverage downplayed any suggestion that there might be voter suppression going on in 2020.
NYT: Why Did It Take So Long to Vote in Texas and California?
The New York Times (3/4/20) assured us that voting problems were not caused by “deliberate efforts to drive down turnout.”
“Why Did It Take So Long to Vote in Texas and California?” asked a New York Times headline (3/4/20), which offered a reassuring answer in its subhead: “Some voters stood in lines for hours. But despite voter suppression concerns, the primary breakdowns apparently reflected snafus more than malign intent.” Reporter Michael Wines explained:
Some critics complained on Twitter and elsewhere that the delays amounted to voter suppression in a state where Republicans have been frequently sued, sometimes successfully, for trying to minimize Democratic power. But Texas elections are tightly controlled by local officials, not state ones. And in big cities like Houston and Austin which had the biggest problems on Tuesday, those officials are Democrats with scant reason to depress turnout in Democratic urban strongholds.
And yet, in the very next paragraph, Wines reported that “voting machines were divided equally between Democratic and Republican voters—but many more Democrats turned out to vote on Tuesday,” later explaining that
the imbalance stemmed from the county Republican Party’s refusal to agree with Democrats to hold a joint primary election in metropolitan Houston in which voters could cast ballots on any machine. All but a handful of the state’s 254 counties held joint primaries.
The article’s final paragraph noted that the Houston voting site at historically black Texas Southern University, where people waited up to seven hours to vote,
allotted 10 voting machines to each party, and eventually added 14 additional machines for Democratic voters, she said. But of those who showed up on Tuesday, 1,132 voted in the Democratic primary. Sixty-eight voted for Republican candidates.
WaPo: Long voting lines in Texas spotlight concerns about access to the polls
The Washington Post (3/4/20) blamed long voting lines on ” a number of complicated factors.”
It’s a curiously stark mismatch between evidence and conclusions, a phenomenon repeated in the Washington Post (3/4/20), where reporter Elise Viebeck likewise took issue with those suggesting voter suppression was happening:
One of the remaining Democrats in the presidential field—Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—seized on the episode, tweeting that it revealed a “crisis of voter suppression.”
However, interviews with election officials, activists and voters pointed to a number of complicated factors that combined to produce the massive lines in Harris County.
(The print version’s lead: “Voter suppression came to mind for some, but the reality was complicated.”)
Like Wines, Viebeck noted the Harris County GOP’s refusal to hold a joint primary, and that, after the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act, Texas closed 750 polling places—more than any other state.
A Houston Chronicle article (3/4/20) about the situation slightly complicated the question of responsibility for giving equal numbers of machines to each party (reporting that though Republicans refused the joint primary, which would have prevented the problem, they were given more machines than they asked for, because the Democratic county clerk’s office worried about charges of discrimination), but it also pointed out that “almost two-thirds of the county’s voting centers were in county commissioner precincts in west Harris County held by Republicans.”
Sure, there were plenty of technological snafus and administrative errors—and those certainly need to be highlighted, so that pressure is put on election officials to fix them—but why pooh-pooh charges of voter suppression when voter suppression (which often masquerades as bureaucratic incompetence) is also an undeniable problem?
MSNBC: Lawrence O'Donnell on Super Tuesday
Lawrence O’Donnell (MSNBC, 3/3/20) on long Super Tuesday lines: “They’re all kind of excited about this.”
Others went so far as to celebrate the lines. On MSNBC (3/3/20), Lawrence O’Donnell reported:
My phone is filled with texts from people, friends of mine in those lines. I have one from a Hollywood polling place where the casting director is in a conversation with a cinematographer and a math teacher and someone who was an undecided voter an hour ago in that line. And she says they just realized and only just realized that they’ve been on the line for two hours, because it’s been so much fun…. I’ve got one from a very affluent community in the Pacific Palisades, a director who’s been in line for two hours. He’s not complaining. They’re all kind of excited about this.
It’s charitable that the affluent aren’t complaining about standing in line for hours (as no one should face obstacles to vote)—but they’re also typically not worried about getting fired or missing a paycheck for doing so. Oblivious to this reality, O’Donnell also dismissed the idea that a city should be expected to make it possible for all of its citizens to vote:
And the infrastructure for voting in Los Angeles is a difficult one to maintain. Because on the last mayoral election, this is the election for the mayor of Los Angeles, the voter turnout was 20%. And so to build an infrastructure in Los Angeles that is capable of handling this giant surge turnout that they’re getting tonight is impossible.
To be fair, most journalists were more concerned than O’Donnell about people’s access to democracy, but they were still remarkably disinterested in asking how the concerted (and partisan) efforts to suppress turnout post-Shelby are playing out in 2020. In the Super Tuesday coverage, NBC (3/4/20) was the only broadcast network to air the words “voter suppression” (in a quote from a voter standing in line in Texas), in a segment less than two minutes long that noted the elimination of many voting centers in both Texas and California, but didn’t mention the partisan nature of that act in Texas, instead characterizing it as simply “designed to make voting easier.”
NYT: The Student Vote Is Surging. So Are Efforts to Suppress It.
The New York Times‘ earlier reporting (10/24/19) on efforts to suppress the student vote did not inform coverage of lower-than-expected youth turnout in the 2020 primaries.
The failure to connect the dots extends to coverage of lower-than-expected turnout, in particular youth turnout. Plenty of reporters seized on early turnout numbers to point out that Bernie Sanders’ campaign is failing in its goal of mobilizing youth and other traditionally low-turnout groups, but rarely do they look at the relationship between turnout and suppression—despite the fact that those groups typically face more obstacles to voting.
And Wines’ dismissal of suspicions of voter suppression on the grounds that urban polling places are controlled by Democrats seems to willfully ignore the fact that establishment Democrats often have a strong incentive to make sure that older Democrats vote more than young ones—and have been known to manipulate the voting process to their own advantage (City & State, 11/6/18).
In fact, the Times‘ coverage was even more remarkable, given Wines’ insightful reporting months earlier about efforts to suppress the student vote in Texas and several other states (10/24/19), in which he noted that recently enacted “restrictions fit an increasingly unabashed pattern of Republican politicians’ efforts to discourage voters likely to oppose them.”
There surely are multiple reasons for lower-than-hoped-for turnout that no doubt intersect with each other, including both obstacles to voting and failure (or lack) of efforts to mobilize voters; it’s instructive to see where journalists instinctively turn to look for the culprit. Particularly post-Shelby, ID requirements, poll closures and voter roll purges have ramped up, inevitably taking a toll on democratic access. As Emory University’s Carol Anderson recently told Counterspin (3/3/20) about voter suppression:
To see the overall pattern, and continuing to hammer it home, about what is at stake in this democracy…requires good investigative journalism, it requires going beyond the soundbite, it requires a clarion call: This nation is in danger.
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‘Something really rotten’: Here’s the evidence of extensive voter suppression in Georgia’s notorious 2018 election
Written by Common Dreams February 28, 2020
As the 2020 presidential campaign cycle grinds on, there’s renewed concern about the 21st century’s newest form of warfare: cyber-sabotage of government systems, including elections and online disinformation intended to incite unrest. But as Suppressed: The Fight to Vote, a documentary from Brave New Films, makes clear, partisan voter suppression tactics with 20th-century roots remain and can thwart multitudes of voters from changing their state’s political leaders.
Suppressed: The Fight to Vote revisits the most visibly unfair election of 2018: the race for Georgia’s governor between Republican Brian Kemp—then Georgia secretary of state and supervisor of its election apparatus—and Democrat Stacey Abrams, an ex-state legislative leader and voting rights activist who led one of the most vibrant grassroots campaigns seen in Georgia in many years.
The election, which put Kemp in the governor’s seat and which Abrams did not concede, is a showcase of how legal technicalities and opaque bureaucracy ended up discouraging, disqualifying, and disenfranchising purple-state voters who sought a regime change.
“Pull back that veneer [of legal but opaque rules and officials who didn’t help voters], and you see something really rotten happening,” Carol Anderson, chair of African American Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, says as the film opens. “It’s almost like termites coming in. They’re in the wood. They’re eating the wood away. And you don’t even realize your house is getting ready to collapse until it’s almost too late.”
Suppressed’s storyline starts earlier in the decade. In 2013, a GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court gutted the core enforcement provision in the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965. Its opinion said that racism in American society had passed. Thus, states and counties that had histories of racial discrimination in elections no longer needed to have any change in election laws and procedures vetted by the U.S. Department of Justice.
As Suppressed and many voting rights groups have noted, numerous red-run states that play outsized roles in national elections quickly implemented mundane-sounding, overly bureaucratic—but, as Anderson says, “lethal”—rules to suppress Democratic voting blocs. (The documentary cites Alabama, Arkansas, North Carolina, Ohio, Kansas, North Dakota, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia as targets of suppression.)
This history has been told before, but there is an undeniable power with seeing the faces and hearing the words of people who personally bore the brunt of a menu of suppressive tactics—people who are predominantly non-white. One cannot help but note that race and party are almost always synonymous in Georgia, as they are across much of America.
The documentary follows a chronology that peels back layers of GOP-led suppressive tactics, starting with those that laid a foundation for disqualifying Democratic voters. These include efforts to close longtime polling places in predominantly black and lower-income neighborhoods in locales such as Randolph County, Georgia, which, in a rare glimmer of hope, saw the local populace reverse those poll closures. “The incident that we experienced threw the spotlight on everything else that had been going on,” Bobby Jenkins, a retired superintendent of schools, said. As the film notes, since 2012, Georgia has closed 214 polling places, with 75 percent of closed polls in African American communities.
The “everything else” that Jenkins refers to begins with the starting line of the voting process for individuals: voter registration. The voices of people who were infrequent voters but who received postcards saying that they could be taken off of county rolls followed. That little-understood process of purging rolls is legal, but not mandatory, under the 1993 National Voter Registration Act. Nonetheless, the intended recipients were confused, including seniors who started voting in the 1950s civil rights and the 1960s voting rights movements.
When these Georgians and others submitted more than 53,000 paper registration forms to county officials working under Kemp—instead of going online to register or to update their voter file information—they later found out that there was no state law requiring their applications be processed before the election that they wanted to vote in—2018’s governor’s race. That fall, crowds of otherwise eligible voters did not get a ballot.
There were other disqualifying moves that were legal but unethical. Thousands of infrequent voters were removed from official rolls because they hadn’t voted recently. Other voters were delisted because there were discrepancies in the spelling of their names in the state’s databases—notably driver’s license records did not match voter registration files. Other people were delisted if their mailing address and the address on their voter registration (their domicile for voting purposes) wasn’t the same—including soldiers in overseas war zones.
Again and again, the vast majority of those affected were from communities of color, not Georgia’s better-off white communities. One can argue, as Republicans have, that it is a voter’s responsibility to know the fine print of the process and to satisfy it. But the film makes clear that county election boards following Kemp’s directives were not offering customer service to voters—or, later, helping voters to cast ballots that got counted.
Similar barriers were seen with people seeking to vote by mail, but who never received an absentee ballot. The film notes that more than 280,000 people wanted to vote by mail, but “tens of thousands did not receive them.” The documentary has people recounting their phone calls to local election officials, who, in turn, replied that their request for an absentee ballot had been received, but they didn’t know where their ballot was.
The hurdles kept coming. When it came to voting in precincts on Election Day, many precincts in communities of color did not have enough voting machines compared to precincts in white communities. That shortage, atop delays caused when people learned that they weren’t listed on voter rolls—and protested—caused long lines to form. Many voters had to wait for hours. In some cases, people had to leave to take care of their family members or go to work.
When voters who were not on the rolls insisted on voting, they were given provisional ballots. These are ballots that combine registration information with a regular ballot. But the state requires those voters to return to county election offices within a few days with other ID before those votes are counted. For some people, doing that means lost wages, which is akin to a modern poll tax—the 19th-century practice of forcing black people to pay to vote.
These microaggressions kept coming and cascading. The film shows the grassroots energy of Abrams’ campaign, which was history-making when compared to past Georgia elections. Never before was the state poised to elect an African American woman as governor. But come election night, the results reported Kemp leading by more than 50,000 votes.
Abrams would not concede the race. (Afterward, her advocacy group, Fair Fight, filed one of the most comprehensive voting rights lawsuits in recent years to redress a catalog of suppressive tactics.) The film closes with Abrams’ defiant press conference that came after post-election challenges did not find enough votes for her. Recovering 50,000 votes is unheard of in post-election challenges.
“I acknowledge that former Secretary of State Brian Kemp will be certified as the victor in the 2018 gubernatorial election,” she said. “But to watch an elected official baldly pin his hopes for election on the suppression of the people’s democratic right to vote has been appalling. This is not a speech of concession, because concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true or proper. As a woman of conscience and faith, I cannot concede that.”
Suppressed: The Fight to Vote briefly continues to make the point that these partisan suppressive tactics are not unique to Georgia. The documentary is more than a cautionary tale about voter suppression in one state that, had elections been fairer, would be politically purple as its populace has become more multiracial. The film is a reminder that in 2020 there are many ways to tilt the playing field to game election results.
Many of those suppressive tactics have been around for decades and endure because they are effective. These tactics have nothing to do with Russians or cyber-sabotage. They are as old as America itself—but the victims, as Brave New Films has shown so vividly, are ordinary Americans who believe in democracy’s promise but typically are non-whites.
Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.
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GOP doesn’t want to hear about Russian interference. It’s too busy wrecking American elections on the ground level
Written by Sophia Tesfaye / Salon February 24, 2020
Ever since the 2016 election, the U.S. intelligence community has consistently claimed that Russia and its agents continue to work to undermine American elections. When intel officials returned to Congress on Feb. 13 to warn — as required by law — that Russians are already interfering in the 2020 election to aid President Trump, several Republican lawmakers pushed back against the assessment before rushing to the White House to complain.
“I’d challenge anyone to give me a real-world argument where [Vladimir] Putin would rather have President Trump and not Bernie Sanders,” Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, told The New York Times after the briefing before the House Intelligence Committee. According to reports, the intelligence community’s top election security official told committee members that multiple agencies have concluded that Russia wants President Trump re-elected to serve the Kremlin’s interests. Days later, Trump booted the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, and replaced him with Richard Grenell, a political lackey who lacks any relevant experience.
This rinse and repeat of Republican corruption and cover-up at the expense of our elections is nothing new. Recall that Robert Mueller’s investigation concluded the Russians had hacked both the Democratic and Republican national committees. The DNC’s information was released ahead of the 2016 election, while the RNC’s information was withheld — presumably to control the GOP. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the Republican leader in the Senate, then threatened President Obama that if his administration went public with information about Russian interference, he would tell the voters that it was Obama who was interfering with the election.
At least a dozen Republican congressional campaigns went on to use materials stolen from Democrats by Russian hackers during the 2016 election. The GOP coverup continued within hours after Mueller’s testimony about foreign election interference before the House Intelligence Committee in 2019, when the Republican-controlled Senate moved to block four separate bills to defend the U.S. democratic process.
In a clear demonstration of the principle that rampant corruption always begins at the top, the RNC announced plans this week to support the downriver ripples of Republicans’ long-term war against democracy.
Republican lawmakers across the country, faced with losing the popular vote by greater margins election after election, have responded by restricting access to the ballot before elections — and then crippling the power of winning Democratic opponents after an election. In Kentucky, a GOP supermajority in the state legislature just voted to strip some executive powers from newly-elected Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat. Beshear won a closely contested election in which Republican incumbent Matt Bevin, who initially refused to concede.
It’s a move replicated by Republicans in North Carolina after losing the governorship in 2016, in Wisconsin after the 2018 defeat of Republican Gov. Scott Walker, and in Michigan, where Democrats swept every statewide office in 2018’s midterm elections. Now the RNC, along with Trump’s campaign, plans to spend millions to defend the GOP’s nationwide efforts to thwart democracy ahead of the 2020 election.
As Politico first reported, RNC chair Ronna McDaniel has committed to spend $10 million in legal fees this cycle to defeat what she called “the Democrats’ voter suppression myth” and to defend Republican legislation that imposes draconian restrictions on voter behavior, like Michigan’s potential 90-day prison sentence for anyone found guilty of providing transportation to the polls for a person who is able to walk — even a legally blind voter who cannot drive.
“These actions are dangerous, and we will not stand idly by while Democrats try to sue their way to victory in 2020,” McDaniel said of lawsuits challenging Michigan voting laws. McDaniel pledged to use the RNC’s resources to “aggressively defend the integrity of the democratic process and support the right of all eligible voters to cast an effective ballot.”
Republicans in battleground states like Florida are already gearing up for Election Day voter challenges on citizenship and residency grounds, as evidenced by a new GOP bill that allows the political parties to assign poll watchers from outside a given district. In 24 states, any citizen can challenge a voter without documentation to prove his or her eligibility. In Indiana, Republicans are again advancing a bill that would allow county election officials to kick voters off the rolls immediately without notice, even after two federal courts found such a practice violates voters’ rights. Republicans in several states have introduced a new crop of voter ID bills ahead of the 2020 elections.
So while Republicans in Congress openly act to support Russian interference in our elections, Republicans in state legislatures across the country are determined to limit the number of Americans who can actually vote. Without these twin assaults on democracy, they know they can’t win.
Sophia Tesfaye is Salon’s Deputy Politics Editor and resides in Washington, D.C. You can find her on Twitter at @SophiaTesfaye
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/how-right-wing-groups-use-old-law-and-imperfect-data-to-purge-voters-from-statewide-rolls/
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How right-wing groups use old law and imperfect data to purge voters from statewide rolls
Written by Steven Rosenfeld / Independent Media Institute January 21, 2020
Wisconsin has become early 2020’s Exhibit A for political fights surrounding the updating of statewide voter lists, where escalating court battles over conflicting law, procedures and underlying data could lead to removing thousands of legal but infrequent voters.
The fray’s epicenter is a series of rulings by a county judge against Wisconsin’s bipartisan but deadlocked state election board, which has refused to immediately delete 209,000 voter registrations in a swing state with 3.3 million voters. The conflict may preview legal battles coming to other states. California, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Colorado and Virginia have all received letters from Judicial Watch, a right-wing group, threatening to file suits like the complaint from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) against the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC).
WILL’s lawsuit, where two of its three plaintiffs are donors to state Republican campaigns, seeks the immediate removal of 209,000 infrequent voters who were flagged for the WEC by an interstate data consortium run by top election officials. In March 2019, the WEC’s staff recommended taking 12 to 24 months to vet those voters because in 2018 after using the consortium’s analytics, 24,270 inactive but registered voters—or 7 percent of those flagged and delisted—showed up to vote, as a memo from the WEC explained. (Those voters could re-register under a same-day registration law after showing the correct documentation.)
The affected voters, whose numbers were slightly larger than Donald Trump’s 22,748-vote margin over Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin in 2016, were mostly traced to quirks in the state’s driver’s license database where addresses were extracted and used to verify a voter’s status. The bipartisan WEC initially decided to postpone removing the 209,000 voters, but has since split on party lines. (An appeals court has stayed the lower court’s purge order, and the state chapter of the League of Women Voters has filed a federal lawsuit to stop it.)
But Wisconsin is not the only state wrestling with voter analytics. In Georgia, the process used last fall to remove 300,000-plus old registrations (out of 7.4 million statewide) led to 22,000 voters being reinstated in December. The reversal came after Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger moved up the date up for Georgia’s data query by six months, restoring the inactive voters’ status. In Iowa, election officials pressed pause after finding a 100,000-person database that may have incorrectly listed former felons, who cannot vote until they reapply and regain that right.
Thus, in early 2020, there is an emerging trend of the potential disqualification of thousands of infrequent voters in swing states. While partisan claims surrounding these developments often dominate their news coverage, this trend is driven by a confluence of conflicting laws, regulatory precedents and imperfect voter data.
“The voter registration process and the list maintenance process have become incredibly polarizing,” said Matthew Weil, the Elections Project director at Washington’s Bipartisan Policy Center. “Any removal from the [statewide voter] list is now considered by some to be a purge. And any perceived deadweight is considered ripe for fraud. Neither one of those views is right. There should be reasons to remove people. And there are reasons why we don’t want to remove people too quickly also.”
“Part of the problem here is we are using antiquated, outmoded systems,” said Barbara Arnwine, who from 1989 to 2015 ran the nation’s largest Election Day legal hotline and has since founded the Transformative Justice Coalition. “And it [mass removals] is not required under the NVRA [the National Voter Registration Act of 1993]. But even for those states that chose to do it, they are purposely engaging in a process that is fundamentally outdated and ineffective—and has the predictable consequence of removing valid voters from registration lists.”
Weil and Arnwine both said that the NVRA, which was crafted for an era when people used paper registration forms and postcard mail to contact voters, needed updating. But such modernization was not part of House-passed H.R. 1, an election reform package now stuck in the Senate. Thus, today’s partisan litigants who see advantages in using old and sometimes conflicting state and federal laws, their accompanying bureaucratic procedures and imperfect government data, will likely continue to unfold in 2020 to help their political allies.
“Dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections and Judicial Watch will insist, in court if necessary, that states follow federal law to clean up their voting rolls,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in its January 2 statement threatening more list maintenance suits. “Judicial Watch found major voting list issues in California, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, and Colorado.”
Ground Zero: Wisconsin
Self-appointed voting list vigilantes are not new. But Wisconsin, which had 2016’s second-closest presidential election margin and has seen some of the past decade’s most bitter fights over voting rules, has not seen a voting list fight for many years. Nor does the state have a history of voter fraud. Instead, its election administration has been seen as a model led by a bipartisan panel that valued civic participation.
Part of that legacy led the state to join an interstate consortium—the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC)—that draws on several state and federal government databases to help officials update their statewide voter rolls, and to identify and then contact eligible but unregistered voters. (Disclosure: Voting Booth’s reporter was part of the Pew Center on the States team that designed ERIC.) More than half the states now use ERIC.
