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AN 7 26
WASHINGTON — Mass voter challenges are likely to occur in the 2026 midterm elections, the Brennan Center for Justice warned Tuesday, with the potential to “undermine the democratic process.”
President Donald Trump and the Republican Party have been laying the groundwork for questioning the election process in state after state, as Trump has made “election integrity” the centerpiece of his recent domestic policy initiatives, including in a July 16 address to the nation.
The center, at NYU School of Law, found in a report Tuesday that more than 185,000 challenges to voter eligibility were filed by private citizens in 2024, though “the real number is likely higher” since many election officials either were not contacted or sent incomplete responses to an inquiry. The center is regarded as left-leaning.
Mass challenges are a fairly recent development, spurred by improvements in election technology and transparency. Thousands of votes now can be challenged at once.
They’ve rarely been successful, but experts worry they create voter doubts about whether elections are being conducted fairly. Historically such challenges have also often been used to suppress the votes of people of color, a separate brief said.
“Eligible voters facing challenges sometimes don’t vote simply because the process is too confusing. Responding to a challenge requires numerous steps that can trip up voters. They may not understand their options for verifying their identity,” said the report by Brennan Center Counsel Andrew Garber.
Garber found that “mass voter challenges have become a key element in the campaign to use election integrity as a pretext for voter suppression.”
In 2024, he found, election deniers lodged challenges, “in addition to spreading lies about widespread voter fraud, refusing to certify elections, discrediting voting machines, engaging in bad faith poll watching, filing frivolous lawsuits, and threatening election officials with physical harm or criminal penalties”
This year, Garber warned, such challenges are likely to be an “integral strategy in the playbook to undermine the democratic process.”
Mass challenges, he said, “add basically zero value to elections while creating new costs.”
One big worry, though: “There are instances of eligible voters being removed from the rolls and learning of their removal after the deadline to register and vote in the next election,” the report said. “As is often the case with voter suppression, vulnerable individuals frequently suffer the effects.”
Mullin threats
The Trump administration is pushing state officials to examine their voter rolls and tighten their election security, thus opening the door for the help of the federal government in conducting mass challenges, the report predicted.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said last week that hundreds of thousands of noncitizens are registered to vote in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania and threatened to prosecute election officials in states that don’t “participate in securing the elections” ahead of the November midterms. He has not specified the source of his data.
Trump has demanded Congress require people to show proof of citizenship when they register to vote and photo IDs at the polls. So far, lawmakers have so far been reluctant to approve the SAVE America Act that in various versions would restrict voting, and it remains stalled in the U.S. Senate.
Trump and his allies have maintained for years the 2020 election was marred by voter fraud. No evidence of any widespread fraud has been found.
Election officials have largely maintained their rolls are accurate and up to date.
“In most states, list maintenance practices tend to keep pace with natural changes in voters’ lives, such as moving,” said a report this month by the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research.
Mass challenges
Recent mass challenges have rarely been successful.
The report cited efforts in Georgia, Michigan, Texas, Florida and Iowa in 2022.
“These challenges were widely rejected for lack of evidence or failure to comply with state law,” the Brennan Center found.
In 2024, Brennan’s research found that private citizens filed at least 185,232 voter challenges in the states studied. Of those, the center found officials accepted at least 5,477. That means they may have removed the voter from the rolls, declared them inactive or taken other steps to make it difficult for them to vote.
Researchers sent requests to Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas and to numerous counties in those states, the report methodology said.
“One takeaway is evident: With only around 3 percent of challenges clearly accepted, challenges contributed little to list maintenance in 2024,” Brennan found.
For instance, Georgia got in touch with about 875,000 voters in 2023 who had moved or had not voted for several years. That was more than a hundred times the number of Georgia voters who were successfully challenged the next year.
The center compiled the report by sending public records requests to 42 state and local government entities. It asked for any documents involving voter challenges in 2024 and how officials dealt with those challenges. It also looked at court filings, public reporting and election board meetings.
