VOTER SUPPR 4 STEAL

9/25/20

see Fascism

see BIG LIE

see state gop

see gerry

see vote by mail

see stop the steal

see ninja fraudit

bAK 11 21 html Heilemann

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mma

August 18, 2025, edition of MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show

RACHEL MADDOW (HOST): Trump said Putin says that people shouldn't be allowed to vote by mail. Says that he got that idea from Putin. And so today Trump says that he will sign an executive order banning Americans nationwide from voting by mail.

...

I feel like I'm seeing three different lanes, three different tactics by which Trump is trying to call into question the normalcy and to sort of change expectations around the 2026 midterms. Do you think that's fair? Do you disagree?

GARRETT GRAFF (GUEST): I absolutely agree, and I think that what you're doing is key to understanding this. Which is I think too often we think of sort of Donald Trump being crazy over here, being crazy over here, and being crazy over here and that they're not related to some sort of larger plan or effort. Whereas I think what we are seeing is this roadmap for how our country loses free and fair elections. Which is I have never been one to believe that, you know, Donald Trump is going to cancel the midterms or cancel the 2028 presidential race. Russia, as we know, has elections. Saddam Hussein was elected head of Iraq when he was dictator there. Instead, what I think we are watching is subtle and not so subtle efforts by Republicans across the country, including in the White House, to change who gets to vote, how they vote, and subtly shape the electorate for 2026 and 2028, such that Republicans can lock in an illegitimate minority rule.

MADDOW: That, of course, proceeds in parallel with Trump's yearslong effort to try to normalize the questioning of otherwise normal election results. So if you are narrowing, as you say, the number of people who can vote and the means by which people can vote, and you have normalized this idea that election results are inherently suspect and shouldn't be trusted if they don't favor Trump and his causes, that stew gets pretty toxic pretty quickly whether or not elections are canceled. I mean, you get, I guess the question is how you — where you see the line being drawn as to whether or not elections still count as free and fair once you're playing in these sorts of categories.

GRAFF: Absolutely. And I think you also need to fast-forward through some of the developments that we're seeing this year. You know, the hiring of 10,000 new ICE officers represents a sort of super-empowered professional thuggery in cities across the country where federal law enforcement has been a light, if any, presence. You know, we have armed National Guard troops headed from red states into blue cities right now, just as they did in Los Angeles earlier this spring. You don't need to discourage all that many people voting in all that many places across the country to radically reshape national politics.

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actually russian voter suppression?! cyber attack via bots?

an 11 24

Russia made an audacious public attempt to blackmail the incoming U.S. president, according to a military expert.

Vladimir Putin and his ministers are already trying to mess with Donald Trump's head when Kremlin intelligence chief Nikolai Patrushev claimed in an interview that Trump had "relied on certain forces" to win a second term in the White House and warned that he had "corresponding obligations" that he was "obliged to fulfill," wrote Slate columnist Fred Kaplan.

:{:{"This is a mind-blowing bit of psychological warfare!" Kaplan wrote. "The Russians are basically telling Trump: We put you in office. Now it’s time for you to pay us back.Did this make Trump wonder: WTF?"}:

The FBI, the director of national intelligence and the top cybersecurity agency all confirmed that Russia was sowing disinformation against Kamala Harris during the election campaign, and law enforcement blamed the foreign adversary for bomb threats called into polling stations in Black neighborhoods.

"However, there is no evidence — nor has anyone claimed — that Trump or his campaign staffers colluded in, or knew anything about, these videos or the bomb threats," Kaplan wrote. "If Trump did have some involvement, or if Russia possesses some other form of kompromat (compromising material) on Trump, Patrushev’s message constitutes an extraordinarily bodacious threat of blackmail, delivered in public, against an American president-elect.

"If Trump did not have any involvement in this escapade, Patrushev’s gambit shows — some would say, confirms— that Russia’s main goal, in all these misinformation ventures, is to sow chaos, breed mistrust, and weaken the sinews of democracy in Western countries, especially in the U.S., regardless of who is the president," Kaplan added.

Trump and the MAGA movement have long sought to improve relations with Russia, but Kaplan said the Kremlin's reaction to his re-election should serve as a warning.

"One can only wonder what Trump will do — whether he’ll change his position, whether he’s capable of changing his stance — when he realizes, if he realizes, that Putin is not his friend," Kaplan wrote. "Trump certainly should not act as if he is."

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db https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-jan-6-phone-logs-7-hour-gap-might-have-a-stupid-explanation

no lnx

There Might Be a Stupid Explanation for the 7-Hour Gap in Trump’s Phone Logs

THE NEW ABNORMAL

That, plus: Why Colorado’s secretary of state is being forced to take an opponent indicted for compromising voting equipment seriously. (Hint: It has to do with the MyPillow guy.)

The Daily Beast

Published Apr. 01, 2022

The New Abnormal really made it 201 episodes without anyone on the team asking, “Do we need to slap a content warning label on this?” But then Madison Cawthorn had to go and start flapping his gums about orgies.

The freshman Republican congressman has earned the ire of his colleagues after letting slip that he’s borne witness to their sexual bacchanalia, complete with—and why not—“key bumps of cocaine.” That key feature (pun noted) is exactly why New Abnormal co-host Andy Levy takes umbrage with co-host Molly Jong-Fast’s preferred term for the whole debacle: “Orgygate.” Levy simply will not stand for this erasure of the copious amounts of drugs allegedly consumed by the nation’s leaders!

Somebody else probably thinking too hard about this nightmare affair is GOP House leader Kevin McCarthy. As Levy puts it, “This is ‘unacceptable’ to Kevin McCarthy because he’s afraid that people in his district are going to be going around saying, ‘Is Kevin McCarthy participating in orgies and doing key bumps?’ So this directly has the possibility of affecting him—and that’s all he cares about.”

Jong-Fast, meanwhile, is doing her damnedest not to picture the possibility of a raunchy Louie Gohmert getting it on with a debauched Newt Gingrich.

Thankfully, relief descends upon the pod in the form of George Conway, a lawyer and Washington Post contributor. What he offers up is one potential explanation for the suspicious 7-hour-37-minute-sized hole in former President Donald J. Trump’s phone logs: that it wasn’t so much a document destruction conspiracy as it was good old-fashioned incompetence.

“I don’t defend Donald Trump,” Conway says—always a good start. “But I think people may be getting a little ahead of themselves about this story… I think there’s a lot of suggestion out there that there was essentially an erasure or alteration of records. I would not make that accusation at this point. We simply don’t know. And not that Donald Trump would have any moral compunction about it. It’s just that these people were not sufficiently organized or competent to conduct a cover-up that would require that level of concentration and competence.”

Instead, Conway posits, what he thinks Jan. 6 investigators will find is that Trump was sitting in a room, “transfixed,” watching the riot at the Capitol. “He’s sitting there, watching an insurrection. He’s president of the United States and he fomented the insurrection, and he’s sitting there watching gleefully, too busy to talk on the phone using the switchboard at the White House to create a record,” the lawyer theorizes. If the then-president was making calls in a way that didn’t leave a paper trail, it wasn’t deliberate.

“He’s malicious and insidious,” Conway says, “but he’s not that competent.”

[Trump Asked Kid Rock About North Korea & There Is No Bottom]

Later in the episode, the co-hosts call up Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who kindly outlines what it is a secretary of state does all day. (Oversee elections for states, as it turns out.) But that’s not all. Though Griswold has been leading a vanguard to strengthen election security in Colorado, the threat of voter fraud remains terrifyingly real—all the more so because the call is coming from inside the house.

One of Griswold’s more unusual opponents for the secretary of state seat this election cycle is a Mesa County clerk named Tina Peters, who was recently indicted for an election-tampering scheme aided by none other than the MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. Why is someone who’s been indicted allowed to run for government office? That’s just the Colorado way, Griswold says. “Colorado is the nation’s gold standard for election access and security,” she explains, “but we’ve also become ground zero for these insider threats and conspiracies.”

To fight that, Griswold is working to tighten election infrastructure. Her first legislative priority, prohibiting open-carry within 100 feet of an election site, was signed into law earlier this week. Now the focus is on a landmark bill to disincentivize bad actors like Peters from compromising or illegally accessing voting equipment. If you do, Griswold says, “you’re going to go to jail. It’s going to be a felony.”

But despite all the optimism, there’s still room for a healthy dose of concern. “I think we’re seeing the groundwork so that the next time an extreme elected official or candidate does not want to accept the results of a free and fair election, it will be easier for them to try to take their seats, no matter the results,” Griswold says, “which is very frightening for the future of this country. And it underscores the need to make sure that election-deniers do not become secretaries of state, in that we continue to have free and fair elections for all Republican, independent, and Democratic voters in this country.”

placard say a maj never passed a bill (~ fillibuster?) vs 160x Rp amy Klobuchar

Manchin pushes a revisionist history in his fight to preserve the filibuster

Jon Skolnik Salon

January 21, 2022

On Wednesday, just months out from the midterm elections, Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., blocked their own party's effort to pass a sweeping voting rights overhaul by refusing to exempt...

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/election-police/

an 1 22 no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/tina-peters/

Colorado, a state that President Joe Biden won by 14% in 2020, Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters is among the far-right MAGA Republicans who has promoted the Big Lie and false claims that the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump — a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked. Now, according to the Colorado Sun, a grand jury in Mesa County is investigating allegations that Peters tampered with election equipment.

The grand jury, according to Sun reporter Thy Vo, “accepted the case” on January 12.

“Peters, a Republican who was barred from overseeing the 2021 election by the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office, has been under criminal investigation by local, state and federal authorities for months,” Vo reports. “Peters has spread baseless claims about the 2020 presidential election being stolen and has been facing scrutiny since she allegedly allowed an unauthorized person to attend a sensitive Dominion Voting Systems software update in May. Photos of passwords taken during the update were then posted online.”

Peters was among the speakers at MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s “Cyber Symposium” event in South Dakota in August. Lindell, a leading promoter of the Big Lie, is being sued for defamation by Dominion for making the false claim that its equipment was used to help Biden and his Democratic allies steal the election.

On Thursday morning, January 13, Mesa County District Attorney Dan Rubenstein and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser issued an official statement on the case.

“Over the past few months,” Rubenstein and Weiser explained, “we have made progress in the multi-agency investigation. This investigation will be thorough and guided by the facts and the law. More information will be made available when the prosecutors are ethically and legally permitted to provide additional details. To maintain the impartiality of the investigation, we have no further comment at this time.”

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...And the GOP has embraced Hungary, and they really see Hungary’s present as America’s future. And so, Tucker Carlson, you know, had whole week of broadcasting there. And even Mike Pence, who’s not the most worldly person, trotted over to Budapest and talked about how he hoped that abortion rights would be taken away soon. So, Hungary is this model of white Christian supremacy, anti-trans, homophobic. It checks all the boxes of what the GOP is actually today.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, we talk about him as a model and him modeling himself on autocrats around the world. But what about him as a model at home for people like Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor? You lay out, in a very chilling piece, this image of DeSantis surrounded by the people he wants to basically deputize as what his opponent in running for governor has talked about as his “secret police.”

RUTH BEN-GHIAT: Yeah, Ron DeSantis is an example — so, when you have somebody like Trump who imposes this kind of authoritarian party discipline, the system populates with mini-Trumps.They used to be called mini-Duces and mini-Hitlers, and now we have these mini-Trumps. And so, what we’ve seen is, in places like Texas and Florida, states are becoming laboratories of autocracy.

And DeSantis is particularly disturbing, because, you know, he wants to have his own civilian National Guard. And many states have those, but I discovered, doing research, that he’s also establishing an office for, quote, “election integrity,” which is code speak for election fraud, where it’s going to have its own prosecutors and investigators. So, anybody who — if there’s like an election result in the state that DeSantis doesn’t like, he can have his goons go after them and accuse them of violating election law. And they’ve made what used to be misdemeanors into felonies, so these people could be put in jail.So this is an example of the kind of authoritarian system at the state level that DeSantis has planned.

AMY GOODMAN: Ruth Ben-Ghiat, I want to thank you for being with us, expert on the psychology of authoritarianism and fascism. She is the author of Strongmen: How They Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fall, a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, and she publishes Lucid, a newsletter on threats to democracy.

https://www.mediamatters.org/one-america-news-network/year-after-january-6-one-america-news-has-found-its-insurrectionist

no lnx vid

A year after January 6, One America News has found its insurrectionist footing

OAN spent the last year promoting GOP voter suppression efforts, selling airtime to a demented pillow maven, and priming its audience for political violence -- perhaps even civil war

WRITTEN BY BOBBY LEWIS

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM BEATRICE MOUNT

PUBLISHED 01/06/22

The January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump was a watershed moment for conservative media. The “peaceful transition of power” that has long been a force in the mythologization of American democracy broke down that day, and rather than owning up to the gravity of a violent attack on that tradition, One America News Network stuck to its familiar playbook of lies and deceit – this time in service of increasing voter suppression.

A survey performed inSeptember 2021 found that 68% of Republicans wrongly believed that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Among Republicans who primarily trust far-right outlets like OAN, 97% believed the election was stolen. This correlation is no coincidence, and right-wing media’s continued lies about the 2020 election have provided fuel for nationwide voter suppression efforts by the GOP. In the wake of the Capitol attack, OAN became an important part of the conservative media campaign pushing a whopping 440 bills in state legislatures in 2021 that attempted to restrict voting access.

Voter suppression is nothing new for the conservative movement, but OAN used the aftermath of January 6 to double down on election lies and promote efforts to make voting more difficult for its fellow Americans – while priming its right-wing audience for a potential civil war.

OAN helped drive a frenzy for fraudulent election audits

OAN correspondent Christina Bobb disputed the 2020 election results before a winner was even declared, a moment which was a harbinger for her coverage in 2021. Fueled by a passionate embrace of the Big Lie that the election had been stolen, Bobb essentially became a salesperson for election audits in any state that would entertain the idea.

Bobb provided documents and testimony to get the Arizona audit in motion, and founded a nonprofit to raise money for the audit. Her group Voices & Votes raised $605,000 for the Arizona audit, or about 10% of its cost, undoubtedly in part because of Bobb’s frequent fundraising during her audit coverage on OAN.

The amateurish operation in Arizona appears to be the playbook for other so-called “audits” going forward, even though it confirmed both President Joe Biden’s victory in the state and the oft-asserted fact that there was no significant fraud. But that didn’t stop Bobb or other audit extremists.

Bobb has been concentrating her efforts to spread audits to Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan, counting on friendly GOP legislatures to indulge in the Big Lie. Some states, like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, are making moves toward their own audits. In Texas, which Trump won handily, preliminary results of an audit have once again confirmed earlier counts.

Besides its own correspondent, OAN has helped create a second star of the right-wing election fraud movement. MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell was already known before the 2020 election to be a prolific, unhinged Trump supporter, but Lindell’s delusions turned into an erratic fusillade of election lies, and -- unprecedented in television news -- the wealthy pillow CEO acquired vast swaths of OAN airtime in 2021 to zealously push his own false claims and conspiracy theories.

OAN repeatedly aired at least three different Lindell “documentaries” alleging to unravel the conspiratorial web behind the 2020 election.Additionally, OAN ran ads for Lindell’s three-day “cyber symposium” over 150 times in a single week, before devoting more than 30 hours of live coverage to his erratic event. Just before Lindell's symposium began, OAN was sued by Dominion Voting Systems for defamation over spreading other election lies; later the network was hit with another defamation suit from voting technology company Smartmatic.

OAN followed the symposium and defamation suit by letting Lindell take over its evening programming on at least three occasions. In his “The Lindell Report” the businessman aired even more potentially defamatory election lies.

OAN backed voter suppression attempts nationwide

Pursuant to its whole-of-network embrace of the Big Lie, OAN gave friendly coverage to or expressed outright support of several voter suppression efforts in states all over the country.

OAN’s prime-time shows became important stops for Texas state legislators to promote Senate Bill 7, which “includes provisions to limit early voting hours, curtail local voting options and further tighten voting by mail.” On June 1, OAN’s Natalie Harp hosted GOP state Rep. Kyle Biedermann to raise concerns about “a lot of things going on against the laws” in 2020, like “drive-thru voting” and “ballots that were mailed out that shouldn’t have been mailed out.”OAN’s Dan Ball hosted state Sen. Bob Hall, who claimed that SB 7 would guard against what he called “soft fraud” by “election officials taking advantage of rules to bend them as much as they could in their favor.” According to Media Matters’ data, since December 2020, eight Texas state legislators have made at least 23 appearances on OAN prime time, many of them clustered around the SB 7 debate.

The Georgia omnibus election bill was another focal point of OAN programming, particularly since the network is also interested in fomenting an election audit in Georgia. In ostensible news segments, OAN reports called Senate Bill 202 a “voting rights bill” that is “securing integrity for future elections,” and literally laughed at the notion that anyone would take issue with these “common-sense changes.” The Justice Department filed suit against Georgia over a long list of “racially discriminatory” provisions in the law, including “the prohibition on efforts by churches and civic groups to provide food or water to persons waiting in long lines to vote.”

OAN frequently turns to one guest in particular forGeorgia political commentary: former state representative and current gubernatorial candidate Vernon Jones. According to Media Matters' data, Jones has made at least 26 appearances on OAN prime time since December 2020 -- often dedicated to promoting his campaign for governor while pushing election lies and audit attempts.

Video file

CitationFrom the October 5, 2021, edition of OAN's Real America with Dan Ball

OAN primed its audience for more political violence

On June 23, correspondent Pearson Sharp drew widespread condemnation for an OAN segment suggesting mass executions of Democrats for supposedly stealing the election from Trump.

Declaring the 2020 election was actually “overthrown,” Sharp told his audience: “Any American involved in these efforts, from those who ran the voting machines to the very highest government officials, is guilty of treason under U.S. Code. 2381, which carries with it the penalty of death.”

Despite the unmistakable clarity of Sharp’s words, he told Talking Points Memo, “Neither I, nor OAN, are suggesting anyone should be executed,” but added, “That is for the appropriate law enforcement agencies to determine.”

Sharp’s midsummer bloodlust wasn’t much of an aberration for One America News Network. OAN guests have casually gamed out civil war scenarios on-air, and the network has aired reports accusing “retired Democrat generals” of spreading civil war allegations against Republicans, while falsely claiming “evidence indicates that it is actually the left that is at war.”

Though she did not directly suggest violence, Bobb brought in the new year by strongly denouncing the Biden administration as “fascist” and “illegitimate,” in part for having “faked an insurrection on the Capitol” and stealing the 2020 election. For a conservative steeped in Second Amendment mythology about “the tree of liberty” and “the blood of tyrants,” the dots don’t need to be connected.

Wayne Allyn Root, a radio host and far-right conspiracy theorist, appeared on OAN in December and denounced Biden’s “communist dictatorship” for stealing both the 2020 election and Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats, giving Democrats their current tie-breaking Senate majority “destroying this country.” Root accused Democrats of “looking for a civil war,” which he claimed conservatives like him do not want -- but later in the same rant, Root said that the oppression of conservatives by the Democratic Party “is a lot worse” than the conditions that merited the American Revolution.

“The worst is yet to come,” Root warned.

Video file

CitationFrom the December 29, 2021, edition of OAN's The Real Story with Natalie Harp

OAN is headed into 2022 with more of the same lies, and little care for any negative consequences

From OAN’s perspective, 2021 was a good year for “election integrity.” OAN’s Bobb fought for and secured an Arizona election audit, and successfully spun the mundane results into enough fuel to keep pushing for more audits. OAN collected viewers and money from airing MyPillow’s Lindell, even if it did help get the network sued for defamation. Several of the voter suppression initiatives OAN supported became law. OAN’s suggestions of political violence have retained a veneer of plausible deniability while priming the audience with fury and fear to keep pushing for more voter suppression.

Reckless, false commentary about stolen elections and calls for punishing enemies are how we got Trump supporters invading the Capitol, menacing members of Congress, and chanting to execute Trump’s vice president one year ago. But it’s all just good business for OAN.

12 21 no lnx

This 232-year-old power has never been used by Congress — but it could save the republic

President Joe Biden departs the U.S. Capitol after speaking at the House Democratic Caucus meeting, Thursday, October 28, 2021.

Thom Hartmann and Independent Media Institute December 23, 2021

The Founders of this nation, and the Framers who wrote our Constitution, created (as Ben Franklin famously said) a constitutional republic: a government “deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed” through citizens’ (then white men) right to vote.

They referred to this as “republicanism” because it was based on the Greek and Roman republics (then thousands of years in the past but still remembered and idealized), and when put into law they called it “a Republican Form of Government.”

Today that form of government in crisis in America, as that core right to vote that defines republicanism is under attack by Republican legislators in red states across our nation.

“In emergency, break glass” is the almost-never-used option available should a building catch fire or otherwise be in crisis. There’s a similar alarm and safety valve built into the US Constitution that, like that glass in so many buildings, has never before been used to protect our republic.

READ: New report says 'evidence is mounting' for a disturbing reason the National Guard failed to act on Jan. 6

It’s called the Guarantee Clause, and it’s the basis of the Right To Vote Act that has passed the House and is stalled by a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

The Guarantee Clause, however, has never been used as a part of our everyday politics or law: most people, in fact, have never heard of it.

It’s never been used or adopted as law by the courts so it’s essentially “potential power,” a powerful but tightly coiled force quietly waiting for a real emergency, buried deep in our Constitution for 232 years.

But it comes alive when Congress activates it for the first time, which could be right now because the Freedom to Vote Act does just that, explicitly firing it up by name.

READ: 'This speech is unhinged': Russia expert explains why he was truly scared by Putin's recent remarks

Joe Manchin is one of its co-sponsors, although it’s mostly an effort by Senators Klobuchar (its main sponsor), Kaine, King, Merkley, Padilla, Tester, and Warnock. On the Republican side, it appears to have support from Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski...

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/glenn-youngkin-2655516940/

son 17 yo vote 2x?

note any bill to keep GOP from steal election is called "federalization" // gubmint

// AG fed overreach squad?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/desantis-election-police/

Ron DeSantis (R) has unveiled a propospal to develop a statewide law enforcement agency to investigate election-related crimes.

On Wednesday, November 3, the Republican governor held a news conference where he discussed election integrity as he echoed many of former President Donald Trump's claims about voter fraud — despite having no actual evidence to reference. DeSantis, who is preparing for his re-election campaign next year, released a statement detailing the purpose of his proposed legislation.

"We are excited to say that next legislative session we are proposing another package of election integrity reforms that will make Florida the number one state for elections," DeSantis said. "I am excited that with this legislation, our state will be able to enforce election violations, combat voter fraud and make sure violators are held accountable. If potential violators know they will be held accountable, they will be much less likely to engage in improper conduct in the first place."

According to DeSantis' his latest piece of legislation will:

Establish an Office of Election Crimes and Security within the Department of State to investigate election crimes and fraud;
Elevate the crime of ballot harvesting to a third-degree felony,which the governor's offices said was to recognize that "this offense is a serious attack on democracy;"
Require timelines for supervisors of elections to clean the voter rolls of ineligible voters; and
Prohibit unsecure, "haphazard drop box locations" in Florida.

During his recent news conference, DeSantis spoke to a crowd of his supporters were he discussed actions voters could take under the proposed legislation if they witness any form of voter fraud.