Soon after Wisconsin joined ERIC, its state election board found a unique but deepening problem. Unlike all but one other state in the consortium, Wisconsin’s Division of Motor Vehicles never offered a voter registration option to residents getting a driver’s license. That is because when theNVRA—or so-called Motor Voter law—was passed in 1993 (and primarily required the drivers’ agencies to offer registration), it exempted states with Election Day registration. Wisconsin was a same-day state. Its reward for good behavior had come back to haunt it.
The NVRA also had other provisions and timelines for updating voter rolls, which become bloated after people move or die. The bottom line in 2020 is that people who have not voted since the 2012 presidential election could be removed if they have had no subsequent contact with election officials. The law envisions that contact as responding to postcard mailings—which many people ignore—or showing up and voting.
In 2017, when Wisconsin’s election board sent various public databases to ERIC for data mining, or using redundant records to update the voter files, it ran into an unexpected problem. Because the state DMV did not manage addresses for voter registration purposes, its files did not have some voters’ actual home addresses. (Voter registration must have actual addresses for voters to get a correct ballot.)
“In these situations, the voters may have provided an address in their transaction with the DMV that was different from their voting address, even though DMV asked for their residential address on their forms,” the March 2019 WEC memo said. “These voters were likely unaware that the information provided to the DMV would affect their voter registration status.”
The reason for the incongruity has nothing to do with elections. It was because people who had registered cars for others—such as a family member who lives elsewhere—used their addresses to avoid paying a county car tax. That tax-evading move was what was behind most of the voters who were removed in 2017 but showed up to vote in 2018, said Kevin Kennedy, the former director of Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board (which preceded the WEC) and who worked in Wisconsin elections for nearly four decades. The ERIC algorithms used to verify the voter rolls could not tie the same address to that individual. Being exempt from the NVRA’s requirement to register voters at its DMVs hid this address snafu.
Instead, Wisconsin had an older state law on its books for voter list maintenance. That law required removing voters “upon receipt of reliable information” within a month. That deadline and ERIC’s list of 209,000 infrequent voters (most of whom had moved or died) was cited in the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty suit. In suburban Ozaukee County north of Milwaukee, a GOP stronghold, Circuit Court Judge Paul Malloy cited that state law as he repeatedly ordered the mass purge to proceed. Malloy has since held the WEC in contempt for not acting, including issuing penalties and additional fines for its three Democratic members. (An appeals court stayed his rulings.)
WILL’s argument is typical of right-wing lawsuits targeting voter registration lists. It alleges that various vague harms that “impair” or “threaten… the legal rights and privileges” of its plaintiffs. On the other side of this partisan lens are voting rights activists who say that no list maintenance process can ever be error-free, and cite errors made by ERIC in Wisconsin and Maryland. (ERIC’s defenders say these problems come with managing any large and fluid list, and note that ERIC has helped to identify and to register more than 5 million new voters nationally.)
Broad Swipes, Local Remedies
But all of these arguments and details—which come from a conflicting mix of laws, bureaucracy and porous data—obscure some bigger points, said Justin Levitt, a professor of constitutional law at Loyola Law School and former staff attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Voting Section.
“There are only a few states where nonvoting is still used to trigger the NVRA removal procedure, and they tend to be [citing] legacy laws from decades ago when ham-handed approaches to list maintenance were more common,” he said. “The vast majority of states only start the NVRA process when there’s some affirmative evidence of ineligibility, which is a little more like using a scalpel rather than a chainsaw to do surgery.”
In other words, activist right-wing law groups are targeting an imperfect landscape surrounding the way voter rolls are updated. And the most likely impact—should they prevail in court—could be disrupting or discrediting the 2020 voting process in swing states. But it is hard to estimate the magnitude of their impact apart from noting thousands of voters could be affected in states with close elections.
“We don’t have great data on how many of the registrations at issue in these battles correspond to voters who are still eligible,” said Levitt, who added that the remedy for voters was checking their registration status two months before Election Day. “Purges unquestionably affect voters. But this is an area where voters have more control than other aspects of election administration.”
Kevin Kennedy noted that any incorrectly purged Wisconsin voter could re-register on Election Day, when people have to present proof of residency and a photo ID. While unsuspecting voters might not have all those documents with them, he said that the state does accept emailed bills as proof of one’s addresses.
“If anything, it’s actually gotten better because you can do it electronically,” said Kennedy. “You can show your electronic bills. [But] they are not always the best for students, because sometimes their bills are at their parents’ house.”
Stepping back, the former state election director said the fray over voter rolls was a sign of how hard-fought 2020’s election cycle would likely be in his state.
“In Wisconsin in 2020, the big thing besides the voter purge issue will be a voter turnout issue,” Kennedy said. “The Democrats are saying they need to mobilize voters. They can look back to last April and see they were clearly out-mobilized in the state Supreme Court race. It was supposed to be a non-partisan race, but clearly had partisan motivations going on there. You’re not going to see Republicans sit back. They will redouble their efforts.”
Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.
This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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update: 1/20 https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/voting-rights-roundup-floridas-top-court-validates-gop-poll-tax-on-voters-with-felony-convictions/
no lnx
Voting Rights Roundup: Florida’s top court validates GOP poll tax on voters with felony convictions
Written by Stephen Wolf,Daily Kos January 20, 2020
Leading Off
? Florida: The new conservative majority on Florida’s Supreme Court issued an advisory opinion on Thursday validating the modern-day poll tax Republicans passed last year by requiring citizens who’ve served their felony sentences to also pay off all court-related fines or fees before they can regain their voting rights. The justices concluded that such financial obligations were part of the terms of felony sentences under the new voter-approved constitutional amendment, even though the amendment’s ballot summary made no mention of these obligations.
The 2018 constitutional amendment that nearly two-thirds of voters approved was supposed to restore voting rights to up to 1.4 million citizens, but the GOP’s poll tax could negatively affect up to 1.1 million of those individuals by imposing a financial barrier that many of them will never be able to overcome. However, a federal district court in a separate suit temporarily blocked most of the requirement for the specific plaintiffs in that case late last year, which was partly stayed while the GOP’s appeal is still pending. The plaintiffs are asking the district court to expand the ruling to all individuals affected by the poll tax.
While that federal case stands a chance of blocking the poll tax, such a ruling could prove a double-edged sword for voting rights advocates. That’s because the court’s conservative majority may deem the payment of court fines and fees to be “non-severable” from the rest of the voting rights restoration amendment.
In other words, if the federal courts invalidate the poll tax, Florida’s Supreme Court could strike down the rest of the amendment by holding that the surviving provisions can’t be separated from the financial penalty. Such a ruling would effectively overturn the rights restoration amendment entirely, leaving Florida to once again impose a lifetime ban on voting for any felony conviction.
That outcome would be a devastating blow to voting rights and mark a vicious cycle of voter suppression intended to thwart voters of color and Democrats. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis—who called voting a “privilege” and not a right in response to the opinion—likely would not have won in 2018 but for the fact that lifetime felony disenfranchisement disproportionately prevents black citizens from voting. Yet precisely because of that victory, DeSantis and his fellow Republicans were able to pass their poll tax in order to keep up to a million citizens from voting.
Voter Registration and Voting Access
? Kansas: Despite bipartisan support for a 2019 law that was supposed to give counties the option of letting voters cast a ballot at any polling place countywide instead of just their locally assigned polling place, Republican Secretary of State Scott Schwab told legislators on Tuesday that the regulations needed to implement these countywide voting centers won’t be ready until after the 2020 elections. The new system was intended to make voting more accessible and has increasingly been adopted in other jurisdictions.
? New Jersey: New Jersey’s Democratic-run state Assembly has passed two bills to improve voting access, sending them to Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy for his expected signature.
One bill would finally establish an online voter registration system, something only a few other states currently lack. The second measure would fix problems with New Jersey’s system for permanent absentee mail voting by allocating funding needed for local governments to handle the higher volume of mail ballots. The system would automatically mail an absentee ballot in all future elections, unless the voter opts out, to any voter who cast an absentee ballot in recent election years.
? South Carolina: South Carolina’s Republican-run state government has agreed to a settlement in a lawsuit brought by the Democratic Party that would end the state’s requirement that voters provide their full Social Security number on voter registration forms and instead ask voters only for the last four digits
Plaintiffs had sued last year and argued that requiring the full number potentially intimidated voters by opening them up to the risk of identity theft. They also noted that nearly every other state uses some other identifier. If the federal court where the case was filed approves the settlement, voter registration forms and training instructions for election workers will likely be updated in time for the 2020 elections.
? Virginia: Democrats have passed a bill out of state Senate committee that would remove the excuse requirement to vote absentee.The bill would also enable a period of in-person absentee voting similar to traditional early voting in other states. Now that Democrats control state government, this bill will likely become law.
? Washington: With the 2020 legislative session under way, Washington Democrats have introduced three bills designed to expand voting rights, improve voting access, and subsequently increase turnout.
The first bill would end the ban on voting for citizens who are still on parole or probation for a felony conviction, which would leave only those who are currently incarcerated unable to vote if it becomes law. A similar bill was introduced last year but failed to advance.
The second bill seeks to expand voting opportunities for younger people by automatically “pre-registering” 16- and 17-year-olds when they obtain a driver’s license so that they’re added to the voter rolls as soon as they turn 18 (currently, those not yet of voting age aren’t included under the existing automatic registration law). In addition, 17-year-olds would be allowed to vote in primaries if they would turn 18 by the general election, which a number of states already allow. Lastly, that bill would expand voting locations on college campuses.
The third bill could have the biggest impact on elections by moving all elections in the state (aside from special elections) to coincide with the even-year federal election cycle. Currently, local governments such as Seattle’s hold their elections in odd-numbered years, and statewide ballot initiatives can be voted on in both odd and even years. However, since odd-year turnout is almost always a small fraction of even-year turnout, odd-year elections can lead to electorates that are disproportionately older, whiter, and wealthier than the potential electorate as a whole.
Democrats control both legislative chambers and the governor’s office, meaning there’s a good chance some or all of these proposals will become law.
Voter Suppression
? Missouri: Missouri’s state Supreme Court has upheld a lower court ruling that gutted most of the GOP’s voter ID law, meaning that voters will no longer need a photo ID to vote and can instead present a non-photo ID such as a utility bill. The GOP-backed law gave voters who only had a non-photo ID the option to sign a sworn affidavit, but justices struck down the affidavit requirement as “contradictory” and “misleading.”
Justice Patricia Breckenridge, who’d been named to the bench by former Republican Gov. Kit Bond, sided with her four Democratic-appointed colleagues to uphold the lower court’s ruling, leaving two GOP appointees in the minority. Following the decision, Republican state Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft signaled that he wanted the GOP-dominated legislature to “move forward” with an unspecified effort to revive the photo ID requirement.
? New York: Federal district court Judge Alison Nathan recently ruled that New York’s state Board of Elections was unconstitutionally violating voters’ rights by designating certain voters as “inactive” and removing their names from poll books used to verify a voter’s registration status when they show up to vote. Nathan ordered election officials to make sure that lists of inactive voters be made available to poll workers.
The state moves voters to “inactive” if a single mailing is marked as “undeliverable” by the post office or if officials have reason to believe the voter had moved. However, because the U.S. Postal Service and the National Change of Address database has many inaccurate records, thousands of voters who hadn’t moved were placed on the inactive list. When they would show up to vote on Election Day, some weren’t given the chance to vote a provisional ballot or were told by poll workers to go to another polling site, but if that alternative ended up being the wrong polling site, their ballot went uncounted.
Nathan’s ruling will help mitigate this problem, though to resolve it fully, New York will need to implement same-day voter registration. An effort to do so is in the works, but because it would require an amendment to the state constitution, same-day registration could not take effect prior to 2023.
? Texas: The plaintiffs challenging Texas’ lack of an online voter registration system for those updating the address on their driver’s license online have filed a new lawsuit after their first effort prevailed at the district court level but wasoverturned by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The appeals court had held that the plaintiffs lacked standing because they subsequently were able to re-register by other means and were therefore no longer harmed by the system by the time they filed their suit. Plaintiffs had unable to update their registrations online even though voters updating their licenses in person or by mail are given the opportunity to register, which the district court agreed was a violation of federal law.
To avoid having their case dismissed for lack of standing, these newest plaintiffs (one of whom participated in the first case) have not updated their registrations after moving. The plaintiffs do not plan to remain unregistered throughout the duration of their case, though, particularly with Texas’ primaries approaching on March 3.
One of the attorneys for the plaintiffs told the Texas Tribune that she does not believe the 5th Circuit’s decision means “that someone has to remain unregistered through the course of the lawsuit” because it “would be in effect telling someone that in order to vindicate their most important constitutional right, they would have to sacrifice that right for years and years.”
In a separate effort, Democratic Party organizations are seeking to intervene in and revive the original lawsuit as a way to avoid the possibly lengthy time needed for the newer suit to succeed.
? Wisconsin: A trio of rulings from three separate Wisconsin courts on Monday and Tuesday has resulted, for now, in a halt to a conservative group’s effort to require the state to remove 209,000 voter registrations from the rolls.
On Monday, a lower court judge, who had previously ordered the purge to go forward, held Democratic election officials in contempt for not proceeding with the removal. These officials, who’d asked the judge, Daniel Malloy, to issue a stay while they appeal, pointed out that Malloy’s order had not specified a deadline by which they were obligated to act.
Later that same day, the state Supreme Court declined to expedite an appeal requested by the plaintiff, a conservative organization called the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. WILL had hoped that the Supreme Court, which is dominated by right-wing jurists, would give it a friendly reception, one but conservative justice who’s up for re-election this year recused himself and another sided with the court’s two liberals in declining to fast-track the case. That resulted in a 3-3 tie, meaning the plaintiff’s request was rejected.
Finally, on Tuesday, the state’s intermediate Court of Appeals stayed Malloy’s decisions: both his order directing the purge to proceed and his contempt ruling. That amounted to a victory for voting rights advocates, who, if they cannot halt the purge, at least want to delay it until after November’s elections.
The win is only temporary, though: The state Supreme Court’s refusal to expedite the case does not guarantee that the court will stop the purge if the case eventually reaches them. A separate federal lawsuit opposing the purge remains ongoing.
Election Consolidation
? Kentucky: A committee in Kentucky’s Republican-dominated state Senate has unanimously approved a constitutional amendment that would end the practice of electing statewide offices such as governor in odd-numbered years.
The proposal would extend the terms of the officials elected in 2023 to five years so that such elections would coincide with presidential elections every four years beginning in 2028. Republicans hold the three-fifths supermajorities needed to put this amendment on the ballot without any Democratic votes, but it’s unclear if Democrats would even oppose it.
Republicans unsuccessfully tried passing this same proposal in 2019, but after their narrow loss in lost last year’s election for governor, it’s likely that they will more seriously consider the measure this session. The GOP is likely motivated by the belief that aligning state elections with presidential elections will help them win state races, given how red Kentucky is. While that may very well be the case, this is nevertheless a rare GOP move that could advance their partisan interests by making elections more democratic rather than less.
Consolidating the election dates could in fact significantly boost voter participation in state elections, and it’s likely that presidential-year turnout is more demographically representative of all eligible voters than off-year turnout, especially because more young voters tend to vote only in presidential years. Proponents also argue that this change would save millions of dollars in administrative costs by reducing the number of different elections the state holds.
Redistricting
? New Jersey: New Jersey Democrats have passed a bill out of both legislative chambers that would end the practice of “prison gerrymandering” by counting incarcerated people at their last address for redistricting purposes instead of where they are imprisoned (and can’t even vote). The change, which Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy is expected to sign, will likely shift representation from less-urban places with prisons to urban areas with large communities of color.
The bill’s scope, however, is limited, as it only applies to legislative redistricting and not congressional or local redistricting. The impact on congressional redistricting would likely be minimal, but the impact on local elections could have been considerable in localities with prisons, given the smaller size of such districts.
Ballot Measures
? Florida: Florida’s Supreme Court has approved an initiative for the November ballot that would amend Florida’s constitution to prohibit local governments from having the power to grant voting rights in local elections to noncitizen legal residents. Florida’s constitution currently says “[e]very citizen of the United States who is at least eighteen years of age and who is a permanent resident of the state …shall be an elector …,” but the amendment would replace the phrase “every citizen” with “only a citizen.” At least 60% of voters would have to approve the initiative for it to pass.
Electoral College
? Electoral College: On Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case in April that could determine whether laws banning “faithless electors” in the Electoral College are unconstitutional.
These laws prevent electors pledged to a candidate from voting for a different candidate. The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Colorado’s ban on faithless electors last year, but Washington’s Supreme Court upheld its state’s faithless elector ban. The losers in both lawsuits appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, meaning that to resolve this split, the justices must overturn at least one of these rulings.
The 10th Circuit’s decision may be the one that’s more vulnerable on appeal. As election law expert Derek Muller has previously noted, the 10th Circuit failed to take notice of a similar case out of Minnesota that the 8th Circuit rejected in 2018, deeming the issue moot. Muller further observed that the Supreme Court could overturn the 10th Circuit’s ruling on procedural grounds, much as the Minnesota challenge was.
However, if the Colorado ruling were to be upheld by the Supreme Court and therefore set a national precedent, it would unbind every elector from any state law prohibiting faithless electors. Such an outcome could alter the result of a close Electoral College vote, adding uncertainty as to whether a candidate who appeared to have won a narrow victory would in fact prevail in the Electoral College. While faithless electors have been infrequent in modern history, removing any limits could embolden electors to defect and consequently risk chaos if electors were to randomly overturn expected election results.
florida initiative, then rolled back by gop legislature?
key on bush 2020 win FLA?
OMFG
Crucially, this recording sets in context the claim by a senior Trump campaign source that “we have three major voter suppression operations under way”,made to Bloomberg in October 2016. By then Cambridge Analytica was working simultaneously with the Trump campaign; the Defeat Crooked Hillary Super PAC, overseen personally by Rebekah Mercer; an underground platform doing psychographic microtargeting of congregations and religious communities;the far-right Media Research Center; theNational Rifle Association; and a massive, secretively funded campaign by the National Sports Shooting Federation of gun companies.
How to make black youth not vote
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-the-trump-bunker-with-12-days-to-go
...Several things jump out. Despite Trump’s claim that he doesn’t believe the polls, his San Antonio research team spends $100,000 a week on surveys (apart from polls commissioned out of Trump Tower) and has sophisticated models that run daily simulations of the election. The results mirror those of the more reliable public forecasters—in other words, Trump’s staff knows he’s losing. Badly. “Nate Silver’s results have been similar to ours,” says Parscale, referring to the polling analyst and his predictions at FiveThirtyEight, “except they lag by a week or two because he’s relying on public polls.” The campaign knows who it must reach and is still executing its strategy despite the public turmoil: It’s identified 13.5 million voters in 16 battleground states whom it considers persuadable, although the number of voters shrinks daily as they make up their minds.
Trump’s team also knows where its fate will be decided. It’s built a model, the “Battleground Optimizer Path to Victory,” to weight and rank the states that the data team believes are most critical to amassing the 270 electoral votes Trump needs to win the White House. On Oct. 18 they rank as follows: Florida (“If we don’t win, we’re cooked,” says an official), Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia.
Trump believes he possesses hidden strength that may only materialize at the ballot box. At rallies, he’s begun speculating that the election will be like “Brexit times five,” implying that he’ll upend expectations much as the Brexit vote shocked experts who didn’t believe a majority of Britons would vote to leave the European Union. Trump’s data scientists, including some from the London firm Cambridge Analytica who worked on the “Leave” side of the Brexit initiative, think they’ve identified a small, fluctuating group of people who are reluctant to admit their support for Trump and may be throwing off public polls.
Still, Trump’s reality is plain: He needs a miracle. Back in May, newly anointed, he told Bloomberg Businessweek he would harness “the movement” to challenge Clinton in states Republicans haven’t carried in years: New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Connecticut, California. “I’m going to do phenomenally,” he predicted. Yet neither Trump’s campaign nor the RNC has prioritized registering and mobilizing the 47 million eligible white voters without college degrees who are Trump’s most obvious source of new votes, as FiveThirtyEight analyst David Wasserman noted.
To compensate for this, Trump’s campaign has devised another strategy, which, not surprisingly, is negative. Instead of expanding the electorate, Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans. Trump’s invocation at the debate of Clinton’s WikiLeaks e-mails and support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to turn off Sanders supporters. The parade of women who say they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and harassed or threatened by Hillary is meant to undermine her appeal to young women. And her 1996 suggestion that some African American males are “super predators” is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent black voters from showing up at the polls—particularly in Florida.
On Oct. 24, Trump’s team began placing spots on select African American radio stations. In San Antonio, a young staffer showed off a South Park-style animation he’d created of Clinton delivering the “super predator” line(using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts”—nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.” The aim is to depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”
The Trump team’s effort to discourage young women by rolling out Clinton accusers and drive down black turnout in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood with targeted messages about the Clinton Foundation’s controversial operations in Haiti is an odd gambit. Campaigns spend millions on data science to understand their own potential supporters—to whom they’re likely already credible messengers—but here Trump is speaking to his opponent’s. Furthermore, there’s no scientific basis for thinking this ploy will convince these voters to stay home. It could just as easily end up motivating them.
Regardless of whether this works or backfires, setting back GOP efforts to attract women and minorities even further, Trump won’t come away from the presidential election empty-handed. Although his operation lags previous campaigns in many areas (its ground game, television ad buys, money raised from large donors), it’s excelled at one thing: building an audience. Powered by Project Alamo and data supplied by the RNC and Cambridge Analytica, his team is spending $70 million a month, much of it to cultivate a universe of millions of fervent Trump supporters, many of them reached through Facebook. By Election Day, the campaign expects to have captured 12 million to 14 million e-mail addresses and contact information (including credit card numbers) for 2.5 million small-dollar donors, who together will have ponied up almost $275 million. “I wouldn’t have come aboard, even for Trump, if I hadn’t known they were building this massive Facebook and data engine,” says Bannon. “Facebook is what propelled Breitbart to a massive audience. We know its power.”