“Acquiring a complete record of challenges is impossible: They are often made ad hoc, officials may have no obligation to track them, and the records produced are often incomplete,” the center noted, adding that some officials refused to provide records or said they got no challenges.
AN PHOENIX FLA 7 26
“‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’”
That’s how federal judge Mark Walker began his 2022 injunction blocking enforcement of Ron DeSantis’ “Stop Woke Act” in Florida institutions of higher education.
In case you don’t recognize the quotation, it’s from George Orwell’s “1984:” You know, the novel where the Ministry of Truth rewrites history and forbids free enquiry.
Certain words are banned; wrong thinking is punished. Even hearing about disfavored ideas is considered an attack on decency and order.
As defendant in the case, the State of Florida argued (apparently with a straight face) university professors have the right to free speech, sure, but only if the state approves of that speech.
The law forbade teaching anything that explores racial or gender injustice.
You weren’t allowed to say, given how we still struggle to overcome discrimination against minorities, women, and the disabled, that maybe diversity, equity and inclusion programs helped a lot of people; you must embrace color-blindness in all things (because we all know race doesn’t matter in America!); yet, woe betide you if you ever made a white person feel “guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex.”
Like many of us teaching in the state university system, the judge was unimpressed.
DeSantis and the legal team from his Ministry of Truth appealed up the food chain to the 11th Circuit, and what do you know?
‘Breathtaking assertion of power’
The majority opinion, by a Trump appointee, is unsparing.
Judge Britt C. Grant wrote, “If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it.”
She called the Stop Woke law “a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse.”
Naturally, the governor pitched a little hissy fit, taking to social media to say, “State universities are funded by taxpayers and directed by elected officials and their appointees. The state has both a right and a responsibility to ensure instruction at these universities is consistent with the underlying mission and to exclude indoctrination and ideological agendas.”
He called the decision “judicial overreach.”
Let’s talk about gubernatorial overreach. Or, to put it another way, what is this guy’s problem with education?
Is he really that frightened of ideas?
If he and his education appointees are so convinced their positions — slavery had an upside, gender is 100% biological, capitalism is divinely ordained, a woman’s highest destiny is to be a mother, vaccines are unnecessary, climate change isn’t real — are valid, surely they’d welcome testing them with historical records, expert reports, and empirical evidence.
Facts, even.
Reading books by and about, say, gay people, teaching the history of Stonewall, or examining central Supreme Court decisions such as Obergefell v. Hodges, do not mean straight people will somehow become gay, any more than studying Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” will necessarily inspire you to assassinate any official you think has gotten too big for his britches.
Gender studies will not destroy heterosexuality; it’s simply a way to talk about the ways people understand who they are, how they present themselves, how other people see them.
Snowflakes
Universities are supposed to be where you encounter people who aren’t like you, unfamiliar, maybe upsetting, points of view, tricky topics, and ideas your parents don’t approve of.
Intellectual freedom means we should be able to discuss almost anything.
Yet the DeSantis administration act like snowflakes, hypersensitive, unwilling to contemplate anything outside their very white, very Christian, pathetically nationalist, bubble.
DeSantis is especially nervous America’s racial history, trying to outlaw “The 1619 Project,” a brilliant collection of writings about how the arrival of the first slaves on the Virginia shore has informed and shaped our country, shutting down or crippling African American Studies programs.
I guess white people are so used to considering themselves the “real” Americans who had all the good ideas, invented all the good stuff, and “built this country,” the reality that Africa is as central to our identity as Europe is scary.
The governor and his crew seem especially freaked out by the possibility students might encounter Critical Race Theory. Listening to them, you’d think CRT is to blame for everything from high gas prices to the common cold.
CRT is pretty simple: Race is socially constructed (not biological) and racism is not merely a product of individual bias (though that’s part of it) but embedded in our legal, educational, medical, and financial systems.
Say a white person and a Black person commit the same crime. It would make sense if they got the same sentence, right?
But in most cases the Black person will get a longer sentence.