"There'll be people if you see someone ballot harvesting, you know, what do you do? If you call into the election office, a lot of times they don't do anything," DeSantis said at his news conference. "If you know that, there's, you know, in Florida, it's Constitutionally mandated, only citizens are allowed to vote in Florida, and yet you see examples of people, they'll even check they're not citizens, and they'll still be given ballots."

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/mitch-mcconnell/

'Disingenuous nonsense': McConnell mocked for 'plainly silly' case against voting rights bill

state of Florida is under fire for trying to silence professors who want to testify about voting rights

Cody Fenwick

October 31, 2021

After public outrage over its decision to block professors from testifying as expert witnesses about voting rights, the University of Florida tried to defend itself this week by issuing a statement claiming to support "academic....

4theppl --> lewis --> joe's plan?

Manchin's big hopes for a bipartisan deal just went down in humiliating defeat

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

October 20, 2021

Minutes ago Senate Republicans filibustered critical voting rights legislation – actually, filibustered debate on voting rights legislation. They refused to even allow debate on protecting the most important, most critic....

1021 an

Michele Carew is the latest casualty in the Trumpist war on voting. The veteran elections administrator tendered her resignation to officials in Hood County, Texas, on Friday after a brutal campaign by Trump loyalists to oust her. Trump won 81 percent of the vote there, but Carew still found herself in the crosshairs of those seeking to entrench the GOP's control over election administration. They want to see Carew's duties reassigned to a county clerk, who is notorious for (what else?) sharing electoral conspiracy theories on social media.

Carew is one of many local election officials across the country who have chosen to quit rather than absorb right-wing abuse.Among 14 southwestern Ohio counties, one in four of election officials has already called it quits. Pennsylvania is grappling with a similar exodus.

"These conspiracy theorists are in it for the long haul," county clerk Barb Byrum told the Associated Press. "They're in it to completely crumble our republic, and they're looking at these election administrator positions. They're playing the long game."

It all keeps coming back to the Big Lie. The Big Lie of voter fraud is a classic stabbed-in-the-back narrative. These fantasies crop up whenever fascists need to reconcile their conviction that they're strong and special with the reality that they've been shut out of power. They convince themselves that they would have won, if it hadn't been for the treacherous Other who denied them their glorious birthright.

In the most famous stabbed-in-the-back narrative, it was the German Army of World War I that supposedly could have triumphed had the craven politicians not betrayed them. Today, Donald Trump's supporters console themselves with the fantasy that they won the 2020 election, but Democrats, unions, Black people and the Chinese Communist Party cheated them out of power.

A good stabbed-in-the-back narrative also suggests a target at which to direct resentment and even violence. "Stop the Steal" was the rallying cry that Trump used to sic a mob on the Capitol on Jan 6.

Local elections officials are still bearing the brunt of Trumpist fury. A special investigation by Reuters documented 102 threats of death or violence against 40 local election officials. Those are a fraction of the true number of threats. Milwaukee election official Claire Woodall-Vogg estimated she'd received 150 threats since a Gateway Pundit, a massively popular conspiracy blog, published lies about her.

Election administration skews disproportionately female, like education and public health — two other spheres where GOP radicals have directed their ire. The California Voter Foundation, a watchdog group, estimates that 75 percent of local election officials are women.

"The common thread is that no one has any respect from women […]," Milwaukee elections official Woodall-Vogg said in an interview with CNN in which the mother of two small children recounted how her harassers delight in calling her a cunt and a whore.

In Georgia, Republicans are using a new state law to purge Democrats of color from local elections boards. At least 10 board members have been removed under the new state law or by local ordinances. Of these, at least 5 of the ousted members are people of color.

"I speak out and I know the laws," Ms. Lonnie Hollis, an ousted Black board member told the Times. "The bottom line is they don't like people that have some type of intelligence and know what they're doing, because they know they can't influence them."

Michigan Republicans are busily replacing local election board members with pliant functionaries who, they hope, will refuse to certify future Democratic victories. The state's former elections director warned that it would create "a mess" if 10 or 15 counties refused to certify the election. It would be more than "a mess." It would be yet another procedural coup attempt. The GOP is organizing to steal the next election in plain sight, but the Department of Justice has done little more than convene a task force to study the problem. The Big Lie must not be allowed to cast a shadow over our democracy.

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/pennsylvania-gop/

bypass governor

God’s will is being thwarted': Hard-liners seek more partisan control of elections — even in solid Republican counties

Jeremy Schwartz ProPublica The Texas Tribune

October 03, 2021

by Jeremy Schwartz, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

...

1021 digby

One of the morememorable quotes from the 2020 post-election period was the one in which a Republican insider blithely told a reporter for the Washington Post that there was no harm in letting Trump cry himself out:

"What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change," the official said. "He went golfing this weekend. It's not like he's plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He's tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he'll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he'll leave."

We all know how that turned out, don't we?

Today, the congressional Jan. 6 commission continues to subpoena witnesses and demand documents from various players in the post-election saga, and the press keeps reporting new information on exactly what went down during that bizarre period weekly. Last month, the new book from Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, "Peril," revealed the existence of a full-blown coup plot based upon a legal theory advanced byconservative constitutional lawyer John Eastman, formerly of Chapman College and a founder of the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank. They actually memorialized what they planned to do in writing.

The idea was to have Mike Pence refuse to acknowledge the electoral votes of certain states whose legislatures might be persuaded to send an alternate slate of electors and then declare Trump the winner based upon the remaining electoral votes. It was a cockamamie scheme, but the concept of Republican state legislatures declaring that the vote was rigged and sending an alternate slate to declare Trump the winner did not come from nowhere. I wrote this in November 2020, just a couple of weeks after the election:

Having lost over and over again in court, Trump and his team have switched to their Plan B, which, as longtime Democratic strategist Chris Marshall spelled out in detail in Salon on Thursday, is to delay the certification of the vote in certain states and try to get Republican legislatures to assign electors to vote for Donald Trump instead of the actual winner, Joe Biden. This is based on the theory that if they can create enough chaos around the election results, Republican loyalists will rise to the occasion and "save democracy" from the Democrats, who are allegedly stealing the election.

Trump's behavior with all these phony "audits," even in places like Texas where he won, is explained as an extension of that plan. They are attempting to create so much distrust in the electoral process that in the case of a semi-close election, the default "solution" will be for the (Republican) state legislatures to take over the process and decide the winner. Lest you think the courts would automatically reject such a clearly unconstitutional move, don't count on it. As the New Yorker's Jane Mayer noted:

Few people noticed at the time, but in … Bush v. Gore, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, hinted at a radical reading of the Constitution that, two decades later, undergirds many of the court challenges on behalf of Trump. In a concurring opinion, the Justices argued that state legislatures have the plenary power to run elections and can even pass laws giving themselves the right to appoint electors.

Today, the so-called Independent Legislature Doctrine has informed Trump and the right's attempts to use Republican-dominated state legislatures to overrule the popular will. Nathaniel Persily, an election-law expert at Stanford, told me, "It's giving intellectual respectability to an otherwise insane, anti-democratic argument."

That's the legal argument. The implementation will require provocateurs to help foment the chaos and distrust on the ground. Enter Trump's former campaign chairman (and pardoned accused felon) Steve Bannon. You may recall that Bannon was heavily involved in the Jan. 6 planning, urging Trump to "kill the Biden presidency in its crib" and promising listeners of his wildly popular podcast the night before that "all hell will break loose tomorrow. It's them against us. Who can impose their will on the other side?"

ProPublica did extensive reporting last month showing that since then Bannon has been pushing a "precinct strategy," whereby MAGA followers take over the Republican apparatus at the precinct level, which in many states means they have influence over how elections are run, including the choice of poll workers and members of election boards. When Bannon announced this strategy, it "rocketed across far-right media" and suddenly people who had never before been involved in politics were volunteering all over the country, in blue states as well as red states, cities and suburbs and rural areas alike.

This strategy is the brainchild of Arizona activist Daniel J. Schultz, who has been pushing it for several years:

In December, Schultz appeared on Bannon's podcast to argue that Republican-controlled state legislatures should nullify the election results and throw their state's Electoral College votes to Trump. If lawmakers failed to do that, Bannon asked, would it be the end of the Republican Party? Not if Trump supporters took over the party by seizing precinct posts, Schultz answered.

Schultz is now a huge right-wing celebrity, has been on Bannon's show at least eight times and holds weekly Zoom calls with activists around the country. Last July he told his audience, "Make sure everybody's got a baseball bat. I'm serious about this. Make sure you've got people who are armed."

Bannon isn't confining himself to trying to destroy the democratic electoral system. NBC News' Jonathan Allen reported that he's also planning an assault on the government once he gets Trump back in the White House, as a continuation of his "deconstruction of the administrative state." To that end, Bannon held a meeting last week with "scores of former Trump political appointees" at the Capitol Hill Club and gave them their marching orders for the hypothetical day when Trump returns to power.

He was invited by a new group called the Association of Republican Presidential Appointees,which has the goal of having non-confirmable executive branch appointees ready on Day 1 to go in and take over. In practice, that means they would immediately set about systematically dismantling everything put in place under a Democratic president and deregulating everything in sight. Bannon aptly calls them his "shock troops."

Now maybe all this is just the lunatic fringe acting out and nothing will come of it. Bannon has been flogging this kind of anti-democratic strategy for a long time. But considering how radical the GOP establishment itself has become, it seems foolhardy to make that assumption. Inviting Bannon to address this ambitious new Republican group sends a clear signal that his previously outlandish ideas and strategies have become mainstream conservative thinking.

an 921 salon

Decades of strategizing by anti-abortion forces and a relentless conservative focus on winning the courts culminated this month in the U.S. Supreme Court's 5-4 decision to allow the nation's most restrictive rollback of reproductive rights to go into effect. The decision effectively prohibits most abortions in Texas and provides a road map for red state legislatures nationwide to evade judicial review and undo Roe v. Wade in their states as well.

But that wasn't the only careful right-wing project that contributed to this back-door assault on five decades of constitutional protections and Supreme Court precedent. This decision is inextricably bound to the long-term GOP war on voting rights, itself a two-front effort between red state legislatures and a conservative Supreme Court majority.

You might even call it a Texas two-step. First, unelected, tenured judges did what elected Republicans didn't feel empowered to do in 2006 and put a stake into the Voting Rights Act. Then, after blessing a new generation of sophisticated voter suppression methods, as well as providing a green light for partisan and racial gerrymanders, uninhibited lawmakers — untethered from nearly any accountability — can pass laws dramatically out of step with voters, like the new Texas abortion bill. This court then smiles on those efforts as well. (And of course, all this is amplified and encouraged by the right-wing media ecosystem.)

It's a nifty closed loop that has the added benefit of sheltering Republicans from any consequences for their extremism, and from any real fear that a changing electorate will threaten entrenched one-party rule.

This isn't even the first time that the Supreme Court and Texas legislature have danced in this fashion, though nearly a decade ago, it was the Roberts court that led.

When Chief Justice John Roberts authored a 5-4 decision in the 2013 Shelby County case, hobbling the Voting Rights Act and putting an end to pre-clearance in states, like Texas, that had a longstanding history of racially motivated voting chicanery, Texas did not wait long before showing America that, contrary to Roberts' sense that things were "dramatically" different in the South, in reality little had changed.

That very afternoon, Texas jumped to take advantage of Roberts' decision by enacting a deeply restrictive voter ID law that requires specific forms of identification to vote. This would be the first post-Shelby voting restriction in Texas, but hardly the last. The new law demanded an ID that 600,000 Latino citizens lacked; it allowed a ballot to be cast with a gun license but not a student ID. It enabled Republicans to place barriers before the rising electorate of young and Hispanic voters who lean Democratic and help ensure themselves a hold on power.

It was a magnificent two-step. When a Republican Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act in 2006, nearly unanimously, and the 25-year extension was signed into law by President George W. Bush, GOP leaders whipped the votes for passage, fearing that it would be bad for the Republican brand to be seen as hostile to voting rights. It's a story that Jesse Rhodes tells brilliantly in his book "Ballot Blocked." GOP leaders wanted to make inroads with Latino and Black voters, and worried that Hurricane Katrina and the souring economy and Iraq war might make that a challenge during a tough midterm year. They didn't want to also be seen as keeping minorities from the polls.

So the voting rights putsch was outsourced to the courts. Bush appointed, and the GOP Senate confirmed, two Supreme Court justices known to have a very limited view of the Voting Rights Act's scope and relevancy: Roberts as chief justice and Samuel Alito to replace the retiring Sandra Day O'Connor. Roberts, as a young Justice Department official in the Reagan administration, had lobbied aggressively against the 1982 reauthorization of the VRA.

When the court did the GOP's dirty work, hollowing out the pre-clearance mechanism that Republicans viewed as untenable to take on through the political process, the Roberts decision offered Congress the option to revisit and update the pre-clearance formula. But once the courts had dealt its blow, the Republican majority had no appetite to revisit the VRA and those efforts crashed in Congress. That's the case to this day: When the Democratic House voted on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act earlier this summer, every House Republican opposed the bill, and it would appear to have little chance of surviving a GOP filibuster in the Senate.

Texas Republicans may well have seen the Shelby County decision coming when they passed a draconian voter ID bill — initially blocked under pre-clearance in 2012 — ahead of the court's ruling. During that same period, Republican lawmakers also prepped new state legislative and congressional maps that were the subject of much complicated litigation from 2011 through 2018.

The legal history here becomes convoluted: Courts originally blocked the first maps enacted by Republicans in 2011. A federal court rejected them under pre-clearance, finding that these lines made it tougher for minority voters to elect a candidate of their choosing. As the 2012 elections neared, a three-judge panel ordered tweaks to the legislative maps — but these were supposed to be temporary fixes while the legal challenges worked their way through the courts.

But when the Shelby decision came down, as the Texas Tribune observed, Texas suddenly no longer needed to pre-clear its maps. Republican leaders disingenuously cloaked themselves in a map they could claim was drawn by the courts, when really those judges had only approved the first step in a much longer process. How could we be diluting minority voters, the state protested, when we just took the courts' map? Lower federal courts disagreed, and developed a rich evidence file that delved deep into the 2011 mapmaking process and referred to the 2013 GOP strategy as "discriminatory at its heart."

Once again, however, the Supreme Court stepped in. In 2018's Abbott v. Perez, the Supreme Court overturned those lower court decisions that found Republicans had diluted minority votes in multiple state house districts. They OK'd what had been called a racial gerrymander of the state legislature which judges said went "out of its way" to preserve GOP power at the expense of Latino voting power, with "serious costs to our democracy."

That 5-4 decision, written by Justice Alito, insisted that when it comes to redistricting, the good faith of the legislature must be assumed. Alito blithely dismissed a 150-page lower court reportthat laid out, county by county, the precise machinations that Republican mapmakers used to crack and pack growing numbers of Latino voters, and even a careful study of which Latino voters were most likely to turn out. (Those unlikely to vote could also be carefully distributed in order to make districts appear to resemble a "minority opportunity" district, without actually being one.)

In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor accused the majority of ignoring "undeniable proof of intentional discrimination," contributing to the deliberate underrepresentation of minority voters and doing "great damage" to both equal opportunity and equal participation in the political process. The majority decision, she wrote, "blinds itself to the overwhelming factual record" in order to "allow Texas to use electoral maps that, in design and effect, burden the rights of minority voters."

Texas isn't a red state or a blue state. It's a voter suppression state, with some of the lowest turnout numbers in the country, in part because the state — with the full support of the U.S. Supreme Court, since the 2013 Shelby County case — makes it so difficult to vote. By 2014, Texas turnout had plunged to the lowest in the nation, just 28.3 percent according to the Elections Project. A sexy 2018 U.S. Senate race between Ted Cruz and Beto O'Rourke helped push that number higher, but the Elections Project still found Texas mired among the lowest 10 states in the nation.

Political scientists will long debate the impact of redistricting, voter ID laws and other restrictive techniques, as well as the Roberts court's rulings on the VRA and gerrymandering, on the democratic backsliding that has become a feature of so many red state legislatures and contributed to the growing crisis of GOP minority rule. But no one needs an advanced degree to see the effects of this two-step on extreme legislation on reproductive rights, among other issues, coming from Texas, Ohio, Georgia, Alabama, Missouri and elsewhere — despite zero indication that voters in these states desire these new restrictions or have moved anywhere near as far right on these issues as their representatives.

Perhaps the problem is that this Supreme Court has made it exceptionally difficult for voters to get rid of their representatives when they go too far, and that this has emboldened lawmakers who no longer fear that their extremism might lead either to defeat or reproach from the courts. Indeed, this Supreme Court, under Alito's lead, has encouraged legislatures to go a step further. After the ruling on the Texas law, in which justices threw up their hands at the novel workaround created by empowering citizens to turn in anyone involved in making an abortion possible, the signal to every other state was this: Go as far as you want. This court has your back.

The message to the rest of the nation is clear as well. When voting rights are hollowed out, it opens the door to an assault on every right you hold dear and any policy that matters to you, whether that's reproductive rights, labor rights, gun control, the environment, or whether or not your kids can be asked to wear masks at school during a pandemic.

If voters want to change those policies, Samuel Alito says tough. He can't be voted out of office — and his colleagues just keep tilting the rules so your legislators can't be either.

As redistricting begins in state legislatures nationwide, Republican state legislators are building up their own walls of protection. If Democrats want to reverse course before a potential generation of GOP minority rule, 2022 could be the last chance. Congress must protect voting rights. And we all must prioritize state legislative and secretary of state races. We invest now to win next November — or the Texas two-step could be playing in your state next.

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/robert-kagan-2655176730/

[big lie] ignore elections]

...When Stelter asked Snyder what "role" right-wing media play in this "scenario," the historian responded, "Right-wing media, with a few honorable exceptions, is one giant safe space for the Big Lie. What's happened is that rather than facts coming up from below to shape stories, we now have one enormous fiction — which is that Mr. Trump won this election. And that one enormous fiction, rather than casting light on things, just casts a huge shadow. Anything that doesn't fit that fiction can't be talked about. Anything which seems like it might somehow support that fiction gets all the airtime."

Snyder's appearance on "Reliable Sources" came only three days after the Washington Post published a sobering essay/op-ed by Never Trump conservative Robert Kagan, who warned that "the United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War." Stelter mentioned Kagan's article to Snyder, who didn't find Kagan's dire warning to be the least bit alarmist. In fact, Stelter and Snyder seemed to agree that Kagan's warning is spot on.

Stelter asked Snyder if the mainstream media need to be spending more time talking about "worst-case scenarios" in the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election, and the historian responded, "Those aren't worst-case scenarios. That's the mainstream…. When you have a two-party system and one of the parties is lining up against democracy, we're not talking about a worst-case scenario — we're talking about a situation where democracy is not something that can be taken for granted as a background to all the other news. Democracy itself is the foreground, and the struggle as to whether this country as to whether this country will be democratic in the future…. is the main story…. The story is whether we have a democracy or not."

Echoing the warnings in Kagan's article, Snyder added that the GOP has a game plan for stealing the 2024 election.

Snyder told Stelter, "The game is we cast doubt on 2020, we passvoter suppression laws…. If we get ahold of the House and the Senate in 2022, we plan not to certify a Democrat if he wins in 2024. We pass memory laws and voter suppression laws at the state level which give the states themselves the right to allocate electors…. We do all of that to aim for an outcome in2024 in which the guy who loses is nevertheless the winner…. That is not a worst-case scenario. That is happening before our eyes right now."

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/robert-kagan-2655176730/

[big lie] ignore elections]

Echoing the warnings in Kagan's article, Snyder added that the GOP has a game plan for stealing the 2024 election.

an 921

...Cruz asked Tolson, "In your judgement, are voting ID laws racist?" — to which she replied, "It depends." And when Cruz wanted to know which ones in particular she considers racist, Tolson responded, "Apologies, Mr. Cruz, your state of Texas, perhaps."

Cruz told Tolson, "OK, so you think the entire state of Texas is racist" — and the USC law professor clarified, "I'm not saying the entire state of Texas is racist…. The voter ID law was put into place to diminish the power of Latinos, with racist intent."

Cruz asked her what the evidence for this claim was, and she quickly had an answer: A federal district court ruled that the voter ID law was enacted for an "unconstitutional discriminatory purpose." Cruz had no response to this reply, so he just moved on.

The hearing was titled, "Restoring the Voting Rights Act: Combating Discriminatory Abuses."

Here are some responses to Tolson's testimony:...

omg

https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2021/08/23/conservative-think-tank-end-wisconsin-elections-commission/

looks legit

conservative think tank — run by a former staffer for then-Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald and connected to former Gov. Scott Walker — has called for abolishing the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) and moving the administration of state elections to the elected secretary of state.

The think tank, the Institute for Reforming Government, called for the change to state election law in a news release Monday morning.

“It is time to abolish WEC and implement good government accountability when it comes to Wisconsin’s elections and work to restore confidence among Wisconsin residents,” Chris Reader, executive vice president of IRG, said in a statement. “When unelected bureaucrats oversee Wisconsin’s elections it can lead to the erosion of faith and confidence in our electoral system. Thirty-three other states have elected officials overseeing the election process, providing a good measure of accountability by empowering people across ideological spectrums to provide a check on who manages elections. This is a good government measure that will benefit all Wisconsinites.”

The think tank’s president is CJ Szafir, who previously worked on Fitzgerald’s staff and served as the executive vice president for the right wing legal outfit, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. Walker is named on the think tank’s website as its former national honorary chairman.

According to the think tank’s most recently available :{tax records:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, it paid Walker’s consulting firm, the Walker Group, more than $164,000 in 2019.

The call comes as Republicans continue an effort to delegitimize state election administration in the wake of the 2020 presidential election and former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen.

This weekend, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) :{met with Trump:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:to discuss an ongoing investigation into the election led by former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman. Gableman recently traveled to South Dakota for a conspiracy theory-laden convention, run by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, where lies were spread about the 2020 election.

Gableman was joined by a state lawmaker and Robert Spindell, a member of the Elections Commission who has frequently spread conspiracy theories about last year’s election as well.

The conservative group’s call to disband the Wisconsin Elections Commission — made up of six members, three appointed by Democrats and three by Republicans — comes just six years after Republicans themselves created the commission. Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls), who chairs the Assembly Campaigns and Elections Commission, has continued an effort to hold a “forensic audit” of the 2020 election — similar to the widely derided audit held in Arizona.

Fitzgerald, now a member of Congress, and Walker were behind the creation of the WEC in 2015 after they disbanded the Government Accountability Board (GAB) over some similar complaints to the present complaints about the WEC. The GAB was made up of members appointed by a panel of appellate judges and was responsible for administration of the state’s election, ethics and campaign finance laws.

Republicans disbanded the GAB after it began investigating Walker for violations of campaign finance laws through so-called John Doe investigations.

GOP leaders, including Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, :{directly cited:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: those investigations as the reason for the disbanding of the GAB and the creation of two new commissions to take its place — the Wisconsin Elections Commission and Wisconsin Ethics Commission.

The legislation that created the WEC was introduced by then-Rep. Dean Knudson (R-Hudson). Knudson is now a member of the WEC and its former chair.