Since Trump paid to build this audience with his own campaign funds, he alone will own it after Nov. 8 and can deploy it to whatever purpose he chooses. He can sell access to other campaigns or use it as the basis for a 2020 presidential run. It could become the audience for a Trump TV network. As Bannon puts it: “Trump is an entrepreneur.”
Whatever Trump decides, this group will influence Republican politics going forward.These voters, whom Cambridge Analytica has categorized as “disenfranchised new Republicans,” are younger, more populist and rural—and also angry, active, and fiercely loyal to Trump. Capturing their loyalty was the campaign’s goal all along. It’s why, even if Trump loses, his team thinks it’s smarter than political professionals. “We knew how valuable this would be from the outset,” says Parscale. “We own the future of the Republican Party.”
...
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Wylie covers plenty of ground, explaining in illuminating and often scary detail how Cambridge Analytica exploited the data to create Facebook pages that would needle “neurotic, conspiratorial citizens,” propagating an outraged solidarity.(The efficacy of these techniques is still a matter of debate.)He describes another project that the company called “voter disengagement” — that is, suppression of African-American voters. Republican clients, worried that demographic changes were spelling electoral trouble for them, asked Cambridge Analytica to find “ways to confuse, demotivate and disempower people of color.”
https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/federal-judge-blocks-ncs-voter-id-law-cites-states-sordid-history-of-racist-voter-suppression/
corruption it's also a devil term; djt needed to defend from it, so he i'm not a puppet 'd joe hunter biden --> ukraine (also bizarro mirror on server)
“Do So. Don't vote. Don't be involved in politics. It's like a sign of resistance against – not government, against politics. And voting. And very soon they're making their own YouTube videos. This is the prime minister’s house that's being graffitied! … It was carnage.
“And the reason why this was such a good strategy is because we knew, and we really really knew, that when it came to voting, all the Afro-Caribbean kids wouldn't vote, because they ‘Do So’. But all the Indian kids would do what their parents told them to do, which is go out and vote. And so all the Indians went out and voted, and the difference on the 18-35-year-old turnout is like 40%, and that swung the election by about 6% – which is all we needed!”
Again, Nix was selling his company’s expertise in promoting cynicism and apathy to suppress turnout among the opposition. But this campaign was even more manipulative: enlisting young Afro-Caribbeans in what pretended to be an authentic youth movement, secretly designed to manipulate them into surrendering their votes. This is what ‘compliance’ means in psychological warfare: achieving the desired behavioural effect from a ‘hostile audience’.
Asked for comment on the Do-So campaign, Nix responded in an email earlier today, writing, “The objective of this campaign was to highlight and protest against political corruption.There is nothing unlawful or illegal about assisting with this activity. SCL / CA has never undertaken voter suppression and there is no evidence to the contrary.”
Nix’s closing comments in his summer 2016 pitch were tantalising: “We’ve got an in-house intelligence team, so we can do full intelligence protection… Opposition don’t hack your emails and everything else. And we're pretty good at getting intelligence too… You know what? We do a lot of counter operations.You can spend $10 million on an election.Or we can send one of our guys in to go offer the leader of the opposition a bribe, you know, three weeks before polling. It's a very good way to win an election.”
Beneath the veneer, this seems to have been some of the work Alexander Nix was most proud of. This is how he pitched his company around the world, just as he was finally starting to work for Trump. This is the man who the Mercers and Steve Bannon enlisted to help them reshape the American political mind.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-republicans-have-a-coordinated-attack-to-assure-an-electoral-victory-in-2020
no lnx
How Republicans have a coordinated attack to assure an electoral victory in 2020
Written by Terry Schwadron / Raw Story, DC Report December 31, 2019
Set aside the would-be political boomerang effects of impeachment or even of having a presidential reelection candidate who seems to draw sustenance from public insults and personal boasts.
If you’re the Republican Party, apparently it is not enough to use the power of incumbency for reelection, or the argument that you cut taxes or that Donald Trump has been “keeping promises”—at least in a sort-of manner.
Republicans have tagged a coordinated attack on the voter rolls to try to assure electoral victory. Rather than celebrate the fact that more voters may want to join the 40% of us who troop loyally to the polls on all sides, Republicans repeatedly seems to be targeting those who might vote against them.
In Wisconsin,a judge appointed by a Republican governor recently used an extreme and malicious interpretation of a Wisconsin state voting law to throw about 234,000 voters off state rolls. The decision on a case brought by the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law &Liberty, to force the state elections commission to keep voting rolls up to date and drop voters within 30 days of not answering a letter of confirmation from the elections panel.
In Georgia, it was the Republican Gov. Brian Kemp himself, the former secretary of state who had overseen voter operations and elections, who summarily disqualified 300,000 voters, overwhelmingly black and rural, from being able to vote. It was Kemp who used similar voter suppression techniques to defeat Stacey Adams, the former black Speaker of the House for governor. Adams has struck back with state and nationwide campaigns to foster voter registration.
In Washington, Republicans stuck together to form enough opposition to kill what is called HR 4, a bill to reinstate various portions of the defunct Voters Rights Act to ensure balance in voter registration. The background here is that a decade ago, the U.S. Supreme Court had held the Voters Rights Act of 1965 no longer needed because it was adjudged by a majority of the court that states had stopped much of its history of voter suppression by race.
There are other cases as well, in Ohio and Texas, for example, but the trend is clear.The insurance policy Republicans seek is to limit the numbers of people who might vote, particularly in a situation where the thought is that new voters, like college students at a particular campus, or immigrants, might lean Democratic in registration and voting.
Republicans seek to limit the numbers of people who might vote, particularly in a situation where the thought is that new voters, like college students at a particular campus, or immigrants, might lean Democratic.
Meanwhile, Democratic efforts on voter registration are organized around finding new voters using guns, same-sex issues, and family economics as lures. The new Democratic governor in Kentucky, Andy Bashear, has added 140,000 to voter rolls by re-enabling felons who completed their sentences, something tried and squashed in Florida. Local campaigns have focused on campuses around the country.
Add to this the idea of the growing number of court challenges to partisan, gerrymandered districts, including those in North Carolina this year, and you have the outlines of a coordinated campaign. Each of the actions is local, but the overall impact will be felt in national elections.
A National Public Radio has noted, since the 2010 elections, 24 states have implemented new restrictions on voting. Alabama now requires a photo ID to cast a ballot. Other states such as Ohio and Georgia have enacted “use it or lose it” laws, which strike voters from registration rolls if they have not participated in an election within a prescribed period of time.
Mother Jones journalist Ari Berman, author of “Give Us the Ballot, ”has said that many of the restrictions are part of a broad, continuing Republican strategy to tighten access to the ballot — an effort that was bolstered in 2013 by the Supreme Court’s ruling.
In Georgia,the state moved to block would-be voters if their voter registration application names on the voter registration did not exactly match other state databases, these voters were sent a letter telling them that their applications were pending and they needed to provide more information to election officials. Previously, these voters could show up and vote at the polls with the correct ID, but not vote by mail. If you got a letter in the mail that said there was a problem with your registration, you probably would think that you weren’t eligible to vote.
The Associated Press reported that Justice Clark, a senior political adviser and senior counsel to Trump’s reelection campaign, was caught discussing 2020 voter suppression efforts while at a Wisconsin chapter meeting of the Republican National Lawyers Association,though Clark denies it and says he was discussing “false accusations” that the GOP engages in voter suppression.
Clark can be heard on tape at the event saying, “Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places. Let’s start protecting our voters. We know where they are.
Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.”With all the talk about Russian attempts to influence the election, perhaps we should be looking closer to home for who’s trying their best to rig election results.
Personally, I wish we could all get behind the idea fundamental to the nation’s values – that everyone should be voting, and that each vote should count.
Let’s Make America Fair Again.
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2x?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States
Voter suppression in the United States concerns allegations about various efforts, legal and illegal, used to prevent eligible voters from exercising their right to vote. Where found, such voter suppression efforts vary by state, local government, precinct, and election. Separately, there have also been various efforts to enfranchise and disenfranchise various voters in the country, which concern whether or not people are eligible to vote in the first place (not covered by this article; see Voting rights in the United States).
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Methods
Purging of voter rolls
Between November 2015 and early 2016, over 120,000 voters were dropped from rolls in Brooklyn, New York.[2] Officials have stated that the purge was a mistake and that those dropped represented a "broad cross-section" of the electorate. However, an WNYC analysis found that the purge had disproportionately affected majority-Hispanic districts. The board announced that it would reinstate all voters in time for the 2016 congressional primary.[3] The Board of Elections subsequently suspended the Republican appointee in connection to the purge, but kept on her Democratic counterpart.[4]
In 1998, Florida created the Florida Central Voter File to combat vote fraud documented in the 1997 Miami mayoral election. Many people were purged from voter registration lists in Florida, because their names were similar to those of convicted felons, who were not allowed to vote at that time under Florida law. According to the Palm Beach Post, African-Americans accounted for 88% of those removed from the rolls but were only about 11% of Florida's voters. However, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, nearly 89% of felons convicted in Florida are black; therefore, a purge of convicted felons could be expected to include a disproportionately high number of blacks. The Post added that "a review of state records, internal e-mails of DBT employees and testimony before the civil rights commission and an elections task force showed no evidence that minorities were specifically targeted".[1]
In 2008, more than 98,000 registered Georgia voters were removed from the roll of voters because of a computer mismatch in their personal identification information. Some 4,500 voters had to prove their citizenship to regain their right to vote.
Georgiawas challenged for requesting Social Security records for verification checks on about 2 million voters. That was more requests than any other state. An attorney involved in the lawsuit said Georgia violated a federal law prohibiting widespread voter purges within 90 days of an election, contending that the letters were sent out too close to the election date. The director of the American Civil Liberty Union's Georgia Voting Rights Project said, "They are systematically using these lists and matching them and using those matches to send these letters out to voters." "They're using a systematic purging procedure that's expressly prohibited by federal laws,...if people who are properly eligible, are getting improperly challenged and purged. Elise Shore, a regional attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), agreed the letters appear to violate two federal laws against voter purging within 90 days of the election. "People are being targeted, and people are being told they are non-citizens, including both naturalized citizens and U.S.-born citizens," said Shore. "They're being told they're not eligible to vote, based on information in a database that hasn't been checked and approved by the Department of Justice (DOJ), and that we know has flaws in it." Secretary of State Karen Handel denied that the removal of voters' names was an instance of voter suppression.[5][needs update]
In 2019, presiding circuit court Judge Paul V. Malloy of Ozaukee County, Wisconsin, removed 234,000 voters from the statewide rolls. ruling that state law compelled him to do so.[6]
Limitations on early and absentee voting
In North Carolina, Republican lawmakers requested data on various voting practices, broken down by race. They then passed laws that restricted voting and registration many ways that disproportionally affected African Americans, including cutting back on early voting.[7][8] In a 2016 appellate court case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit struck down a law that removed the first week of early voting. The court held that the GOP used the data they gathered to remove the first week of early voting because more African American voters voted during that week, and African American voters were more likely to vote for Democrats.[9] Between 2008 and 2012 in North Carolina, 70% of African American voters voted early.[10] After cuts to early voting, African American turnout in early voting was down by 8.7% (around 66,000 votes) in North Carolina.[11][12]
Voting procedure disinformation
Voters may be provided with false information about when and how to vote, leading them to fail to cast valid ballots. For example, in recall elections for the Wisconsin State Senate in 2011, Americans for Prosperity, a conservative political advocacy group founded in 2004 by brothers Charles and David Koch to support Republican candidates and causes in the United States,[13] sent many Democratic voters a mailing that gave an incorrect deadline for returning absentee ballots. Voters who relied on the deadline in the mailing could have sent in their ballots too late for them to be counted.[14] The organization claimed that it was caused by a typographical error.[15]
Just prior to the 2018 U.S. presidential election, the New York Times warned readers of a numerous types of deliberate misinformation, sometimes targeting specific voter demographics. These included false information about casting ballots online email and by text message, circulating doctored photographs in 2016? which claimed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were arresting voters at polling places and included threatening language meant to intimidate Latino voters. It advised them that misinformation was being circulated about polling hours and places, intending to mislead, and messages purportedly sent by "President Trump" to Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, and Georgia were actually disseminated from Republican organizations. In 2018, Trump actually spread information about defective machines in a single Utah county giving the impression that such difficulties were nationwide.[16]
Caging lists
Main article: Voter caging
Caging lists have been used by political parties to eliminate potential voters registered with other political parties. A political party sends registered mail to addresses of registered voters. If the mail is returned as undeliverable, the mailing organization uses that fact to challenge the registration, arguing that because the voter could not be reached at the address, the registration is fraudulent.[17]
Identification requirements
In July 2016, a federal appeals court found that a 2011 Texas voter ID law discriminated against black and Hispanic voters because only a few types of ID were allowed; for example, military IDs and concealed carry permits were allowed, but state employee photo IDs and university photo IDs were not.[18] In August 2017, an updated version of the same Texas voter ID law was found unconstitutional in federal district court; the district judge indicated that one potential remedy for the discrimination would be to order Texas election-related laws to be pre-cleared by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).[19] The court also ruled that the law would force some voters to spend money traveling to a government office to update their identification information; the court compared this provision to a poll tax.[20]
During the 21st century, several states with Republican-controlled governments passed restrictive voter ID laws affecting identification cards for college students (a liberal-leaning demographic group).[21]
Historical examples
...
2016 presidential election
Further information: United States presidential election, 2016
The 2016 presidential election was the first in 50 years without all the protections of the original Voting Rights Act. Fourteen states had new voting restrictions in place, including swing states such as Virginia and Wisconsin.[73][74][75][76]
Kansas
In early 2016, a state judge struck down a law requiring voters to show proof of citizenship in cases where the voter had used a national voter registration form. In May, a federal judge ordered the state of Kansas to begin registering approximately 18,000 voters whose registrations had been delayed because they had not shown proof of citizenship. Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach ordered that the voters be registered, but not for state and local elections. In July, a county judge struck down Kobach's order. Kobach has been repeatedly sued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for allegedly trying to restrict voting rights in Kansas.[77][78]
North Carolina
In 2013, the state House passed a bill that requires voters to show a photo ID issued by North Carolina, a passport, or a military identification card to begin in 2016. Out-of-state drivers licenses were to be accepted only if the voter registered within 90 days of the election, and university photo identification was not acceptable.[79] In July 2016, a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a trial court decision in a number of consolidated actions and struck down the law's photo ID requirement, finding that the new voting provisions targeted African Americans "with almost surgical precision," and that the legislators had acted with clear "discriminatory intent" in enacting strict election rules, shaping the rules based on data they received about African-American registration and voting patterns.[80][81] On May 15, 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the Appeals Court ruling.[82]
North Dakota
An ID law in North Dakota which would have disenfranchised large numbers of Native Americans was overturned in July 2016. The judge wrote, "The undisputed evidence before the Court reveals that voter fraud in North Dakota has been virtually non-existent."[78]
Ohio
Since 1994, Ohio has had a policy of purging infrequent voters from the rolls. In April 2016, a lawsuit was filed, challenging this policy on the grounds that it violated the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA)[83] and the Help America Vote Act of 2002.[84] In June, the federal district court ruled for the plaintiffs, and entered a preliminary injunction applicable only to the November 2016 election. The preliminary injunction was upheld in September by the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Had it not been upheld, thousands of voters would have been purged from the rolls just a few weeks before the election.[83]
Wisconsin
In Wisconsin, a federal judge found that the state's restrictive voter ID law led to "real incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections, particularly in minority communities"; and, given that there was no evidence of widespread voter impersonation in Wisconsin, found that the law was "a cure worse than the disease." In addition to imposing strict voter ID requirements, the law cut back on early voting, required people to live in a ward for at least 28 days before voting, and prohibited emailing absentee ballots to voters.[78] A study by Priorities USA, a progressive advocacy group, estimates that strict ID laws in Wisconsin led to a significant decrease in voter turnout in 2016, with a disproportionate effect on African-American and Democratic-leaning voters.[85][86]
2017–2018
Election Integrity Commission and Crosscheck
Main article: Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity
In May 2017, Donald Trump established the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, purportedly for the purpose of preventing voter fraud. Critics have suggested its true purpose is voter suppression. The commission was led by Kansas attorney general and Republican gubernatorial nominee Kris Kobach, a staunch advocate of strict voter ID laws and a proponent of the Crosscheck system. Crosscheck is a national database designed to check for voters who are registered in more than one state by comparing names and dates of birth. Researchers at Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and Microsoft found that for every legitimate instance of double registration it finds, Crosscheck's algorithm returns approximately 200 false positives.[87] Kobach has been repeatedly sued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other civil rights organizations for trying to restrict voting rights in Kansas.[77] On February 20, 2016, while speaking to a committee of Kansas 2nd Congressional District delegates, regarding their challenges of the proof-of-citizenship voting law he championed in 2011, Kobach said, "The ACLU and their fellow communist friends, the League of Women Voters— you can quote me on that, sued".[88]
Often, voter fraud is cited as a justification for such measures, even when the incidence of voter fraud is low. In Iowa, lawmakers passed a strict voter ID law with the potential to disenfranchise 260,000 voters. Out of 1.6 million votes cast in Iowa in 2016, there were only 10 allegations of voter fraud; none were cases of impersonation that a voter ID law could have prevented. Only one person, a Republican voter, was convicted. Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, the architect of the bill, admitted, "We've not experienced widespread voter fraud in Iowa."[89]
Alabama
Alabama HB 56, an anti-illegal-immigration bill co-authored by Kris Kobach and passed in 2011, required proof of citizenship to be presented by voters on Election Day.[90] Much of the law was invalidated on appeal at various levels of appeals courts or voluntarily withdrawn or reworded.[91][92][93]
In its 2014 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court of the United States allowed jurisdictions with a history of suppression of minority voters to avoid continuing to abide by federal preclearance requirements for changes in voter registration and casting of ballots.Within 24 hours of that ruling, Alabama implemented a previously-passed 2011 law requiring specific types of photo identification to be presented by voters. The state closed DMV offices in eight of ten counties which had the highest percentage black population, but only three in the ten counties with the lowest black population. In 2016, Alabama's Secretary of State (SOS) John Merrill began the process to require proof of citizenship from voters, despite Merrill saying he did not know of any cases where non-citizens had voted. Four-term Republican Representative Mo Brooks found that he himself had been purged from the rolls. Merrill also declined to publicize the passage of legislation that enabled some 60,000 Alabaman former felons to vote.[94][95] Alabama's requirement regarding proof of citizenship had been approved by federal Election Assistance Commission Director Brian Newby.[96]
In 2018, critics accused the state of intentionally disenfranchising non-white voters.[97][needs update]
Georgia
In Louisville, Georgia, in October 2018, Black senior citizens were told to get off a bus that was to have taken them to a polling place for early voting. The bus trip was supposed to have been part of the "South Rising" bus tour sponsored by the advocacy group Black Voters Matter. A clerk of the local Jefferson County Commission allegedly called the intended voters' senior center to claim that the bus tour constituted "political activity," which is barred at events sponsored by the county. Latosha Brown, one of the founders of Black Voters Matter, described the trip's prevention as a clear-cut case of "...voter intimidation. This is voter suppression, Southern style." The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund sent a letter to the county calling for an "immediate investigation" into the incident, which it condemned as, "an unacceptable act of voter intimidation," that "potentially violates several laws."[98][needs update]
Georgia's Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, the Republican gubernatorial nominee, was the official in charge of determining whether or not voters will be allowed to vote in the November 2018 election and has been accused of voter suppression. Minority voters are statistically more likely to have names that contain hyphens, suffixes or other punctuation that can make it more difficult to match their name in databases, experts noted, and are more likely to have their voter applications suspended by Kemp's office. Barry C. Burden, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of its Elections Research Center said, "An unrealistic rule of this sort will falsely flag many legitimate registration forms. Moreover, the evidence indicates that minority residents are more likely to be flagged than are whites." Kemp has suspended the applications of 53,000 voters, a majority of whom are minorities. "Even if everyone who is on a pending list is eventually allowed to vote, it places more hurdles in the way of those voters on the list, who are disproportionately black and Hispanic," said Charles Stewart III, Professor of Political Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[99][needs update]
Indiana
In 2017, Indiana passed a law allowing the state to purge voters from the rolls without notifying them, based on information from the controversial Crosscheck system. The Indiana NAACP and League of Women Voters have filed a federal lawsuit against Connie Lawson, Indiana's Secretary of State, to stop the purges.[100] In June 2018, a federal judge ruled that the law violated the National Voter Registration Act.[101]
North Dakota
In September 2018, a federal circuit court of appeals reversed an earlier federal district court ruling that had struck down a law requiring voters to have a residential street address. The United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case, Brakebill v. Jaeger.[102] The case had been brought to challenge state legislation that was believed to be targeting Native American voters on a Turtle Mountain Chippewa reservation. The tribal chairman had signed an executive order to provide photo identification for members so they could vote. The demand was so high, the I.D. machine overheated, melting the I.D.s The chairman said, "We want to take down those barriers and give everybody that opportunity to get out and voice their opinions." "It upsets me that these barriers are put in front of our people." Days earlier, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear a petition for a stay to the new law's requirements. The tribal leadership warned the decision would unfairly impede Native American voters in the November 6, 2018 election who had strongly supported U.S. Senator Heidi Heitkamp in 2012.