‘The perfect villain’
The Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health policy think tank, has repeatedly shown structural racism (conscious or not) in the medical profession means doctors and nurses misdiagnose Black, Latino, and members of other ethnic communities far more often than they do whites, and, unlike with white patients, tend to dismiss their pain.
Infant mortality among people of color is at least twice as high than it is for whites.
There’s nothing sinister or anti-American in acknowledging, as Justice Thurgood Marshall said, the original Constitution was “defective from the start,” given that it upheld slaveholders’ rights in their human property and protected the slave trade.
Slavery was at the heart of our republic since its beginning.
It still reverberates in our culture.
There’s nothing anti-white in pointing this out. The Founders installed in the Constitution ways to amend it, fix social problems, even change American society.
The country is an ongoing project: We’re still striving for that “more perfect union,” and acknowledging the blindingly obvious ways in which our deals don’t match up with our reality is not a heinous assault on patriotism.
CRT was developed by legal scholars, and has long been part of law school curricula. Nobody much noticed it until 2021, when a right-wing activist called Christopher Rufo kicked off a national moral panic.
You might remember Rufo from the 2024 presidential campaign, amplifying J.D. Vance’s lies about Haitians in Ohio eating cats and dogs.
Before that, Rufo had made a name for himself as a warrior against anything he saw as “woke,” especially in higher education.
DeSantis appointed Rufo to New College’s Board of Trustees (he’s since left) to help destroy what once was an admired, creative, and tolerant liberal arts school, labeling any teaching he didn’t like “Critical Race Theory.”
CRT, he said, is “the perfect villain.”
Army of lefties
Having tried to banish CRT along with sociology, the unpleasant parts of American history, the novels of Toni Morrison, and any science that might reveal things are more complicated than they’d like, DeSantis, the various mediocrities running Florida’s Department of Education, and fellow travelers such as Moms for Liberty, have convinced themselves universities are hotbeds of “Marxist indoctrination.”
Apparently, professors — especially in the Humanities and Social Sciences — are not merely “woke,” we’re a bunch of commies, determined to brainwash the Youth of Florida into hollering “Workers of the World Unite!” — assured they have nothing to lose but their chains.
Or something like that.
Alas, all my colleagues and I must be really lousy at indoctrination. I don’t know anybody who’s been successful in producing even one committed Marxist.
But DeSantis et al. are convinced higher education is a plot to produce an army of lefties.
Not that they can produce much evidence of this.
They’re more ideologically rigid than the most committed Trotskyite, and less logical than the American officer who, standing in the ruins of a Vietnamese provincial capital in 1968, told reporter Peter Arnett, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”
Maybe the administration’s idea is to destroy higher ed in order to save it.
Hypotheticals
No doubt DeSantis took some comfort from the dissent in the 11th Circuit’s ruling.
Judge Barbara Lagoa, a former member of the Florida Supreme Court, (indeed, a DeSantis appointee and often mentioned as a potential U.S. Supreme Court justice), argues, what if “a professor who says that Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel was ‘exhilarating’ and something to be celebrated and encouraged?”
She goes on to say, “Florida acts well within its authority to curb professorial endorsements of that kind within its own classrooms.”
First of all, if someone were stupid enough to say such a thing, that professor could be disciplined for creating a hostile educational environment.
But taking a hypothetical case of poor judgment and concluding somehow professorial speech must always be equivalent to the views of the state violates the First Amendment.
The First Amendment protects offensive speech — even hate speech.
In George Orwell’s essay “Freedom of the Press,” he writes, “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
Or to quote again from the majority opinion, the university’s mission is to get students to “puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth.”
Professors call this “teaching.”
RANDOM EG
When it comes to talking about immigrants, the word “invasion” is both explosive and inaccurate, experts and human rights advocates say. Yet with Donald Trump back in the White House, it’s showing up on official orders and other communications — and it’s being echoed by Ohio politicians.
Just in the waning weeks of January, Trump issued two executive orders using the language — “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion” and “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.”
On Thursday, more than 80 civil and human rights organizations sent a letter to congressional leaders calling on them to reject what the groups said was a “false and bigoted conspiracy theory.”