The current Wisconsin secretary of state is Democrat Doug La Follette. The office is largely responsible for maintaining government records, as Republicans took nearly all of the other responsibilities — and most of the staff — away from the office they now want to run elections under Walker, moving La Follette to a storage room in the Capitol basement. In 2015, a different right wing think tank, the MacIver Institute, called for :{abolishing the position:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:.

The Institute for Reforming Government did not respond to a request for comment.

texas kill roe and voting in one day?! abbott

https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/big-lie/

omg

no lnx

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/09/the-big-money-behind-the-big-lie

The New Yorker

A Reporter at Large

August 9, 2021 Issue

The Big Money Behind the Big Lie

Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy are being promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups that are determined to win at all costs.

By Jane Mayer

August 2, 2021

It was tempting to dismiss the show unfolding inside the Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, as an unintended comedy. One night in June, a few hundred people gathered for the première of “The Deep Rig,” a film financed by the multimillionaire founder of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, who is a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump. Styled as a documentary, the movie asserts that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen by supporters of Joe Biden, including by Antifa members who chatted about their sinister plot on a conference call. The evening’s program featured live appearances by Byrne and a local QAnon conspiracist, BabyQ, who claimed to be receiving messages from his future self. They were joined by the film’s director, who had previously made an exposé contending that the real perpetrators of 9/11 were space aliens.

But the event, for all its absurdities, had a dark surprise: “The Deep Rig” repeatedly quotes Doug Logan, the C.E.O. of Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based company that consults with clients on software security. In a voice-over, Logan warns, “If we don’t fix our election integrity now, we may no longer have a democracy.” He also suggests, without evidence, that members of the “deep state,” such as C.I.A. agents, have intentionally spread disinformation about the election.Although it wasn’t the first time that Logan had promoted what has come to be known as the Big Lie about the 2020 election—he had tweeted unsubstantiated claims that Trump had been victimized by voter fraud—the film offered stark confirmation of Logan’s entanglement in fringe conspiracies. Nevertheless, the president of the Arizona State Senate, Karen Fann, has put Logan’s company in charge of a “forensic audit”—an ongoing review of the state’s 2020 Presidential vote. It’s an unprecedented undertaking, with potentially explosive consequences for American democracy.

Approximately 2.1 million Presidential votes were cast in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and accounts for most of the state’s population. In recent years, younger voters and people of color have turned the county’s electorate increasingly Democratic—a shift that helped Biden win the traditionally conservative state, by 10,457 votes. Since the election, the county has become a focus of ire for Trump and his supporters. By March, when Logan’s company was hired, the county had already undergone four election audits, all of which upheld the outcome. Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican and a former Trump ally, had certified Biden’s victory. But Trump’s core supporters were not assuaged.

As soon as the Fox News Decision Desk called the state for Biden, at 11:20 p.m. on November 3rd, Trump demanded that the network “reverse this!” When Fox held firm, he declared, “This is a major fraud.” By the time of the “Deep Rig” première, the standoff had dragged on for more than half a year. The Cyber Ninjas audit was supposed to conclude in May, but at the company’s request Fann has repeatedly extended it. On July 28th, the auditors completed a hand recount, but they are still demanding access to the computer routers used by Maricopa County and also want to scrutinize images of mail-in-ballot envelopes. The U.S. Department of Justice has warned that “private actors who have neither experience nor expertise in handling” ballots could face prosecution for failing to follow federal audit rules. Trump, meanwhile, has fixated on Arizona’s audit, describing it as a step toward his “reinstatement.” On July 24th, he appeared in Phoenix for a “Rally to Protect Our Elections,” and said, “I am not the one trying to undermine American democracy—I’m the one trying to save American democracy.” Predicting that the audit would vindicate him, he rambled angrily for nearly two hours about having been cheated, calling the election “a scam—the greatest crime in history.”

In June, I stood in the bleachers at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, where the audit was taking place, and witnessed people examining carton after carton of paper ballots cast by Arizonans last fall. Some inspectors used microscopes to investigate surreal allegations: that some ballots had been filled out by machines or were Asian counterfeits withtelltale bamboo fibres. Other inspectors looked for creases in mail-in ballots, to determine whether they had been legitimately sent in envelopes or—as Trump has alleged—dumped in bulk.

As the audit has unfolded, various violations of professional norms have been observed, including inspectors caught with pens whose ink matched what was used on ballots. One auditor turned out to have been an unsuccessful Republican candidate during the election. As I watched the proceedings, black-vested paid supervisors monitored the process, but their role was cloaked in secrecy. The audit is almost entirely privately funded, and a county judge in Arizona recently ordered the State Senate to disclose who is paying for it. Last week, Cyber Ninjas acknowledged having received $5.7 million in private donations, most of it from nonprofit groups led by Trump allies who live outside Arizona, including Byrne.

I was joined in the bleachers by Ken Bennett, a former Arizona secretary of state and a Republican, whom the State Senate had designated its liaison to the audit. He acknowledged that, if the auditors end up claiming to have found large discrepancies, “that will of course be very inflammatory.” Indeed, a recent incendiary claim by the auditors—that the vote had tallied about seventy thousand more mail-in ballots than had been postmarked—prompted one Republican state senator to propose a recall of Arizona’s electoral votes for Biden. (In fact, the auditors misunderstood what they were counting.) Nevertheless, Bennett defended the audit process: “It’s important to prove to both sides that the election was done accurately and fairly. If we lurch from one election to another with almost half the electorate thinking the election was a fraud, it’s going to rip our country apart.”

Many experts on democratic governance, however, believe that efforts to upend long-settled election practices are what truly threaten to rip the country apart. Chad Campbell, a Democrat who was the minority leader in the Arizona House of Representatives until 2014, when he left to become a consultant in Phoenix, has been shocked by the state’s anti-democratic turn. For several years, he sat next to Karen Fann when she was a member of the House, and in his view she’s gone from being a traditional Republican lawmaker to being a member of “Trump’s cult of personality.” He said, “I don’t know if she believes it or not, or which would be worse.” Arizona, he added, is in the midst of a “nonviolent overthrow in some ways—it’s subtle, and not in people’s face because it’s not happening with weapons. But it’s still a complete overthrow of democracy. They’re trying to disenfranchise everyone who is not older white guys.”

Arizona is hardly the only place where attacks on the electoral process are under way: a well-funded national movement has been exploiting Trump’s claims of fraud in order to promote alterations to the way that ballots are cast and counted in forty-nine states, eighteen of which have passed new voting laws in the past six months. Republican-dominated legislatures have also stripped secretaries of state and other independent election officials of their power. The chair of Arizona’s Republican Party, Kelli Ward, has referred to the state’s audit as a “domino,” and has expressed hope that it will inspire similar challenges elsewhere.

Ralph Neas has been involved in voting-rights battles since the nineteen-eighties, when, as a Republican, he served as the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. He has overseen a study of the Arizona audit for the nonpartisan Century Foundation, and he told me that, though the audit is a “farce,” it may nonetheless have “extraordinary consequences.” He said, “The Maricopa County audit exposes exactly what the Big Lie is all about. If they come up with an analysis that discredits the 2020 election results in Arizona, it will be replicated in other states, furthering more chaos. That will enable new legislation. Millions of Americans could be disenfranchised, helping Donald Trump to be elected again in 2024. That’s the bottom line. Maricopa County is the prism through which to view everything. It’s not so much about 2020—it’s about 2022 and 2024. This is a coördinated national effort to distort not just what happened in 2020 but to regain the House of Representatives and the Presidency.”

Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the country’s foremost election-law experts, told me, “I’m scared shitless.” Referring to the array of new laws passed by Republican state legislatures since the 2020 election, he said, “It’s not just about voter suppression. What I’m really worried about is election subversion. Election officials are being put in place who will mess with the count.”

Arizona’s secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, whose office has authority over the administration of elections, told me that the conspiracy-driven audit “looks so comical you have to laugh at it sometimes.” But Hobbs, a Democrat, who is running for governor, warned, “It’s dangerous. It’s feeding the kind of misinformation that led to the January 6th insurrection.” QAnon followers have been celebrating the audit as the beginning of a “Great Awakening” that will eject Biden from the White House. She noted, “I’ve gotten death threats. I’ve had armed protestors outside my house. Every day, there is a total barrage of social media to our office. We’ve had to route our phones to voice mail so that no one has to listen to it. It can be really traumatizing. I feel beaten up.” She added, “But I’m not going to cave to their tactics—because I think they’re laying the groundwork to steal the 2024 elections.”

Although the Arizona audit may appear to be the product of local extremists, it has been fed by sophisticated, well-funded national organizations whose boards of directors include some of the country’s wealthiest and highest-profile conservatives. Dark-money organizations, sustained by undisclosed donors, have relentlessly promoted the myth that American elections are rife with fraud, and, according to leaked records of their internal deliberations, they have drafted, supported, and in some cases taken credit for state laws that make it harder to vote.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island who has tracked the flow of dark money in American politics, told me that a “flotilla of front groups” once focussed on advancing such conservative causes as capturing the courts and opposing abortion have now “more or less shifted to work on the voter-suppression thing.” These groups have cast their campaigns as high-minded attempts to maintain “election integrity,” but Whitehouse believes that they are in fact tampering with the guardrails of democracy.

One of the movement’s leaders is the Heritage Foundation, the prominent conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. It has been working with the American Legislative Exchange Council (alec)—a corporate-funded nonprofit that generates model laws for state legislators—on ways to impose new voting restrictions.

Among those deep in the fight is Leonard Leo, a chairman of the Federalist Society, the legal organization known for its decades-long campaign to fill the courts with conservative judges. In February, 2020, the Judicial Education Project, a group tied to Leo, quietly rebranded itself as the Honest Elections Project, which subsequently filed briefs at the Supreme Court, and in numerous states, opposing mail-in ballots and other reforms that have made it easier for people to vote.

Another newcomer to the cause is the Election Integrity Project California. And a group called FreedomWorks, which once concentrated on opposing government regulation, is now demanding expanded government regulation of voters, with a project called the National Election Protection Initiative.

These disparate nonprofits have one thing in common: they have all received funding from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Based in Milwaukee, the private, tax-exempt organization has become an extraordinary force in persuading mainstream Republicans to support radical challenges to election rules—a tactic once relegated to the far right. With an endowment of some eight hundred and fifty million dollars, the foundation funds a network of groups that have been stoking fear about election fraud, in some cases for years. Public records show that, since 2012, the foundation has spent some eighteen million dollars supporting eleven conservative groups involved in election issues.

...LONG

an 821

Mayer, author of the 2016 New York Times bestseller "Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right," is shedding light on how dark money donated by ultrarich conservatives has contributed to the tactics used to magnify former President Donald Trump's claims of widespread voter fraud.

In a piece published by The New Yorker, Mayer dissected the controversial election audit in Maricopa County, Ariz., as she explained why the effort is not as local as it may seem.

"Although the audit in Arizona may appear to be the product of local extremists, it has been fed by sophisticated, well-funded national organizations whose boards of directors include some of the country's wealthiest and highest-profile conservatives," Mayer wrote.

She went on to discuss the uses of dark money and how it has aided in promoting the falsehood of widespread voter fraud.

"Dark-money organizations, sustained by undisclosed donors, have relentlessly promoted the myth that American elections are rife with fraud, and, according to leaked records of their internal deliberations, they have drafted, supported, and in some cases taken credit for state laws that make it harder to vote," she wrote.

Experts are expressing concern about the efforts being made to upend election laws and dismantle the United States' democracyWhile Mayer largely highlighted the election audit in Arizona, there are many different states across the country where Republican lawmakers are taking aim at voting practices and election laws.

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Never expected I'd say this': Election expert delivers a terrifying warning

Sky Palma Raw Story

August 05, 2021

Speaking on CNN this Thursday, election law expert Richard Hasen said he worried about the future of elections in the United States of America.

"I never expected to say I'd be scared sh*tless on CNN...

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/justice-alito-voting-rights/

Colorado Trump supporter accused of murdering his wife and voter fraud in her name: report

Alex Henderson

May 14, 2021

Right-wing media outlets have been full of debunked conspiracy theories falsely claiming that widespread voter fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election, and those outlets typically point the finger at...

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/ohio-voter-fraud/

by gop official?!

One need only compare now-President Joe Biden's losses in Texas in 2020 to his losses in Idaho or Wyoming to see that Texas has gone from deep red to light red. Biden lost Texas by 6%; he lost Wyoming by 43%, Idaho by 30% and North Dakota by 43%. Nonetheless, the Democratic Party has, historically, had a turnout problem in the Lone Star State; Democrats are going to need a heavier turnout in the Democrat-leaning parts of the state if they are going to win statewide races (presidential, gubernatorial or U.S. Senate) in the future. And Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, during a June 4 appearance on Steve Bannon's podcast, essentially admitted that voter suppression helped former President Donald Trump win Texas in 2020.

Paxton told Bannon, who served as White House chief strategist in the Trump Administration in 2017 following his years as chairman of Breitbart News, that had his office not blocked Harris County from sending out mail-in ballot applications to its residents, Trump would have lost Texas in 2020. Harris County includes Democrat-leaning Houston.

"Trump won by 620,000 votes in Texas," Paxton told Bannon. "(The) Harris County mail-in ballots that they wanted to send out were 2.5 million. Those were all illegal, and we were able to stop every one of them."

What Paxton described as "mail-in ballots" were mail-in ballot applications. There's a difference between sending out 2.5 applications for mail-in ballots and actually sending out 2.5 mail-in ballots. And there was nothing evil or sinister about the applications that Harris County officials wanted to send out, as Paxton claimed.

Nonetheless, Paxton's comments were revealing, as they underscore the fact that far-right Republicans like Paxton and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott are scared to death of the possibility of Democrats ramping up voter turnout in the more Democratic parts of the state — which include not only Houston (which hasn't had a Republican mayor since the early 1980s), but also, Austin, El Paso, Dallas and San Antonio. However, the Texas GOP has a very strong ground game in countless rural counties in North Texas and Central Texas, and they really know how to turn out the Republican base in those areas of the state.

Journalist Sharon Zhang, reporting on the interview in Truthout on June 7, stresses that it's "unclear" whether or not Trump "would have actually won the state if Harris County had been allowed to follow through on its plan to make voting more accessible."

"While President Joe Biden won the county by a 13-point margin or nearly 220,000 votes, with record-breaking voter turnout, Trump carried the state with over 600,000 votes," Zhang explains. "Regardless of whether the results would have been any different for Biden had Harris County been able to send out mail-in ballot applications, Paxton's statement about the election results seven months after the fact is revealing of how conservatives view elections and voting rights. Rather than ensuring that elections are conducted fairly, they openly support blocking access to the ballot by any means necessary — especially among voters in more Democratic leaning and non-White areas."

Zhang continues, "Paxton, after all, is the same person who sued to disenfranchise millions of voters in battleground states following Biden's victory in the 2020 elections. Regardless of whether Paxton's lawsuit against the mail-in ballot applications handed Trump his victory in Texas, it was certainly one more tool in the GOP's voter-suppression toolbox for the state."

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staffer cut and paste racist stuff, did not know?

an 621 Texas GOP blames 'typo' as Democrats force their retreat on controversial voter suppression bill: report

Greg Abbott consulted an infamous climate change denier before Texas' energy debacle: reporter?]

ncil

Meaghan Ellis June 11, 2021

Republican lawmakers in Texas are scrambling as their already-flawed voter suppression bill falls apart at the seams. Some of the features that critics were most concerned about may not end up in the final version at all because of the state Democrats' efforts.

On Friday, June 11, independent journalist Judd Legum took to Twitter with a timeline of the events unfolding in Texas as Democratic lawmakers push back against the controversial bill.

He noted that Republican lawmakers' actions on May 31 assumed they would be passing sweeping legislation to restrict voting practices across the state. However, Democrats took a stand by walking out and denying Republicans a quorum, meaning a final vote on the bill couldn't happen. While the frustrated lawmakers are preparing to revisit the bill during a special session, Legum noted that an "extraordinary" occurrence is underway.

There are a number of discrepancies that are now coming to light. With this particular bill, the devil is in the details, and the Democrats' stunt gave the details time to come out. While some critics said that walk-out merely delayed the inevitable passage fo the bill, Legum argued that the delay is actually resulting in signficiant changes to the legislation.

Apparently, there are a number of "typos" within the bill that Republican lawmakers were attempting to expedite.

"Republicans are COMPLETELY UNPREPARED to defend the substance of the bill and are abandoning major provisions," Legum tweeted. "First, the GOP claimed the ban on Sunday voting before 1PM was a typo This isn't credible because they defended the ban as the bill was debated But [it's] out."

He added, "Now Republicans are scrapping a provision to allow Texas judges to void an election based on thin evidence of fraud (w/o regard to whether the alleged fraud changed the result) A chief House sponsor of the bill now calls the provision 'horrendous!'"

On June 1, state lawmaker Rep. Travis Clardy (R-Texas), who also serves on the state's Elections Committee, spoke with NPR about the typographical errors in the piece of legislation.

"Actually, that's one of the things I look forward to with fixing the most," Clardy said. "That was not intended to be reduced. I think there was a — you know, call it a mistake if you want. What should have been '11' was actually printed up as '1.'"

Legum wrote, "There may not be a special session until the Fall. How many more 'typos' or horrendous provisions will be found before then? When defending the indefensible, time is not on your side."

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i think

see kenyatta

Your boos mean nothing to me': Democratic lawmaker Brian Sims slams Republicans who cut his mic

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

June 10, 2021

Democratic state Representative **Brian Sims** shared a few truths with his Republican colleagues on the floor of the Pennsylvania House, truths that they deemed so "inflammatory" they literally cut his mic – twice – and...

fox lies

https://www.mediamatters.org/voter-fraud-and-suppression/how-fox-news-lying-about-texas-voter-suppression-bill

dems fled quorum? tx rangers and helo?! 8k$/yr?!

texas Gov. Greg Abbott vows to defund state Legislature after voting restrictions bill fails

Patrick Svitek The Texas Tribune

June 01, 2021

May 31, 2021

"Texas Gov. Greg Abbott vows to defund state Legislature after voting restrictions bill fails, threatening salaries" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a...

precursor wd win but looked at margin vs 2020 30 pts? excuse, build on big lie, justify voter suppression bills

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/republicans-blame-partys-election-fraud-lies-for-lack-of-voter-turnout-for-new-mexico-special-election/

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/dark-money-groups/

Earlier this year, Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives took a stand against voter suppression when they passed House Resolution 1, a.k.a. the For the People Act — a comprehensive voting rights/election reform bill that now faces an uphill climb in the U.S. Senate under the rules of the filibuster, which requires 60 or more votes for most legislation. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and many other Senate Republicans are vehemently opposed to HR 1, and according to the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Government, "dark money" from "the Koch network" is helping to fuel that opposition.

In an article published on May 28, CREW members Meghan Faulkner and Miru Osuga explain, "There's a whole lot of dark money behind the opponents of democracy reform. The Koch network alone has spent tens of millions backing many of the senators who are opposing the For the People Act, which would overhaul campaign finance rules and enforcement and make it harder for dark money groups, like those in the Koch network, to secretly influence our elections."

Faulkner and Osuga note how much "the Koch network" has spent "backing" GOP opponents of the For the People Act, including $5.6 million spent on Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, $1.3 million on Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, $4.9 million on Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, $4.3 million on Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, $5.7 million on Sen. John Cornyn of Texas and $4.3 million on Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas.

"All told," Faulkner and Osuga note, "groups associated with the Koch network have spent over $100 million boosting the campaigns of current Republican senators, none of whom are supportive of comprehensive campaign finance reform. That total doesn't even include millions of dollars in additional dark money spending from these groups that was never reported to the Federal Election Commission."

KochPAC is a political action committee funded by employees of Koch Industries and their allies. Billionaire oligarch Charles Koch, the 85-year-old brother of the late David Koch, has been a major supporter of right-wing causes.

According to CREW, one of the things that troubles "the Koch network" is how "popular" the proposals of the For the People Act are. The bill comes at a time when Republicans in state legislatures all over the United States are aggressively pushing voter suppression bills.

"The Koch network and other dark money groups know exactly how popular this democracy reform is and how much it threatens the broken campaign finance system they depend on," Faulkner and Osuga stress. "That's why they're doing their best to defeat it quietly in Congress, aided by the senators whose campaigns they've boosted with millions of dollars of secret money."

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some one asked democ lost in hungary? // trump. courts, make harder for opps to vote...

~ vote law over 400 in ---states? beto sez hr1 only hope

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/scholars-democracy/?rs=182

As Republican lawmakers continue to push for legislation to restrict voting, a Washington Post columnist is shedding light on a major warning from more than 100 scholars and experts: America's democracy is at risk.

More than 100 scholars of democracy signed in support of a new public statement of principles, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. The scholars aimed to make one thing very clear: "On the line is nothing less than the future of our democracy itself," they wrote.

"Our entire democracy is now at risk," the scholars write in the statement, which WaPo columnist Greg Sargent obtained before it was released. "History will judge what we do at this moment."

The scholars have a dire request for lawmakers. "We urge members of Congress to do whatever is necessary — including suspending the filibuster — in order to pass national voting and election administration standards," the scholars wrote as they referenced the voting rights protections included in the For the People Act.

In the letter continued:

In future elections, these laws politicizing the administration and certification of elections could enable some state legislatures or partisan election officials to do what they failed to do in 2020: reverse the outcome of a free and fair election. Further, these laws could entrench extended minority rule, violating the basic and longstanding democratic principle that parties that get the most votes should win elections.

Democracy rests on certain elemental institutional andnormativeconditions. Elections must be neutrally and fairly administered. They must be free of manipulation. Every citizen who is qualified must have an equal right to vote, unhindered by obstruction. And when they lose elections, political parties and their candidates and supporters must be willing to accept defeat and acknowledge the legitimacy of the outcome.

Speaking to Sargent, Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America, weighed in to explain the purpose of the scholars' collective statement.

"We wanted to create a strong statement from a wide range of scholars, including many who have studied democratic backsliding, to make it clear that democracy in America is genuinely under threat," Drutman said.

He continued, "The playbook that the Republican Party is executing at the state and national levels is very much consistent with actions taken by illiberal, anti-democratic, anti-pluralist parties in other democracies that have slipped away from free and fair elections."

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U.S. democracy facing historic crisis | Stanford News ›

woman gov voter suppr curbside

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/kay-ivey/

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/arizona-voter-law/

one hr gov ducey

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/republicans-water-to-voters

ncrm badasch

all nine Republicans on the U.S. Senate Rules Committee on Tuesday killed an amendment by Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff that would make it illegal for states to ban volunteers from giving water to voters waiting in line. Sen. Ossoff's home state of Georgia passed a law making it illegal to give water to voters waiting in line. That law was signed by GOP Gov. Brian Kemp.

"This is about decency — basic decency," Ossoff said in a press conference announcing the amendment, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. "This is about the health and well-being of a senior citizen who's being made to wait six hours in line to vote and allowing a volunteer to hand that senior citizen a bottle of water without facing up to a year in jail."

The Republicans voting against water are: Ranking Member Roy Blunt (MO), Mitch McConnell (KY), Richard Shelby (AL), Ted Cruz (TX), Shelley Moore Capito (WV), Roger Wicker (MS), Deb Fischer (NE), Cindy Hyde-Smith (MS), and Bill Hagerty (TN).