She was running for a second term against then-U.S. Representative Kevin Cramer in a race that could determine the majority in the U.S. Senate. The upcoming contest prompted state Republican lawmakers to implement voter ID changes. The party's rationale was that officials had cited nine "suspected cases" of double voting, while Heitkamp attributed the action to partisan motivations. The question was whether North Dakota could require voter IDs to include a residential address, rather than a Post Office box, which had been the case during the primary election in June. A survey cited by the plaintiffs indicated 18 percent of Native Americans lacked a valid ID because of the newly imposed residential street address requirement, in contrast to only 10.9 percent of non-Natives. The survey further determined that Native Americans disproportionately lacked the documentation and resources needed to obtain an ID, given in part because of higher rates of poverty and less access to transportation. The Supreme Court's unwillingness to revive the case focused national attention on North Dakota and Native voting rights. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a 2020 presidential candidate said the voter ID requirements could disenfranchise "thousands" of Native Americans. Former Attorney general Eric Holder termed it "nothing more than voter suppression." House Majority Leader Republican Al Carlson, who sponsored the new ID law said, "Our attempt was never to disenfranchise anybody." "From a legislative standpoint, we wanted the integrity ... in the ballots, but we also want to have anybody that wants to vote that is a legal citizen be able to identify where they live and be able to vote."
During the primary six voters were permitted to vote using their post office box addresses per a federal judge's order: Four of them had voted in the wrong precinct because the "arbitrary" location of their P.O. box didn't match their residence, the state contended in court. North Dakota Deputy Secretary of State Jim Silrum said the "vast majority" of North Dakotans "have and know those addresses." Azure admitted there were "quite a few" people on the reservation who lacked a residential street address. Former Spirit Lake Chairman Russ McDonald said the cause for disenfranchisement was common in reservation areas. North Dakota's Standing Rock Sioux Tribe issued a statement decrying the Supreme Court's refusal to stay the order, arguing that "hundreds" of its members will not be able to vote. Chairman Mike Faith said there "is no good reason that a P.O. Box address is not sufficient to vote."
"This law clearly discriminates against Native Americans in North Dakota," Faith's statement added. "Our voices should be heard and they should be heard fairly at the polls just like all other Americans." Heitkamp, who had recently reintroduced a Native voting rights bill, similarly criticized North Dakota's actions. "I'm not going to attribute any noble motive to what they're doing. They're clearly trying to disenfranchise Native American people," she said, arguing that her 2012 victory has "a lot to do with it." Cramer, who was to beat Heitkamp for her Senate seat, during a KVLY-TV town hall, said "there's not another place in America where it's easier to vote than North Dakota." He noted it's the only state without voter registration.
Republican Secretary of State Al Jaeger's office had distributed information to tribal leaders on obtaining a residential address through county 911 coordinators. Election officials also noted that voters who don’t have sufficient ID on Election Day have a week to produce one to ensure their vote is counted. IDs can be supplemented with documents like a utility bill.
Despite North Dakota Republican Governor Doug Burgum's verbal assertion that he wanted to strengthen relationships with tribes, he defended the law, saying, "I signed this bill because it protects the right to vote and provides eligible citizens with multiple pathways to legally cast their ballot." The Native American Rights Fund (NARF) a voting rights group based in Colorado has also announced plans to work with North Dakota's tribes to have officials posted at polling places who can provide letters identifying voters' residential addresses.
Silrum said he would have liked to launch a more robust voter information campaign, but the court rulings came too close to the election to make that feasible. He said the office is printing a voter ID poster in the state's newspapers and reaching out directly to tribal leaders and universities, among other efforts.
[103][104]
Anti-suppression efforts
Starting in 2015, various states enacted laws for automatic voter registration. At Politico's "State Solutions" voter engagement conference, former Secretary of State and Oregon Governor Kate Brown said, "Registration is a barrier to people participating in this process." "Voting is a fundamental right of being a citizen, and people across the country should have the ability to access this fundamental right without barriers like registration." She emphatically aimed at critics of policies, such as Oregon's "motor voter" law that are aimed at increasing voter turnout, saying, "I think the good news is, in Oregon, we actually want people to vote in our state."[105]
See also
==
new
https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/the-decade-republicans-hijacked-our-democracy-via-the-gerrymander/
no lnx
The decade Republicans hijacked our democracy — via the gerrymander
Written by David Daley / Salon December 30, 2019
As this decade comes to a close, 59 million Americans live in a state where one or both chambers of the state legislature is controlled by the party that got fewer votes in the 2018 election.
In Wisconsin in 2018, voters elected a Democratic U.S. senator, defeated an incumbent Republican governor, picked Democrats for every statewide office, and favored Democratic candidates for the state assembly by more than 200,000 ballots. Republicans nevertheless controlled more than 63 percent of the seats.
We end the 2020s with voter purges in Ohio, Wisconsin and Georgia, with precinct closures weaponized to lower voter participation across the South, with Texas, Tennessee and Florida making it harder to register new voters. The ball drops on the 2010s with state legislatures in Florida, Michigan and Missouri willing to undo voting reforms approved by upwards of 60 percent of the people via initiative.
One of our final images of the U.S. House will be the floor debate over impeachment, with its dueling images of older, white men defending the president’s actions over Ukraine and younger members, largely women and people of color, insisting that no one, even a president, stand above the law.
White men make up a smaller slice of the American electorate with each election. Yet they maintain outsized power in Congress and state legislatures. A new decade dawns with a crisis of representation that threatens the integrity of representative democracy itself.
We’re in this mess, in many ways, because of gerrymandering. This was the decade that the gerrymander — perhaps the oldest political trick in the book — pushed American politics into a dangerous state of anti-majoritarianism, grounded in racial fear and identity politics, that may take at least another decade to overcome, assuming we ever do so.
It’s worth remembering how we got here. After all, the decade began with the likelihood that changing American demographics might push the nation in a very different direction.
As thousands celebrated America’s first black president in Chicago’s Grant Park on election night 2008, the smartest analysts on every network, left and right, watched Barack Obama defeat John McCain and wondered whether an increasingly diverse nation might render Republicans a minority party for decades.
Top Republican strategists had a different idea. The 2008 election might have been historic, they understood, but 2010 had the potential to be transformative. Every state legislative and congressional district in the nation would be redrawn after the 2010 census. State legislatures would draw most of the lines. If Obama and the Democrats suffered a difficult midterm election, as new presidents often do, Republicans could quickly change their fortunes, dominate redistricting, and draw themselves an enduring advantage, even in competitive states they’d lost in 2008, such as Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
The GOP plan — known as REDMAP, or the Redistricting Majority Project — was headquartered at the Republican State Leadership Committee, led by former party chairman Ed Gillespie. It was announced on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal by no less than GOP mastermind Karl Rove. The RSLC’s key benefactors included Koch Industries, Walmart, Reynolds American and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The RSLC identified just over 100 state legislative races in crucial states, and drowned Democratic incumbents in waves of sophisticated negative advertisements in the final weeks of the 2010 race. (It helped that cocky Democrats snoozed on the importance of redistricting and barely put up any fight.) And when it came time to remap these states in 2011, using the most exacting voter data andsophisticated mapping technology ever deployedon redistricting, the political operations of new House Speaker John Boehner, Paul Ryan and many other establishment figures would play key roles.
It worked. In 2012, the first election held under these lines, Democratic U.S. House candidates won 1.4 million more votes than Republicans nationwide. Republicans held the chambers nevertheless, decisively, 234-201. In targeted swing states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, Democratic candidates would earn tens of thousands more votes, but the Republican-drawn districts packed and cracked those votes so precisely that the GOP would win 13 of the 18 seats from Pennsylvania and nine of 14 from Michigan. Democratic state legislative candidates would routinely win more votes in these states as well; Republicans would hold both chambers in Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin regardless.
So yes, it worked. But it also contained the seeds of the party’s unraveling, placed a frustrated and impossible-to-please base in charge, and set the stage for an outsider to sweep up the pieces four years later.
But first, something else would happen in 2012: Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney, and shaken Republicans realized they’d lost the popular vote in five out of six presidential elections, GOP leaders commissioned a warts-and-all diagnosis of the party’s brand. It wasn’t pretty. One-time Republican voters now described the party as “scary,” “out of touch,” “narrow-minded,” even “stuffy old men.”
Its authors named the report the Growth and Opportunity Project but it soon became known by everyone as something catchier and more urgent: the Republican autopsy. Among the causes of death? Republicans had “lost their way with younger voters.” Many minorities “think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.”
It recommended that the party modernize itself, learn how to persuade and appeal to a wider variety of people, champion policies that make life better for working Americans rather than the rich, then head to communities Republicans had tended to avoid and make their case. “We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian and gay Americans and demonstrate that we care about them, too,” the autopsy concluded.
When Donald Trump captured the GOP nomination in 2016, many Republicans bemoaned not following this advice from the autopsy and more, such as championing immigration reform and becoming genuinely welcoming and inclusive on social issues. But it was already too late. The autopsy itself had been dead on arrival, and long before Trump descended his gilded Manhattan escalator and joined the Republican race. It had already been smothered, unaware, by the very Republican establishment who commissioned the report.
REDMAP made it impossible.
The new districts drawn by Republicans made their districts older, whiter, and more conservative. These new districts — where the Republican primary was the only race that mattered — produced a different kind of congressman (and most of them were men), incentivized against compromise, insulated from the ballot box, interested in listening only to their base.
These members also didn’t much care for the Republican establishment in Washington. They would bring a much different tone and tenor to Congress. Boehner, now the House speaker, learned this right quick. In summer 2013, a first-term congressman from North Carolina’s 11th district wrote Boehner a letter, suggesting that the GOP look to defund Obamacare by threatening a government shutdown. Boehner knew it was folly. Democrats controlled the White House and the Senate. It was a strategy doomed to fail. Rove blasted it in the Wall Street Journal.
ButMark Meadows enlisted 79 other Republicans in this quest. His own district, previously a swing district that most recently produced a conservative Democrat, had been redrawn so that he captured it by more than 15 percentage points. It was 87 percent white.
In the New Yorker, Ryan Lizza and David Wasserman looked at the districts of the 80 signatories. They were, on average, 75 percent white and just 9 percent Latino, compared to an average district that’s 63 percent white and 17 percent Latino. In 2012, Obama won the national popular vote by 4 percentage points. In those districts, Romney won by an average of 23. The Republican members exceeded even that landslide margin: They won their seats by an average of 34 percentage points. As the nation changed, redistricting not only held back demographic change, but it turned back the clock and solidified conservative white power. As Lizza concluded, “these 80 members represent an America where the population is getting whiter, where there are few major cities, where Obama lost the last election in a landslide, and where the Republican Party is becoming more dominant and more popular. Meanwhile, in national politics, each of these trends is actually reversed.”
Boehner, given little choice, followed the “suicide caucus” over the cliff. Predictably, disaster ensued and he had to change course. And predictably, the “suicide caucus” saw no reason to compromise or change its own. This was just one of more than four dozen battles to repeal Obamacare in the House, none of which stood any greater likelihood of victory.Immigration reform, one of the only policy options the autopsy’s authors saw as crucial for the party’s future, stood no chance in this climate.
Neither did the GOP leadership. A year later,Meadowswould turn on Boehner, filing a parliamentary motion to “vacate the chair” that would ultimately lead to the speaker’s resignation.
The House had been set on a dangerous new course. REDMAP, like some Frankenstein’s monster, would not only devour Boehner, but the new members empowered by these toxic, technology-driven gerrymanders would accelerate all of the worst polarizing trends in our politics. The Freedom Caucus, legislators created and empowered by REDMAP, would run the House. Ryan, Boehner’s successor, would later step aside in frustration as well, proven ineffective despite GOP control of Congress and the White House. The autopsy wouldn’t be worth the paper it was printed on. The GOP establishment hoped that controlling redistricting would buy themselves time to set a new course. Instead, the party’s course, and our nation’s history, would beset by the new leaders that their gerrymandering rendered unbeatable and uncontrollable.
Did Boehner learn any lesson from his unholy creation? Well, earlier this month he and Ryan signed on as chairs of a Speakers Advisory Council generated to fundraise for the REDMAP creators’ 2020 redistricting strategy.
Here’s the thing: When you’re trying to ensure that the side with less support continues to hold power, when you’re trying to maintain control without talking to a changing nation, your tactics aren’t likely to end with redistricting. [MAX X DRIVES SYS OUT OF BALANCE --> UNINTENDED CONSEQ AND SYS FAIL?]
Indeed, efforts to make it harder for citizens to vote were among the very first actions by gerrymandered state legislatures, especially in Wisconsin and North Carolina, where a federal court found that those barriers were “surgically” crafted to target blacks. Gerrymandered legislatures can take such anti-democratic actions because the people’s representatives need not fear the judgement of the people. [no FEEDBACK] And after the U.S. Supreme Court [MOD] undid essential protections within the Voting Rights Act, in the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder, states and other entities didn’t have to fear the courts, [DISABLE CHECKS AND BALANCE] either, when they wanted to change the rules around voting. Across much of the nation, but especially in the South, as well as in states with one-party control and newly gerrymandered legislatures, came aflood of voter ID bills, cutbacks in absentee and early voting, voter roll purges, precinct closures and more.
Gerrymandered legislatures felt free to ignore the will of the people. Other legislatures followed along. In Florida, for example, where 64 percent of voters approved a 2018 state constitutional amendment ending felony disenfranchisement, lawmakers added an additional burden instead — complete repayment of any fines and fees connected to the sentence or prison term — that many critics compared to a poll tax. Legislators also undermined a legal victory allowing campus sites to be used for early voting with a sneaky provision that requires something always at a premium on colleges: Easy parking.
Texas would make it a felony for anyone to cast an ineligible ballot, even by accident. Arizona looked to dial back early voting and expand voter ID requirements. Tennessee passed legislation that would make it put those who run voter registration drives in jeopardy of massive fines if they submitted too many incomplete applications. Indiana made it harder to sue in state court to extend voting hours, often necessary when machines malfunction or when lines are long.Legislatures in Missouri, Utah, Michigan and Idaho worked to unwind popular 2018 initiatives won by citizens demanding reforms politicians had refused to make.
And so we end this decade with the water in Flint still undrinkable, thanks to gerrymandering.
In 2011, Michigan’s GOP-controlled legislature dramatically expanded the state’s power to take over financially struggling municipalities and place them under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager. Angry voters toppled the law in a November 2012 ballot initiative, concluding that it gave the state too much power to usurp local control and run roughshod over elected officials. One month later, lawmakers ignored the public and reinstated the program.
Then, in 2014, the emergency manager appointed to run Flint changed the city’s water supply to the Flint River and decided against installing corrosion inhibitors to properly treat the water, saving an estimated $140 a day. It sparked a lead contamination crisis and an outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease that killed 12 people and sickened hundreds of children.
And so we end this decade with fetal heartbeat laws on the march in aggressively gerrymandered states like Ohio, Georgia and Alabama, that would enact abortion restrictions dramatically out of sync with the wishes of voters even in these red states.
And so we end this decade with a national consensus on gun controland putting an end to the horrifically numbing routine of mass shootings, but an anti-majoritarian and broken political system where large majorities are ever-stymied and unable, again and again, to translate the will of the people into action. The decade closes with consensus on climate change, but progress and agreements being rolled back.
We stand on the verge of the next redistricting cycle, which will begin in 2021, without the prospect of intervention from the federal courts, with the gerrymander wars headed south and the prospect of states using citizen population, rather than total population, to draw state legislative districts, all, again, with the goal of standing athwart demographic change and shouting “stop.”
These wars will be fought with Democrats, at last, fully awakened and focused on state legislatures. They’ll take place with dramatically more public awareness and media attention paid to the importance of structural voting issues that once made eyes glaze over. And they’ll be undertaken with solid majorities of Americans of all ideologies backing rules and reforms enshrine the best promises of our democracy.
But the damage that has done is severe and will be long-lasting. Forty years ago, when Raymond Donovan, the labor secretary under Ronald Reagan, was acquitted on fraud and larceny charges, he famously asked “Which office do I go to to get my reputation back.” We should all pose the same question about the way urgent issues went unaddressed during this bitter and polarized decade, stolen from us, in part, by the gerrymander.
It may require a generation to repair the damage to our civic fabric from this decade’s cynical and corrosive festival of partisan gerrymandering. It helped heightened and accelerated polarization, extremism and our dysfunctional politics. It’s incumbent on all of us to ensure it doesn’t get worse before it gets better. There may not be any battle in the next decade that’s more urgent.
David Daley, a former editor of Salon, is the author of the national bestseller “Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count” and the forthcoming “Unrigged: How Americans Fought Back, Slayed the Gerrymander and Reinvented Democracy.”
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Listen: Top Trump advisor admits GOP ‘traditionally’ suppresses votes
Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement December 21, 2019
A bombshell audio recording reveals a top Trump campaign official admitting that the Republican Party regularly suppress ES the vote and he is promising a much more aggressive and “better-funded” program for the 2020 election after relaxed Election Day rules.
“Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places,” the senior political adviser and senior counsel to the Trump re-election campaign, Justin Clark, says in the audio, according to the Associated Press. “Let’s start protecting our voters. We know where they are. … Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.”
Clark, who made the remarks during an event with influential Republicans, “said he was referring to false accusations that the GOP engages in voter suppression,” the AP notes.
“Neither I nor anyone I know or work with would condone anyone’s vote being threatened or diluted and our efforts will be focused on preventing just that,” Clark said.
The audio offers other insights.
“We were able to change state party rules in 37 states around the country that are not only streamline [sic] the process but really beneficial to the President,” Clark says (below).
Former Georgia House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams, who lost her gubernatorial election campaign by 50,000 votes after the Georgia Secretary of State, her opponent, kicked 670,000 voters off the rolls, weighs in:
Ahem. ?? Voter suppression isn’t a bug; it’s a feature for the GOP. Wisconsin, Georgia, Ohio, Michigan, Florida…you name the competitive state, and I can tell you their plan. They’re just finally saying the quiet part out loud. @fairfightaction #FightVoterSuppression https://t.co/7gSU0QkIoe
— Stacey Abrams (@staceyabrams) December 20, 2019
Clark’s remarks begin at the 5:00 minute mark. At the 7:30 mark Clark begins to brag about how they have been able to change state rules to make them better for President Trump.
Listen:
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1219 an
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Listen: Top Trump advisor admits GOP ‘traditionally’ suppresses votes
Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement December 21, 2019
A bombshell audio recording reveals a top Trump campaign official admitting that the Republican Party regularly suppress ES the vote and he is promising a much more aggressive and “better-funded” program for the 2020 election after relaxed Election Day rules.
“Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places,” the senior political adviser and senior counsel to the Trump re-election campaign, Justin Clark, says in the audio, according to the Associated Press. “Let’s start protecting our voters. We know where they are. … Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.”
Clark, who made the remarks during an event with influential Republicans, “said he was referring to false accusations that the GOP engages in voter suppression,” the AP notes.
“Neither I nor anyone I know or work with would condone anyone’s vote being threatened or diluted and our efforts will be focused on preventing just that,” Clark said.
The audio offers other insights.
“We were able to change state party rules in 37 states around the country that are not only streamline [sic] the process but really beneficial to the President,” Clark says (below).
Former Georgia House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams, who lost her gubernatorial election campaign by 50,000 votes after the Georgia Secretary of State, her opponent, kicked 670,000 voters off the rolls, weighs in:
Ahem. ?? Voter suppression isn’t a bug; it’s a feature for the GOP. Wisconsin, Georgia, Ohio, Michigan, Florida…you name the competitive state, and I can tell you their plan. They’re just finally saying the quiet part out loud. @fairfightaction #FightVoterSuppression https://t.co/7gSU0QkIoe
— Stacey Abrams (@staceyabrams) December 20, 2019
Clark’s remarks begin at the 5:00 minute mark. At the 7:30 mark Clark begins to brag about how they have been able to change state rules to make them better for President Trump.
Listen:
kos 1219
A single county judge in Wisconsin has ordered the purge of over 200,000 names from the state’s voters rolls. More than 90% of those names are not in the county where the judge presides. In fact, the number of names the judge ordered stricken is over twice the whole population of his county.
As reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Judge Paul Malloy acted on a request from just three voters who were backed by a conservative organization, while ignoring both the state election commissions and the League of Women Voters, nether of which were allowed to testify. The center of the case was a letter that the elections commissions sent out to voters it believe may have moved. However, that letter was sent only a month earlier, and the elections commission intended to give voters until 2021 to correct any information.
But Malloy didn’t give the commission, or the voters, that chance. Instead, he ordered the names removed in advance of the nexts election. To get an idea of how big a deal that is, Donald Trump won the state of Wisconsin by just 23,000 votes. In fact, it’s that kind of margin that has Republicans out hunting for cases like this in which they can make it impossible for everyone to vote.
In fact, Malloy seems to have done even more than the conservative group “Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty” asked. The original request was for an injunction requiring election officials to remove voters who had not responded in 30 days. Instead, Malloy issued a “writ of mandamus” ordering the purge and threatening any election commissioner who refused to cooperate.
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kos 1219
A single county judge in Wisconsin has ordered the purge of over 200,000 names from the state’s voters rolls. More than 90% of those names are not in the county where the judge presides. In fact, the number of names the judge ordered stricken is over twice the whole population of his county.
As reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Judge Paul Malloy acted on a request from just three voters who were backed by a conservative organization, while ignoring both the state election commissions and the League of Women Voters, nether of which were allowed to testify. The center of the case was a letter that the elections commissions sent out to voters it believe may have moved. However, that letter was sent only a month earlier, and the elections commission intended to give voters until 2021 to correct any information.
But Malloy didn’t give the commission, or the voters, that chance. Instead, he ordered the names removed in advance of the nexts election. To get an idea of how big a deal that is, Donald Trump won the state of Wisconsin by just 23,000 votes. In fact, it’s that kind of margin that has Republicans out hunting for cases like this in which they can make it impossible for everyone to vote.
In fact, Malloy seems to have done even more than the conservative group “Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty” asked. The original request was for an injunction requiring election officials to remove voters who had not responded in 30 days. Instead, Malloy issued a “writ of mandamus” ordering the purge and threatening any election commissioner who refused to cooperate.