As at times past, numbers of migrants spiked at the U.S.-Mexico border at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic and severely strained resources. That led certain politicians on the right — including Trump, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and now-Ohio U.S. Sen.Bernie Moreno — to claim it was an invasion even though migrants weren’t driving tanks, carrying machine guns, or even functioning as an organized group. They don’t even committed crime at rates as high as native-born Americans
“Immigration policy is an important topic that demands congressional discussion and debate,” the groups’ letter to Republican and Democratic congressional leaders said. “We implore Senate and House leadership not to support or fund efforts that are led by a fictional and dangerous conspiracy theory purporting an ‘invasion.’ Congress should not provide the justification for continued attacks on our democracy.”
In Texas, Abbott has tried to portray what has happened at the border as a military invasion as he seeks to take border-security responsibilities into his own hands. Such powers have traditionally been reserved for the federal government because it would create chaos if each of the 50 states was in charge of its own policy and security when it came to dealing with foreign countries.
Also, the places along the border that Abbott claimed were the site of a military invasion are among the safest communities in the country. So, even when immigrants showed up in large numbers, that didn’t amount to the military invasion Abbott claimed in an attempt to get around federal primacy, a judge ruled last year.
“Contemporary definitions of ‘invasion’ and ‘actually invaded’ as well as common usage of the term in the late Eighteenth Century predominantly referred to an ‘invasion’ as a hostile and organized military force, too powerful to be dealt with by ordinary judicial proceedings,” U.S. District Judge David Alan Ezra wrote last year as he blocked Abbott. “This Court could not locate a single contemporaneous use of the term to refer to surges in unauthorized foreign immigration.”
After briefly lifting it, the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year upheld Ezra’s stay and is scheduled to hear Texas’s appeal in July.
Meanwhile, many experts have said false claims of invasion have prompted murderous rampages against vulnerable communities. For example, Patrick Crusius in 2019 drove from Dallas to El Paso, posted a manifesto saying he was stopping an “invasion” at the border and went to a Walmart. There he used an AK-47 to murder 23 and injured 22 more.
Some experts say the fact that such false, incendiary rhetoric can be deadly isn’t just incidental, it’s part of the point. It scares immigrants and others from standing up to those who use it, and that serves the political ends of those who use such rhetoric, those experts say.
Not to fight false claims that we’re being invaded undermines democracy, a program director at one of the groups that signed the letter to congressional leaders said in a statement.
“Depicting migrants and refugees as an ‘invasion’ is not only a dangerous and bigoted attempt to fearmonger, it is now the basis of an authoritarian power grab,” said Liz Yates of the Western States Center.
In their letter, all the groups said the harm will only spread unless those in power stand against claims of an “invasion.”
“This bigoted narrative has already been leveraged to promote policies that have and will continue to have a devastating impact on immigrant communities,” the letter said. “It has also inspired a pattern of white nationalist and antisemitic deadly attacks across the nation. Use of this bigoted conspiracy theory as justification for a policy agenda poses a public safety risk not only to the immigrant communities who are targeted for policy enforcement, but also to Jewish, Black, Brown, Muslim, LGBTQ+, AANHPI, Latinx and many other communities who are implicated in this conspiratorial rhetoric. It also constitutes a direct threat to our democracy.” Congress must refuse to further legitimize this bigotry by sanctioning or funding policies in its name.”
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Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.
an sorta random eg 12 24
Mayor Barbara Foushee and city council members from the town of 21,000 located immediately west of Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina’s flagship campus pointed fingers at Duke Energy for knowing about the dangers associated with climate change but failing to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.
This marks the first lawsuit of its kind, in which a town is seeking action against a utility company in this manner, Foushee said. It was filed in Orange County Superior Court in Hillsborough. The state of Vermont passed law earlier this year that requires fossil fuel companies to pay a share of the damage caused by climate change.