Watch as the Republicans kill the water for voters amendment:...

//oann AZ ninja?

"that’s not normal’: DeSantis signs voter suppression bill into law — bars all local news but gives Fox 'exclusive'

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

Florida Republican Governor **Ron DeSantis** Thursday morning signed a voter suppression bill into law that massively restricts access to the ballot box, following the lead of Georgia GOP...

===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/texas-lt-gov-patrick-claimed-that-most-non-white-texans-dont-drive-but-the-data-clearly-says-otherwise-report/

note: gerry and elect college not enough to ensure win with dwindle demographic (only xians not leaving?)

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/republican-lesson/

no lnx twet

Republicans learned an extremely dangerous lesson from the 2020 election

Alex Henderson April 13, 2021

When candidates lose a presidential election, their party typically performs an "autopsy" and tries to figure out exactly where they went wrong. President Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, for example, was arguably the result of three "autopsies" — as Democrats had lost three presidential elections in a row during the 1980s. But Never Trump conservative Jonathan V. Last, in a column for The Bulwark published this week, argues that the Republican response to former President Donald Trump's loss to now-President Joe Biden in the 2020 election was to double down on Trumpism.

"In the days after Democrats unseated an incumbent president and won unified control of Congress," Last writes, "the victorious party went through a round of self-analysis and recriminations. The Republicans, who managed a trifecta of losing that hadn't been accomplished since Herbert Hoover, doubled down. Then they backed up their bets, split 4s, and doubled down again."

Last adds that with the GOP having doubled down on Trumpism following Trump's loss, one of the talking points of "Conservatism Inc." is "how beside-the-point 'democracy' is, anyhow." And Last points to a recent tweet in which conservative writer David Harsanyi wrote, "I'm not pro-democracy, I am pro-freedom. If democracy erodes freedom, (then) it's not something to celebrate."

The conservative Bulwark columnist argues that the GOP, with its post-election "autopsy," isn't trying to figure out how to appeal to a wider range of voters, but trying to discourage voting.

"When Republicans conducted their autopsy," Last writes, "they skipped 'How to Win: Option 1' and went straight to Options 2 and 3 — leapfrogging the question of how to get more votes and focusing on how to use institutional leverage to take power even while losing popular majorities. Option 2 — the path of least resistance — is for Republicans to change voting rules at the state level in the hopes that they can drive down the number of Democratic votes cast and win the Electoral College despite being a persistent minority. A lot has been written about these various initiatives, some of which are more grotesque than others."

With biting sarcasm, Last adds, "But the real cutting-edge work being done as a result of the GOP autopsy concerns Option 3: figuring out how a Republican can win the presidency even while losing the popular vote and the Electoral College."

After the 2020 presidential election, Last writes, some Republicans in the state governments in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia had enough integrity to resist Trump allies who wanted them to defy the Electoral College results. But with Option 3, according to Last, the GOP could try to purge state governments of Republicans who will accept Electoral College results even if they don't like an election's outcome.

"So, the key parts of the Republican autopsy have been: (1) building the political will to use raw power next time, and (2) removing the Republican officials who were not willing to comply last time," Last explains. "That's why Republican state parties have censured nearly every Republican who did not participate in Trump's attempted coup."

Last continues, "That's why (Secretary of State) Brad Raffensperger is the target of a primary challenge in Georgia…. That's why Nevada Republicans are attacking Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, the only Republican to have won state-wide office in 2018. Even though she is a Republican, Cegavske refused to go along with the attempt to overturn Nevada's result."

As much sarcasm and scathing humor as Last uses in his column, the Never Trumper concludes it by making a disturbing point and stressing that many Republicans have become overtly "authoritarian" and are undermining checks and balances.

Last writes, "This is how authoritarianism starts. A society goes from the rule of law, to rule by law — where the minority gets just enough power to change the laws so that they can amass more power. And here is a serious question: If Republicans managed enough votes to sustain an objection to counting electoral votes, what would our recourse be? Crossing our fingers and hoping that the Supreme Court steps in?.... The time to fight against authoritarianism isn't December 2024. It's now."

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Georgia's harsh lesson for Republicans | Financial Times ›

Georgia's so-called Election Integrity Act of 2021, the voter suppression bill that Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law on March 25, has drawn vehement criticism from Delta Airlines, Coca-Cola and other Georgia-based companies — and Major League Baseball voiced its opposition by moving its 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver. The right-wing Heritage Action for America, however, is defending the law with a million-dollar ad buy aimed at businesses, according to Axios reporter Hans Nichols.

President Joe Biden has slammed the law as "Jim Crow in the 21:{st:(style="position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}: Century." And Nichols reports that in Heritage Action's ad, which will air on outlets that include CNBC and local Georgia television, the right-wing group declares, "President Biden is lying about Georgia's new election reform. This new ethics law doubles early voting on weekends."

Heritage Action Executive Director Jessica Anderson told Axios, "After weeks of media spin and corporate posturing around Georgia's new voting law, we thought it was time someone told the truth. The truth is that the new law makes it easier to vote and harder to cheat. Heritage Action is standing behind Gov. Kemp, state legislators and the Georgians who made this happen."

What the ad doesn'tmention is the many ways in which the Election Integrity Act of 2021 makes voting more difficult in Georgia, from limiting absentee voting to making it a crime to give food or water to someone waiting in line to vote.

Nichols notes, "Critics of the law say its measures are intended to target heavily Democratic jurisdictions and will hurt Black and Latino voters the most."

Heritage Action is a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank.

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2006 some corps helped surprised Lewis on re-up? see trms

andy young dtr grabbed Delta ceo after airport ceremeony got him on bd ~ GA voter supp, coke belated follow (after signed) but MLB -->Colo McConn threats corps tp stay out of politics

Unhinged': Texas Republican Dan Crenshaw mocked for calling companies opposing voter suppression 'fascism'

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

April 08, 2021

**Republican U.S. Congressman Dan Crenshaw** of Texas is getting roundly criticized and mocked after attacking the growing number of major corporations publicly opposing voter suppression laws, like Georgia's, and...

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/billionaire-elections/

A newly surfaced recording shows a senior adviser to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell conspiring with the Koch brothers' network and other conservative groups to torpedo sweeping voting rights legislation.

The Jan. 8 recording obtained by *The New Yorker* reveals leading conservative activists are alarmed by public support for House Resolution 1 and Senate Bill 1, commonly known as the For The People Act, and they privately admitted they had no effective way to counter the argument that billionaires should be able to buy elections.

"When presented with a very neutral description" of the bill, "people were generally supportive,"Kyle McKenzie, the research director for the Koch-run advocacy group Stand Together."The most worrisome part . . . is that conservatives were actually as supportive as the general public was when they read the neutral description."

"There's a large, very large, chunk of conservatives who are supportive of these types of efforts," he added.

The election reform bill, which would ban large, anonymous political donations, enjoys broad public support, and McKenzie told participants that Senate Republicans would need to use "under-the-dome" legislative tactics to stop the bill because generally everyone but them agreed billionaires should not be able to buy elections behind the scenes.

"Unfortunately, we've found that that is a winning message, for both the general public and also conservatives," McKenzie said.

The Koch-funded group had spent a lot of money to find persuasive arguments against the bill, but found that even claiming it would allow Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) to hold Trump administration officials accountable wasn't particularly effective.

"Sadly," he said, conservatives weren't even persuaded when the phrase "cancel culture" was tied to the bill.

"It really ranked at the bottom," McKenzie said. "That was definitely a little concerning for us."

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===

AA Dem woman jaile for dr knock presser; 2 pp bill --> 100 signed next day?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/georgia-voter-id-law

Georgia, State Rep. Donna McLeod was among the Democrats who fought hard against the voter suppression bill that Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law on Thursday, March 25 — and the next morning, McLeod did not mince words when she slammed the law as "White supremacy" and "Jim Crow 2.0" during an appearance on CNN's "New Day."

McLeod, who was first elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 2016, told CNN hosts Alisyn Camerota and John Berman, "I live in Gwinnett County. We have endured lines every single election. This is just going to create more lines because you're not giving people more options to vote. And with longer lines, that means you're going to have people that will probably not want to vote anymore."

Georgia's new law goes out of its way to make voting more difficult in the Peach State, from limiting early voting to making absentee voting more complicated to reducing the number of ballot drop boxes. And the law is so draconian that it even makes it a crime to give food or water to someone who is waiting in line to vote.

"To actually say to people you can't give food or water, that's just cruel," McLeod told Camerota and Berman.

“Jim Crow 2.0 is represented in that picture,” Georgia state Rep. Donna McLeod says about the group of white men su… https://t.co/L68IvIar2q

— New Day (@New Day)1616758431.0

The 53-year-old McLeod is originally from Kingston, Jamaica, and she told the "New Day" hosts that as someone who worked hard to become a United States citizen, she is appalled that Georgia Republicans are going out of their way to make voting more difficult in her state — especially in heavily Black areas.

McLeod urged Democrats at the federal level to do away with the filibuster in the U.S. Senate and pass House Resolution 1, a.k.a. the For the People Act — a comprehensive voting rights bill that she said would, if passed, protect voters from the type of abuses in Georgia's "disgusting" new voter suppression law.

From Your Site Articles

Insulting' GOP bill would let Arizona lawmakers throw out presidential election results

Meaghan Ellis

February 06, 2021

As Republican lawmakers in Arizona introduce a number of proposed election bills, one piece of legislation has sp...

still stop steal BS?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/arizona-2020-election/

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/voter-suppression

comm dr

since former President Donald Trump failed to reverse the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, Republicans in more than two dozen states have introduced over 100 bills to restrict voting access, an alarming development that voting rights advocates have pointed to as yet another reason for Democrats to abolish the filibuster, an anti-democratic tool currently allowing the GOP minority to block the enactment of a suite of popular pro-democracy reforms.

Mother Jones journalist Ari Berman on Thursdayreported on the GOP's ongoing nationwide push to make voting more difficult—particularly for communities of color and other Democratic-leaning constituencies—and in some cases to empower state legislatures to overturn election results. He called state-level Republicans' efforts "a huge scandal that should be getting as much attention as Trump's plot to overturn the election."

Republicans across the country, Berman said, are "weaponizing Trump's lies" about fraud in an attempt to roll back voting rights after last year's historic turnout and expansion of mail-in ballots.

"Democrats have a clear choice," Berman continued. "They can get rid of the filibuster to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the For the People Act to stop GOP voter suppression, or they can allow the GOP to undermine democracy for the next decade."

"The stakes," Berman added, "couldn't be higher." That's because, according to an analysis conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice in late January, Republicans at the state level have introduced three times as many bills to chip away at voting rights compared to the same point last year.

Already this year, 106 bills have been introduced in 28 states—including 17 under complete GOP control, where passage is more likely—to undermine access to the franchise. According to the Brennan Center's report, "These proposals primarily seek to: (1) limit mail voting access; (2) impose stricter voter ID requirements; (3) limit successful pro-voter registration policies; and (4) enable more aggressive voter roll purges."

"These bills," the report argues, "are an unmistakable response to the unfounded and dangerous lies about fraud that followed the 2020 election."

106 bills introduced in 28 states already this year to restrict voting access finds @BrennanCenter That's 3x as h… https://t.co/o69lHRGgsd

— Ari Berman (@Ari Berman)1612459832.0

And this week, as CNN reported on Friday, "lawmakers in the Republican-controlled Georgia Senate added more. They include proposals that would eliminate no-excuse absentee voting for many state residents and end automatic voter registration when obtaining a driver's license."

According to Berman, the nine bills that Georgia Republicans introduced on February 1 would amount to "one of the worst voter suppression laws ever passed."

On first day of Black History Month Georgia Republicans introduced NINE bills to make it harder to vote, including… https://t.co/qwLmKWq6o7

— Ari Berman (@Ari Berman)1612458849.0

Not to be outdone, Arizona Republicans have since the start of 2021 introduced 34 bills to make voting harder, including reducing the number of polling places in Maricopa County from 100 to 15.

Arizona Republicans have introduced 34 BILLS to make it harder to vote, including ending mail voting, purging list… https://t.co/4kXh0wNIMT

— Ari Berman (@Ari Berman)1612459235.0

Georgia and Arizona are not alone; similar reactionary proposals are being pushed by Republicans in more than two dozen additional states.

The spike in anti-democracy bills represents an intensification of an existingtrend rather than a new development. As Common Dreamsreported last November, Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) admitted shortly after the election that making voting more accessible hurts the GOP's electoral prospects.

"If we don't do something about voting by mail, we're going to lose the ability to elect a Republican in this country," Graham told Fox News host Sean Hannity.

The GOP has been trying to undercut efforts to expand voting access for years. "A decade ago," Bermanwrote, "Republicans passed new voter ID laws and other efforts to curtail voting rights when they took power in the states following [former President] Barack Obama's election."

But now, he added, "Republicans are taking their assault on voting rights to the next level." Like the Brennan Center, Berman attributed the surge in anti-democracy legislation to Trump's failed bid to subvert the will of the people in last year's election.

According toBerman, the GOP is "trying to accomplish through legislation what Trump couldn't with litigation. All in all, these efforts amount to the most concerted attempts to roll back voting rights since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965."

I don't know what else to say y'all. The state GOPs are *accelerating* their anti-democracy attacks. It's downrigh… https://t.co/EH0Sm6GfIr

— Ezra Levin (@Ezra Levin)1612503804.0

Meanwhile, at the federal level, Democratic lawmakers are pushing to expand ballot access.

CNN reported that "the voting bills in Congress—which Democrats have said are an early priority—would establish at least 15 days of early voting in federal elections, allow for automatic voter registration, restore voting rights to former felons, and bar states from prohibiting mail-in and curbside voting—along with a slew of other changes to election and campaign-finance laws."

As Common Dreams reportedlast month, Democratic leaders have said the For the People Act, a far-reaching package of democracy reforms, is a legislative priority. But GOP opposition to the bill renders passage unlikely unless lawmakerskill the filibuster.

The Brennan Center's Wendy Weiser told CNN that "you have an absolutely necessary piece of legislation to restore our democracy. The filibuster absolutely shouldn't stand in the way of accomplishing it."

From Your Site Articles

Aligned with Trump

At least five people, including a Capitol police officer, died in connection to the riot, which happened after Trump and some of his closest allies led a rally urging supporters to fight to prevent Congress’ declaration of Biden’s victory.

Several pro-Trump groups were involved with planning the rally, which was held near the White House. Trump encouraged people who attended the rally to march on the U.S. Capitol. Critics, including several Republicans, accused him of inciting the violence. On Tuesday, Trump said the comments were “totally appropriate.”

Groups with the same 501(c)(3) status as Donors Trust are prohibited under tax regulations from supporting specific candidates. However, they can skirt those rules by supporting and promoting policies that align with a particular politician. In the case of Trump-fueled unrest, several groups historically backed by Donors Trust money aligned themselves with Trump’s false claims about widespread election fraud.

Turning Point USA, a nonprofit founded by staunch Trump ally Charlie Kirk, received over $850,000 from the Donors Trust. Kirk has continued to parrot the president’s attacks on the election, falsely claiming Biden’s victory was fraudulent.

“I will say it very bluntly. This election was stolen from President Trump. And the changes to the election, to the ballot questions, to the voter registration, to the access problems in these states” Kirk said in December.

Kirk’s affiliated 501(c)(4) Turning Point Action was listed as a participant in last week’s “March to Save America” rally, which preceded the attack on Capitol Hill. Prior to the rally, in a tweet he later deleted, Kirk said the group would be involved with sending over 80 buses to the rally. CNBC captured a screenshot of tweet before it was deleted.

Kirk recently said on his podcast that those from Turning Point got back on their buses and left following the conclusion of the rally.

A Turning Point Action spokesperson said the group did not include a march to the Capitol on its itinerary.

“Turning Point Action (TPA) did bus some students to the January 6th rally, which included a speech from the President of the United States. Following the president’s remarks, TPA then bused those students immediately out of the area,” the spokesperson said. “The march to the Capitol Building was never part of TPA’s itinerary,nor did TPA encourage participation in the march. TPA’s leadership condemns political violence and immediately did so as soon as news broke of the incident at the Capitol Building. ”

The New York Times reported that the group ended up sending only seven buses to the rally from New Jersey, North Carolina and other locations. twt]

other connections

The 85 Fund, a group with ties to longtime Trump judicial advisor Leonard Leo, received over $10 million from the Donors Trust in 2019. According to a report by The Guardian and the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, it was once known as The Judicial Education Project. It was run by Carrie Severino, who also is in charge of the Leo-affiliated Judicial Crisis Network. Severino’s Judicial Crisis Network actively campaigned in support of Trump’s nominees to the Supreme Court.

The Donors Trust lists an address for the 85 Fund in Washington that matches the address on The Judicial Education Project’s 2018 990 form. Leo also told Axios that the 85 Fund would be one of the groups used to funnel millions of dollars into conservative battles around the country.

The Judicial Education Project, though, has another alias, according to the report: the Honest Elections Project. The organization claims to be nonpartisan and says that “through public engagement, advocacy, and public-interest litigation, the Honest Elections Project will defend the fair, reasonable, common sense measures that voters want in place to protect the integrity of the voting process.”

A review of advertisements and litigation reveals that, in some cases, the group is aligned with claims about election fraud that are similar to Trump’s. The group lists two Michigan-related lawsuits linked to Republicans that took place before the November election.

In September, The Detroit News reported on one of those lawsuits, which featured two former Republican secretaries of state. The former officials challenged Michigan’s plan to count absentee ballots that are postmarked before Election Day but arrive up to 14 days afterward. Biden went on to win Michigan, even though an appeals court did rescind the 14-day extension of mail in ballots.

Fox News reported in June on another suit featuring theHonest Elections Project.In that case, a Republican named Tony Daunt claimed that Michigan voter registration rates in some counties are too high because their voting records have not been updated to remove ineligible voters, such as those who have died or convicted of crimes.

A leader of the Honest Elections Project told CNBC that the group concluded after the election that no widespread voter fraud occurred and they did not get involved with any post-election legal challenges. It also condemned the violence on Capitol Hill.

“HEP was created to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. Before the election, HEP fought to preserve the rule of law as left-wing groups, including the Democratic Party, filed over 200 lawsuits to challenge existing election laws,” Honest Elections Project executive director Jason Snead said in a statement. “After the election, HEP concluded that there was no widespread fraud and did not challenge or support any challenge to the results of the 2020 election. The violent insurrection at the Capitol was a heinous attack against democracy, the rule of law, and the election system HEP was created to defend.”

Former U.S. Attorney General William Barr said in December that the Department of Justice has found no evidence of voter fraud.

the anti-immigration VDARE Foundation, which the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled a hate group, received just under $2 million from the Donors Trust in 2019. The foundation is run by Peter Brimelow, somebody the Southern Poverty Law Center says is a “leading anti-immigration activist.”

Brimelow did not return a request for comment.

Since the riot last week, VDARE has become a platform for several writers standing with Trump and people who attended the rally.

“I believe Trump won the election and I believe that this matters,” says an article on the foundation’s site. The writer also says he believes the anti-fascist protesters and frequent Trump targets known as antifa were “amongst the crowd.” Ken Kohl, a senior official in the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office, recently said that investigators saw no indication of antifa being part of the riot.

Another writer on VDARE’s site admitted to cheering on the Capitol invasion. “I’m going to open with a confession here: watching those protestors rampaging through the halls of Congress on Wednesday afternoon, there was a part of me that was cheering them on,” the article says.

Project Veritas, an activist group founded by investigator James O’Keefe, received over $4 million in 2019 from the Donors Trust. In August, The New Republic reported that Project Veritas was secretly moving ahead with sting operations that would “undermine the integrity of absentee and mail-in ballot counts.”

Jered Ede, chief legal officer for Project Veritas, told CNBC that the group condemns the violence at the Capitol and pushed back on the idea their investigations are attempts to undermine the election. He also said Project Veritas has proved at least two instances of fraud and irregularities, including in New Hampshire and Texas.

“Project Veritas has been exposing voter fraud and election integrity stories for nearly a decade. We did so prior to 2020, we did so prior to 2019, we did so prior to Mr. Trump announcing his candidacy, and we will continue to do so for as long as we are around,” Ede said in part of his lengthy responses to CNBC. “Neither our donors nor any politician control or direct what stories we cover. We have and will continue to cover these stories because voters deserve to know the truth and have faith in their electoral system.”

Project Veritas pushed a Pennsylvania postal worker’s claim about mail-in ballots that the Trump campaign would cite in a lawsuit that eventually went nowhere, according to The Washington Post.

The Center for Security Policy received over $800,000 from Donors Trust in 2019.It was founded by Frank Gaffney, who pushed conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama’s administration and the Muslim Brotherhood. In the buildup to the riot, Gaffney questioned the results of the election.

Fred Fleitz, president of the Center for Security Policy, told CNBC late Tuesday that the group acknowledges that Biden is going to be the new president. He said Gaffney was no longer running the organization. The website lists Gaffney as executive chairman.

“Center for Security Policy accepts Joe Biden as the legal President of the United States,” Fleitz said. “It’s time to move on. We are an organization that is going to focus on holding Biden accountable when it comes to national security. Gaffney does not run the organization. He’s not the president of the organization, I am,” Fleitz added.

In a post on the group’s website, Gaffney himself claimed in December the media is pushing a “false narrative” that “there’s no evidence of electoral larceny in the 2020 presidential race — or at least none that would have made a difference,” he said. Gaffney also wrote that “the online resource EveryLegalVote.com makes clear that election integrity was systematically compromised.”

In January, a Center for Security Policy article claimed there are 10 truths about election fraud, including that election fraud has become “more sinister and sophisticated.”

An article on Jan. 5, a day before the riot, is headlined “Exercising your First Amendment rights? How to avoid Antifa violence at the upcoming January 6th protests.” Then article then goes on to give protesters tips on how to avoid fights with antifa.

Gaffney’s own condemnation of the violence after the protest included him calling for a hearing that would show “evidence of electoral grand larceny.”

The Gaffney posts disappeared off the group’s website shortly after CNBC reached out for comment. CNBC has screenshots of the posts.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/republicans-trump-2648997598/

11/21/20

Donald Trump and his, uh,lawyer Rudy Giuliani are moving into the next phase of Trump's attempted coup, which entertainingly involves Giuliani sweating out the previous day's martinis into his hair dye while barking incomprehensible conspiracy theories at bewildered reporters.

Unfortunately, the less amusing and more worrisome aspect of the whole ordeal involves Trump's efforts to lean on Republican-run state legislatures to appoint pro-Trump electors in states where Joe Biden clearly won.

Like most people reading this, I, too, wish I had a crystal ball and could look into the future at Jan. 20, 2021, to see how this all shakes out. In the meantime, the main point of concern is that nearly all Republican politicians are, to one degree or another, supporting Trump's efforts. Some, like Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, are flirting with openly seditious behavior by actively trying to get legal ballots thrown in the trash. Most, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, are playing word games to avoid saying who they think will be or should be sworn as president in two months. The only Republican senator to speak out so far is Mitt Romney of Utah, who was also the only Republican senator who voted to convict Trump after his impeachment trial earlier this year.