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-right-wing-war-on-american-voters/
aNYONE WHO IMAGINED, after Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, that the Republican right had maxxed out the possibilities for suppressing the votes of people unlikely to vote for its candidates was sorely mistaken. Although Democrats rallied in the midterms and off-year elections, winning back the U.S. House and flipping 10 state legislative chambers, a series of voting restrictions enacted by right-wing legislators in key states helped ward off a genuine blue wave, particularly in the gubernatorial elections in two large Southern states.
“Let’s say this loud and clear—without voter suppression, Stacey Abrams would be the governor of Georgia, and Andrew Gillum is the governor of Florida,” U.S. Senator Kamala Harris, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, told an NAACP gathering in Detroit on May 5. Harris’ remarks addressed two 2018 races lost to Republicans by narrow margins; the Georgia race was overseen by Brian Kemp, who was then Georgia’s secretary of state—and Abrams’ opponent in the gubernatorial race.
Let’s say this loud and clear—without voter suppression, Stacey Abrams would be the governor of Georgia, and Andrew Gillum is the governor of Florida.
SEN. KAMALA HARRIS
Voter-suppression measures have been spreading like viruses from state to state throughout the decade since Barack Obama became the first African-American president. The means and methods range from voter ID laws to purges of voter registrations and worse. A recent report from the Brennan Center for Justice found that between 2016 to 2018, 17 million voter registrations had been purged from the rolls. And that’s just one method of voter suppression currently in use. In Tennessee, an African-American voter registration effort was effectively criminalized by legislative action. In Florida, a voter referendum restoring rights for formerly incarcerated citizens was undercut by Republican lawmakers who limited its scope—while also passing a law designed to cut down on student voting. In Texas in 2018, a precinct at Prairie View, a historically black university where students have long struggled to exercise their franchise, had its early-voting hours cut back to fewer than half of others in the area. “Here we go again,” student Jayla Allen later recalled thinking when she heard the news.
The GOP push to restrict the franchise began in earnest after the backlash mid-term elections of 2010, when Tea Party landslides gave the party control of state legislatures across the South and industrial North. While Republicans set to work perfecting the age-old art of gerrymandering, creating artificial advantages in congressional and state legislative elections by rigging districts in their favor for the duration of the decade, they were also busy concocting new barriers to voting for the likeliest Democratic voters: African Americans, Latinos, and young people.
The purpose of these efforts was made clear decades ago, when Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) addressed a major gathering of religious fundamentalists and
, “I don’t want everybody to vote,” adding, “our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” In 2016, Jim DeMint, then president of Heritage, was just as frank, telling a St. Louis radio host, “in the states where they do law voter ID laws you’ve seen, actually, elections begin to change toward more conservative candidates.”
Republican lawmakers in 19 states have passed new measures to suppress votes since 2017. And with so much at stake in 2020—not just the presidency and control of Congress, but the balance of power in state legislatures that get to draw new district lines for a new decade after the U.S. census—they’re not done yet, especially in the presidential battlegrounds. In 2016, voters in 13 Republican-run states had new rules to navigate when they went to the polls. Several, not surprisingly, were presidential battlegrounds like Wisconsin and Ohio. But most were states like Indiana, Mississippi, or Texas, where Republicans held statewide power, but where urban areas were becoming progressive strongholds with clashing priorities. With so much hinging on the outcome of 2020 elections—not just the presidency and perhaps democracy itself, but control of Congress, state governments, and redistricting for a decade—the pace of the efforts to suppress the vote, and the desperation to defend it, will only accelerate in 2020.
Interactive illustration from the Brennan Center for Justice. Click on a county to view the numbers.
NOBODY PAID MUCH ATTENTION last summer when an upstart group called the Tennessee Black Voter Project began dispatching canvassers across Memphis, Nashville, and countless small towns to register voters for the midterm elections. After all, few states are as deep-red as Tennessee, a one-time Democratic bastion in the South where Donald Trump bested Hillary Clinton by a margin of more than 25 percent in 2016. A decade’s worth of voter-suppression tactics, including mass purges of mostly black voters from the rolls and a Voter ID law that made it impossible for many college students to vote, has seemingly convinced many Tennesseans to the left of Trump that voting is no longer worth the bother. The state ranked 50th in turnout in 2016, and a sad 45th in voter registration. A band of millennial African Americans with clipboards and pens would surely be powerless to change that state of affairs.
But organizers like Tequila Johnson, co-founder of the civil rights group The Equity Alliance and manager of the Black Voter Project, saw “both a need and an opportunity,” she told me. They’d seen what happened when black voters had been fully engaged in Alabama the previous December, boosting Democrat Doug Jones to a shocking win in a U.S. Senate special election, and they knew that Stacey Abrams’s New Georgia Project was registering hundreds of thousands and threatening to upend the politics of one of Tennessee’s near neighbors. They also knew that even though people weren’t voting, they certainly weren’t happy and content; as Republicans accrued near-absolute power over the last decade, they’d moved one of the South’s traditionally moderate states further and further to the right, even gutting the state’s popular and progressive health-care program, TennCare.
“People look at Tennessee and say, ‘It’s red and it’ll never change,’” Johnson says. “The state actually hasn’t been red for all that long, but people increasingly thought, ‘my vote doesn’t matter,’ and our Democratic Party has not done a good job of outreach. But people are suffering from these right-wing policies. And millennials like me, including in rural parts of the state, are more open to change and accepting differences than the generations before us.”
So the Black Voter Project got to work. Canvassers set up shop outside church services, jails, and courthouses; they snagged grocery-shoppers and signed up club-goers; they went to housing projects and “100-percent immigrant communities,” as Johnson says. By October, they’d submitted more than 90,000 registration forms to stunned election officials, mainly in Shelby County (Memphis) and Davidson County (Nashville). The new voters weren’t enough to tilt the balance of power statewide, but black turnout soared—from 31 percent in 2014 to 45 percent in 2018—and helped Democrats recapture a majority on the Shelby County Commission while ousting a Republican county mayor and sheriff. In Nashville, where turnout nearly doubled from four years earlier, new voters helped pass a ballot initiative to create a community oversight board for police.
Johnson knew what to expect next. “We weren’t naive enough to think that our voter-participation numbers had happened by mistake,” she says. Tennessee had recently reduced early-voting periods and required proof of citizenship at the polls. “We knew it was by design. For us to be radical enough to say, ‘We’re gonna register people,’ for us to be bold enough to call ourselves the Tennessee Black Voter Project—we knew there would be a push-back.”
Sure enough, when Republican lawmakers convened in Nashville this winter, they were determined to snuff out this “radical” voter-registration effort in its infancy. Citing inflated figures of erroneous forms submitted, implying that mass voter fraud was underway, and echoing complaints by overwhelmed county election officials, Republican lawmakers like Rep. Mike Carter called the Black Voter Project a “debacle,” claiming that it had somehow prevented “honest voters” from being able to cast their ballots.
In April, Tennessee’s GOP majority passed a sledgehammer of a bill, making it a crime for groups with paid canvassers (as opposed to volunteers) to submit incomplete or inaccurate registration forms: Up to $2,000 in fines will be assessed for each county where an organization submits more than 100 deficient forms, and up to $10,000 if the number exceeds 500. Organizers also face criminal sanctions if they don’t attend training sessions run by local officials, or if they fail to mail in voter-registration forms within 10 days—a short window by most states’ standards. (A lawsuit against the measure, which has kept it from being enforced thus far, continues tomove through the courts.)
While other states have imposed regulations on voter-registration drives, there’s never been anything like this law. For Black Voter Project co-founder Charlane Oliver, the upshot was plain to see: “They don’t want black people to vote.”
They don’t want black people to vote.
CHARLANE OLIVER, BLACK VOTER PROJECT
Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, which works to engage African Americans in the South and assisted the Tennessee project in its start-up phase, says the Republicans’ aim was to keep voter-registration drives small and localized. “They know it’s very hard to do large-scale voter operations without paying canvassers. You can’t make a dent in a state like Tennessee with some mom-and-pop organization that relies on volunteers. The people who wrote this legislation don’t mind ad-hoc efforts. But they don’t want to see 90,000 people registered in one cycle.” The legislation, he says, will make it harder for groups to sign up paid canvassers going forward. “People will be reluctant to take that chance,” he says. “It’s intimidation, period.”
Voting-rights advocates fear that the Tennessee law will—if it survives court challenges—likely spread to other Republican-controlled states, perhaps in time to put the clamps on voter-registration efforts in presidential battlegrounds heading into the 2020 elections. “Republicans are using the state as a testing ground,” Johnson says. “Let’s test this out in Tennessee, see if it flies—and if it’s found constitutional, watch it spread to 15 or 20 more states.”
IN 2013, THE U.S. SUPREME COURT swung open the voter-suppression floodgates by invalidating a key section of the Voting Rights Act in ShelbyCounty*v. Holder*. Since 1965, states and municipalities with histories of discriminatory voting laws had been required to run any changes in their elections by the Department of Justice before enacting them; after Shelby, they had free rein. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg predicted in a scorching dissent that the ruling would result in a resurgence of Jim Crow-style voter suppression laws, and she’s been proven sadly prophetic. In short order, 25 states turned back the historical clock—after decades in which voting laws had become steadily more liberal—by passing restrictive voter-ID laws, cutting back on early voting (which voters of color tend to use more than whites), and closing polling places in minority neighborhoods.
Voter suppression paid spectacular dividends in 2016. Multiple studies have shown that Donald Trump would not have won the presidency without racially biased election laws that sprang up post-Shelby, particularly in the six big states that went from voting for Obama in 2008 to backing Trump—Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The tilt was most dramatic in the last of those states: After a strict voter-ID law passed the GOP-controlled Wisconsin legislature, turnout in Milwaukee, where 70 percent of black Wisconsonites live, plummeted from 74 percent in 2012 to 55 percent in 2016, while statewide, Latino and Asian voting went down 6 percent. That was enough to give Trump a nail-biting and decisive victory. Nationwide, only 59 percent of eligible African Americans voted in 2016, after 66 percent had turned out in 2012—a number that couldn’t simply be explained away by problems with Hillary Clinton’s campaign.The justification offered was always the same: Right-wing groups claim they simply want to combat widespread “voter fraud” and return “integrity” to American elections. President Trump’s claim of “millions” of illegal voters in the 2016 election—supposedly denying him a popular-vote victory—has been echoed repeatedly by right-wing groups like Judicial Watch. In 2017, the group’s president,
of the anti-immigrant Remembrance Project that “we had about one-and-a-half million illegal votes in the last election,” and that “about 80 percent vote for Democrats,” meaning that “one point one million voted for Hillary Clinton.” In “Rigged,” a documentary about voter suppression, Michael Hyers of the right-wing Voter Integrity Project in North Carolina, which has used a Jim Crow-era law to challenge the eligibility of thousands of voters of color in the state, captured the spirit of the movement all too colorfully: “It’s about time we turn on the lights and start cleaning the cockroaches out of here.”
Republicans have come to depend on voter suppression to hold back Democrats in both the Rust Belt and the South, where demographic changes are eroding the white GOP’s decades-long dominance. But voting-rights advocates have started to fight back, with measures to expand voting rights in new ways—and counter the right’s continuing push to curtail them.
Last November, even as Trump acolyte Ron DeSantis was edging out Democrat Andrew Gillum in the race for governor of Florida, voters in the ultimate battleground overwhelmingly passed an amendment to the state constitution that looked like a death blow to Trump’s chances of carrying the state a second time. Nearly 65 percent voted for a ballot initiative that would restore voting rights to people convicted of felonies who’d served their time. Florida had become an outlier in recent decades, one of just four remaining states (along with Iowa, Kentucky, and Virginia) that still barred people convicted of felonies from voting, even after they returned to society. The law had been on the books since 1868, when Florida lawmakers—forced by the federal government to allow African Americans to vote—had devised it as a way to prevent them from gaining power, in tandem with post-Civil War laws that made black men easy to incarcerate.
[Cliff Albright of Black Voters Matter says that right-wing Republicans have created “a fog of confusion” around the rules of voting. (Photo: Rogelio Solis/AP/Shutterstock)]
Now that this vestige of Jim Crow had been erased by popular demand, the number of newly eligible voters would be staggering: Estimates ranged from 1.4 to 1.6 million, including one-fifth of the state’s voting-age African Americans. When this legion of formerly disenfranchised Floridians began registering to vote in January, the state’s newspapers and newscasts featured heartwarming stories about folks like Delmus Calloway, who’d served six years on drug-possession charges and then, upon his release in 2007, turned his life around, becoming director of public works for the small city of Gretna. “This right here makes me feel like I am part of society,” Calloway told the Tallahassee Democrat. “Today is a great day for me. It’s an honor.”
But the prospect of all these new voters did not warm the hearts of Republican lawmakers. At DeSantis’ urging, they attached strings to the amendment—big, knotty strings. After months of raucous debate, they voted to allow only those who’d paid off all the fees, fines and surcharges attached to their sentences to become eligible to vote. Considering that Florida is a national leader in racking up those financial penalties, this meant that only a fraction of those who had completed their sentences would likely ever be able to exercise their franchise. The state assesses more than 115 different fines against defendants—and unpaid court charges after 90 days are handed over to private debt collectors, who can add a surcharge of up to 40 percent to the fines and fees incurred by the those so convicted.
“What this bill does is reestablish a poll tax,” said Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU of Florida. “It is not constitutional, it is not legal, and it is not right to deny people the right to vote because you can’t pay.”
What this bill does is reestablish a poll tax.
MICAH KUBIC, ACLU OF FLORIDA
As soon as DeSantis signed the bill on the final Friday in June, two lawsuits were filed to overturn what Gillum called a “nullification” of the vote last November. “We were unambiguous as voters,” he said. “We were going to be a state that didn’t judge people forever for their worst day.”
What the courts decide could well determine who wins Florida in 2020. The state already has a history of intolerably long urban voting lines, purges of eligible voters “accidentally” swept up in the maintenance process, worse-than-useless voting machines, and crackdowns on voter-registration groups. And if Florida’s new poll tax is upheld, it will be mighty tempting for Republican lawmakers in other states to follow suit, stripping voting rights from ex-felons who’ve already regained them.
COMPARED TO THE IMPACT of Florida’s re-disenfranchisement of so many formerly incarcerated people, some of the other voter-suppression measures passed over the last year by swing-state Republicans look like small potatoes. But they could turn out to be decisive. “Elections are increasingly so close,” notes Marcia Johnson-Blanco of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. “You don’t have to restrict very many people from voting to change the outcome.”
Ever since students shared some of the blame for electing Barack Obama in 2008, they’ve become particular targets for right-wing suppression efforts—particularly in states that are likely to be 2020 battlegrounds. In North Carolina, a voter-ID referendum passed last November with ambiguous wording; when Republican lawmakers filled in the details this winter, they invalidated the use of most college students’ IDs at the polls. In New Hampshire, as well, most students will also be ineligible to cast ballots; a law passed last year requires drivers who want to vote to get a state driver’s license, and those who own cars that they drive in New Hampshire to get an in-state car registration—yet another new poll tax, according to many an outraged undergraduate (not to mention older Democrats).
Student voting has long been a bone of contention in Florida. Last year, the state was forced by the courts to allow early voting on several college campuses, thwarting the plans of Republican election officials. Nearly 60,000 students took advantage. Heading into 2020, GOP lawmakers were determined not to let that happen again: At the same time they restricted ex-felons’ voting rights, they passed a measure requiring early-voting sites to have “sufficient nonpermitted parking to accommodate the anticipated amount of voters.” Civil-rights groups said this mouthful of legal verbiage was aimed directly at colleges campuses, which typically require parking permits for their limited number of spots.
“This is not about parking,” said state League of Women Voters President Patricia Brigham, whose group has filed suit to overturn the law. Instead, she said, the measure takes aim at less-fortunate kids. “Those students with cars, they can hop in their car and go to a voting site off campus. This is about students living on campus who don’t have a car and want to vote early.”
In the emerging Southwest battleground states of Texas and Arizona, Republicans spent much of this winter and spring trying to slice away potential Democratic votes in different ways. Texas lawmakers outlawed mobile polling places, which some urban (read: Democratic) counties had been using to give voters easier access to polls. Arizona, where Democrats won a U.S. Senate seat and several statewide offices in 2018, has a rich history of voter suppression; because of its history of disenfranchising Native Americans, it was one of nine states required to “preclear” changes to elections prior to the Supreme Court’s Shelby decision. More recently, though, the state has made voting easier by, among other things, allowing voters to cast “emergency votes” on the last weekend before an election, if they found they couldn’t vote on Election Day. And during the state’s generous 26-day early voting period, voters weren’t required to show photo ID. Republicans shot down both of those progressive laws this spring. “This is their strategy,” said Democratic state Rep. Athena Salman. “This year, we’re going to chip away at this part of your right. Next year …”
Republicans still have another year to chip away at voting rights before the presidential election—a fact that gives civil-rights advocates migraines. “I’m just not as creative as the people who are trying to suppress the vote,” Johnson-Blanco says, laughing gamely. “We’re trying to play catch-up all the time.”
The pace is already picking up as November 2020 approaches. In many states, election officials will conduct purges of the voting rolls; the Supreme Court has allowed them to kick off voters who’ve skipped two consecutive federal elections, and most Republican-controlled states make use of them, sometimes failing to provide the notice (and opportunity to re-register) that the law requires.
As did his friend, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia (second from right), Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill (left) will oversee the administration of his own statewide race. Kemp served as Georgia’s secretary of state, overseeing the gubernatorial election in which he ran against Stacey Abrams. Merrill, one of the nation’s most prolific voter-roll purgers, is running for a U.S. Senate seat. (Photo from Merrill’s Facebook page.)
One of the most prolific purgers, Alabama’s Republican Secretary of State John Merrill, is overseeing his own 2020 campaign for U.S. Senate, currently one candidate in a field of Republicans vying for the nomination to run against Democrat Doug Jones. Merrill has made no secret of his desire to create barriers to Alabamians who want to vote: “As long as I’m secretary of state of Alabama, you’re going to have to show some initiative to become a registered voter in this state,” he told documentary filmmaker Brian Jenkins in 2016. Asked why he opposed automatic registration for eligible citizens over 18, Merrill said, “If you’re too sorry or lazy to get up off of your rear and go register to vote, or to register electronically, and then to vote, then you don’t deserve that privilege.”
Post-Shelby, states are free to shorten their early voting periods, and to close down more polling places where Democrats live. New laws, some inspired by the latest methods cooked up in states like Tennessee and Florida, will be passed—and most will land in the courts. With Democrats’ attempts to restore the full powers of the Voting Rights Act stymied by Mitch McConnell and the Republican U.S. Senate majority, it will be another election year marked by chaos and uncertainty for voters and local election officials alike. In some states, as in 2016, voters won’t know what kind of ID is required until a court rules in the fall. Some won’t know that they’ve been purged from the voting rolls until they arrive to vote. Some won’t know where to vote; one recent report found that 1,688 polling places have been closed since 2012. Texas alone had 760. African Americans and Latinos know they will have to wait in longer lines. Others will be reading stories about disputes, in states like Georgia, over whether votes will be counted by machine, or by paper ballots that can be recounted and audited.
This uncertainty creates what Cliff Albright of Black Voters Matter calls a “fog of confusion” around voting—an indirect form of voter suppression that might be more powerful than all the others. “Voter suppression is not just one incident, one policy at a time,” says Renitta Shannon, a Democratic state representative in Georgia. “It’s a collection of actions chipping away at voting rights. If you aren’t directly preventing people from voting, you’re sending a message that it’s going to be a hassle, or that their votes won’t count. Some people are bound to end up saying, OK, why bother?”
But voting-rights advocates, who had no way of preparing for the voting-rights backlash that followed Obama’s first victory, have begun to counter it by working to broaden voting at the same time that they’re fighting off new forms of suppression. Groups like Move Texas helped triple youth turnout in that state in 2018. In Florida, Gillum has founded an ambitious nonprofit aimed at expanding the vote dramatically, while Abrams has expanded her Georgia operation, now called Fair Fight Action, to 20 states for 2020. And though the courts continued to deliver rulings favorable to voter-suppressors—like October’s Rucho vs. Cunningham decision, in which five conservative Supreme Court justices barred federal courts from hearing partisan gerrymandering claims (as opposed to racial gerrymandering lawsuits)—the key cases aren’t all setbacks.
They have created in me a fire they intended to dim.
TEQUILA JOHNSTON, THE EQUITY ALLIANCE
Shortly after that ruling, judges in North Carolina went the opposite way, prohibiting the state from using Republican maps in 2020. Meanwhile, in other states, Democrats and voting-rights groups are suing to restore lost early-voting days, including crucial weekend hours before election days. In Texas, Democrats are contesting a new law that prevents campuses from having early-voting sites. And in Tennessee, while the crackdown on voter registration groups awaits its legal fate, Black Voter Project stalwarts like Tequila Johnson continue their work to counter, if not overcome, the effects of voter suppression.
“I’m going to do it anyway,” she says, despite the potential legal jeopardy. “What would have happened if Dr. King had said, ‘I’m not going to march across that bridge in Selma because there’s a law against it’? I find it almost an obligation to pick up that torch, to push forward, regardless of what the consequences are.”
Johnson keeps 25 registration forms in her car, with a goal of having them all gone by the end of each week. “On Juneteenth, I turned in 165 registration forms that I’d gathered during the month. As I was in the grocery store, gas station, picking my child up from camp, whenever I had a conversation, I’d be like—are you registered to vote?” She laughs, then turns serious and says, “They have created in me a fire they intended to dim.”