“We’re bringing this lawsuit because taking care of our town, each other, and our climate is at the center of everything we do here in Carrboro,” Foushee said. “The climate crisis is causing tremendous harm to our community’s health and well-being.”
The suit seeks “compensation for the damages (both past and future) that it is incurring as a direct and proximate result of Duke’s campaign of deception and resulting exacerbation of the climate crisis” — damages that the suit estimates will total in the millions of dollars.
In a statement released on Wednesday, Duke Energy said, “We are in the process of reviewing the complaint. Duke Energy is committed to its customers and communities and will continue working with policymakers and regulators to deliver reliable and increasingly clean energy while keeping rates as low as possible.”
Suppressing a long-known truth
Top executives at Duke Energy have known about the risks of fossil fuels for more than 50 years, according to the lawsuit. But that didn’t stop the company from a “widespread campaign” to misinform the public about its effects on the environment, the complaint argues.
An example of this deception occurred when one of Duke’s predecessor entities, Cinergy, released an annual report in 2004 claiming there was “an unresolved but robust debate on the ‘science’ of global warming.” The lawsuit points out how “science” is placed in quotation marks even though Cinergy and Duke were aware of the causes and consequences of climate change.
The lawsuit points out that “North Carolina has just suffered its hottest year on record, and temperatures for the region may increase as much as 6°-10°F by the end of the century.”
Climate change, it states, has also contributed to extreme weather events, like Hurricane Helene, which wreaked catastrophic damage across communities in western North Carolina earlier this year.
“For far too long, corporations like Duke Energy have prioritized their executives’ personal fortunes at the expense of our communities, our planet and our collective well-being,” Mayor Pro Tem Danny Nowell said.
Based in Charlotte, Duke Energy provides electricity to more than eight million customers in six states and natural gas to around two million customers in five states. With a near-monopoly in North Carolina, the company is one of the country’s largest operators of coal and natural gas power plants.
The Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst ranked Duke Energy as the nation’s third-biggest emitter of gases responsible for climate change on the Greenhouse 100 Polluters Index.
Taxpayers aren’t funding the lawsuit, Foushee said. A nonprofit organization is covering the legal fees.
Council member Randee Haven-O’Donnell said Carrboro has made efforts to mitigate climate change since the 1970s, aiming to protect the area’s natural surroundings and ecosystems.
The actions of Duke Energy, however, have set that process backwards.
“We’ve been working hard and in earnest to protect our climate, and the giant utility has been deceiving us,” she said. “Duke Energy’s deceptive public information campaign has been working against us, erasing the progress we’ve urgently been striving to make to address climate change.”
Echoing findings of a recent nonprofit’s exposé
The allegations in the lawsuit about the knowledge that Duke and its predecessors possessed decades ago and then subsequently suppressed, echo findings detailed in a lengthy report prepared by Sue Sturgis, Research and Communications Manager for the nonprofit Energy and Policy Institute entitled “Duke Energy Knew: Documenting the Utility’s Early Knowledge and Ongoing Deception About Climate Change.”
According to the report, which was released in November, warnings about greenhouse-gas-induced climate change from Duke’s corporate predecessors date as far back as 1968 and were regularly touted in the 1970’s as justification for efforts to expand nuclear power.
Later on, Sturgis wrote — particularly in the 1980’s and 90’s as nuclear power fell from favor — warnings about CO2 emission and climate change became muted or disappeared.
In an interview with NC Newsline for an upcoming edition of the radio show/podcast, News & Views, Sturgis described the sequence events:
“And then, when the consensus around the science really came together in the late 1980’s we saw both the Duke utilities and also the industry associations that they were involved in pivot at that point, in order to protect their business model. They realized that if they were saying that…the climate problem was going to cause difficulties for their business model…they moved away from that message. Rather than change their business model, they said, ‘well, maybe we’re not so certain about the science, after all.” And so that’s really when we saw them selling the denial.”
Click here to explore Sturgis’ report. Read the Carrboro lawsuit below:
NC Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. NC Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Rob Schofield for questions: info@ncnewsline.com. Follow NC Newsline on Facebook and X.