The common theory in the political class is that this silence is borne out of fear of Trump and his tweeting fingers. Former President Barack Obama, who has been blunt in his concerns about the threat Trump represents to our democracy, characterized the GOP's passive consent to this coup exactly this way.

"I'm more troubled that you're seeing a lot of Republican officials go along with it, not because they actually believe it, but because they feel intimidated by it,"**Obama** told MSNBC's Jonathan Capehart on Thursday.

Obama is right on two out of three counts. It's true that Republican officials don't believe a word of Giuliani's sweaty conspiracy theories, which Heather Digby Parton has described as "going full Infowars." It's also true that this GOP compliance is the real problem here. As I explain in the latest Standing Room Only newsletter, successful coups rely on various bureaucrats and lower level politicians who go along. If Trump pulls this off, it will be entirely because he has the tacit support of both state and congressional Republicans all along the way.

But Obama is wrong on the third front: Republicans aren't doing this because they're scared of Trump. They're doing this because most of them, on one level or another, want him to succeed. And even if he fails, they appreciate him advancing the idea that voters in certain areas — notably, cities where Black people outnumber white people — shouldn't really have the right to vote.

Let's face it: The reason Trump has gotten this far is that he's building on decades of Republican antipathy to democracy, an antipathy borne out of resentment that people they deem as "less" American than themselves — people of color, urban people, people who know what "tempeh" is — have the right to vote at all.

For instance, look at this 2016 article from Heritage Foundation writer John Merline, who argued that Hillary Clinton's popular-vote lead in that election didn't really matter, because if "you take California out of the popular vote equation, then Trump wins the rest of the country."

Breitbart writer Joel Pollak made a similar argument regarding this year's election, claiming on Twitter, "Biden won the popular vote — unless you exclude California." He went on to say that "you shouldn't" exclude California, but implied that this alleged fact is "worth noting," which is only true if you believe California voters are somehow less American than other voters. (For the record, this isn't even true. Biden's overall popular-vote lead now exceeds his 5 million-vote lead in the Golden State.)

This belief of Republicans that some voters shouldn't really be voters is especially evident in their enthusiasm for voter suppression, which has kicked into high gear ever since 2013, when Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee, gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This kicked off a flood of GOP-sponsored efforts clearly aimed at stopping as many people of color as possible from exercising their right to vote.

While it's become routine these days for pundits to lament Giuliani's supposed fall from grace, the reality is the man was always a virulent racist. As Radley Balko reminded readers of the Washington Post in 2016, Giuliani kicked off his 1993 New York mayoral campaign by helping to incite a racist police riot aimed at denying that elected Black leaders should have any authority over the NYPD. Giuliani led the drunken and armed crowd of cops as they blocked traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, waving signs with racist cartoons of then-Mayor David Dinkins, and calling Black elected officials the n-word. The cops also physically terrorized two Black city council members.

Trump and Giuliani's official arguments for why Trump deserves to invalidate the election are a bunch of incoherent and baseless conspiracy theories. The actual argument underlying all that, however, is simple: The coalition Joe Biden built is composed of people who don't deserve the right to vote.

The reason the larger Republican Party isn't pushing back is that they largely agree with this underlying argument. Whatever personal distaste many Republicans may have for Trump's gauche behavior or the alcohol content of Giuliani's shoe polish sweat, they're inclined to see only upside for themselves in letting this play out.

Maybe Trump pulls off a miracle and succeeds in his coup, which means their party captures the White House for four years — or more.

But even in the far likelier event that the Trump coup fails, it's a win-win for most Republicans: He has done an immense amount to advance the goal of delegitimizing huge swaths of the American electorate that prefer Democrats. Besides, "establishment" Republicans don't have to go out to dinner with Trump anymore and listen to his vainglorious monologues. So of course Republicans aren't standing up to him. Why mess with a good thing?

see legal voter supression, dirty tricks

wapo nyt fortune mag:

some lawyers at Jones Day and Porter Wright, which have filed suits about the 2020 vote, said they were worried about undermining

===

see criminalization

:{https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/voting-rights-roundup-new-report-finds-felony-:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{disenfranchisement-bans-5-million-people-from-voting/:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:

mma1120

No pushback when Trump adviser suggests that counting votes after election night is stealing the election

Trump adviser Jason Miller appeared on ABC's This Week. Talking with George Stephanopoulos, Miller claimed that Donald Trump will be ahead on election night but that Democrats will try to "steal" the election by counting ballots after that. The fact is that ballots are usually counted for many days and that mail-in ballots in many cases will be delayed in the count due to Republican-led state legislatures. Stephanopoulos, however, did not push back on the claim at all.

Over on Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace did not push back either when guest Corey Lewandowski said that Trump would be winning by such margins on election night that "there will be no need to continue to count" in the ensuing days.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/latest-james-okeefe-election-fraud-claim-crumbles-but-not-before-barr-used-it-cast-doubt-on-election/

is he so dumb/delusional that he believes lies or is it just score points gin up any BS that could be useful to win/vs irrelefance unable to raise $?

Kos

fraudster and felon James O'Keefe took advantage of the chaos at the U.S. Postal Service to do his usual thing: commit fraud in order to prove that voter fraud is real. In this case, he conned a postal worker into claiming postal workers in Erie, Pennsylvania were instructed to backdate ballots mailed after Election Day. The postal worker, Richard Hopkins, has recanted, telling postal workers that he made it all up. But not after Trump's little BFF Sen. Lindsey Graham used the allegations to ask the Justice Department for a federal investigation. Which Trump-owned Attorney General William Barr then opened.

When shit got real and it came to lying to investigators from the U.S. Postal Service's Office of Inspector General, Hopkins got cold feet. Officials told both The Washington Post and the House Oversight Committee that he recanted in a signed affidavit, saying that he had lied.And then in a video tweeted out by O'Keefe, Hopkins recanted his recanting. Which probably had more to do with trying to preserve the $136,000 he'd raised on a GoFundMe page by Tuesday evening. If so, it was in vain. GoFundMe's Bobby Whitmore told the Post the money raised on the site was "not disbursed and Hopkins never had access to the funds." O'Keefe is undaunted, as usual, and says that he's got recordings of the investigators coercing Hopkins and pressuring him to sign a document he didn't understand. Which seems pretty farfetched—the guy had to understand what "I lied before" means.

That Graham and Barr are using O'Keefe to call the results into question in Pennsylvania is so Trumpy it's disgusting. And completely predictable. When it comes down to whether there was any actual fraud in Pennsylvania, though, and when lawyers are facing a judge, in court, the fraud claims melt. When it comes to real legal jeopardy of lying about voter fraud—interfering in an election, which is a crime—these people fold.

There's another bit of fraud by the Trump campaign, though, that could be happening. Remember how the Trump campaign in Wisconsin was recruiting volunteers to call Pennsylvania Republicans to get them to send in ballots after the election? Illegally? Well, thousands of ballots were received in post offices Monday, which "included hundreds meant for closely fought contests in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona." More than 400 were received in Pennsylvania. None of them will count. Pennsylvania is the only state among the aforementioned ones that had an extended deadline for receiving ballots, but the deadline was this past Friday.

Whether that actually was part of the Trump campaign's fraudulent call for voter fraud or just people who don't understand how elections work is unknown. But knowing how Republicans love to commit voter fraud, you've got to wonder.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

there’s no evidence of widespread voter fraud so Texas' Lt. Governor Patrick is offering $1 million to anyone who can find it

The Texas Tribune

By Shawn Mulcahy, The Texas Tribune

Nov. 10, 2020 AN

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/this-isnt-going-to-happen-top-gop-operative-throws-cold-water-on-trumps-claims-of-voter-fraud/

as President Donald Trump and his allies desperately try to push the narrative that the election that's slipping away from him is actually being stolen via voter fraud, a longstanding top operative in the Republican Party threw cold water on the suggestion.

Karl Rove, the former adviser to George W. Bush, wrote a blog post on Thursday describing the state of the race. His overall analysis seemed to generally match the consensus view of election analysts at the time — votes in key swing states remain outstanding, but results look increasingly favorable for Joe Biden — though he didn't explicitly lay out that Trump is on a track to lose. He even put a negative spin on his analysis for Biden, arguing that his campaign did nothing to lift up down-ballot Democrats.

But in one notable paragraph, he sharply broke with the president and his allies who are concocting baseless claims about voter fraud to cast doubt on the results and drum up legal challenges to the process.

The level of voter fraud needed to turn the election around for Trump, Rove explained, is just not plausible:

There are suspicious partisans across the spectrum who believe widespread election fraud is possible. Some hanky-panky always goes on, and there are already reports of poll watchers in Philadelphia not being allowed to do their jobs. But stealing hundreds of thousands of votes would require a conspiracy on the scale of a James Bond movie. That isn't going to happen.

Though Democrats have been worried about reports that the post office — deliberately or otherwise — delayed delivery of a substantial number of mail-in ballots, they haven't been making sweeping claims about fraud that would undermine the final election.

Those claims are coming from the Trump camp — which strongly suggests they think they're losing. It's notable that Rove, of all people, isn't on board for this gambit.

"Karl Rove is an expert on fake voter fraud scandals," said HuffPost reporter Arthur Delaney. "He was involved in firing US Attorneys for not prosecuting bogus voter fraud cases, a disgrace that led to the resignation of the Attorney General."

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/listen-democratic-voters-are-receiving-suspicious-calls-in-effort-to-suppress-votes-on-election-day/

no lnx

listen: Voters in at least 6 swing states are receiving robocalls designed to spread election misinformation

Meaghan Ellis November 03, 2020

Voters in multiple states have received suspicious calls urging them to "stay home and stay safe" on Election Day — an effort state and local officials say is an attempt to suppress votes across the country.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel took to Twitter on Tuesday morning to raise awareness about the robocalls reported by residents in Flint, MI. She made it clear that the calls were completely false as she described the tactic as "an effort to suppress the vote."

"Getting reports of multiple robocalls going to Flint residents that, due to long lines, they should vote tomorrow," Nessel tweeted, adding, "Obviously this is FALSE and an effort to suppress the vote. No long lines and today is the last day to vote. Don't believe the lies! Have your voice heard! RT PLS."

Getting reports of multiple robocalls going to Flint residents that, due to long lines, they should vote tomorrow.… https://t.co/PbNzaKJuu1

— Dana Nessel (@Dana Nessel)1604418091.0

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) has also chimed in with her report about the robocalls. She tweeted, "We received reports that an unknown party is purposefully spreading misinformation via robocalls in Flint in an attempt to confuse voters. Let me be clear — if you plan to vote in-person, you must do so, or be in line to do so, by 8PM today."

Statement from Secretary of State @JocelynBenson on correcting misinformation being shared in Flint… https://t.co/kq5cBzhgUb

— Michigan Department of State (@Michigan Department of State)1604421495.0

Audio of the call has also begun circulating on social media platforms. The six-second clip features an automated voice that tells voters: "Time to stay home. Stay home and stay safe."

Listen to the clip below:

Deen Freelon · voter suppression voicemail 11/2/2020]

In addition to the calls reported by Flint, MI, residents, calls have also been reported in multiple other states. Ahead of the election, residents in other battleground states including Nebraska, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania have also reported suspicious robocalls.

According to The Washington Post, there are a number of reasons why the disturbing calls have also caught the attention of the tech company, YouMail.

Upon further investigation, the tech company — which boasts its own robocall-blocking application for smartphones — has reported that the "reach and timing" of the mysterious calls signals the possible involvement of foreign operatives.Multiple robocalls have been conducted to people in approximately 280 of the United States' 317 area codes.

biden bus, cops pepper spray NC, temecula block polls, bridge nJ?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/texas-gop-asks-state-supreme-court-to-trash-over-117-000-votes/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/how-the-gop-is-using-suppression-and-intimidation-in-2020/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/fears-of-violence-and-voter-intimidation-grow-as-election-day-draws-closer-reports/

alex h

the 2020 presidential election will go down in history as one that was even more volatile than the 1968 election, and many Americans have been expressing fears that violence and voter intimidation will occur on Election Day. That fear is addressed in new articles by the Washington Post, Time and USA Today.

Journalist Mark Berman, in the Post, reports that law enforcement are preparing for the worst.

"Tens of millions of Americans have cast ballots at early-voting sites, and tensions and accusations of voter intimidation have already flared up during this process," Berman explains. "Many Americans still plan to turn out on Election Day; so, law enforcement officials have conducted drills involving multiple agencies to try to game out what could happen. Police officials in multiple cities stressed that they have no information about specific threats relating to the election, but are instead preparing to make sure they are ready."

Andrew Walsh, a deputy chief for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, told the Post, "I don't think we've seen anything like this in modern times…. When you look at previous elections, there's always been the concern when you have large crowds…. We know (that) can be a target for someone who has an agenda."

David Brown, a superintendent for the Chicago Police Department, told the Post, "We are all in conversations with our counterparts across the country about what we might expect. But everything is uncertain, and so, we're trying as best we can to anticipate any hazard that might happen." And Washington D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham noted, "It is widely believed that there will be civil unrest after the November election regardless of who wins."

Reporter Melissa Chan, in Time, reports that police departments around the U.S. expect to be on high alert on Election Day.

Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based think tank the Police Executive Research Forum, told Time, "It's fair to say the police are preparing in ways they never would have had to for Election Day. This year is unlike any other year."

According to Chan, "The presence of militia groups at polls could pose real safety concerns in light of a new Amnesty International report that said U.S. law enforcement failed to protect peaceful protesters from violent attacks by armed vigilante groups and counterprotesters in nearly 200 cases from May to September.The report, released Friday, said law enforcement often neglected to deploy an adequate amount of trained officers, separate or deescalate tensions between opposing groups and often harmed peaceful protesters while dealing with violent ones."

In USA Today, journalistTrevor Hughes addresses fears that far-right extremists will resort to acts of voter intimidation on Election Day — and that Black voters will be among their targets.

The NAACP's Stephanie Owens told USA Today, "The symbolism of who you're supporting is a very large component of our election tradition, but there is almost nothing traditional about this election. People are already being targeted based on the candidates they are supporting."

The Rev. Carl Day, a Philadelphia-based pastor and liberal/progressive activist, has been warning the Black community that they could be targeted for voter intimidation. Day told USA Today, "When the president of the United States seems like he's inciting a demographic of people to be on standby and he's saying he might not leave office, it brings legitimate fears to people. It's in a lot of conversations in a lot of rooms I'm in."

Carolyn Gallaher, a professor at American University's School of International Service in Washington, D.C., told USA Today, "Everyone I know is concerned both about voter intimidation at the polls and potential violence as we get results from the election — and sort of what that might look like not just around the election, but between the election and the inauguration."

Gallagher fears that the far right will resort to violence whether Trump wins reelection or is defeated by former Vice President Joe Biden. The American University professor told USA Today, "The violence will occur either way. If Biden wins, it will be an excuse to try to delegitimize the results and to go after perceived enemies on the left — and of course, that means labeling pretty much anyone that you disagree with Antifa. But I worry, too, if Trump wins, this will be a signal to these far-right groups that have supported him — extremist groups like the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, other groups like this — that they will see this is like open season to go after people that have been opponents of Trump."

odd timing?

an 1020

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/an-agency-trump-created-just-debunked-his-lies-about-massive-mail-in-voting-fraud/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trump-lawsuit-to-stop-nevada-mail-in-vote-count-condemned-as-obvious-and-desperate-suppression-attempt/

meaghan e

the United States of America is widely known as "The Free World," but sadly, voter suppression is still a major topic of contention and a contributing factor to the polarization of the country.

According to the LA Times, voter suppression is at an all-time high and President Donald Trump's war on mail-in voting has only triggered more acts of voter suppression. From voters in Memphis, Tenn. being turned away from a poll location for wearing "Black Lives Matter" t-shirts to excessively long voting lines in Georgia as a result of nearly 10% of poll locations being shut down, voter suppression has played a dominant role in this election.

In fact, some Democratic voters have been faced with more aggressive acts of voter suppression as a result of voter intimidation. Richard L. Hasen, a University of California (Irvine) law professor and authority on voting, weighed in on the resurfacing of major voter suppression in the United States.

"We have an incredibly polarized country and we have a political party whose leader thinks it's to the party's advantage to make it harder for people to register to vote and to vote," Hasen told the LA Times. "So that is where we are."

Hasen went on to discuss the Republican Party and the difference between President Donald Trump and previous Republican presidential candidates like Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). Trump has focused on implementing ways to suppress votes, typically among Black and Latino voters.

The law professor also expressed concerns about the rise of a "voter suppression wing" as he highlighted Trump's focus on suppressing opposing votes as a means of winning the election as opposed to pushing for inclusion of voters.

"There are two strands in the Republican Party," said Hasen. "There is one that has tried to be more inclusive, as a means to win elections and there is a voter-suppression wing. With Trump in office, it's clear the voter-suppression wing is dominant right now."

Heightened concerns about voter suppression and intimidation continue to impact states all across America as Election Day approaches.

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BILL MOYERS: –said the Council for National Policy's executive committee president, Bill Walton.Ralph Reed, chairman of the nonprofit, Faith and Freedom Coalition told the CNP audience that conservatives are going to be harvesting ballots in churches. “We're going to be specifically going in, not only to white evangelical churches, but into Hispanic and Asian churches and collecting those ballots.'"And then, here's the one that really stands out. At that meeting, J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department official and the president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a charity, described mail-in voting as the number one left-wing agenda. He urged the activists not to worry about the criticism that might come their way. Quote, “Be not afraid of the accusations that you're a voter suppressor." Any of that surprise you?

ANNE NELSON: Not in the least. On the contrary, you'll find the footprints of those statements in my book. One of the techniques that this movement has used is using data profiles and directing information to voters to either get them to vote for Republicans or to suppress the vote if they're not likely to. The Koch brothers brought state-of-the-art political data operations to the table with an organization called i360. And that was harnessed to organizations that were run by CNP members.

So, for example, one of them was the Susan B. Anthony List, which is anti-abortion. One of them was the NRA. They also combined data from churches and from political data and consumer data. So that allowed canvassers for these organizations to do their door-to-door canvassing having a huge amount of information about each individual voter, and a tailored individual script for them. So, for example, if you are canvassing in Springfield, Missouri, and you're working for the Susan B. Anthony List, you know that at such-and-such an address, there's a Catholic housewife with six kids there who watched an anti-abortion film on Netflix and ordered LIVES OF THE SAINTS from Amazon. You have all of that in your cell phone, and you also have a script that's been prepared and tailored for that voter, right? But you're going to have a totally different script based on the data for the next-door neighbor who's a gun owner who's all about the second amendment.

And the Democrats have lagged behind, not in terms of the data they have, but the way they've networked data across state lines and to organizations that are doing their political groundwork. So that's been a factor.The use of data has been very important in the last few campaigns, and not always well-understood. But there's also a really important matter of how data is used to suppress votes. And that's where I would direct people to a news story done by Channel Four in Britain. The Council for National Policy partners and the Koch brothers' data platform i360 used data from Cambridge Analyticawith several hundred million voters, with some2,000 data points for every voter. So that includes you and me, Bill, okay? They know a lot about us, and so what they did in this story documenting what happened with African Americans in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was find that if voters were not likely to vote for Republicans. If they leaned Democratic, they would target them with misinformation that would disincline them to vote at all. And in other cases, such as what's been documented in Michigan, some 90,000 African American voters were persuaded not to vote for the top of the ticket for Hillary Clinton by these methods. So, in these states, they always go by very, very narrow margins. So, I would argue that a lot of these data operations, some of them of questionable legality, have actually changed the course of electoral history.

BILL MOYERS: What do you think they're doing for this election in two weeks?

ANNE NELSON: Well, we know that the Trump 2020 app has highly questionable practices, in terms of its privacy and the way it accesses people's cell phone directories, all of their contacts, friends and family, and then sends messages out to them, often without the user knowing that they're doing it. They also combine that with consumer data. So, for example, if you downloaded their app on one phone that was a different account, they could trace your credit card records back to your own account. They also use geolocation, so once you download the app, they figure out where you are and what kind of messaging would appeal to you and leverage you to attract other voters. And they use this through beacons that are placed around areas like political rallies and churches, right, to locate the people with the apps and then engage them for political purpose. It has been recently revealed that thesebeacons had even been implanted in Trump yard signs. So, they're really, I would say, on the cutting edge of political technology. And it's in this very murky area of law where there are abusive practices involving privacy, but there's no clear legal framework to govern it.

BILL MOYERS: And what stuns me is their ability to connect this very sophisticated information gained by very up-to-date, modern technology to a lot of poor pastors in East Texas and Southern Alabama who are concerned about the state of the world. And here, they've been led into, one of the most sophisticated political campaigns that really has not their interest at heart. And they become soldiers in the crusade–

signature match ppl color

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/signature-matching-could-result-in-millions-of-perfectly-legitimate-ballots-being-thrown-out-especially-among-non-white-voters-report/

Civil rights group sues Trump administration over voter intimidation: A 'clear threat to our democracy'

Kenny Stancil Common Dreams

Latino civic engagement organization Mi Familia Vota Education Fund and several individual voters on Wednesday sued President Donald Trump and members of his administration for voter intimidation in violation of f...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trumps-push-for-voter-intimidation-appears-to-be-working-reports/

alex h

During his first debate with former Vice President Joe Biden on September 29, President Donald Trump urged his supporters to serve as poll watchers. Trump's critics have been arguing that Trump was promoting voter intimidation and encouraging would-be vigilantes, and according to reporting from Vanity Fair and Florida's WFLA News 8, it appears to be working.

WFLA (an NBC affiliate in Tampa) reports that in St. Petersburg, Florida, two armed men dressed as security guards in a tent they set up outside an early voting site "were not hired by" Trump's campaign, even though they claimed to be.

Julie Marcus, supervisor of elections in Pinellas County, Florida, told WFLA that Sheriff Bob Gualtieri "told me the persons that were dressed in these security uniforms had indicated to sheriff's deputies that they belonged to a licensed security company, and they indicated — and this has not been confirmed yet — that they were hired by the Trump campaign."

Marcus, a Republican who was appointed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, also told WFLA, "The sheriff and I take this very seriously. Voter intimidation, deterring voters from voting, impeding a voter's ability to cast a ballot in this election is unacceptable and will not be tolerated in any way, shape or form."

During his debate with Biden, Trump said, "I'm urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully." And Trump's critics have been arguing that he wasn't talking about official poll watchers, but rather, was encouraging his supporters to become vigilantes.

In Vanity Fair, journalist Eric Lutz reports that "at several sites across the country, including California and New Mexico, Trump supporters have gathered near polling sites — in some cases, worrying those waiting to vote."

In Florida, Lutz notes, an armed police officer named Daniel Ubeda "was seen near a poll wearing a face mask that read 'TRUMP 2020' and 'NO MORE BULLSHIT' on the front of it."

Attorney Steve Simeonidis, who chairs the Dade County Democratic Party, saw Ubeda near that polling place and told the Miami Herald, "He may have been going to vote. But he was in full uniform with the mask and a gun. That's voter intimidation."

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, in response to that incident, said, "It's a violation of departmental orders. A police officer is supposed to be impartial."