Tags: Andrew GillumBrian KempCharlane OliverCliff AlbrightDelmus CallowayDonald J. TrumpHillary ClintonJim DeMintJohn MerrillKamala HarrisMicah KubicMichael HyersMitch McConnellPatricia BrighamPaul WeyrichRep. Athena SalmanRep. Mike CarterRon DeSantisRuth Bader GinsburgStacey AbramsTequila JohnsonTom Fittonvoter intimidationvoter suppressionACLU of FloridaALECAmerican Legislative Exchange CouncilBlack Voter ProjectBlack Voters MatterBrennan Center for JusticeHeritage FoundationJudicial WatchLawyers' Committee on Civil RightsLeague of Women VotersMove TexasNew Georgia ProjectThe Equity AllianceThe New Georgia ProjectVoter Integrity Project
not sure this fits here
no lnx
Just one Republican breaks ranks to join the Democrats in passing new Voting Rights Advancement Act
Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams December 6, 2019
Just one Republican—Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania—joined a united House Democratic caucus on Friday to pass what rights groups hailed as “historic” legislation to restore and expand voter protections that were gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013.
Lisa Gilbert, vice president of legislative affairs for Public Citizen, said passage of the Voting Rights Advancement Act (H.R. 4) is a “critical step” in combating Republican voter suppression efforts that have proliferated in the six years since the Supreme Court’s infamous decision inShelby County v. Holder.
“Numerous state legislatures have undertaken targeted and deliberate steps to limit or impede the right to vote for communities of color, students, the elderly, and people with disabilities,” said Gilbert. “Americans who are eligible to vote but are denied that right due to fabricated or illegal barriers are being deprived of the full privilege of our democracy.”
BREAKING: The House just passed #HR4, one of the most important bills to emerge during this Congress. As voter suppression continues to spread across the US, this bill would breathe life back into the Voting Rights Act. A win for the people & a win for democracy! #RestoreTheVote pic.twitter.com/TR14b3ltxQ
— Kristen Clarke (@KristenClarkeJD) December 6, 2019
BREAKING: @RepBrianFitz is the one and only House Republican that believes in voting rights. https://t.co/37aqHMYIMO
— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) December 6, 2019
“If we want a true democracy, we must protect the right to vote for all,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “The Voting Rights Advancement Act is critical to getting there.”
The legislation now heads to the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has refused to allow a vote on Democrats’ For the People Act (H.R. 1), to which the Voting Rights Advancement Act was previously attached.
As Ari Berman of Mother Jones reported, H.R. 4—sponsored by Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.)—would “initially cover 11 states: nine in the South, plus California and New York, which have more recently been found to discriminate against Latinos and Asian Americans.”
“The bill would also require all states to get federal approval for election changes that are known to disproportionately affect voters of color, such as strict voter ID laws, tighter voter registration requirements, and polling place closures in areas with large numbers of minority voters,” Berman noted.
Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, applauded the House for passing H.R. 4 and demanded that McConnell bring the bill up for a vote in the Senate as soon as possible.
“The passage of H.R. 4 in the House of Representatives today brings us one step closer to restoring the Voting Rights Act and undoing the tremendous damage of Shelby,” Gupta said in a statement. “The VRAA is too important—and the right to vote is too fundamental—to end up buried in the McConnell legislative graveyard.”
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no lnx few
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-right-wing-war-on-american-voters/
...
Voter-suppression measures have been spreading like viruses from state to state throughout the decade since Barack Obama became the first African-American president. The means and methods range from voter ID laws to purges of voter registrations and worse. A recent report from the Brennan Center for Justice found that between 2016 to 2018, 17 million voter registrations had been purged from the rolls. And that’s just one method of voter suppression currently in use.In Tennessee, an African-American voter registration effort was effectively criminalized by legislative action. In Florida, a voter referendum restoring rights for formerly incarcerated citizens was undercut by Republican lawmakers who limited its scope—while also passing a law designed to cut down on student voting. In Texas in 2018, a precinct at Prairie View, a historically black university where students have long struggled to exercise their franchise, had its early-voting hours cut back to fewer than half of others in the area. “Here we go again,” student Jayla Allen later recalled thinking when she heard the news.
The GOP push to restrict the franchise began in earnest after the backlash mid-term elections of 2010, when Tea Party landslides gave the party control of state legislatures across the South and industrial North. While Republicans set to work perfecting the age-old art of gerrymandering, creating artificial advantages in congressional and state legislative elections by rigging districts in their favor for the duration of the decade, they were also busy concocting new barriers to voting for the likeliest Democratic voters: African Americans, Latinos, and young people.
The purpose of these efforts was made clear decades ago, when Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) addressed a major gathering of religious fundamentalists and said, “I don’t want everybody to vote,” adding, “our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” In 2016, Jim DeMint, then president of Heritage, was just as frank, telling a St. Louis radio host, “in the states where they do law voter ID laws you’ve seen, actually, elections begin to change toward more conservative candidates.”
Republican lawmakers in 19 states have passed new measures to suppress votes since 2017. And with so much at stake in 2020—not just the presidency and control of Congress, but the balance of power in state legislatures that get to draw new district lines for a new decade after the U.S. census—they’re not done yet, especially in the presidential battlegrounds. In 2016, voters in 13 Republican-run states had new rules to navigate when they went to the polls. Several, not surprisingly, were presidential battlegrounds like Wisconsin and Ohio. But most were states like Indiana, Mississippi, or Texas, where Republicans held statewide power, but where urban areas were becoming progressive strongholds with clashing priorities. With so much hinging on the outcome of 2020 elections—not just the presidency and perhaps democracy itself, but control of Congress, state governments, and redistricting for a decade—the pace of the efforts to suppress the vote, and the desperation to defend it, will only accelerate in 2020.
Interactive illustration from the Brennan Center for Justice. Click on a county to view the numbers.
NOBODY PAID MUCH ATTENTION last summer when an upstart group called the Tennessee Black Voter Project began dispatching canvassers across Memphis, Nashville, and countless small towns to register voters for the midterm elections. After all, few states are as deep-red as Tennessee, a one-time Democratic bastion in the South where Donald Trump bested Hillary Clinton by a margin of more than 25 percent in 2016. A decade’s worth of voter-suppression tactics, including mass purges of mostly black voters from the rolls and a Voter ID law that made it impossible for many college students to vote, has seemingly convinced many Tennesseans to the left of Trump that voting is no longer worth the bother. The state ranked 50th in turnout in 2016, and a sad 45th in voter registration. A band of millennial African Americans with clipboards and pens would surely be powerless to change that state of affairs.
Tequila Johnson, co-founder of The Equity Alliance and a manager in last year’s elections for the Tennessee Black Voter Project, speaks to reporters, Tuesday, April 2, 2019, at the Cordell Hull legislative building in Nashville, Tenn., after a news conference in opposition to a bill that would stiffen penalties if voter registration groups violate new restrictions. (AP Photo/Jonathan Mattise)]
But organizers like Tequila Johnson, co-founder of the civil rights group The Equity Alliance and manager of the Black Voter Project, saw “both a need and an opportunity,” she told me. They’d seen what happened when black voters had been fully engaged in Alabama the previous December, boosting Democrat Doug Jones to a shocking win in a U.S. Senate special election, and they knew that Stacey Abrams’s New Georgia Project was registering hundreds of thousands and threatening to upend the politics of one of Tennessee’s near neighbors. They also knew that even though people weren’t voting, they certainly weren’t happy and content; as Republicans accrued near-absolute power over the last decade, they’d moved one of the South’s traditionally moderate states further and further to the right, even gutting the state’s popular and progressive health-care program, TennCare.
“People look at Tennessee and say, ‘It’s red and it’ll never change,’” Johnson says. “The state actually hasn’t been red for all that long, but people increasingly thought, ‘my vote doesn’t matter,’ and our Democratic Party has not done a good job of outreach.But people are suffering from these right-wing policies. And millennials like me, including in rural parts of the state, are more open to change and accepting differences than the generations before us.”
So the Black Voter Project got to work. Canvassers set up shop outside church services, jails, and courthouses; they snagged grocery-shoppers and signed up club-goers; they went to housing projects and “100-percent immigrant communities,” as Johnson says. By October, they’d submitted more than 90,000 registration forms to stunned election officials, mainly in Shelby County (Memphis) and Davidson County (Nashville). The new voters weren’t enough to tilt the balance of power statewide, but black turnout soared—from 31 percent in 2014 to 45 percent in 2018—and helped Democrats recapture a majority on the Shelby County Commission while ousting a Republican county mayor and sheriff. In Nashville, where turnout nearly doubled from four years earlier, new voters helped pass a ballot initiative to create a community oversight board for police.
Johnson knew what to expect next. “We weren’t naive enough to think that our voter-participation numbers had happened by mistake,” she says. Tennessee had recently reduced early-voting periods and required proof of citizenship at the polls. “We knew it was by design. For us to be radical enough to say, ‘We’re gonna register people,’ for us to be bold enough to call ourselves the Tennessee Black Voter Project—we knew there would be a push-back.”
Sure enough, when Republican lawmakers convened in Nashville this winter, they were determined to snuff out this “radical” voter-registration effort in its infancy. Citing inflated figures of erroneous forms submitted, implying that mass voter fraud was underway, and echoing complaints by overwhelmed county election officials, Republican lawmakers like Rep. Mike Carter called the Black Voter Project a “debacle,” claiming that it had somehow prevented “honest voters” from being able to cast their ballots.
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In April, Tennessee’s GOP majority passed a sledgehammer of a bill, making it a crime for groups with paid canvassers (as opposed to volunteers) to submit incomplete or inaccurate registration forms: Up to $2,000 in fines will be assessed for each county where an organization submits more than 100 deficient forms, and up to $10,000 if the number exceeds 500. Organizers also face criminal sanctions if they don’t attend training sessions run by local officials, or if they fail to mail in voter-registration forms within 10 days—a short window by most states’ standards. (A lawsuit against the measure, which has kept it from being enforced thus far, continues to move through the courts.)
While other states have imposed regulations on voter-registration drives, there’s never been anything like this law. For Black Voter Project co-founder Charlane Oliver, the upshot was plain to see: “They don’t want black people to vote.”
They don’t want black people to vote.
CHARLANE OLIVER, BLACK VOTER PROJECT]
Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, which works to engage African Americans in the South and assisted the Tennessee project in its start-up phase, says the Republicans’ aim was to keep voter-registration drives small and localized. “They know it’s very hard to do large-scale voter operations without paying canvassers. You can’t make a dent in a state like Tennessee with some mom-and-pop organization that relies on volunteers. The people who wrote this legislation don’t mind ad-hoc efforts. But they don’t want to see 90,000 people registered in one cycle.” The legislation, he says, will make it harder for groups to sign up paid canvassers going forward. “People will be reluctant to take that chance,” he says. “It’s intimidation, period.”
Voting-rights advocates fear that the Tennessee law will—if it survives court challenges—likely spread to other Republican-controlled states,perhaps in time to put the clamps on voter-registration efforts in presidential battlegrounds heading into the 2020 elections. “Republicans are using the state as a testing ground,” Johnson says. “Let’s test this out in Tennessee, see if it flies—and if it’s found constitutional, watch it spread to 15 or 20 more states.”
IN 2013, THE U.S. SUPREME COURT swung open the voter-suppression floodgates by invalidating a key section of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. Since 1965, states and municipalities with histories of discriminatory voting laws had been required to run any changes in their elections by the Department of Justice before enacting them; after Shelby, they had free rein. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg predicted in a scorching dissent that the ruling would result in a resurgence of Jim Crow-style voter suppression laws, and she’s been proven sadly prophetic. In short order, 25 states turned back the historical clock—after decades in which voting laws had become steadily more liberal—by passing restrictive voter-ID laws, cutting back on early voting (which voters of color tend to use more than whites), and closing polling places in minority neighborhoods.
Well-funded right-wing groups such as Judicial Watch are leading efforts to purge voter rolls. Here is JW President Tom Fitton in one of his frequent appearances on Fox Business Channel’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight.” (Screenshot: Fox Business Channel)]
The justification offered was always the same: Right-wing groups claim they simply want to combat widespread “voter fraud” and return “integrity” to American elections. President Trump’s claim of “millions” of illegal voters in the 2016 election—supposedly denying him a popular-vote victory—has been echoed repeatedly by right-wing groups like Judicial Watch. In 2017, the group’s president, Tom Fitton, told a gathering of the anti-immigrant Remembrance Project that “we had about one-and-a-half million illegal votes in the last election,” and that “about 80 percent vote for Democrats,” meaning that “one point one million voted for Hillary Clinton.” In “Rigged,” a documentary about voter suppression, Michael Hyers of the right-wing Voter Integrity Project in North Carolina, which has used a Jim Crow-era law to challenge the eligibility of thousands of voters of color in the state, captured the spirit of the movement all too colorfully: “It’s about time we turn on the lights and start cleaning the cockroaches out of here.”
Voter suppression paid spectacular dividends in 2016. Multiple studies have shown that Donald Trump would not have won the presidency without racially biased election laws that sprang up post-Shelby, particularly in the six big states that went from voting for Obama in 2008 to backing Trump—Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The tilt was most dramatic in the last of those states: After a strict voter-ID law passed the GOP-controlled Wisconsin legislature, turnout inMilwaukee, where 70 percent of black Wisconsonites live, plummeted from 74 percent in 2012 to 55 percent in 2016,while statewide, Latino and Asian voting went down 6 percent. That was enough to give Trump a nail-biting and decisive victory. Nationwide, only 59 percent of eligible African Americans voted in 2016, after 66 percent had turned out in 2012—a number that couldn’t simply be explained away by problems with Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Republicans have come to depend on voter suppression to hold back Democrats in both the Rust Belt and the South, where demographic changes are eroding the white GOP’s decades-long dominance. But voting-rights advocates have started to fight back, with measures to expand voting rights in new ways—and counter the right’s continuing push to curtail them.
Last November, even as Trump acolyte Ron DeSantis was edging out Democrat Andrew Gillum in the race for governor of Florida, voters in the ultimate battleground overwhelmingly passed an amendment to the state constitution that looked like a death blow to Trump’s chances of carrying the state a second time. Nearly 65 percent voted for a ballot initiative that would restore voting rights to people convicted of felonies who’d served their time. Florida had become an outlier in recent decades, one of just four remaining states (along with Iowa, Kentucky, and Virginia) that still barred people convicted of felonies from voting, even after they returned to society. The law had been on the books since 1868, when Florida lawmakers—forced by the federal government to allow African Americans to vote—had devised it as a way to prevent them from gaining power, in tandem with post-Civil War laws that made black men easy to incarcerate.
Cliff Albright of Black Voters Matter says that right-wing Republicans have created “a fog of confusion” around the rules of voting. (Photo: Rogelio Solis/AP/Shutterstock)]
Now that this vestige of Jim Crow had been erased by popular demand, the number of newly eligible voters would be staggering: Estimates ranged from 1.4 to 1.6 million, including one-fifth of the state’s voting-age African Americans. When this legion of formerly disenfranchised Floridians began registering to vote in January, the state’s newspapers and newscasts featured heartwarming stories about folks like Delmus Calloway, who’d served six years on drug-possession charges and then, upon his release in 2007, turned his life around, becoming director of public works for the small city of Gretna. “This right here makes me feel like I am part of society,” Calloway told the Tallahassee Democrat. “Today is a great day for me. It’s an honor.”
But the prospect of all these new voters did not warm the hearts of Republican lawmakers. At DeSantis’ urging, they attached strings to the amendment—big, knotty strings. After months of raucous debate, they voted to allow only those who’d paid off all the fees, fines and surcharges attached to their sentences to become eligible to vote. Considering that Florida is a national leader in racking up those financial penalties, this meant that only a fraction of those who had completed their sentences would likely ever be able to exercise their franchise. The state assesses more than 115 different fines against defendants—and unpaid court charges after 90 days are handed over to private debt collectors, who can add a surcharge of up to 40 percent to the fines and fees incurred by the those so convicted.
“What this bill does is reestablish a poll tax,” said Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU of Florida. “It is not constitutional, it is not legal, and it is not right to deny people the right to vote because you can’t pay.”
What this bill does is reestablish a poll tax.
MICAH KUBIC, ACLU OF FLORIDA]
As soon as DeSantis signed the bill on the final Friday in June, two lawsuits were filed to overturn what Gillum called a “nullification” of the vote last November. “We were unambiguous as voters,” he said. “We were going to be a state that didn’t judge people forever for their worst day.”
What the courts decide could well determine who wins Florida in 2020. The state already has a history of intolerably long urban voting lines, purges of eligible voters “accidentally” swept up in the maintenance process, worse-than-useless voting machines, and crackdowns on voter-registration groups. And if Florida’s new poll tax is upheld, it will be mighty tempting for Republican lawmakers in other states to follow suit, stripping voting rights from ex-felons who’ve already regained them.
COMPARED TO THE IMPACT of Florida’s re-disenfranchisement of so many formerly incarcerated people, some of the other voter-suppression measures passed over the last year by swing-state Republicans look like small potatoes. But they could turn out to be decisive. “Elections are increasingly so close,” notes Marcia Johnson-Blanco of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. “You don’t have to restrict very many people from voting to change the outcome.”
Ever since students shared some of the blame for electing Barack Obama in 2008, they’ve become particular targets for right-wing suppression efforts—particularly in states that are likely to be 2020 battlegrounds. In North Carolina, a voter-ID referendum passed last November with ambiguous wording; when Republican lawmakers filled in the details this winter, they invalidated the use of most college students’ IDs at the polls. In New Hampshire, as well, most students will also be ineligible to cast ballots; a law passed last year requires drivers who want to vote to get a state driver’s license, and those who own cars that they drive in New Hampshire to get an in-state car registration—yet another new poll tax, according to many an outraged undergraduate (not to mention older Democrats).
You don’t have to restrict very many people from voting to change the outcome.
MARCIA JOHNSON-BLANCO, LAWYERS’ COMMITTEE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS]
Student voting has long been a bone of contention in Florida. Last year, the state was forced by the courts to allow early voting on several college campuses, thwarting the plans of Republican election officials. Nearly 60,000 students took advantage. Heading into 2020, GOP lawmakers were determined not to let that happen again: At the same time they restricted ex-felons’ voting rights, they passed a measure requiring early-voting sites to have “sufficient nonpermitted parking to accommodate the anticipated amount of voters.” Civil-rights groups said this mouthful of legal verbiage was aimed directly at colleges campuses, which typically require parking permits for their limited number of spots.
“This is not about parking,” said state League of Women Voters President Patricia Brigham, whose group has filed suit to overturn the law. Instead, she said, the measure takes aim at less-fortunate kids. “Those students with cars, they can hop in their car and go to a voting site off campus. This is about students living on campus who don’t have a car and want to vote early.”
In the emerging Southwest battleground states of Texas and Arizona, Republicans spent much of this winter and spring trying to slice away potential Democratic votes in different ways. Texas lawmakers outlawed mobile polling places, which some urban (read: Democratic) counties had been using to give voters easier access to polls. Arizona, where Democrats won a U.S. Senate seat and several statewide offices in 2018, has a rich history of voter suppression; because of its history of disenfranchising Native Americans, it was one of nine states required to “preclear” changes to elections prior to the Supreme Court’s Shelby decision. More recently, though, the state has made voting easier by, among other things, allowing voters to cast “emergency votes” on the last weekend before an election, if they found they couldn’t vote on Election Day. And during the state’s generous 26-day early voting period, voters weren’t required to show photo ID. Republicans shot down both of those progressive laws this spring. “This is their strategy,” said Democratic state Rep. Athena Salman. “This year, we’re going to chip away at this part of your right. Next year …”
Republicans still have another year to chip away at voting rights before the presidential election—a fact that gives civil-rights advocates migraines. “I’m just not as creative as the people who are trying to suppress the vote,” Johnson-Blanco says, laughing gamely. “We’re trying to play catch-up all the time.”
The pace is already picking up as November 2020 approaches. In many states, election officials will conduct purges of the voting rolls; the Supreme Court has allowed them to kick off voters who’ve skipped two consecutive federal elections, and most Republican-controlled states make use of them, sometimes failing to provide the notice (and opportunity to re-register) that the law requires.
As did his friend, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia (second from right), Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill (left) will oversee the administration of his own statewide race. Kemp served as Georgia’s secretary of state, overseeing the gubernatorial election in which he ran against Stacey Abrams. Merrill, one of the nation’s most prolific voter-roll purgers, is running for a U.S. Senate seat. (Photo from Merrill’s Facebook page.)]
One of the most prolific purgers, Alabama’s Republican Secretary of State John Merrill, is overseeing his own 2020 campaign for U.S. Senate, currently one candidate in a field of Republicans vying for the nomination to run against Democrat Doug Jones. Merrill has made no secret of his desire to create barriers to Alabamians who want to vote: “As long as I’m secretary of state of Alabama, you’re going to have to show some initiative to become a registered voter in this state,” he told documentary filmmaker Brian Jenkins in 2016. Asked why he opposed automatic registration for eligible citizens over 18, Merrill said, “If you’re too sorry or lazy to get up off of your rear and go register to vote, or to register electronically, and then to vote, then you don’t deserve that privilege.”
Post-Shelby, states are free to shorten their early voting periods, and to close down more polling places where Democrats live. New laws, some inspired by the latest methods cooked up in states like Tennessee and Florida, will be passed—and most will land in the courts. With Democrats’ attempts to restore the full powers of the Voting Rights Act stymied by Mitch McConnell and the Republican U.S. Senate majority, it will be another election year marked by chaos and uncertainty for voters and local election officials alike. In some states, as in 2016, voters won’t know what kind of ID is required until a court rules in the fall. Some won’t know that they’ve been purged from the voting rolls until they arrive to vote. Some won’t know where to vote; one recent report found that 1,688 polling places have been closed since 2012. Texas alone had 760. African Americans and Latinos know they will have to wait in longer lines. Others will be reading stories about disputes, in states like Georgia, over whether votes will be counted by machine, or by paper ballots that can be recounted and audited.
This uncertainty creates what Cliff Albright of Black Voters Matter calls a “fog of confusion” around voting—an indirect form of voter suppression that might be more powerful than all the others. “Voter suppression is not just one incident, one policy at a time,” says Renitta Shannon, a Democratic state representative in Georgia. “It’s a collection of actions chipping away at voting rights. If you aren’t directly preventing people from voting, you’re sending a message that it’s going to be a hassle, or that their votes won’t count. Some people are bound to end up saying, OK, why bother?”