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AN 12 24
Give the people what they want.
That’s the grumbling I’ve heard from more than one progressive in Kansas after voters strengthened GOP supermajorities in the Statehouse. New political math mean legislators likely won’t expand Medicaid or legalize marijuana anytime soon. Rather than support families in need, these lawmakers likely will erect further barriers to nutrition, health care and secure housing.
So what, these profoundly irritated people say. *Voters wanted this. Let them suffer the consequences
The same sentiment can be heard in national post-election dialogue. Voters can select leaders who harm them, experts warn.
“Authoritarianism is often popular. Many people support a strong and decisive leader,” said Timothy Longman, a professor of international relations and of political science at Boston University. “In Africa, which is the focus of my scholarship, military coups have frequently been greeted with dancing in the streets, because people think that military rule will bring order.”
People want a state government that throws the needy to the wolves. Let them feast.*
I understand why people feel this way. I understand the temptation to throw up one’s hands and retreat, leaving callous lawmakers free rein to slash taxes for oligarchs, pare budgets to the bone and legalize discrimination against minority groups. After an election in which consequences were clearly spelled out — Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly explicitly connected Medicaid expansion to state legislative races — a majority chose callousness.
But here’s my modest proposal: Forget that nonsense.
What’s right is right, no matter the majority’s whims. In Kansas, sizable numbers either voted another way or chose not to vote at all. Should we blithely accept policy that harms these folks as well?
A rising tide lifts all boats. But a sinking tide lowers all boats. Giving the people what they want could hurt everyone and everything.
Before starting at Kansas Reflector, I spent nearly four years in nonprofit children’s advocacy. My former boss, John Wilson, laid it out in a column published here Wednesday. Children will suffer the consequences of a neglectful Legislature. They can’t vote. They can’t make the kind of decisions that hand political power to one party or another. Their fates are up to the adults who take care of them.
“We cannot let the next legislative session go by without providing targeted relief to Kansas kids in need,” Wilson wrote.
He added: “We need every lawmaker to go into the 2025 session with the belief that there are tangible answers to the complex issues we’re facing.”
That means transcending rigid ideological frameworks. That means working across the aisle. That means accepting that sometimes government can provide solutions rather than simply create problems. That means opening lawmakers’ minds to the possibility that they can build and create, rather than slash and burn. Sometimes, the right thing to do — making sure that children grow up healthy and educated — transcends any one election.
This goes for Kansas’ delegation in Washington, D.C., too. Our U.S. senators and representatives will confront an dizzying array of choices in the coming months, along with great pressure from the new presidential administration. Can they chart an independent course, one that includes the folks who didn’t vote for them last month? Hope springs eternal, as Alexander Pope wrote.
I’m making a narrow point here, one that I don’t want folks to misconstrue. Lawmakers will reflect ideologies and policies supported by the voters who elected them. That’s natural. That’s the electoral name of the game. I raise no objection to such representation, even if I object to the policies that result.
Give the people what they want.
On the other hand, not all governmental functions can or should be viewed through an explicitly political lens.
Basic human rights transcend any election. These include the right to necessities such as housing and health care; the right to live unimpeded by prejudice; and the right to raise one’s voice in opposition, no matter the circumstances. They are elemental. They are foundational. While partisans may view such rights as liberal, they are in fact just reflections of our shared humanity.
In the words of President Franklin Roosevelt, speaking in 1941: “Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere.”
Some might say Wilson’s column sounds too optimistic. Some might say my column sounds too confrontational. (Some might say Roosevelt was just another liberal Democrat.) They might be correct. Or maybe we — and a huge number of Kansans — understand that politics can only take us so far.
Working together, let’s give the people what they need.
Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary,[here
Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and X.
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random eg
President-elect Donald Trump may have quieted his lies about widespread voter fraud after his win last month, but the impact of his effort to cast doubt on the integrity of American elections lingers on.
Although this post-election period has been markedly calmer than the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, there were isolated flare-ups of Republican candidates borrowing a page from Trump’s playbook to claim that unsatisfactory election results were illegitimate.