On October 21, the Washington Post's Joshua Partlow reported, "A wide array of complaints have been reported around the country, many involving Trump supporters, according to tips reviewed by ProPublica's Electionland projectand shared with other news organizations, including the Washington Post."

dejoy

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/usps-still-hasnt-reversed-election-mail-slowdown-despite-multiple-court-orders-attorneys-general/

igor salon

U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is still not processing election mail at the rate it did prior to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's controversial changes, reigniting concerns that mail-in ballots in certain states may not arrive before voting deadlines, according to states who sued the agency over a reported mail slowdown.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who is leading a multi-state coalition in a lawsuit challenging the USPS' "illegal" changes, claimed in a Monday federal court filing that the agency's performance was down more than 5% since DeJoy implemented the changes in July and continued "to be lower than at any point in 2020," according to Bloomberg News.

Multiple federal courts issued orders blocking DeJoy's changes in response to lawsuits from Shapiro and other attorneys general, but the filing alleged that some USPS divisions had not complied with the orders. One division has a compliance rate as low as 85%, and others have not reported performance metrics, the filing said. The USPS has still barely increased late and extra trips as required by the orders, it added.

"Despite being subject to multiple injunctions, defendants have not improved their service performance," Shapiro said, asking the court to appoint an independent monitor to ensure the agency complies with the courts.

Though DeJoy, a top donor to President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, has disputed Democrats who criticized him for instituting changes like limiting overtime and removing high-speed mail sorting machines, a new USPS inspector general report faulted the changes ordered by the new postmaster general for reduced performance.

"No analysis of the service impacts of these various changes was conducted, and documentation and guidance to the field for these strategies was very limited and almost exclusively oral," the report says. "The resulting confusion and inconsistency in operations at postal facilities compounded the significant negative service impacts across the country."

The report added that the changes "individually may not have been significant," but "launching all of these efforts at once, in addition to the changes instituted by the postmaster general, had a significant impact on the Postal Service."

The USPS Board of Governors disputed the report, arguing that the changes were not disruptive and "similar to efforts that the Postal Service pursued over the last several years."

Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., who chairs the House Oversight and Reform Committee, and Committee of Oversight and Reform, said in a statement that the IG report confirmed that "Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's sweeping changes — which were hastily implemented without analyzing their potential impact — caused serious delays across the country."

Maloney added that the report undermined DeJoy's testimony to the committee denying that he was aware of the changes, "calling into question whether the postmaster general is continuing to mislead Congress and the American people to this day."

USPS data shows that mail disruptions have been particularly pronounced in key swing states, according to The Washington Post. In 17 postal districts across 10 swing states, on-time first-class mail arrival rates are just 83.9%, or about 7.8% lower than in January and 2% lower than the national average since the changes were implemented. More than 15% of first-class mail in those districts arrives later than the USPS' one- to three-day delivery window.

This has sparked alarm in states like Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, where ballots will be rejected if they arrive after Election Day. In Detroit, for example, only 71% of mail arrived on time in October versus 92.2% in January.

Some major cities in North Carolina have also experienced 10% drops in on-time arrival rates, while "timeliness also varied widely in postal districts in Pennsylvania and Florida," according to the report.

USPS spokesman David Partenheimer told the outlet that the agency had maintained its performance levels despite mail levels surging amid an unprecedented rise in mail voting.

"The Postal Service is fully committed and actively working to handle the increase in election mail volume across the country over the next two weeks," he said, adding that workers had been told to use "extraordinary measures" to speed up deliveries like special pickups, extra trips and Sunday deliveries.

But some postal workers told the outlet that the "ballot-handling directives from higher-ups have been chaotic." Workers in Michigan claimed that they were instructed to focus on package delivery over mail ballot collection. Workers in Pennsylvania plan to handstamp ballot envelopes to avoid them getting caught up in overwhelmed processing plants.

"In the current state of the world, there is nothing a voter could do to work around problems in the post office," J. Remy Green, an attorney representing a group of voters who sued the USPS, told The Post. "I think, at the end of the day, the damage that has been done here —it's not just service performance and quantifiable damage. It is a kind of psychic damage to the confidence of voters and confidence in the vote."

Lawmakers who tried to gain access to see how the USPS is handling mail at large facilities have been blocked by the agency, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., said he and two other lawmakers were blocked from entering a large mail processing facility in his state despite previously touring the facility "without incident or objection." He added that he was told he could not enter nonpublic areas of the facility within 45 days of the election over concerns that doing so would violate the Hatch Act, which bars federal employees like postal workers from engaging in political activity. Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., said he was blocked due to Hatch Act concerns, as well.

"These are phony-baloney excuses," Pascrell told the outlet. "It's not like I'm trying to get into Area 51 or something."

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., said she was also blocked from touring a facility in Florida prior to the 45-day window in early September. Schultz said she was told that the agency would require her to take a "bogus training course" to gain access.

The agency also faces a lawsuit from a union representing postal police officers after the agency issued an order ending daily patrols aimed at preventing robbery of mail collection boxes and vehicles, according to the Journal.

Officers say the move has "left letter carriers without escorts on unsafe routes" and raised concerns that thieves may target mail ballots, according to the report.

The union filed a lawsuit asking a federal court to block the order to "ensure the integrity of the mail" but the litigation is still pending.

"If I was going to undermine public trust in the mail, one of the first things I would do is pull postal police off the street," Frank Albergo, the president of the Postal Police Officers Association, told The Journal.

If the USPS did not intend to undermine election mail security, "then why not wait until after the election to neuter the postal police?" Jim Bjork, a business agent for the union, asked.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/this-is-the-hardest-state-to-vote-in-analysis/

How hard is it to register to vote and then to vote in Texas? it's harder than in 49 other states, according to a “cost-of-voting index" compiled by political scientists at Northern Illinois University, Jacksonville University and Wuhan University in China.

Obviously, it's not impossible to vote in Texas; more than 10% of the state's registered voters — about 2 million citizens — had already cast their ballots, either in person or by mail, by Thursday night. That's certainly a sign of enthusiasm, and could either be a signal of a bigger-than-normal turnout or that a lot of Texas were itching to vote and did so as soon as they could.

But the state has erected obstacles throughout the voting system, and when you compare the comfort and convenience of voting in Texas with other states, Texas ends up at the bottom of the list.

Voting and election law is a persistent struggle in Texas between those who want to knock down impediments to voting and those who think more safeguards are needed to secure the process and the results — though the evidence for this is both anecdotal and thin.

That particular battlefield ranges from voter ID to current legal battles over how many drop-offs each county is allowed to provide for voters who would rather not put their absentee ballots in the mail, who's eligible to vote by mail and whether counties with curbside voting are making things too simple.

Here's how the researchers wrote up our state's position on the list: “Texas maintains an in-person voter registration deadline 30 days prior to Election Day, has reduced the number of polling stations in some parts of the state by more than 50% and has the most restrictive pre-registration law in the country, according to the analysis."

States at the top of the list — where it's easiest to vote — have voting conveniences that aren't available here, like online voter registration, automatic voter registration and allowing voters to register as late as Election Day. (The Texas deadline was Oct. 5.)

Some have universal mail-in voting, which the study considers a hallmark of a state where it's easy to vote. In Texas, voting by mail is only available to people ages 65 and older, to eligible voters confined to jail, for voters who are out of their county of residence during voting, and for voters who cite a disability that prevents them from safely going to the polls.

And higher-rated states require only a signature for in-person voting, instead of tight voter photo identification laws like the one in Texas.

Texas has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country, turning out 45.6% of its population of eligible voters in 2018, compared with a national average of 49.4%, according to the United States Election Project. In the last presidential race, in 2016, turnout was 51.4% of the state's eligible voters, a number that includes adults eligible to vote whether they registered or not. The national average was 60.1%.

The cost-of-voting index is an update of a study that includes indexes for elections back to 1996. In 2016, Texas was fifth from the bottom of the list, in company with Indiana, Tennessee, Virginia and Mississippi. This time around, Texas is behind every other state, in the bottom of the barrel with Georgia, Missouri, Mississippi and Tennessee.

Maybe the low turnout in Texas is related to the state's restrictive voting laws. Maybe eligible adults in Texas are less interested in voting, and the state's voting laws are just an excuse for the low civic engagement.

There's a way to find out, if state lawmakers' goal is to get more Texans voting. If they wanted more people to vote, they'd make it easier.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/texas-counties-can-offer-only-one-drop-off-ballot-location-federal-appeals-court-rules-upholding-gov-greg-abbotts-order/

Emma Platoff, The Texas Tribune Oct. 13, 2020

"Texas counties can offer only one drop-off ballot location, federal appeals court rules, upholding Gov. Greg Abbott's order"was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Texas counties may collect mail-in ballots at only one location, a federal appeals court ruled late Monday, once again upholding an order from Gov. Greg Abbott that restricts voting options.

Abbott in July acted to lengthen the early voting period and allow voters to deliver completed absentee ballots in person for longer than the normal period. But after large Democratic counties including Harris and Travis established several sites where voters could deliver their ballots, Abbott ordered Oct. 1 that they would be limited to one.

A number of civil rights groups sued in at least four lawsuits, calling the order an act of voter suppression that would disproportionately impact low-income voters, voters with disabilities, older voters and voters of color in Democratic counties. A federal judge on Friday sided with those groups, blocking Texas from enforcing the ruling.

But a three-judge panel on the conservative U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appealstemporarily halted that ruling on Saturday and on Monday gave a more formal word on the matter in a written opinion.

“Leaving the Governor's October 1 Proclamation in place still gives Texas absentee voters many ways to cast their ballots in the November 3 election. These methods for remote voting outstrip what Texas law previously permitted in a pre-COVID world," wrote U.S. Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan for the panel of three judges all appointed by President Donald Trump. “The October 1 Proclamation abridges no one's right to vote."

Travis County had designated four locations and Harris County — home to 2.4 million registered voters and spanning a greater distance than the entire state of Rhode Island — had designated a dozen before Abbott's order forced them to close most sites. Fort Bend and Galveston counties also planned to use multiple locations, according to court documents.

Voting rights advocates and local election administrators said the extra sites were critical for helping voters cast their ballots safely during the coronavirus pandemic. Texas is set to receive an unprecedented number of absentee ballots this year, and amid concerns over U.S. Postal Service delays, advocates say, in-person drop-off locations are critical.

Harris County Clerk Chris Hollins has not hesitated to say the governor's decision amounts to voter suppression.

“To force hundreds of thousands of seniors and voters with disabilities to use a single drop-off location in a county that stretches over nearly 2,000 square miles is prejudicial and dangerous," Hollins said earlier this month.

In some states, voters can simply leave their ballots in boxes outside town halls or local churches. Not in Texas, where voters must show an election worker an approved form of identification and can only bring their own ballot.

Abbott had argued that the measure was necessary to ensure election integrity, but he did not provide any evidence and his office did not answer questions about how limiting the highly regulated drop-off locations would do so. In court filings, lawyers for the Texas Attorney General's Office wrote that some counties wouldn't provide “adequate election security, including poll watchers" — “inconsistencies" that the state argued “introduced a risk to ballot integrity."

Abbott said that poll watchers must be allowed at the drop-off sites, as they are at in-person voting sites. Experts say voter fraud is rare, but Republican officials in Texas and nationally have sought to cast doubt on the security of absentee ballots even as their political party calls on its own voters to use them.

The appeals court ruled Monday that Texas did not need to show evidence of voter fraud to justify its decision to limit counties to one location.

“Such evidence has never been required to justify a state's prophylactic measures to decrease occasions for vote fraud or to increase the uniformity and predictability of election administration," Duncan wrote for the court.

One voter who sued the state over the order, 82-year-old Ralph Edelbach, said in court documents that closing the site nearest his Cypress home will mean he adds an extra 20 miles each way to his trip to deliver his ballot, forcing him to spend nearly 90 minutes round trip.

That inconvenience will only be greater, advocates say, for voters with disabilities or those without reliable access to transportation.

The groups that sued the governor include the Texas and National Leagues of United Latin American Citizens, the League of Women Voters of Texas, the Mexican American Legislative Caucus of the Texas House of Representatives and the Texas Legislative Black Caucus.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2020/10/13/texas-election-ballot-drop-off/.

The Texas Tribune is proud to celebrate 10 years of exceptional journalism for an exceptional state. Explore the next 10 years with us.

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trump-appointed judge smacks down campaign's efforts to suppress the vote in Pennsylvania

Laura Clawson Daily Kos

The Trump campaign and the Republican National Convention's efforts to steal the election in Pennsylvania were handed a setback on Saturday by a Trump-appointed judge.

https://www.mediamatters.org/voter-fraud-and-suppression/right-wing-media-seize-flimsy-voter-fraud-stories-spread-misinformation

conservative media — desperate to propagate the myth of widespread voter fraud — are publicizing and distorting local stories to fearmonger about mail-in voting, regardless of whether the original reporting holds up.

As Election Day approaches, right-wing media have been promoting a steady drumbeat of local stories that are supposedly indicative of a national voter fraud crisis. But when examined more closely, these stories often fall apart or otherwise fail to reflect the type of rampant fraud right-wing media figures claim exists.

Coverage of these stories often follows a predictable pattern. Reporting by local outlets, with or without proper context, is written up by conservative publications and shared on Twitter before making its way to Fox News -- and even to the presidential debate stage. Occasionally, as President Donald Trump's administration recently demonstrated, the information comes from the other direction, with White House officials helping to spread these dubious claims from the top down.

In each case, the end goal of this conservative misinformation is clear — to undermine faith in elections through outsized and unwarranted media attention.

During the past month, four such local stories — some which took place in battleground states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — received national attention. But in all four cases, the reality on the ground tells a different story than what right-wing media outlets implied.

Right-wing media are distorting local reporting, some of which was later proven inaccurate, to advance baseless claims of widespread election fraud

On September 23, Wisconsin Fox affiliate WLUK published a short report on three trays of mail found in a ditch. The mail supposedly included absentee ballots, according to a Postal Service spokesperson.

That same day, conservative websites including The Gateway Pundit, Washington Examiner, and Breitbartpublished their own stories on the incident, citing WLUK — but specifically hyping the supposed existence of absentee ballots in their headlines, unlike WLUK, and suggesting the story was emblematic of widespread theft and fraud by the Postal Service. On Twitter, Trump adviser Jason Miller tweeted a link to the Washington Examiner story, while polling group Rasmussen Reports linked to The Gateway Pundit writeup. And after White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany brought up the incident in a press briefing on September 24, Fox News host Tucker Carlson promoted the story in a segment on voter fraud that night.

Finally, during last week’s presidential debate, Trump mentioned ballots being found in a “creek or a river,” which McEnany later clarified was a reference to the incident in Wisconsin.

In fact, the story collapsed when the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on October 1 that the lost mail reported by WLUK did not include absentee ballots from Wisconsin, according to an update from the state election commission.

Another story of supposed election fraud mentioned by Trump on the debate stage also recently fell apart after receiving a flurry of coverage by conservative media.

Trump himself set the right-wing media coverage of this story in motion -- this time involving mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania. After being briefed by Attorney General Bill Barr, Trump appeared on Fox host Brian Kilmeade’s radio show on September 24, where he mentioned that several military mail-in ballots cast for him were found in a trashcan.

A press release by the Department of Justicefurther elaborated on Trump’s claims, first mentioning that nine ballots cast for Trump were found in the trash in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. The number of discarded ballots supposedly cast for Trump was then reduced to seven in a revised press release after it was determined that two ballots had been resealed. The fact that the press releases mentioned who the votes were cast for at all seemed like an obvious attempt to suggest that Trump was the candidate being disadvantaged by this fraud, according to election experts.

These statements set off a flurry of coverage on Fox and elsewhere in right-wing media. But despite the nefarious implications suggested by Trump and the Justice Department, local officials later revealed that the ballots were mistakenly discarded by a temporary worker “who confused the envelopes with absentee ballot applications,” not as part of some anti-Trump plot. Yet even after this information became public,Fox hosts like Carlson and Laura Ingraham continued to point to the incident as a reason mail-in voting was not to be trusted.[tukr vid]

although right-wing media figures will do their best to spin any story related to supposed voter fraud, it is important for local reporters not to feed this narrative themselves through the framing of these stories.

For instance, a CBS affiliate in Colorado published a story on September 25 titled “Colorado Secretary Of State Mails Postcards To Non-Citizens, Dead People Urging Them To Vote.” Although the story has since been retracted, conservative media outlets instantly ran with this framing.

Breitbart and the Washington Examiner published stories based on the reporting from Colorado. On Twitter, Trump adviser Jenna Ellis tweeted a link to Breitbart’s article, and Donald Trump Jr. linked to the Colorado station’s original, since-deleted article. On Fox, Ingraham later cited the story during her show on October 1[vid]

as Colorado ABC affiliate KMGH explained, the story “inaccurately claimed that a postcard sent to some people in Colorado asking them to vote ... used the voter-roll mailing list used to send ballots out and was urging people to illegally register to vote.” Conservative media figures promoted this narrative despite the fact that the mailings were actually urging people to register to vote, and the postcards “came from a different list than the one used to mail ballots to registered voters.” Moreover, the mailings that were inadvertently sent to people who were not legally eligible to vote also contained clear information about the requirements to register.

Despite the best efforts to properly contextualize these stories, right-wing media may still distort them. On September 24, NBC4 in Washington, D.C. noted that some voters in Fairfax County, Virginia, inadvertently received two mail-in ballots. The article noted that the mistake, which was attributed to a technical error, “does not present an opportunity for voter fraud” because a second ballot from any individual would be rejected by officials.

However, Breitbart published the story with this context stripped out to suggest it raises “further concerns about possible electoral fraud in the November election,” and the incident was mentioned on talk radio and Fox as well. Hans von Spakovsky, a longtime purveyor of manufactured voter fraud claims, appeared on a local D.C. talk radio program on September 29 and was asked about the Virginia story[aud van s]

that night, Trump mentioned the incident during the debate, highlighting the pattern of election misinformation and false claims of voter fraud circulating between right-wing media and the president.

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A new study found that the president was the main source for misinformation in voting: A Harvard study published on October 1 found that most misinformation on voter fraud comes from social media promoting information from “political and media elites,” especially Trump.
Russia is using American conservative news sites to spread propaganda:The Wall Street Journal published an October 7 report that found Russian news outlet RT was still getting a lot of traffic in the United States. RT is part of the Mixi.Media traffic-swapping network along with multiple major conservative outlets, including RealClearPolitics, National Review, The Daily Caller, and others. This allows members to display their content on the other network members’ home pages, giving RT the ability to put Russian narratives in front of the eyes of American conservatives.

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/judicial-watchs-tom-fitton-instructs-trump-form-transparency-strike-teams-storm-government

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https://www.mediamatters.org/voter-fraud-and-suppression/james-okeefes-videos-attacking-mail-voting-minnesota-fall-apart-after

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James O’Keefe’s videos attacking mail-in voting in Minnesota fall apart after being spread by right-wing media

WRITTEN BY ERIC KLEEFELD

PUBLISHED 10/07/20

Serial political fraudster James O’Keefe, founder of the right-wing group Project Veritas, is now facing the collapse of yet another of his purported “sting” videos — this time, involving accusations of ballot fraud and bribery in Minneapolis. But the fraud and bribery might really be coming from Project Veritas itself.

About Project Veritas

Project Veritas’ basic modus operandi is to secretly record videos, then deceptively edit and release them in order to create a “gotcha” moment for right-wing media. These attempts often backfire. [Business Insider, 11/28/17]

Project Veritas has a long history of distorting videos, claiming they show things they do not actually show, and deceptively editing secret recordings to make the subjects look worse. Project Veritas also has a history of targeting low-level volunteers and staff, then attributing uninformed statements to organizers higher up in authority. [Media Matters, 10/6/14]

Project Veritas refuses to ever release unedited videos, only clips. “We treat our raw video as the same as a reporter’s notebook and we do not release it,” said Project Veritas spokesman Neil McCabe. [Snopes, 10/01/20]

Another O’Keefe stunt from earlier this year involved supposed inflation of coronavirus death statistics in New York City. Despite containing no evidence or meaningful information, it was widely picked up in right-wing media. [Media Matters, 4/30/20]

Project Veritas’ latest scheme is a project codenamed “Diamond Dog” meant to discredit mail-in voting. The intention of this scheme is “literally to get Trump reelected,” as a source said. [The New Republic, 8/3/20]

Project Veritas’ latest claims

O’Keefe’s first new video claimed to implicate an “Ilhan Omar connected Ballot Harvester.” The video featured Snapchat videos by a man referred to as “Liban Mohamed” with absentee ballots collected in his car. Though he is described as “connected” to Omar, he identifies himself in an audio clip as working for his brother Jamal Osman’s successful campaign in an August special election for the Minneapolis city council. [YouTube, 9/27/20]

A second video claimed to show an exchange of $200 for a single vote. Both videos relied heavily on the statements of a community “insider” named Omar Jamal. O’Keefe claimed that “our sources inside the Somali community here allege that the architect of this pay-for-votes scheme is none other than U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.” [YouTube, 9/28/20]

The new video releases appear to have been promoted beforehand with Trump campaign officials. The latest Project Veritas release was teased on Twitter by Donald Trump Jr. and businessman Mike Lindell, Trump’s Minnesota campaign chair. [Election Integrity Partnership, 9/29/20]

The videos’ release may have been moved ahead of schedule to distract from The New York Times’ reporting on Trump’s personal finances.“Mr. O’Keefe’s promotional posts had said the video would be released on Monday, but Project Veritas released it on Sunday instead, a few hours after the publication of The Times’s investigation. … Many of the same accounts that had shared promotional tweets also shared the video as soon as it was released, moving it quickly into Twitter’s trending topics alongside The Times’s tax investigation.” [The New York Times, 9/29/20]

Fact-checking Project Veritas’ claims

The collection of absentee ballots by a designated person who delivers them to be counted, which right-wing media refer to as “ballot harvesting,” was legal in Minnesota for a period this summer, during which the man in the Snapchat videos claims to have been working. The Minnesota Supreme Court reinstated a limit on collecting ballots in early September, after the state’s primary election had already taken place. [Star Tribune, 9/9/20]

Project Veritas has provided no direct evidence for any vote-buying. Any such allegations in the video “come solely from unnamed people who speak with Project Veritas operatives in the video and whose faces are not shown.” [The New York Times, 9/29/20]

Now, “Liban Mohamed” has come forward — though his name is actually Liban Osman, and he was not working for Rep. Ilhan Omar’s campaign. Osman also said that Project Veritas misleadingly edited together two different videos he had taken a month apart from each other, as he boasted of his brother’s campaign and its successful fundraising against a wide field of 11 opponents. [KMSP-TV, 10/5/20]

An Omar campaign spokesperson confirmed that Liban Osman had never worked or volunteered for Omar’s campaign. [Snopes, 10/1/20]

Liban Osman says Project Veritas’ main “insider” source, Omar Jamal, had offered him a bribe of $10,000, to be paid by Project Veritas. Osman says Jamal wanted him to say he was harvesting ballots for Rep. Ilhan Omar, and claims Jamal said to him, “They [Project Veritas] are not after you or your brother. Why are you defending her?” Project Veritas is denying the accusation. [KMSP-TV, 10/5/20]

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CitationVia Fox 9, KMSP-TV, October 5, 2020