But voting-rights advocates, who had no way of preparing for the voting-rights backlash that followed Obama’s first victory, have begun to counter it by working to broaden voting at the same time that they’re fighting off new forms of suppression. Groups like Move Texas helped triple youth turnout in that state in 2018. In Florida, Gillum has founded an ambitious nonprofit aimed at expanding the vote dramatically, while Abrams has expanded her Georgia operation, now called Fair Fight Action, to 20 states for 2020. And though the courts continued to deliver rulings favorable to voter-suppressors—like October’s Rucho vs. Cunningham decision, in which five conservative Supreme Court justices barred federal courts from hearing partisan gerrymandering claims (as opposed to racial gerrymandering lawsuits)—the key cases aren’t all setbacks.
They have created in me a fire they intended to dim.
TEQUILA JOHNSTON, THE EQUITY ALLIANCE]
Shortly after that ruling, judges in North Carolina went the opposite way, prohibiting the state from using Republican maps in 2020. Meanwhile, in other states, Democrats and voting-rights groups are suing to restore lost early-voting days, including crucial weekend hours before election days. In Texas, Democrats are contesting a new law that prevents campuses from having early-voting sites. And in Tennessee, while the crackdown on voter registration groups awaits its legal fate, Black Voter Project stalwarts like Tequila Johnson continue their work to counter, if not overcome, the effects of voter suppression.
“I’m going to do it anyway,” she says, despite the potential legal jeopardy. “What would have happened if Dr. King had said, ‘I’m not going to march across that bridge in Selma because there’s a law against it’? I find it almost an obligation to pick up that torch, to push forward, regardless of what the consequences are.”
Johnson keeps 25 registration forms in her car, with a goal of having them all gone by the end of each week. “On Juneteenth, I turned in 165 registration forms that I’d gathered during the month. As I was in the grocery store, gas station, picking my child up from camp, whenever I had a conversation, I’d be like—are you registered to vote?” She laughs, then turns serious and says, “They have created in me a fire they intended to dim.”
Tags: Andrew GillumBrian KempCharlane OliverCliff AlbrightDelmus CallowayDonald J. TrumpHillary ClintonJim DeMintJohn MerrillKamala HarrisMicah KubicMichael HyersMitch McConnellPatricia BrighamPaul WeyrichRep. Athena SalmanRep. Mike CarterRon DeSantisRuth Bader GinsburgStacey AbramsTequila JohnsonTom Fittonvoter intimidationvoter suppressionACLU of FloridaALECAmerican Legislative Exchange CouncilBlack Voter ProjectBlack Voters MatterBrennan Center for JusticeHeritage FoundationJudicial WatchLawyers' Committee on Civil RightsLeague of Women VotersMove TexasNew Georgia ProjectThe Equity AllianceThe New Georgia ProjectVoter Integrity Project
rww 1119
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/robert-reich-the-myth-of-voter-fraud-and-the-truth-about-whats-really-threatening-our-elections/
https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/students-could-be-a-major-force-in-2020-but-not-if-republicans-can-help-it/
no lnx
Students could be a major force in 2020 — but not if Republicans can help it
Written by Laura Clawson / Daily Kos October 25, 2019
Republicans are always looking for ways to find people likely to vote for Democrats and keep them from voting, and that’s putting a big voter-suppression target on college campuses, where one poll has found45% of students to be Democrats and just 24% Republicans.This is where Republican creativity truly flowers—not in the arts or music, but in finding ways to keep students from voting.
Voter ID laws are always fruitful, with state after state passing laws making it anywhere from confusing to completely impossible to use a college ID to vote. That’s the case in Wisconsin and North Carolina and Texas and Tennessee. In New Hampshire, legislators jumped over that and required out-of-state college students to get New Hampshire drivers licenses and auto registrations, effectively a poll tax. This stuff can make a big difference, reports The New York Times: “Nationwide, student turnout in the 2016 presidential election exceeded that of the 2012 presidential vote — but according to the Tufts institute, it fell sharply in Wisconsin, where the state’s voter ID law first applied to students that year.” Donald Trump prevailed in Wisconsin by fewer than 23,000 votes, and there are more than 170,000 students in just the University of Wisconsin system
In Texas, in case a punitive voter ID law wasn’t enough,Republicans passed a law against polling places that are only open for part of the state’s 12-day early-voting period. That affects a significant number of college campus polling places. Florida Republicans, too, took aim at early-voting places on college campuses, and when their first effort was struck down by the courts, they found a backdoor way to revive it.
Students can also run into trouble knowing at what address to register to vote, with some campuses spread across multiple precincts and elections officials not always sympathetic to helping them figure it out.
Wouldn’t it be nice if Tom Steyer was investing the tens of millions of dollars he’s currently spending on ads for his own presidential campaign in helping make sure students are able to vote?
ref
Politics
Civil rights group challenges rejection of George Mason student voter registrations
Federal court blocks Florida Republicans’ modern-day poll tax 1019 Stephen Wolf / Daily Kos
palast fresno talk 2019
https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-october-16-2019/
hired by stacey abrams effort
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new short film “Suppressed: The Fight to Vote,” Brave New Films exposes rampant voter suppression that affected the outcome of the 2018 midterm election in Georgia and the threat it poses to our elections all across the nation in 2020. The issues Georgians faced included polling place closures, voter purges, missing absentee ballots, extreme wait times and a host of voter ID issues—all of which disproportionately prevented people of color from casting their ballots.
Watch “Suppressed” to discover the insidious tactics politicians use across the country to suppress the vote and stay in power. Host a screening and stay informed at FightToVote.org
LaRose Ohio SoS purge voter rolls, SCOTUS ok’d june? swing state? voterID before?
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/ohio-to-purge-more-than-200000-voters-using-list-flagged-with-numerous-errors/
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Ohio to purge more than 200,000 voters using list flagged with numerous errors
Written by Igor Derysh / Salon September 9, 2019
Ohio is set to purge nearly a quarter-million people from its voter rolls Friday despite journalists and voting rights groups finding repeated mistakes on the state’s list.
Republican Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose published a list in August targeting 235,000 voters the state says are inactive, meaning voters who have not voted for the past six years that the state was unable to contact.
The list of voters was fraught with errors. The secretary of state’s office announced hundreds of changes to the list almost immediately. Two weeks later, voting rights groups discovered that 4,000 people had been erroneously added to the list, the Columbus Dispatch reported. The paper reported days later that another 1,600 people had been incorrectly added to the list because of an error by a software vendor.
The list also included thousands of people who were apparently unaware they had been targeted for removal, even though the state is required to attempt to contact them. More than 11,800 people included on the list have updated their voter registrations so they won’t be canceled, HuffPost reported.
Ohio removes people from the rolls if the state suspects they have moved or died. The list includes people who have not responded to an address confirmation mailing and people who have not voted or participated in any board of elections activity for six years. But voting rights groups say the purge lists are filled with errors that could disenfranchise thousands of legitimate voters. Ohio has already purged 265,000 voter registrations this year, and at least 17 million people have been purged from voter rolls around the country since the 2016 election, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
The Ohio Democratic Party sued to try to stop the state from carrying out the purge, citing the repeated errors on the list. LaRose’s office argued that the errors had been fixed and that the office was taking additional steps to contact people on the list. A federal judge on Tuesday rejected the Democrats’ lawsuit seeking to halt the purge, despite acknowledging problems with past purges. The Supreme Court last year ruled that Ohio’s “supplemental process” that targets voters it suspects have moved or died was legal despite putting eligible voters at risk.
“As we prepare to finalize this process, we’re confident that there has never been a more intensive review of Ohio’s voting rolls, and we’re satisfied that the proper safeguards are in place to ensure any eligible voter will have the opportunity to have their voice heard,” LaRose spokeswoman Maggie Sheehan said in a statement to HuffPost.
But Democrats say that the dubious process all but guarantees that eligible voters will be removed.
“Someone asked me on a call today, ‘Well, what’s the margin of error that’s acceptable in this purging?’ And I said, this isn’t a poll. This is voting. You should not ever be limiting people from the rolls by government error,” Ohio Democratic Party chairman David Pepper told WOSU.
The party’s executive director, Greg Beswick, told Cleveland.com that it was “disturbing” that LaRose planned to go forward with the purge despite admitting to “errors that resulted in thousands of Ohio voters being improperly … and unlawfully flagged to be removed from the rolls.”
“The specter that any active voters are purged due to government error, and no fault of their own, is unacceptable,” he added.
With no legal recourse left, voting rights groups like All Voting is Local are scrambling to contact as many people as possible to encourage them to update their registrations.
“Thousands of voters at risk of being purged have already alerted the state that they are still very much alive and wish to vote,” Mick Brickner, the group’s Ohio state director, said in a statement. “This shows how deeply broken the purge process is and the need for voter registration modernization now.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/probe-of-missing-georgia-votes-finds-extreme-irregularities-in-black-districts/
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Probe of missing Georgia votes finds ‘extreme’ irregularities in black districts
Written by Andrew O'Hehir / Raw Story August 30, 2019
A trove of documents turned over in a congressional probe of missing votes in Georgia’s lieutenant governor race — along with other voting issues — revealed serious irregularities.
The House Oversight and Reform Committee is investigating whether voting machine errorscaused a large drop-off in votes in the lieutenant governor race between Democrat Sarah Riggs Amico and Republican Geoff Duncan, who won the election by about 123,000 votes. The probe is looking at why so many fewer votes were recorded in the race compared to other statewide races, as well as the voter suppression issues that plagued the 2018 state elections.
There were 159,000 fewer votes cast in the lieutenant governor race than in the gubernatorial race between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp. While it is common for down-ballot races to see fewer votes, the lieutenant governor race had twice as much drop-off as other statewide races, even though it was the second race on the ballot, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
There were 80,000 fewer votes cast for lieutenant governor than in other down-ballot races, which represents a 4 percent drop-off from the gubernatorial race, compared to a 2 percent drop-off among even less charismatic down-ballot races. For various reasons, this appears illogical. Historically, the lieutenant governor race has had a much lower drop-off rate than other statewide races in previous elections.
More than 15,500 pages of documents turned over the to Oversight Committee and obtained by the Journal-Constitution shows that the election was plagued by widespread irregularities.
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In one case, a voting machine in Kemp’s home precinct recorded that Republicans won every race, while the other six machines in that same precinct showed that Democrats won every race. The machine showed Republicans winning by roughly the same margin by which Democrats won on the other machines. A statistician’s analysis cited in court documents said “odds of an anomaly that large are less than 1 in 1 million,” the Journal-Constitution reported.
But the problems were far more widespread. The documents show a decline in votes on electronic voting machines in 101 of the state’s 159 counties, even though paper absentee ballots in the same districts did not show a significant decline.
An analysis by the Democratic data-tracking firm TargetSmart found that the drop-off “grew even more extreme in precincts with large African American populations,” according to the report.
“I’ve never seen a drop-off pattern like this, ever,” TargetSmart data analyst Chris Brill told the Journal-Constitution.
The Georgia election as a whole was marred by Republican voter suppression efforts and aging, vulnerable voting machines. The Coalition for Good Governance, an election security group that sued to contest the lieutenant governor race, issued a report alleging that the extreme drop-off in black districts suggests the undervote could not be explained by voters simply skipping that race on their ballots.
“The rates of touchscreen machine–reported undervotes in such precincts in the Lt. Governor contest are far greater than the undervote rates in non–African American neighborhoods regardless of whether those neighborhoods lean Democratic or Republican,” the report said. “The undervote problem did not happen at the same exaggerated levels in many primarily White neighborhoods that overwhelmingly voted for Stacey Abrams and other Democrats, rebutting the argument that the difference can be explained by party-driven voter behavior.”
The group’s analysis found that the drop-off rate in some African-American areas was as high as 13 percent, much higher than the 4 percent statewide figure, The Root reported.
Brill told The Root that TargetSmart’s analysis showed that “as the percentage of the African-American vote would get higher, the undervote would also get higher.”
Brill said in an affidavit filed in court that the results are “extremely suspect and irregular and cast a serious doubt over the accuracy of the final vote and the certified outcome of the lieutenant governor’s contest,” adding that he “finds no reasonable, plausible explanation other than machine malfunction.”
Phillip Stark, a statistician at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a court filing that the undervote rate “strongly suggests that malfunction, misconfiguration, bugs, hacking, or other error or malfeasance caused some DREs [direct recording electronic voting machines] not to record votes in the lieutenant governor’s contest.”
Georgia is one of five states that exclusively uses electronic machines, with no paper backup. Most of the machines in the state are outdated touchscreen devices that are considered vulnerable to hacking. In a ruling earlier this month, federal Judge Amy Totenberg called the state’s machines “unsecure, unreliable and grossly outdated.” Totenberg ordered the state to start using machines with paper backups by next year.
Although there is no clear explanation for what happened to the votes in the lieutenant governor’s race, the Georgia Supreme Court is considering a lawsuit filed to challenge Duncan’s election.
Republican state officials, meanwhile, have been opposed to any sort of review. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has refused to open an investigation into the matter and state officials claimed that the undervote may have been caused by “low interest,” the Journal-Constitution reported, even though other races did not see anywhere near the same drop-off. The secretary of state’s office previously denied Amico’s request for a recount, arguing that it was common for voters to skip down-ballot races without addressing the much higher vote total in other races nor the racial disparity.
Eddie Perez of the Open Source Election Technology Institute, which has pushed for Georgia to adopt hand-marked paper ballots, questioned why officials were so resistant to investigating an election with an inexplicable vote total.
“I don’t know why the state of Georgia appears to be resisting an examination,” Perez told the Journal-Constitution. “They’re not getting any closer to the truth. This really is unusual, and it begs explanation.”
The Coalition for Good Governance is asking the Georgia Supreme Court to consider their lawsuit challenging Duncan’s election after a county judge dismissed the case, even while conceding that there were issues with the entire voting system.
“There is a real wall up and real obstacles to prevent sunshine from coming in and having any kind of election transparency,” Marilyn Marks, the executive director for the Coalition for Good Governance, told the Journal-Constitution. “Let’s find some facts. It’s crazy to think that the paper-ballot voters felt one way about the candidates and the machine voters felt another way.”
Stark, the Berkeley statistician, said in a court filing in the lawsuit that the irregularities are too large to ignore.
“Based on my analysis, described above, and my knowledge of Georgia’s DRE voting system used in the November 6, 2018 election,” he said in an affidavit, “it is my opinion that the certified results of the lieutenant governor’s race are in substantial doubt.”
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/the-voting-wars-come-to-campus/
no lnx
The voting wars come to campus
Written by Daniel Block / Washington Monthly August 27, 2019
Texas: home of corn dogs, Matthew McConaughey, and some of America’s most restrictive voting laws. To register yourself, you have to print out a form and deliver it to the county clerk, because unlike most states, Texashas no online voter registration. To help register others, you must be certified as a “volunteer deputy registrar,” a process that requires either taking an exam or attending an often long and awkwardly timed training session. Your certificate is only valid in the county where it is obtained.
The state has also made it harder to cast a ballot. Between 2013 and 2016, Texas eliminated more than 400 polling locations, the largest drop in any state during that time. In 2013, after years of litigation, it implemented a strict voter ID law. The law, which lists seven kinds of acceptable IDs, became infamous for its brazenly partisan implications—handgun licenses are okay, for example, while student IDs are not.
All of which makes the following statistic so surprising: at the University of Texas at Austin, the state’s flagship university, undergraduate turnout increased from almost 39 percent to 53 percent between 2012 and 2016. Over that same time period, national youth turnout stayed roughly constant. The National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement at Tufts University, which calculates campus voting rates, has not yet released numbers for last year’s midterms. But at UT Austin’s on-campus polling locations, the number of early ballots cast was more than three times higher than it was in 2014. (Travis County only provides polling site specific data for early voting.)
The state of Texas is not alone in seeming to apply tougher voting rules to college students, who as a group are more left leaning than the overall electorate. In New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, and Arizona—all presidential battlegrounds—Republican-controlled legislatures have created particular obstacles for college voters. And yet, in the midst of this clampdown, there are clear signs that students and schools are surmounting voting barriers and countering their impact—and not just in Texas. At Arizona State University in Tempe, for example, despite a restrictive voter ID law and new limits on mail-in ballot collection, student voting rates went up by double digits between 2012 and 2016.
That’s because at institutions like UT Austin and ASU Tempe, students and staff work to make registering and voting as easy as possible, even as Texas and Arizona have made it harder. They find new, creative ways of registering students. They explain complex voting requirements. They work with local officials to increase polling access on campus. In doing so, they are supported by a growing network of national organizations that provide funding, share information, and help schools develop plans to simplify getting out the vote. (The Washington Monthly incorporates data from these organizations in its college rankings. Both UT Austin and ASU Tempe received perfect scores.)
These efforts appear to be making a difference. Nationwide, college voting rates increased by more than three percentage points between 2012 and 2016, more than the overall turnout increase. Between 2014 and 2018, youth turnout rose by nearly a third.
In an era of high partisanship and close contests, student voting can make a tremendous impact. In Arizona, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema won her U.S. Senate seat by 55,900 votes, roughly the size of ASU Tempe’s student population. In Texas, youth turnout tripled between 2014 and 2018, and Democrat Beto O’Rourke overperformed in counties with a high percentage of young voters. That means that UT Austin was at the vanguard of a trend that helped bring O’Rourke surprisingly close to unseating Ted Cruz from the U.S. Senate.
The increase in student voting is counterintuitive, but it fits a broader pattern. Even as franchise restrictions target certain communities, political scientists have found that they do not usually result in lower proportional turnout. There is little evidence that voter ID laws have led to markedly less voting among racial minorities, even though minorities are far less likely than white people to possess the kinds of identification these laws require. Researchers aren’t quite sure why. But several have suggested that the reason is counter-mobilization: the harder a state works to suppress turnout, the harder people fight back.
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... KOS
...in
- n Louisiana, Republicans are trying to win a supermajority in the legislature so that even if the state’s Democratic governor is re-elected this fall, he won’t be able to veto future GOP gerrymanders.
- In Mississippi, they want to maintain the state’s lifetime ban on voting for people convicted of any of a long list of felonies, even those who’ve completed their sentences—a relic of Jim Crow that makes the state one of just a few to do so.
- And in Kentucky, they’re eager to flip the office of secretary of state—currently held by a Democrat—so that they’ll have complete control over how elections are run when Mitch McConnell seeks an eighth term next year
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/analysis-17-million-americans-purged-from-voter-rolls-between-2016-and-2018/
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Analysis: 17 million Americans purged from voter rolls between 2016 and 2018
Written by Common Dreams August 3, 2019
Millions of Americans are still suffering the consequences of the 2013 Supreme Court decision that loosened restrictions of the Voting Rights Act, giving states with long histories of voter discrimination free reign to purge voters from their rolls without federal oversight.
The Brennan Center for Justice released a study Thursday showing that 17 million Americans were dropped from voter rolls between 2016 and 2018—almost four million more than the number purged between 2006 and 2008.
The problem was most pronounced in counties and election precincts with a history of racial oppression and voter suppression. In such areas voters were kicked off rolls at a rate 40 percent higher than places which have protected voting rights more consistently.
Following the Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, counties with histories of discrimination no longer have to obtain “pre-clearance,” or approval from the Department of Justice (DOJ), before they make changes to voting procedures—allowing them to slash their voter rolls liberally, often resulting in voter suppression of eligible voters.
According to the Brennan Center, Shelby County single-handedly pushed two million people off voter rolls across the country over four years after the case was decided.
“The effect of the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision has not abated,” researcher Kevin Morris wrote Friday.
The Brennan Center said that while there are legitimate reasons for removing names from a state’s voter database, such as a relocation to another state or a death, many voters’ names—especially those of minority voters—are purged even though they meet the state’s requirements for casting a ballot.
“In big states like California and Texas, multiple individuals can have the same name and date of birth, making it hard to be sure that the right voter is being purged when perfect data are unavailable,” wrote Morris. “Troublingly, minority voters are more likely to share names than white voters, potentially exposing them to a greater risk of being purged.”
“Voters often do not realize they have been purged until they try to cast a ballot on Election Day—after it’s already too late,” Morris added.
In its report, the Brennan Center included a map showing the counties where the most voters were dropped from the rolls.
17 million Americans were purged from voter rolls between 2016 and 2018.17 million Americans were purged from voter rolls between 2016 and 2018.
Indiana purged close to a quarter of voters from its rolls between 2016 and 2018, while Wisconsin and Virginia dropped about 14 percent of voters. More than 10 percent of voters in Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Maine were purged from voter databases.
High rates of voter purging in some states have made headlines in recent months. Georgia’s Republican Gov. Mark Kemp came under fire during his election campaign last year for overseeing, as secretary of state, the purging of more than 100,000 voters from the state rolls, including many people of color.
In Ohio, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown was among those protesting this week against an impending purge of as many as 235,000 voters from the state’s rolls.
Across the country, the Brennan Center said Friday, election officials must embrace efforts to make voting easier, not harder, and ensure eligible voters don’t show up to the polls in upcoming elections only to find out that their name has been purged.
“Election administrators must be transparent about how they are deciding what names to remove from the rolls,” said the organization. “They must be diligent in their efforts to avoid erroneously purging voters. And they should push for reforms like automatic voter registration and election day registration, which keep voters’ registration records up to date.”
“Election Day is often too late to discover that a person has been wrongfully purged,” the group added.
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Florida’s GOP governor approves repugnant new law that could ban up to 1 million from voting Floridians voted in favor of a constitutional amendment to restore voting… |
https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/john-roberts-will-wreck-democracy-if-trump-gets-out-of-his-way/
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John Roberts will wreck democracy — if Trump gets out of his way
written by Sophia Tesfaye / Salon June 28, 2019
A pair of rulings handed down by the Supreme Court on the last day of its current session shows just how muchChief Justice John Roberts has overseen the slow destruction of the democratic process in this country over the last decade.