In Wisconsin, Republican U.S. Senate challenger Eric Hovde spread unsubstantiated rumors about “last-minute” absentee ballots in Milwaukee that he said flipped the outcome of the race. Though he conceded to incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin nearly two weeks after the election, his rhetoric helped stoke a spike in online conspiracy theories. The Milwaukee Election Commission disputed his claims, saying they “lack any merit.”
In North Carolina, Republican state Senate leader Phil Berger told reporters last week he feared that the vote-counting process for a state Supreme Court seat was rigged for Democrats. Karen Brinson Bell, the head of the State Board of Elections, skewered Berger for his comments, saying they could inspire violence.
And in Arizona, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake, who has spent two years disputing her defeat in the 2022 governor’s race, hasn’t acknowledged her Senate loss. While she thanked her supporters in a video posted to X, the platform formerly called Twitter, she stopped short of conceding to Democratic U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego.
After a bruising 4 years, a hope for normalcy in American elections
Republicans’ disinformation campaigns have caused Americans’ confidence in elections to plummet and exposed local election officials to threats and harassment, and some observers worry about a return of the GOP’s destructive rhetoric the next time they lose.
“We have to turn this rhetoric down,” said Jay Young, senior director of voting and democracy for Common Cause, a voting rights group. “There cannot be this continued attack on this institution.”
Still, many politicians who either denied the 2020 election results or criticized their local voting processes won election. In Arizona, for example, voters chose state Rep. Justin Heap, a Republican, to lead the election office in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and the largest jurisdiction in the critical swing state. Heap ran on a “voter confidence” platform and suggested at a Trump rally that Maricopa’s election office is a “national laughingstock.”
Trump tapped former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to oversee the U.S. Department of Justice. Bondi, a Republican, served as an attorney for Trump while he disputed the results in 2020. She could use her position as U.S. attorney general to prosecute election officials involved in that election, as Trump promised in an X post in September.
While the rhetoric around stolen elections has been somewhat muted among the GOP ranks since Trump’s victory, conservatives attempted to flip the “election denial” script on Democrats in at least one race.
We have to turn this rhetoric down.
– Jay Young, Common Cause’s senior director of voting and democracy
In Pennsylvania, Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Casey refused to concede defeat until last Thursday, two weeks after The Associated Press called the race for Republican challenger David McCormick. Casey lost by fewer than 16,000 votes, less than half a percentage point.
Casey said he wanted to see the results of an automatic recount and various court cases filed on his behalf, but Republicans jumped on his refusal to bow out quickly.
Last week, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who resisted pressure from Trump in 2020 to “find” votes after he lost the state, lambasted Casey for not conceding the Senate race.
But Kathy Boockvar, president of Athena Strategies and former Pennsylvania secretary of the commonwealth told the Capital-Star that comparisons between what the Casey campaign was doing and Republicans’ efforts to overturn results in the 2020 election were not valid; under Pennsylvania law, a recount is automatically triggered when the margin of votes is under 0.5%, as it was in the Casey-McCormick race.
She added that the practice of “calling” elections has “done more damage to perceptions of elections than a lot of other things, because people think that when the Associated Press calls an election or Decision Desk calls an election, that that has any official relevance, and it has none,” she said. “The Associated Press and others ‘calling’ of elections exist solely for the purpose of feeding people’s need for quick answers to a process that is not designed to be quick for good reasons.”
Even as Republicans mostly toned down their rhetoric this year, some left-wing social media accounts repeated a debunked conspiracy theory that Starlink, the internet provider owned by billionaire and Trump supporter Elon Musk, changed vote counts.
Those posts, however, aren’t comparable to GOP election denialism, according to the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, which fights strategic misinformation.
“While the claims are similar, the rumoring dynamics on the left are markedly different due to the lack of endorsement or amplification by left-leaning influencers, candidates, or party elites,” the center posted last week.
Young, of Common Cause, said it’s clear that election disinformation of any kind has a devastating impact on the local officials tasked with administering the vote.