KMSP-TV in Minneapolis reports that the video showing an exchange of $200 was actually Project Veritas' source, Omar Jamal. “But two sources tell the FOX 9 Investigators the man is a relative of Omar Jamal, and that during the encounter outside Cedar Riverside Apartments, it is Jamal who is handing the man $200 which was intended for the family of a sick relative in Somalia.” [KMSP-TV, 10/5/20]

Project Veritas’ source Omar Jamal

Omar Jamal claims to be the chairman of “Somali Watchdog Group,” but the organization does not appear to exist. It is also unclear if Jamal is at all associated with the Ramsey County Sheriff Department, which he claims to be working for in the Project Veritas video. “Further, according to records obtained by the Daily Dot, Jamal isn’t currently a U.N. Permanent Representative to the Federal Republic of Somalia, which he has also claimed on LinkedIn.”[Daily Dot, 10/1/20]

Jamal has also admitted the video purportedly showing an exchange of $200 for a ballot was a staged dramatization. “I think that incident was one that was depicting how [cash-for-ballot] works,” he said in an interview with a Somali American TV program. He also admitted that he had never met anyone who had received cash in exchange for a vote. [Sahan Journal, 10/1/20]

Project Veritas is now promoting a GoFundMe for their “#BallotHarvesting Insider Omar Jamal,” with a goal of $500,000. The money is allegedly to support efforts to “further expose potentially more election fraud come November.” At time of writing, it has raised just over $31,000. [Twitter, 9/28/20]

Right-wing media and President Donald Trump spread the latest apparent hoax from Project Veritas

On September 28, O’Keefe appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, to promote the video. [Fox News, Hannity, 9/28/20]

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CitationFrom the September 28, 2020, edition of Fox News' Hannity

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones hosted O’Keefe to talk about the story. [Infowars, The Alex Jones Show, 9/28/20]

Video file

CitationFrom the September 28, 2020, edition of InfoWars’ The Alex Jones Show

O’Keefe was interviewed by former National Rifle Association spokesperson Dana Loesch. [YouTube, 9/28/20]

O’Keefe also appeared on The Larry Elder Show. [YouTube, 9/29/20]

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon hosted Project Veritas’ Neil McCabe to discuss the story on his War Room: Pandemic podcast. [Twitter, 9/28/20]

Far-right blogger and white nationalist sympathizer Michelle Malkin hosted state Rep. Steve Drazkowski (R-MN) to discuss the Project Veritas video. [YouTube, 9/28/20]

Glenn Beck promoted the video on his Blaze TV show in a segment titled “Vote Buying In Ilhan Omar’s District?” [YouTube, 9/28/20]

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[New York Post, 9/27/20]

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[Breitbart, 9/27/20]

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[National Review, 9/27/20]

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[The Gateway Pundit, 9/27/20]

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[The Post Millennial, 9/27/20]

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[RedState, 9/28/20]

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[The Epoch Times, 9/28/20]

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[CBN, 9/28/20]

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[The Washington Times, 9/28/20]

Right-wing YouTuber Tim Pool: “Trump Proven RIGHT After Video Shows Voter Fraud By Ilhan Omar Supporters, He DEMANDS Investigation” [YouTube, 9/28/20]“Trump Proven RIGHT After Video Shows Voter Fraud By Ilhan Omar Supporters, He DEMANDS Investigation” [YouTube, 9/28/20]

Pro-Trump cartoonist Scott Adams: “Trump Taxes, Mail-In Ballot Fraud Scandal, How Trump Wins Without Trying” [YouTube, 9/28/20]

Trump amplified the claims at his campaign rally in Duluth, Minnesota. “And what about Omar? Where she gets caught [ballot] harvesting. What the hell is going on? I hope your U.S. attorney is involved,” Trump said, as the crowd chanted, “Lock her up.” [Vox, 10/1/20]

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), in a now-deleted tweet: “Project Veritas offers further evidence of the need to ban ballot harvesting. It's not a partisan issue. It's been abused to help both R & D candidates, including in North Carolina & California. Please help by telling your congressional rep to pass our bipartisan bill HR8285.” [Twitter, 9/28/20]

Gabbard posted a new tweet after the latest allegations broke about the videos:

https://www.mediamatters.org/james-okeefe/james-okeefe-cycle-after-sean-hannitys-eager-promotion-another-project-veritas-video

no vid

fox News star Sean Hannity hosted disgraced right-wing fabulist James O’Keefe last week to promote his latest video “sting,” which seeks to aid President Donald Trump’s reelection by undermining the credibility of U.S. elections. The video has since been discredited -- an incredibly predictable outcome for anyone remotely familiar with O’Keefe’s oeuvre -- but Hannity hasn’t bothered to let his audience know, because he’s a shill for the president.

Every news cycle about an O’Keefe “sting” video is the same (though every cycle about one of his efforts fizzling before launch is hilariously different). O’Keefe’s Project Veritas group targets a Democratic candidate, a progressive group, or a media outlet. His operatives use hidden cameras and leading questions to elicit responses from low-level participants that he can decontextualize and distort. His team edits together the footage into a video which he presents as damning evidence of widespread illegal or unethical behavior. The published result gets blasted through the right-wing infrastructure of social media storytellers, digital media outlets, and talk radio, moving up the food chain until it reaches Fox and the president. And then people take a closer look at the video and its participants and point out the particular ways in which O’Keefe has misled the public this time.

O’Keefe’s latest target is U.S. elections. His latest video is a two-part Project Veritas investigation into a “Cash For Ballots Voter Fraud Scheme” in the Somali American community in Minneapolis. And his latest wild allegation is that his team has identified “the biggest systemic voter fraud smoking gun in American history.”

There is no systemic voter fraud in the U.S. elections and mail-in voting is a secure way to cast ballots, despite the right-wing disinformation campaign to the contrary. And the videos in question are a mishmash of decontextualized snippets, some from anonymous individuals, which ultimately provide no “hard evidence of cash in exchange for votes.” Nonetheless, the video had rocketed through the right-wing noise machine to Hannity’s radio show, his Fox show, and the president in one day.

On his September 28 broadcast, Hannity presented O’Keefe as a credible investigator who had documented corruption. O’Keefe’s video, Hannity warned, “should scare every American.” After acknowledging that “Fox News has not independently verified the contents of the video,” he proceeded to show part of it to his millions of viewers. He brought on O’Keefe himself, who claimed he had produced “incontrovertible evidence” of “voter fraud” that is “all on tape.” “I hope the attorney general of the United States is watching tonight and will watch that video,” Hannity concluded at the end of the interview. “We need to get to the truth."

[vid]

and then the Project Veritas claims started to fall apart.

The “insider” at the center of O’Keefe’s tale who explains the purportedly crooked “scheme” is Omar Jamal, a local gadfly who presents himself as a leader in the Somali American community but has few apparent followers. Subsequent reporting revealed he isn’t a credible source, and he reportedly backtracked on key claims he made to O’Keefe in a subsequent interview -- notably, that he had ever seen cash exchanged for ballots. In fact, he “specifically alleges that he thinks a clip that purports to show a ‘ballot harvester’ paying a voter $200 in exchange for a vote was instead a demonstration of how that process allegedly works” -- a statement he may have been in good position to make, since he is reportedly the “ballot harvester” shown in the clip.

The local Fox owned-and-operated affiliate, KMSP, added to the implosion on Monday with an interview with Liban Osman, another subject of the Project Veritas videos. KMSP provided at least one clear-cut case of Project Veritas deceptively taking Osman out of context to suggest he had been offering money for votes, and Osman told the station that Jamal had offered him $10,000 from the group if he were to claim to be harvesting ballots for Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). “Project Veritas denies manipulating or misrepresenting its undercover video and claims it never offered Liban Osman $10,000,” KMSP reported.

Hannity’s audience hasn’t heard any of this from him, and they shouldn’t expect to. The Fox star knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s been promoting O’Keefe’s purported bombshells for years, despite his lack of credibility, because it’s propaganda intended to benefit the Republican Party, and Hannity is a Republican Party propagandist.

In this case, O’Keefe is the leading edge of an insidious and wide-ranging GOP plan to damage the credibility of absentee and mail-in ballot counts, suppress as many Democratic votes as possible, and undermine confidence in the election results. As part of that effort, Project Veritas has “worked to infiltrate 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,’” The New Republic reported over the summer.

That means we can expect more dubiously edited videos from O’Keefe’s crew in the month before the election -- and there’s little doubt he’ll be back on Hannity’s show to talk about it. That’s Fox’s role in the scheme -- an outlet willing to feed its viewers nonsensical, overblown attacks on the election process to benefit the president.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/experts-warn-of-danger-posed-by-armed-pro-trump-poll-watchers/

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Experts warn of danger posed by armed pro-Trump poll watchers

Kenny Stancil October 11, 2020

Following President Donald Trump's refusal last month to denounce white supremacists along with his longstanding pattern of undermining democratic norms—and in the wake of the FBI's interception of a plot by right-wing domestic terrorists to kidnap Michigan's Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and overthrow the state government—fears are mounting about the danger posed by far-right paramilitary groups heeding Trump's call to "go into the polls and watch very carefully."

Two weeks after Donald Trump Jr. took to social media in an attempt to recruit an "army for Trump's election security," and with early voting already underway, Republicans this week have begun dispatching thousands of volunteers to in-person voting locations and mail-in ballot drop boxes, part of a desperate "effort to find evidence to back up Trump's unsubstantiated complaints about widespread voter fraud," Reuters reported Thursday.

According to more than 20 officials involved in the effort, "the mission... is to capture photos and videos Republicans can use to support so-far unfounded claims that mail voting is riddled with chicanery, and to help their case if legal disputes erupt over the results of... the contest between Republican incumbent Trump and his Democratic opponent Joe Biden."

But critics of the Trump campaign's operation—which revolves around baseless presumptions of fraudulent electoral activity committed by supporters of Democratic candidates—argued that the president's "call for his supporters to serve as self-appointed" poll-watchers "sounded more like an incitement to voter intimidation and violence than an endorsement of the role election observers play in protecting democratic norms."

Given the White House's alarming normalization of violence against political foes, voting rights experts, civic officials, and citizens are increasingly concerned about the negative consequences that could ensue if tensions escalate and the president's most militant supporters—white nationalist gangs, so-called "patriots" donning Confederate and Nazi regalia, and other heavily armed pro-Trump factions—follow his authoritarian cues.

Steven Gardiner, a scholar at the progressive think tankPolitical Research Associates, told The Guardian on Friday that "the militias will absolutely seize on" Trump's comments.

"The possibility of armed factions with military-style rifles showing up at polling places is very troubling," Gardiner added.

When Devin Burghart—director of the anti-hate organization theInstitute for Research and Education on Human Rights—heard Trump endorse voter intimidation at last month's debate, his "first thought was, 'Here we go.'"

"This is the stuff of our worst nightmares," Burghart said.

As Common Dreams reported on Thursday amid the revelation that 13 suspects had been arrested on kidnapping and terrorism charges after law enforcement officials foiled a right-wing plot to attack the Michigan State Capitol and hold Gov. Whitmer hostage, many observers have made connections between Trump's demagogic rhetoric and his followers' violent actions.

"I wonder where they got their motivation from," Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) noted sarcastically on social media, referring to an incendiary message Trump shared in April—during the height of anti-lockdown protests in the state—to "Liberate Michigan!"

"This is a pattern: Trump paints a target. An attack or plot follows," tweeted Washington Post national security correspondent Greg Miller.

Gardiner told The Guardian that "the relationship between the militias and the current administration is call and response."

"It's not always clear who's leading the chant," he added. "Sometimes it's coming from the militias, sometimes it's coming from the president."

Another worrisome development is that gun sales nearly doubled between summer 2019 and 2020, meaning that the U.S. is further arming itself with "deadly weaponry [that] is increasingly finding its way onto the streets, borne by self-styled private militias, and culminating in violent clashes that have caused bloodshed in several U.S. cities," as The Guardian explained.

The New York Times estimated last month that the number of active militia members hovers around 20,000 people in 300 groups, with military veterans constituting one-fourth of those. But a new investigation by The Atlantic magazine into the Oath Keepers, one of the most prominent far-right paramilitary groups, revealed a list of nearly 25,000 current or former members, two-thirds of whom had military or law enforcement backgrounds, suggesting that the number of Americans with ties to extremist factions is larger.

As Common Dreams reported last month, armed white supremacists pose the greatest domestic terrorism threat in the U.S., according to the FBI, despite efforts by the Trump administration to downplay the risks associated with right-wing militias.

According to Gardiner's research, many of the violent incidents committed by far-right vigilantes against anti-racism and anti-police violence protesters this summer were carried out by uncoordinated groups of individuals, with no known involvement of established militias.

"There have been almost 240 incidents [this summer] where small and entirely leaderless bands of extremists coalesced online and then proceeded to take their armed fantasies on to the streets of America," The Guardian reported.

Burghart's team "has been tracking the escalation of militia activity," particularly in key swing states including Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, where "groups have been detected discussing what they call 'voter integrity' efforts" on Election Day.

"We're paying close attention," Burghart said. As a result of Trump's "call to arms" at the first presidential debate, he anticipates that "we'll see a lot more activity from here."

Rachel Carroll Rivas, co-director of the Montana Human Rights Network, told The Guardian that online monitoring conducted by her organization has been "picking up intensifying conversation among militia groups about the legitimacy of the November 3 ballot and of the integrity of mail-in voting."

Rivas explained that "militia groups such as the Montana branch of the United States Freedom Protectors were positioning themselves to be vigilante outriders of law enforcement on Election Day," and that "the possibility of interventions by armed members of the group had to be taken seriously."

"They present themselves as protectors of property and law and order, and are now starting to talk about the election," Rivas said. "They may show up at polling places claiming to want to protect voting rights, but their impact will clearly be intimidatory."

Instilling fear and harassing voters is Trump's goal, according to voting rights advocates. Nina Jankowicz, a political scholar at the Wilson Center, wrote in The Atlantic that "confrontations between unorganized, self-appointed poll watchers and individual voters are a recipe for trouble—and a threat to a fair election."

Jankowicz stated that "if voters encounter any group discouraging or preventing others from casting a ballot, they should immediately inform a poll worker and call a nonpartisan election-protection hotline (866-OUR-VOTE is one example)."

"Election officials across the country should know they have the right to eject poll watchers for disruptions and intimidation, and can call the police if unrest develops outside the station," Jankowicz said. "And police themselves should be reminded that their job is to protect people's ability to vote, no matter their personal political preferences."

Rivas stressed that the threat of voter intimidation "really is top down." Far-right paramilitary groups "are repeating word for word what they hear from President Trump," she said.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/supreme-court-revives-gops-ballot-witness-requirement-in-south-carolina-enabling-state-voter-suppression/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/william-barrs-bogus-voter-fraud-claims-are-part-of-a-long-history-of-republican-voter-suppression-reporter

alex h

With one national poll after another showing President Donald Trump losing to former Vice President Joe Biden in November, the president and Attorney General William Barr continue to obsess over "voter fraud." They baselessly claim the crime is promoted by mail-in voting, despite its history as a reliable practice. Journalist Pema Levy pointed out that Barr's actions are part of a long a seedy history in an article published in Mother Jones this week, describing them as thinly veiled attempts at voter suppression.

"A pattern has emerged in recent years that's easy to spot," Levy explains. "Right before an election, Republican officials in battleground states announce voter fraud investigations. The goal is obvious: suppressing turnout. But what's new this year is that this underhanded tactic is being employed by the president and the Justice Department."

Levy cites Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp as an example of a Republican who has used bogus voter fraud claims to suppress turnout, recalling that only two days before the 2018 midterms, Kemp — who was Georgia's secretary of state before becoming governor — "came out with an explosive announcement: he was investigating the state Democratic Party for attempting to hack into the state's voter registration system."

"At the time, Kemp was both the state's top election official and the Republican nominee for governor in a dead-heat race against Democrat Stacey Abrams," Levy notes. "Kemp had a history of bogus voter fraud allegations against his political opponents, and many recognized the brazen tactic this time. Election law expert Rick Hasen called it 'perhaps the most outrageous example of election administration partisanship in the modern era' and 'banana republic stuff.'"

But in May 2020, Levy adds, Georgia's Republican attorney general "confirmed what was suspected all along: there was no evidence of any crime." Republicans, Levy stresses, "have a long history of making false allegations of voter fraud, only to see their accusations fall apart once scrutinized. But airing such charges right before an election threatens to destabilize and delegitimize it."

This year, according to Levy, one is seeing "an increase in fraud allegations from the Justice Department itself — and it appears to be part of Barr's ongoing effort to transform the (DOJ) into an arm of the Trump campaign, ready to engage in a longstanding GOP voter suppression tactic."

Barr, Levy warns, is showing that he is ready to "possibly aid the Trump campaign's legal efforts to get ballots tossed during the vote-counting process."

When the U.S. Senate confirmed Barr as U.S. attorney general in 2019, Levy recalls, he was hailed as "by-the-book institutionalist" — only to show how much of a Trump loyalist he was when he "misrepresented" the findings of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation and "interfered" in the DOJ's investigation of long-time Trump ally Roger Stone. And during this year's presidential election, Levy predicts, Barr will to do whatever he can to help Trump win reelection.

"Since Barr has torched his credibility," Levy writes, "any allegations of fraud emanating from the Justice Department in the coming weeks should be viewed skeptically. Barr is using an old playbook. You've been warned."

https://www.facingsouth.org/2020/10/institute-index-confronting-gops-poll-watcher-threats

Hours after the start of the Sept. 29 presidential debate betweenPresident Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden — in which Trump refused to condemn white supremacists, made false claims about voter fraud, and urged his supporters to "go into the polls and watch very carefully"— that Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring issued a Tweet saying "voter harassment and intimidation will not be tolerated" in his state: 14 also CA

Number of days before the debate that Herring issued an advisory opinion outlining protections in both state and federal law against voter intimidation in response to reports of activity near polling places that led some voters to fear for their safety: 5

Date on which a group of Trump supporters waving campaign flags disrupted early voting in Fairfax County, Virginia, by rallying near the entrance to a polling placefollowing a "Trump Train" parade led by Republican National Committee (RNC) Co-Chair Thomas O. "Tommy" Hicks Jr. of Dallas: 9/19/2020

Year in which the RNC, after a lawsuit over its hiring of off-duty police to monitor polling places in Black and Latino communities in New Jersey as part of a so-called "ballot security" operation, signed a consent decree pledging to end intimidation of Democratic voters though admitting no wrongdoing: 1982

According to RNC officials, number of voters another one of their 1980s-era so-called "ballot security" efforts was expected to kick off Louisiana's rolls in an effort the officials said was designed to "keep the Black vote down": 60,000 to 80,000

Year in which the consent decree expired despite Democrats' attempts to get it extended, making the 2020 presidential election the first without its protections in 40 years: 2017

Date on whichPresident Trump, in a private meeting with civil rights leaders at Trump Tower, acknowledged that lower turnout among Black voters helped him defeat Hillary Clinton: 1/16/2017

Year in which Justin Clark, an attorney and Trump reelection campaign official, was recorded telling Republican lawyers that the expiration of the consent decree was a "huge, huge, huge, huge deal": 2019

Number of people the Republican Party is now aiming to recruit to serve as what it calls "poll watchers" to look for election problems, raising concerns about possible voter intimidation: 50,000

Date on which Roger Stone — the longtime Trump confidant convicted of felonies for witness tampering and lying to investigators in the Russia election interference case and whose sentence was commuted by the president — appeared on the radio show of Dallas-based far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and said the only legitimate outcome to the 2020 election would be a Trump victory: 9/10/2020

Date on which, Stone, who has Proud Boy ties, organized what became known as the "Brooks Brothers riot" — a violent protest involving George W. Bush campaign operatives who targeted a meeting of election canvassers in Florida's Miami-Dade County during the 2000 presidential recount and succeeded in shutting it down, ultimately leading Al Gore, who won the popular vote, to concede: 11/22/2000

Of the 50 states, number with statutes regulating poll watchers, also known as "partisan citizen observers": 45

Of the 13 Southern states*, number with poll watcher statutes: 13

Number of provisions of federal law that also bar voter intimidation, some of which impose lengthy prison sentences: 6

Factor by which the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a voting rights advocacy group, has boosted its squad of attorneys who'll be on call to help voters who experience intimidation or other problems at the polls this year: 4

Number of attorneys now helping that effort nationwide: more than 21,000

Phone number that voters who experience problems can call to get help from those attorneys: 866-OUR-VOTE

* Facing South counts among the Southern states Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.

Facebook Needs Trump Even More Than Trump Needs Facebook

Bloomberg Businessweek. 17 September 2020.

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Facebook Needs Trump Even More Than Trump Needs Facebook

Employees fear Zuckerberg’s commitment to free speech is more about protecting the president than the company’s ideals.

By and September 17, 2020,

In late 2019, during one of Mark Zuckerberg’s many trips to Washington to defend Facebook in front of Congress, he stopped for a private dinner with Donald Trump and offered the president a titillating statistic. “I’d like to congratulate you,” Zuckerberg said. “You’re No.1 on Facebook.”

At least that’s the story as told by Trump, on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show in January. Trump is technically not the top politician by followers on Facebook. That would be former President Barack Obama. But as the country’s most powerful newsmaker and the person in charge of a government that’s been aggressively pursuing antitrust cases against big tech companies, he does have leverage over Zuckerberg. So the chief executive officer could be forgiven for flattering Trump. Any moment that the president is happy with Facebook is a moment he’s not pursuing hostile regulation—or more likely, sparking a bad news cycle.

Facebook Inc. declined to comment on whether Zuckerberg indeed told Trump he was No.1 and, if so, in what category he meant, but it’s adamant that its founder isn’t playing favorites. After the New York Times speculated that the dinner between Zuckerberg and Trump might have involved a deal over whether Facebook would fact-check the president, Zuckerberg said he was simply stopping by the White House because he was in town. “The whole idea of a deal is pretty ridiculous,” he told Axios in July.

Longtime current and former employees say this denial may be a bit misleading. Zuckerberg isn’t easily influenced by politics. But what he does care about—more than anything else perhaps—is Facebook’s ubiquity and its potential for growth. The result, critics say, has been an alliance of convenience between the world’s largest social network and the White House, in which Facebook looks the other way while Trump spreads misinformation about voting that could delegitimize the winner or even swing the election. “Facebook, more so than other platforms, has gone out of its way to not ruffle feathers in the current administration,” says Jesse Lehrich, co-founder of Accountable Tech, an organization making recommendations to tech companies on public-policy issues. “At best, you could say it’s willful negligence.”

The pattern hasn’t been confined to U.S. politics. A Facebook executive in India was accused in August of granting special treatment to a lawmaker from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party who’d called for violence against Rohingya Muslim immigrants. (It was only after the Wall Street Journal reported on the posts that the company banned the lawmaker, T. Raja Singh.) A memo from a former employee, published by BuzzFeed on Sept. 14, detailed how Facebook had ignored or delayed taking action against governments using fake accounts to mislead their citizens. “I have blood on my hands,” she wrote.

“You can continuously see the challenge of them trying to have these kinds of broad principles around free expression and stopping harm, and then that mixing with the realpolitik of trying to keep the executive branch happy,” said Alex Stamos, the former top security executive at Facebook, at a conference in June. Facebook executives say their only loyalty is to free speech. “The idea that there is systematic or deliberate political bias in our decisions I really don’t think is borne out by the facts,” says Nick Clegg, head of policy and communications. “Of course, there are isolated cases.”