Since assuming the center seat on the nation’s highest court in 2005, Roberts has ruled in favor of unlimited corporate spending in political elections and against enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. This week he added allowing partisan gerrymandering to continue and at least a potential citizenship question on the census, an obvious attempt to intimidate non-citizens and immigrants out of participating.
Yes, technically Roberts joined with the court’s four “liberal” justices in a complex 5-4 decision on whether the Trump administration can ask all recipients a citizenship question on the 2020 census for the first time since 1950. But his ruling isn’t anything to get excited about. Quite the contrary.
The question, which critics say would further reduce the already low Hispanic participation rate, had been blocked by numerous federal courts. The Trump administration had claimed it was necessary to better comply with federal voting rights law.
“There’s no evidence in this record that the secretary [of Commerce] would have asked this question had the Department of Justice not requested it,” Solicitor General Noel Francisco argued in court.
But there was plenty of evidence to suggest that this question was fed to the Trump campaign team around the time of the election by former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a notorious advocate of voter suppression tactics. It likely came through former Trump campaign CEO and White House adviser Steve Bannon, before landing in the lap of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the census. The administration simply lied about all that.
Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y., asked Ross during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing last year, “Has the president or anyone in the White House discussed with you or anyone on your team about adding the citizenship question?”
Ross replied: “I am not aware of any such.”
His lawyers later admitted, however, that “Secretary Ross recalls that [Steve] Bannon called Secretary Ross in the Spring of 2017 to ask Secretary Ross if he would be willing to speak to then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobachabout Secretary Kobach’s ideas about a possible citizenship question on the decennial census,” despite initial claims that Ross could not “confirm that the Secretary spoke to Steve Bannon regarding the Citizenship Question.”
In a July 2017 email to Ross, Kobach proposed wording for a citizenship question. He complained that “aliens who do not actually ‘reside’ in the United States are still counted” in the census numbers used to determine how many seats in Congress each state gets. This is ludicrous on its face: You do not have to be a citizen of a given country to “reside” within it.
The evidence is damning and difficult to ignore — but if the Trump administration had not blatantly lied to Roberts’ face, they probably would have gotten away with it.
“The sole stated reason” for the citizenship question, Roberts wrote in his opinion, “seems to have been contrived. We are presented, in other words, with an explanation for agency action that is incongruent with what the record reveals about the agency’s priorities and decisionmaking process.”
The decision remands the case to lower courts to be reconsidered. The census wasn’t saved by the Supreme Court, but by Trump’s incompetence. Roberts essentially stated that the citizenship question was legitimate — but that the government had to come up with a better excuse for it.
The U.S. census has never been about how many people are citizens or eligible voters in a given area. It’s about a much simpler question: How many people live there. Adding the citizenship question, in light of the evidence that it would depress response rates, only serves as a direct contradiction of the census’ principal purpose. Congress has directed the Census Bureau to spend no more on the 2020 Census than it did in 2010 when, according to the government’s reports, Latinos were undercounted by 1.5 percent and African-Americans by nearly 2 percent.
The Trump administration argued in court that there was not enough evidence that the question would decrease the response rate to block the question. (Research from the Census Bureau itself strongly suggests otherwise.) The administration also previously told the court that the questionnaire needed to be printed by the end of June — which you will notice is upon us. No doubt the government will now concede that the real deadline is October, as the challengers to the question have long argued. Roberts is merely inviting the administration to come back with a better lie.
Under Roberts’ tenure, the court’s conservative justices have previously provided free legal advice to favor certain outcomes. For instances, they asked the Trump administration come back several times with modifications to its so-called travel ban, so that the court could pretend it was something other than a “Muslim ban.” In the infamous Citizens United case, the Roberts court had the plaintiff reframe demands in order for the conservatives to rule on the case they wanted, rather than the one actually in front of them.
Unfortunately for the Trump administration, even with a second bite of the apple on the census question, this case is likely to face even more scrutiny.
As a federal trial judge in Maryland ruled earlier this month, new evidence presented after oral arguments had been heard by the Supreme Court had raised “a substantial issue.” The recently revealed evidence shows just how racist the basis for this entire question actually was.
The late GOP redistricting strategist Thomas Hofeller played a substantial role in adding the citizenship question, according to documents uncovered after his death. Hofeller argued that adding a citizenship question would depress Hispanic response rates, thereby allowing states to redraw districts that boosted “Republicans and non-Hispanic whites” to an unfair electoral advantage for years to come.
The Supreme Court did not initially consider the Hofeller evidence, which did not emerge until the case had been argued, but the evidence of racial bias will indisputably be part of the record the second time around. In a blatant attempt to stop congressional oversight on this front, the Justice Department on recently threatened to invoke presidential powers to withhold the documents on its efforts to add the citizenship question, unless House Democrats backed off their threats to hold Ross in contempt of Congress. So far, Democrats haven’t blink.
In light of an earlier ruling by Roberts, the census case is merely a temporary failure and another example of a rookie mistake by Trump.
Before handing down his surprise decision in the census case, Roberts ruled alongside the other four justices appointed by Republicans to allow partisan gerrymandering to go unchallenged in federal court. This essentially guarantees that the political party that controls a statehouse can draw voting districts however it wishes, without intervention.
“For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent. “Of all times to abandon the Court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one. The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections.”
The ramifications of this decision will be felt for decades to come all over the country. There’s ample evidence that Republicans in office have pursued gerrymandered maps to shut out people of color or other groups likely to vote Democratic — either by carving them up and dispersing them, or by concentrating them into as few districts as possible.
John Roberts, who gave Republicans a green light to install legislative majorities against the will of the people — and may yet allow them yet another tool to keep power through the census — seeks to convey a sense of consensus, as biographer Joan Biskupic notes. Supreme Court justices “do not sit on opposite sides of an aisle, we do not caucus in separate rooms, and we do not serve one party or one interest. We serve one nation,” Roberts insisted last October.
But as Nse Ufot, the executive director of New Georgia Project, the nonprofit voter engagement group founded by Stacey Abrams, notes: “Justice Roberts is hiding behind the concept of federalism. They’re using the separation of powers and branches of government as a pretext for attacking civil rights. They have a sacred duty to uphold the Constitution. [The 2013 decision to overturn parts of the Voting Rights Act] told us everything we needed to know about the Roberts Court and their hostility toward civil rights and voting rights.”
Roberts wrote both of Thursday’s majority opinions. This is his project, and it’s not over.
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also scotus on gerrymander
https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/supreme-court-sends-census-citizenship-case-back-to-lower-court-after-bombshell-evidence-reveals-gops-true-motives/
no lnx
Supreme Court sends census citizenship case back to lower court after bombshell evidence reveals GOP’s true motives
STEPHEN WOLF / DAILY KOS
27 JUN 2019 AT 15:30 ET
In a surprise decision that will help preserve fair political representation, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Trump administration from adding a question to the 2020 census asking U.S. residents about their citizenship status, instead sending the case back to lower court for it to explore explosive new evidence behind the GOP’s motives for including the question.
The addition of this citizenship question would have likely had a chilling effect, intimidating millions of people in immigrant communities into not participating in the census. That in turn would haveturbocharged a new wave of hyperpartisan Republican gerrymandering nationwide, since census data is the bedrock of redistricting.
This impact was in fact the entire rationale behind this question: In a recent bombshell report, based on newly unearthed documents from a deceased GOP political consultant, Thomas Hofeller, Republicans admitted that rigging the census would eviscerate the political power of Democrats and voters of color.
The Constitution mandates that every person in the U.S. be counted in the decennial census, without regard to their legal status. A question on citizenship hasn’t been included in the census since 1950, and even when it has appeared, it has never been asked of every single participant, as the Trump administration intended it to be in 2020. Furthermore, multiple lower courts had ruled that Trump’s attempt to add the question violated both federal law and the Constitution.
Those courts uniformly dismissed the Trump administration’s claim that the Justice Department needed data on citizenship to enforce the Voting Rights Act as a bogus pretext that masked their true motives. Hofeller’s document trove revealed the GOP’s racist and partisan intent: allowing mapmakers to use citizenship statistics result in “a disadvantage to the Democrats” and to be “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.”
Although the Census Bureau had planned to print millions of census forms in July, plaintiffs argued that it could delay printing until October to give the courts time to resolve the case. Now, the case will go back to the federal district court in New York that originally heard the matter. That will allow the judge to conduct an in-depth review of the new evidence and craft a ruling that addresses the Trump administration’s racial and partisan animus. In the likely event that the lower court once again blocks the question, the Supreme Court may let such a ruling stand following its latest decision.
Given the blatant display of partisan and racial bigotry behind the GOP’s plans, this ruling averted a major blow to democracy that would have rivaled the harms of both 2000’s Bush v. Gore decision and the 2013 ruling that crippled the Voting Rights Act. Although the Supreme Court’s Republican majority has advanced an increasingly partisan agenda that undermines the rule of law, Trump’s malicious effort to weaponize the census simply proved to be too extreme for the court to accept.
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619 an
As he blocks election security bills, Mitch McConnell takes checks from voting machine lobbyists
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January 9th, 2019
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today Representatives Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA) and A. Donald McEachin (D-VA) reintroduced the Election Day Holiday Act, legislation that will make Election Day a federal holiday.
The right to vote is fundamental in our democracy, yet U.S. voter turnout is consistently among the lowest of all established democracies around the world. A 2014 study found that among those who didn’t vote, 35 percent didn’t have time to do so because of work or school. The Election Holiday Actmakes Election Day a federal holiday so more Americans have the time they need to vote and participate in our democracy.
“People should not be forced to choose between their job or family and exercising their right to vote.” Rep. Eshoo said. “At a time when our democracy needs to be strengthened, and when many states are restricting access to the ballot box, it’s more important than ever for Congress to reaffirm our commitment to the most fundamental aspect of democracy, the right to vote. Strong voter turnout is essential to a healthy democracy, and this legislation ensures more voices are heard in the political process.”
“I am proud to introduce the Election Day Holiday Act again this Congress with Congresswoman Eshoo to require that our country treats Election Day as a holiday. We must do all we can to remove barriers to the ballot box. I fought for voters’ rights by introducing similar legislation during my time as a member of Virginia’s General Assembly,” said Congressman Donald McEachin. “The right to vote is sacred and should be protected. Our democracy depends on this fundamental principle.”
Reps. Eshoo and McEachin first introduced the Election Day Holiday Act in the 115th Congress with 30 cosponsors. The Election Day Holiday Act is also included in H.R. 1, the For the People Act,the sweeping reform and anti-corruption package introduced by House Democrats to restore our democracy and return political power to the American people
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Texas Republicans are pushing two new bills that critics say are aimed at suppressing voter turnout after a similar bill died days before the end of their legislative session.
On Sunday, a State Senate bill that was passed with only Republican support, which would have increased criminal penalties for voter registration-related crimes and made it harder for volunteers to help elderly and disabled voters get to the polls, effectively died after it missed a legislative deadline in the House, The Texas Observer reported.
With the legislative session drawing to an end, Republican lawmakers have passed two more bills that critics say are intended to reduce voter turnout.
House Bill 1888 would ban mobile polling stations, which help college students, the elderly and low-income residents cast ballots, from being mobile. The bill would require these temporary branch polling places to remain in just one location for the duration of the early voting period. Mobile polling stations are currently used as a way to address demand and wait times for groups that may have difficulty getting to a polling location, like rural voters, college students and residents at long-term care facilities.
State Sen. Joan Huffman, a Houston Republican who sponsored the bill, said that the mobile polling places were being abused by “targeting desirable voting populations at the exclusion of others.” She rejected concerns from Democrats about disadvantaged groups being hurt by the move, saying that those who need to make arrangements to vote “have time to do that.”
But Charles Mario Henry, a San Antonio U.S. Army veteran with impaired mobility, said the move would also hurt vets.
“This is going to take away their ability to access these polls. … We don’t need to have voter suppression laws, especially after serving the country honorably,” Henry told The Texas Observer. “I’m sure, on both sides of the aisle, Republicans and Democrats, we can all agree that taking away those rights is not something we want to do as a state.”
Republicans also doubled down on the state’s failed attempted voter purge. Earlier this year, Texas Secretary of State David Whitley announced that the state had identified nearly 100,000 people he claimed were illegally registered to vote. Whitley later admitted that many of the people on the list were actually naturalized citizens and a federal judge banned the state from removing anyone from the rolls without court permission, slamming Whitley for abusing “the power of government to strike fear and anxiety and to intimidate the least powerful among us.”
Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes introduced an amendment this week that would require the secretary of state to verify voter eligibility by confirming their citizenship status on a monthly basis.
Democrats said the bill raised the same concerns as Whitley’s failed purge attempt.
“My concern is that we’re just going to put a target on naturalized citizens and keep them from being eligible to vote,” San Antonio Democrat José Menendez told The Texas Observer.
“At the end of the day, there are still some problems with tying in the review of the voter rolls with the DPS records, especially because that process has been exposed to be faulty to begin with,” added Zenén Jaimes Pérez, communications director for the Texas Civil Rights Project. “This process will be a waste of time and money on the part of the state.”
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https://www.facingsouth.org/2019/05/institute-index-high-cost-non-citizen-voter-myth
Month in which Texas Interim Secretary of State David Whitley (R) launched a review of the state's voter rolls in an effort to find and remove non-U.S. citizens: 1/2019
In a January advisory he sent to county registrars, number of non-citizens Whitley alleged were registered to vote in his state: 98,000
Number of business days after sending out the advisory that Whitley acknowledged that his list, compiled from Texas Department of Public Safety data, contained erroneous information, though he did not withdraw it or the advisory: 1
Percent of Texas's naturalized citizens who are either Latino or Asian: 75
Date on which President Donald Trump tweeted about Whitley's efforts, sharing additional incorrect information about non-citizen voting: 1/27/2019
Factor by which turnout of Latino voters in Texas increased from the 2014 to the 2018 midterm elections, with exit polls showing they voted overwhelmingly for Democrats: 2
Date on which the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) sent letters to Texas counties warning that they risked being sued if they challenged voters' eligibility based on Whitley's claims: 1/28/2019
Date on which MALDEF filed a lawsuit against Whitley on behalf of individual naturalized citizens and voting rights groups for conspiring with Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, also Republicans, to violate the naturalized citizens' constitutional rights by questioning their voting eligibility: 2/1/2019
Total number of legal challenges brought against Texas over the flawed non-citizen purge: 3
Date on which a settlement was reached in the cases, which were consolidated into one, requiring Whitley to scrap the flawed list: 4/26/2019
According to the judge's order in the case, of the 98,000 people on Whitley's original list, number who had actually been identified by elections officials as potentially ineligible to vote: 80
Amount Texas must pay in costs and attorney's fees for the plaintiffs, in addition to revising how it investigates voter citizenship: $450,000
Date by which Whitley, who was temporarily appointed to the post last December, must be confirmed by the state Senate: 5/27/2019
Date on which all 12 Democrats in the 31-member Texas Senate announced their opposition to him over the non-citizen voting debacle, which would make Whitley's confirmation mathematically impossible: 2/25/2019
Number of other Southern states where Republican politicians have also targeted alleged non-citizen voters using flawed methods: 2*
* Florida and North Carolina.
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fac so
Southern legislatures take aim at direct democracy
After voters approved a constitutional amendment restoring the franchise to people with felony convictions, Florida lawmakers are trying to make it harder for citizens to put amendments on the ballot. Legislators in Arkansas, the only other Southern state that allows citizen-initiated amendments, did likewise after voters passed a minimum-wage hike.
[also have to pay any fees/fines to get vote back
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https://www.democracynow.org/2019/4/24/a_threat_to_democracy_justices_appear
citizen q census
ca ny tex lose big time, fed funds, seats in congress
U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday in a case challenging the Trump administration’s plans to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census. Voting rights activists fear that adding the question will deter immigrants from participating in the census and lead to a vast undercount in states with large immigrant communities. Census officials have estimated 6.5 million people will not respond to the census if the citizenship question is added. This undercount could affect everything from the redrawing of congressional maps to the allocation of federal funding.
The case centers on whether Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross had the authority to add the question to the census. The American Civil Liberties Union and 17 states have sued, saying Ross’s move was aimed at deterring immigrants from participating in the census. During the oral arguments, the court’s conservative majority appeared to side with the Trump administration, while the liberal minority questioned the administration’s motives and methods. Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, “There’s no doubt that people will respond less. If you’re talking about prediction, this is about 100 percent that people will answer less.” We speak with Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. MALDEF is representing plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits challenging the census citizenship question. We also speak with Ari Berman, senior writer at Mother Jones. His new piece is titled “In Census Case, Supreme Court Suddenly Cares a Lot About Voting Rights Act.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday in a case challenging the Trump administration’s plans to include a question on citizenship to the 2020 census. Voting rights activists fear that adding the question will deter immigrants from participating in the census and lead to a vast undercount in states with large immigrant communities. Census officials have estimated 6.5 million people will not respond to the census if the citizenship question is added. This undercount could affect everything from the redrawing of congressional maps to the allocation of federal funding.
The case centers on whether Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross had the authority to add the question to the census. The American Civil Liberties Union and 17 states have sued, saying Ross’s move was aimed at deterring immigrants from participating in the census. During the oral arguments, the court’s conservative majority appeared to side with the Trump administration, while the liberal minority questioned the administration’s motives and methods. Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, quote, “There’s no doubt that people will respond less. If you’re talking about prediction, this is about 100 percent that people will answer less.”
AMY GOODMAN: Chief Justice John Roberts appeared to support the addition of the citizenship question, saying it was, quote, “quite common” to add a demographics questions to the census. He asked the plaintiffs in the suit, “Do you think it wouldn’t help voting rights enforcement?” Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the United Nations recommends countries ask a citizenship question on the census, listing a number of countries that ask about citizenship, including Spain, Germany, Canada, Australia, Ireland and Mexico. After the Supreme Court heard oral arguments, New York state Attorney General Letitia James, who helped bring the lawsuit, spoke outside the court.
ATTORNEY GENERAL LETITIA JAMES: Adding that particular citizenship question could lead to the undercounting in communities across America, particularly in immigrant communities and Hispanic communities. It would mean that communities entitled to resources wouldn’t get those resources. It would deny certain communities of equal representation. And so, in the interest of fairness, in the interest of upholding this quintessential American promise, we are obligated to ensure the most accurate count in the 2020 census. And as such, we must use every tool at our disposal, in our arsenal, to fight to protect its integrity. And that’s what we did today.
AMY GOODMAN: [We go now] to Los Angeles, where we’re joined by Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. MALDEF is representing plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits challenging the census citizenship question. And here in New York, we’re joined by Ari Berman, senior writer at Mother Jones, reporting fellow at The Nation Institute, author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America.
So, Ari, you attended the Supreme Court oral arguments yesterday. Set the scene for us. And were you surprised by the tenor of the questions?
ARI BERMAN: I did. And this really is one of the most important cases for democracy in decades, Amy, because the census determines so many things in our society: how $880 billion in federal funding is allocated, how voting districts are drawn, how many House seats, how many Electoral College votes states have. There really is nothing we do that’s more important in a democracy than the census. And this one question about U.S. citizenship has the possibility to derail the entire census. One of the most important and longest constitutional responsibilities that our government has could now be derailed and turned into a political weapon by the Trump administration to target immigrants and places where lots of immigrants live.
And so, I was hoping I would hear these big-picture debates in the Supreme Court about the importance of the census and how this question threatens the census. Instead, the conservative justices on the court seemed very sympathetic to this question. They really didn’t question the motives of Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, who added this question, even though three different federal courts have struck it down. Six years ago, I was in the Supreme Court when they railed against the Voting Rights Act, called it an act of regional discrimination against the South. And then, suddenly, six years later, the same conservative justices that gutted the Voting Rights Act suddenly believe that this citizenship question is now necessary to enforce the Voting Rights Act, which every voting rights lawyer will tell you it’s not. And so, once again, we have a situation where the Supreme Court seems like they are about to side with folks that want to gut voting rights, roll back civil rights, target immigrant communities, as opposed to protecting one of the most important constitutional responsibilities that we have.
...
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/republican-states-go-all-in-on-voter-suppression-in-response-to-2018-blue-wave
Republicans can only win by cheating, and they’re barely even bothering to hide their intentions. Several Republican-led states are responding to big election losses to Democrats in 2018 not by evolving to answer the electorate’s wishes, but by shrinking that electorate through voter suppression.
In Texas, they’re looking at making a mistake on a voter registration form a felony, with criminal penalties including jail time for voter registration errors or for casting an ineligible ballot. Arizona is trying to make early voting more complicated; Tennessee lawmakers are considering discouraging voter registration groups by creating fines for submitting incomplete forms.
These are all states that either saw substantial gains for Democrats in 2018, or have key races in 2020. In Arizona, in particular, this is a direct result of big Democratic turnout in 2018, and the loss of four statewide seats, including the U.S. Senate seat now held by Kyrsten Sinema. In Texas, two U.S. House seats and 12 state legislative seats flipped. In 2018 in Tennessee, new Democratic registrations and votes surged in Memphis and Nashville.
The second Arizona seat, as well as Sen. John Cornyn’s in Texas, are up in 2020. That and the potential—long shot thought it may be—for those states to flip in the presidential election are enough to have Republicans anxious to make sure as many Democrats and new voters as possible are cut out of the process.
In all of the states, lawmakers insist that they wouldn’t be going after regular people making mistakes, but only “people who are intentionally cheating,” as Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes in Texas says. “This is only going after folks that create chaos intentionally or knowingly,” says Tennessee coordinator of elections Mark Goins. And we all know who that means: young people, people of color, the usual “cheating” suspects for Republicans.
The only way Republicans can win—even in states like Arizona and Texas—is not to let the majority of people vote.
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DN 4/24/19 citizen q on census: gop wants to restrict from everyone/person to cit -> voters, shift from urban ppl of color to white rural; big 3 states could lose reps 1st time in history