Threats to election workers continued even after Election Day. Bomb threats were called into election offices in California, Minnesota, Oregon and other states, forcing evacuations as workers were tallying ballots.
But this was just a slice of the onslaught many officials faced over the past four years. Local election officials need the resources to beef up the way they fight disinformation and physical attacks, Young said.
“We should be doing better by them,” he said.
Kim Lyons of the Capital-Star staff contributed.
*Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and X.
Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kim Lyons for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on Facebook and X.
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an 11 24
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost said in a release Monday that he and 50 other attorneys general are “calling for peace nationwide” with regard to the results of the Tuesday presidential election.
In a press release on Monday, Yost said he and other AGs were responding to national polls “highlighting widespread concerns among Americans about potential post-election unrest.”
“Regardless of the outcome of Tuesday’s election, we expect that Americans will respond peacefully and we condemn any acts of violence related to the results,” the release stated. “A peaceful transfer of power is the highest testament to the rule of law, a tradition that stands at the heart of our nation’s stability.”
The release did not specify the national polls referenced by the coalition. At the end of October, an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll showed 4 in 10 registered voters were “extremely” or “very” concerned about the use of violence in response to the results of the November general election.
The fellow AGs that Yost said he was collaborating with represent Connecticut, Kansas, Oregon, Alabama, Alaska, American Samoa, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, the Northern Mariana Islands, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, the Virgin Islands, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
Violence, the coalition stated, “has no place in the democratic process; we will exercise our authority to enforce the law against any illegal acts that threaten it.”
The comments come after former president and GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump said he “shouldn’t have left” office after he lost the 2020 election, among other comments, including some already questioning whether the Tuesday election will be legitimate. Trump has consistently refused to accept the results of the 2020 election.
Yost haspublicly put his support behind Trump, calling the former president and his VP candidate, Ohio U.S. Senator J.D. Vance, “the law and order ticket.”
Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and X.
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an 7 24
Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird filed an amicus brief Wednesday calling for the U.S. Supreme Court to take up Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s challenge of former President Donald Trump’s prosecution in the New York hush-money trial.
Bailey, a Missouri Republican, filed a lawsuit earlier in July against the state of New York, seeking to lift the gag order imposed on Trump during the trial where he was found guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments during the 2016 presidential campaign season.
The lawsuit seeks to delay sentencing for Trump’s conviction in the case until after the November election, where the former president faces a rematch with President Joe Biden.
While Trump was found guilty in the New York criminal trial, the Supreme Court ruled in July that U.S. presidents have full immunity from criminal charges for official “core constitutional” acts while in office, but not for unofficial acts. The decision sent Trump’s election interference case, where he stands accused of scheming to overturn the 2020 presidential results, back to the lower courts.
The Missouri lawsuit, filed one day after the ruling on presidential immunity, claims the state of New York violated Missourians’ First Amendment rights by issuing a gag order in Trump’s criminal case and preventing voters from hearing the views of a presidential candidate in the 2024 election.
“This lawfare is poisonous to American democracy,” Bailey wrote in the lawsuit. “The American people ought to be able to participate in a presidential election free from New York’s interference. Any gag order and sentence should be stayed until after the election.”
Bird and Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody filed a brief supporting the Missouri lawsuit on Wednesday. Joined by Alaska and Montana, the state attorneys general argued that Trump is the “target of a prosecution by a New York County district attorney” in the hush-money case.
In a news release, Bird claimed New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, has used the trial for political gain, citing a New York Times article on his statements about Trump.
“As a prosecutor, I know that politics has no place in criminal prosecutions,” Bird said. “I am calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case against New York’s political prosecution, gag order, and sentencing of President Trump that interfere with the presidential election. We must protect free and fair elections and the rule of law.”
The sentencing in the New York case has been delayed until Sept. 18 by New York Justice Juan Merchan, who oversaw the case, so the court has time to hear arguments about how the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision impacts state-level convictions.
Iowa Capital Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com. Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on Facebook and X.
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