“Mark is wrong, and I will endeavor in the loudest possible way to change his mind”

Facebook executives often point out that the company was seen as overly friendly to Democrats during the Obama years and that it takes plenty of heat from the Right. In the summer of 2016, the tech website Gizmodo wrote that it had been directing employees to suppress pro-Trump sites in its trending news section. The story led to a scandal over supposed anticonservative bias at social media companies, and it was in response to this backlash that Facebook started to drift rightward. The company flew conservative commentators to its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., to reassure them that there was no need for concern about how Facebook operated.

The romancing continued after election day as Facebook celebrated Trump’s victory. In January 2017, the company co-hosted an inauguration party with the Daily Caller, which has published writers who have espoused white nationalist views.The lemons in the catered drinks were stamped with Facebook logos. An internal report from around the same time touted Trump’s superior strategy with Facebook ads, noting that Trump followed advice and training from the company that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, had rejected. Trump “got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period,” Andrew Bosworth, who currently runs the company’s efforts in augmented and virtual reality and who was head of ads at the time, wrote in a memo to employees in 2018.

Facebook’s mostly liberal staff saw its Republican relationship-building as the price of doing business, but as the company weathered public scrutiny—about Russia’s spread of election misinformation, as well as its failure to stop Cambridge Analytica’s data-gathering operation—something changed. Among the rank and file, and even among some executives, the shift went from grudging professional admiration for Trump to a realization that he was using Facebook to attack many of the issues employees cared about. During the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, during which Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault, head of policy Joel Kaplan was shown seated directly behind the nominee, a close friend. The days following, several Facebook employees say, was the first time they saw colleagues cry openly at Zuckerberg’s weekly question-and-answer sessions.

After the Kavanaugh hearings, employees began to notice that Kaplan, George W. Bush’s former deputy chief of staff, seemed more concerned about critiques of bias from conservatives than from liberals. Facebook’s internal data showed that conservative voices are consistently the most popular on the site. (On a recent Monday morning, the top 10 Facebook posts, by interactions—such as likes, shares, and comments—included eight from conservative pundits and news outlets, one from Ivanka Trump, and one from NPR.) But in 2019, under pressure from the same group who’d visited before Trump’s election, Kaplan commissioned a yearlong independent study that concluded the opposite. “There is still significant work to be done to satisfy the concerns we heard from conservatives,” it said.

Historically, Facebook had given executives in charge of its products immense leeway in making decisions, but suddenly the company’s policy team seemed to have veto power.In January 2018, Zuckerberg asked to reduce the prevalence of news in users’ feeds, especially from incendiary and untrustworthy outlets. The product team tweaked the news feed, but then members of Kaplan’s team reviewed test simulations. They noted that the product change was causing traffic to drop more severely for right-wing outlets such as Fox News and Breitbart News, according to a person familiar with the incident who spoke with Bloomberg Businessweek on the condition of anonymity.

Of course, this was because Fox and Breitbart tend to publish more incendiary content—Breitbart famously once had a “black crime” section on the site. So the engineers were ordered to tweak the algorithm a little more until it punished liberal outlets as much as conservative ones, before releasing the update to 2.5 billion users. Fox maintained its position as the top publisher on Facebook. This kind of review wasn’t unusual, employees say. The policy team would regularly investigate whether changes would affect right-leaning outlets while seeming less concerned about the effects on more left-leaning ones. A Facebook spokesman denies that Kaplan’s pushback was partisan and says the algorithm was not changed as a result of his concerns.

As employees started to worry about Facebook’s proximity to the Right, Facebook’s M-Team—“M” for management—seemed intent on pushing the company even closer to it.At one point, the group flew to New York for a leadership off-site at the headquarters of News Corp., which like Fox News is controlled by Rupert Murdoch and his family. One executive, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom (who left the company in 2018), refused to attend, citing Fox’s polarizing influence, according to a person familiar with the matter. The company says it regularly meets with media outlets. Systrom didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Eventually, Trump pushed the limits. In the early morning hours of May 29, he posted a message to his 29.5 million Facebook followers, warning protesters in Minneapolis that they were risking violent retribution. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” the president wrote. It was a formulation that’s long been associated with police brutality. A similar threat was used by the segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace.

Trump had said the same on Twitter, which quickly hid his post, saying it violated rules against glorifying violence. Zuckerberg waited, leaving the post up for hours while consulting his top lieutenants to discuss what to do. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, Kaplan, and Clegg all weighed in. So did Maxine Williams, the company’s head of diversity. And then, that afternoon, another very influential figure piped up: the president himself, who spoke to Zuckerberg by phone. Zuckerberg said later that he told Trump he disagreed with the post and found it unhelpful. But, crucially, he also didn’t think it went against Facebook’s rules.

Trump’s post remained on Facebook, sparking a virtual walkout. Employees began criticizing Zuckerberg openly and leaking to the press. “Mark is wrong,” tweeted Ryan Freitas, director of product design for the company’s news feed, “and I will endeavor in the loudest possible way to change his mind.” A flurry of stories appeared over the next two months detailing instances that reinforced the suspicions about the alliance between Facebook and Trump.For instance, media outlets reported that the president had no negative hashtags associated with his name on Instagram, while Joe Biden had lots; that a Facebook employee was fired after complaining that the company seemed to be allowing far-right pundits, such as Diamond and Silk, to break rules about misinformation; and that an investigation into Ben Shapiro, whose site the Daily Wire routinely broke the rules to boost its audience, was thwarted by Kaplan’s policy group.

Employees also noticed a difference between Zuckerberg’s relationship with Trump and his interactions with his Democratic opponent. In a June 29 letter addressed to Clegg, Biden’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, pointed out three instances where she felt Trump had shared voting misinformation and asked if Facebook “will apply its policies impartially.” In a separate letter on July 10, campaign general counsel Dana Remus accused Facebook of hypocrisy. “Your company’s actions fail to live up to its stated commitments,” she wrote. Zuckerberg hasn’t spoken to Biden all year.

After the looting-and-shooting post, Facebook’s policy team contacted the White House to explain the company’s process, which lead to Trump’s phone call with Zuckerberg. During the delay, the post got millions of views. Around the same time, Biden posted an open letter asking Facebook to stem the tide of misinformation. Facebook clapped back in public. “The people’s elected representatives should set the rules, and we will follow them,” it said in a blog post. “There is an election coming in November and we will protect political speech, even when we strongly disagree with it.” The message was clear: We listen to the government in charge.

By now, Facebook’s failures during the 2016 election are well known.A group backed by the Russian government used the company’s products to promote Trump and disparage Clinton, according to the report issued by special counsel Robert Mueller. For instance, Russian operatives created fake accounts aimed at Black voters, seen as a key part of Clinton’s base. They told people who followed these accounts they shouldn’t bother voting, or that they should vote by text message, which isn’t possible. In all, the Russian posts reached more than 150 million Americans.

The job of rooting out fake content created by foreign governments falls to Facebook’s election integrity and cybersecurity groups, which are separate from the policy team and, in theory, nonpartisan. Facebook has gotten better at finding these campaigns. Last year alone, it removed 50 networks of accounts like the Russian one from 2016. But some former employees have complained of being ignored or sidelined based on political concerns. In 2018, Yaël Eisenstat, a former CIA intelligence officer, worked on a plan to use software to scan ads for language that could give false information about voting procedures. The proposal was rejected, Eisenstadt was told, because the problem wasn’t urgent enough. She left that November.

The following year, Facebook did make rules against giving incorrect information about how to vote, but then it froze when Trump actually put the policy to the test. On May 20, a week before the looting-and-shooting post, the president claimed that officials in Michigan and Nevada were sending out mail-in ballots illegally, which was not true. A few days later, on May 26, Trump posted that California was mailing ballots to “anyone living in the state,” another lie. The posts stayed up, and Zuckerberg went on Fox News to criticize Twitter, which had fact-checked similar posts. An outside civil rights auditor later concluded that Facebook failed to enforce its own policies in both instances.

Instead Zuckerberg came up with something new—what he called “the largest voting information campaign in U.S. history,” a plan to register 4 million voters. Facebook also designed a “voting information center,” a webpage with facts about the election compiled from state authorities. The social media network has been promoting the page atop every user’s Facebook and Instagram feed and attaches a link to it with every post on the service that mentions the election process. The hub “ensures that people can see the post and hear from their elected officials, warts and all, but also have accurate context about what the experts are saying,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, told reporters in August.

But the links below Trump’s ever-more-frequent postings about voting do not warn Facebook users if the information is untrue—they simply advertise an information center. Moreover, after Republicans complained about the voter registration efforts, Facebook seemed to back off further, according to emails obtained by the Tech Transparency Project. The company had planned a two-day promotion over the July 4th holiday on Facebook, as well as on Instagram and Messenger, but then cut that down to a one-day push on Facebook alone.

Facebook has said that the suggestion that the company scaled down its voter registration plans for political reasons is “pure fabrication.” Another spokesman, replying to a Twitter user who suggested the same, responded with a picture of a woman in a tin foil hat.

The company, of course, knows lots about conspiracy theorists, who thrive on the site. There’s QAnon, a far-right movement that espouses a complex theory involving a cabal of elites engaged in child sex trafficking. The FBI deemed it a form of domestic terrorism in August 2019, but Facebook only started removing accounts in May. The company also initially ignored posts tied to a Kenosha, Wis., militia in which users discussed shooting Black Lives Matter protesters. The militia’s event page was flagged more than 400 times, but moderators allowed it to stay up, according to BuzzFeed. Not long after the posts began appearing, a 17-year-old with an assault rifle shot and killed two people at a protest in the city.

Even as employees accuse Facebook of aiding Trump’s reelection effort, the administration has kept up the pressure on the company. In late May the president signed an executive order threatening to revoke the immunity enjoyed by social media companies, including Facebook, under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, if they showed political bias. The order was an apparent threat to social networks that censored posts from Trump and his allies. Facebook responded by saying the move would restrict free speech.

Trump’s threats haven’t yet materialized into anything crippling—at least not for Facebook. The U.S. Department of Justice is preparing a case against the company’s main rival, Google, which it’s expected to file before Election Day. Meanwhile, Trump has forced another key Facebook competitor, Chinese-owned TikTok, to find a U.S. buyer or face ejection from the country.

So far, Zuckerberg’s cultivation of Trump has seemed to keep Facebook safe from the president’s ire. But Trump is trailing by 7 points or so nationally, and it’s likely that a Biden administration would seek to regulate Facebook. In July, Zuckerberg got a preview of the Democrats’ playbook when he faced the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, alongside all the other major tech executives. Representatives’ questions for him were pointed, prosecutorial, and informed by thousands of internal emails and chat logs that seemed to suggest a path for regulators to argue that the company should be broken up or penalized in some other way.

“All of these companies engage in behavior which is deeply disturbing and requires Congress to take action,” David Cicilline, the Rhode Island representative who’s the panel’s chairman, told Bloomberg in August, the same day Facebook’s stock hit a record high. He said he was especially struck by the “casual way” Zuckerberg admitted to buying Instagram and WhatsApp to eliminate them as competitors. Facebook disputes Cicilline’s statement and says both acquisitions have not harmed competition.

Biden, meanwhile, has said he also favors removing Section 230 protections and holding executives personally liable. “I’ve never been a big Zuckerberg fan,” he told the New York Times in January. Zuckerberg seems keenly aware of the risks of a Trump loss. He’s told employees that Facebook is likely to fare better under Republicans, according to people familiar with the conversations.

This isn’t to say Facebook wouldn’t adapt if Biden wins in November. In June, Zuckerberg announced he’d rehired Chris Cox, former chief product officer, who’d been active in Democratic politics since leaving Facebook last year. Cox is widely considered to be the most likely candidate to become CEO if the Facebook founder ever stepped down. “Nothing stays the same, of course not,” says Clegg, the VP for communications, when asked how Facebook would adjust to a future Biden administration. “We’ll adapt to the environment in which we’re operating.”

Read next: Palantir Is Bad-Mouthing Big Tech While Taking Its Tech Public

some county he size of sm state?!

Gov. Greg Abbott Is Closing All But One Dropoff Location For Mail-In Ballots In Each County

Abbott is closing all but one ballot drop-off location in each of Texas's 254 counties, severely limiting voting access.

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-propaganda-war-against-voting-by-mail/

no lnx

THE FIRST Tuesday in April, as the gravity of the COVID-19 pandemic was becoming all too real, Americans got a scary glimpse of what Election Day in November might look like if the virus were still spreading. We also got a big, loud, ugly preview of the 2020 voting wars.

The state of Wisconsin had no business holding an election on April 7. Sixteen other states had bumped their primary dates back, hoping to give election officials time to adjust to the drastic new conditions and allow more voters to cast their ballots safely by mail. Governor Tony Evers had issued a statewide stay-at-home order. In Milwaukee alone, at least 51 people had already died from the new coronavirus. And so many poll workers were refusing to show up that the city, home to Wisconsin’s largest concentration of voters of color, would be hard-pressed to open even a handful of polling places, never mind the usual 180. “We are over our heads in chaos,” Neil Albrecht, Milwaukee’s election chief, told The Guardian a few days before the voting was slated to start.

Evers, a Democrat, tried to push the election date to May 23 and send mail ballots to all registered Wisconsinites. But he waited too late. By the time Evers called the state legislature into emergency session the week before the polls were to open, asking legislators to approve the delay and green-light an all-mail ballot, President Donald Trump and his right-wing amen chorus had begun to paint voting by mail not as a public-health necessity during a pandemic, but instead as a Democratic plot to “rig” the 2020 elections—“perhaps the worst of all the scams perpetrated through the COVID nightmare,” as Trump fan Laura Ingraham put it to viewers of her Fox News Channel show.

In addition to the Democratic presidential primary that was to take place on that day, there was also an election for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

“A lot of people cheat with mail-in voting,” the president said on April 4. “In Wisconsin what happened is I, through social media, put out a very strong endorsement of a Republican conservative judge, who’s an excellent brilliant judge, he’s a justice. And I hear what happened is his poll numbers went through the roof, and because of that, I think they delayed the election.”

So Wisconsin Republicans forced the show to go on.The Republican leaders of the state Assembly and Senate both gaveled in their special sessions, then gaveled them out within seconds. When the governor responded by issuing an executive order to delay the primary, the majority-Republican state Supreme Court stayed it on the night before the election.

Voting went smoothly enough in the state’s smaller counties and towns, where white Republicans predominate and polling places had no lines. But in the cities, it was an unholy mess. Lines were so long in Green Bay that some people couldn’t vote till after midnight. In Milwaukee, the scene was downright eerie; some poll workers wore makeshift hazmat suits fashioned from plastic bags. National Guard troops, hastily called in to serve as poll workers, dashed around with plastic bottles of disinfectant spray, wiping things down between voters. Local firefighters passed out hand sanitizer to the thousands who waited for hours in lines that stretched for blocks, far past the trail of orange traffic cones that had been set up to keep folks six feet apart. Outside Washington High School, one waiting voter, Jennifer Taft, summed it all up perfectly, holding up a hand-lettered sign reading: “THIS IS RIDICULOUS.”

“I’m disgusted,” Taft told a local reporter. “I requested an absentee ballot almost three weeks ago and never got it. I have a father dying from lung disease, and I have to risk my life and his just to exercise my right to vote.”

Statewide, overall turnout was higher than expected. Even in that compressed time period, 1.1 million of Wisconsin’s 3.3 million voters had sent in absentee ballots—five times the number of voters who did so in the 2016 primary. And when the votes were all tallied six days later, the Democratic Supreme Court challenger had won easily, giving the lie to Trump’s theory that Evers wanted to delay the election to prevent a GOP victory.

But the Republicans’ efforts to sew confusion and long lines in the cities had worked in certain ways: In Milwaukee, which saw historically low Black turnout in 2016 after a strict new Voter ID law went into effect, the primary vote was half what it had been four years earlier. “It was voter suppression on steroids,” said Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez. “They tried to steal the election.”

[I have to risk my life just to exercise my right to vote.

JENNIFER TAFT, MILWAUKEE VOTER]

The mail balloting hadn’t gone smoothly, either: Nearly 12,000 voters who’d requested absentee ballots, like Jennifer Taft, never got them. Three tubs full of absentee ballots that never reached voters were found in a mail center outside Milwaukee. And 23,000 absentee ballots sent in by voters—more than Trump’s margin of victory in the state in 2016—had been disqualified for technical problems. Here as elsewhere, Republican lawmakers had made the process as complicated and time-consuming as possible to keep mail voting down, including a requirement that a witness sign every ballot. Voters’ signatures had to match the signatures on file with the state; as in other states, it’s left to election volunteers and staffers, not handwriting experts, to decide whether the signatures match. Thousands of votes were tossed on this subjective basis. (In June, after the delayed New York primary, 30,000 votes from Brooklyn, one-quarter of the total, would be tossed out for similar reasons.)

The threat of robust turnout figures posed by mail-in voting had fully stirred the right-wing propaganda machine by now—and it had given them a fresh new story to tell about what they claimed was the looming threat of mass left-wing “voter fraud.” The same day Wisconsin’s primary results were announced, an apparently new group called the Honest Elections Project aired an Orwellian TV and digital ad across the country—a six-figure buy—casting what happened in Wisconsin as Democrats’ “brazen attempt to manipulate the election system for partisan advantage by exploiting the coronavirus pandemic.” It was, the narrator intoned, a sign of election-rigging to come: “The facts about the Wisconsin election: Record absentee voting. Five times more than 2016. Democrats didn’t think they could win so they tried lawsuits, changing the rules, even canceling the election. They create chaos. It’s wrong.”

The Honest Elections Project turned out to be a legal alias for the Judicial Education Project, a powerful dark-money PAC funded by the Donors Trust, a nonprofit donor-advised fund often referred to as the “dark money ATM” of the right, with such heavy-hitting benefactors as billionaire Charles Koch and the (Betsy) DeVos family.It was the brainchild of Leonard Leo, a Trump confidant who was instrumental in the choice and confirmations of the president’s Supreme Court nominees, and it would soon begin filing lawsuits seeking to block the expansion of remote voting, and other pandemic-inspired election reforms—using the same lead attorney, longtime Washington litigator William Consovoy, as the Trump campaign.

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a litigious right-wing group that sues to effect voter-roll purges.]

At least three other lavishly funded far-right groups—Judicial Watch, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, and True the Vote—are also combining legal challenges with propaganda efforts designed to discredit, and disable, remote voting for November.The Republican National Committee issued a statement this spring promising to devote at least $20 million to such lawsuits as well. The messages they’re all promoting are identical to Trump’s rhetoric about the dangers of mail-in balloting and the Democrats’ purportedly cynical promotion of it to allegedly rig the election. Their combined resources and firepower adds up to the biggest coordinated effort to suppress votes in history. Until this year, battles over voting rules were mostly waged by Republican state lawmakers and right-wing legal firms not quite acceptable to the mainstream, cheered on by talk-radio shouters and extremist websites like The Gateway Pundit and Breitbart.

“You used to have these small-time, right-wing operations,” Mark Elias, a top Democratic litigator who’s working on several ongoing lawsuits, told The Washington Post in June. “Because Donald Trump has normalized all these crackpot theories about voter fraud, they’ve all now joined forces under the banner of the legitimate Republican establishment.”

All they want, they say, are the same old “fair” and “normal” elections that Trump keeps calling for. But the president, characteristically, had already given away the game before the Wisconsin primary lit the right wing on fire. On “Fox & Friends” during the week before that primary from hell, he’d warned the friendly hosts what would happen if voting by mail were allowed to metastasize: “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

[Gallows humor from artist Mike Licht regarding Wisconsin’s April 7, during-the-pandemic, in-person Spring election. via Flickr creative commons]

THE CRUSADE TO suppress votes in the 2020 election began long before COVID-19 existed, and long before the pandemic led to a popular clamor for more voting by mail. Three weeks after his razor-thin victory in the Electoral College, still irked at hearing about Hillary Clinton’s edge in the popular vote, President-elect Trump issued a tweetstorm citing right-wing conspiracy theories. His chief claim, often to be repeated: “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

On stage at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Committee convention three months later, Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, backed up Trump’s claims. “The left would have you believe that we have about 43 million aliens in this country, both lawful and unlawfully present,” he said. “And none of them vote!” The activists in the audience cheered and chuckled. “You know, under the Obama administration, they opposed Voter ID; they opposed the idea of even asking someone whether they were a citizen before they register to vote,” Fitton went on to say. “Why would you be opposed to that, other than maybe wanting to steal elections when necessary?” Cue applause.

Fitton also seconded Trump’s call for a “federal investigation into voter fraud,” promising that it would be “the most significant civil rights investigation in a generation,” because, he said, “We’re on the side of civil rights. We’re on the side of the civil rights of Americans who potentially are having their votes stolen from them by the thousands, if not millions, by illegal votes.” Getting the findings to back up those assertions would be a breeze, he promised. “It’s easy to figure out where there’s voter fraud,” Fitton said, “and obviously that’s why the leftist voters are screaming, because they’re afraid their gig is up.”

Not quite, as it transpired. That “investigation” was launched in May 2017, when Trump made appointments to his newly concocted Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which included top vote-suppression specialists Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state and anti-immigration zealot, and Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation. But it didn’t prove so easy to find hard proof of the massive fraud they’d long been claiming. After eight months of trying, the commissioners dug up only scattered cases drawn from media reports, and the president disbanded the effort.

[This is a pretext for blocking voices they do not want to hear.

STACEY ABRAMS, FAIR FIGHT FOUNDER]

But voter-suppression is now an industry unto itself, and Judicial Watch and its peers didn’t skip a beat.Ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, Judicial Watch and PILF sent 248 letters to state and local election officials across the country, threatening lawsuits if they didn’t undertake massive, aggressive “purges” of their voter rolls. “Your jurisdiction is in apparent violation of Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act,” the letters claimed. The NVRA, known as the “Motor Voter Act,” was passed in 1993 to “expand voting opportunities” in various ways, including offering registration at driver’s license offices. It also required local elections offices to undertake “uniform, non-discriminatory maintenance” of their registration rolls, striking those who’d become ineligible—by dying, going to prison, or moving out of state.

Under previous administrations, the Justice Department monitored these purges and sometimes stepped in when they became overzealous and were clearly targeting voters of color. “The rationale of removing voters from the rolls to protect against fraud is nonsensical,” Stacey Abrams, who founded the voting-rights group Fair Fight after narrowly losing the Georgia governor’s race in 2018, told Mother Jones earlier this year. “This is a pretext for blocking voices they do not want to hear.”

The letters contained legal threats, but their primary purpose was to stoke publicity about voter fraud—and to raise the profiles of Fitton andJ. Christian Adams, a former Department of Justice official who heads PILF and served on the ill-fated Election Integrity Commission. Adams is best known as the DOJ attorney who promoted a 2008 “voter intimidation” case against two members of a group that dubbed itself the New Black Panthers.On Election Day 2008, the two stationed themselves outside a predominantly white polling place in Philadelphia, one of them holding a nightstick. When Obama’s Justice Department declined to press charges, Adams loudly resigned and wrote a book called “Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department.” In lawsuits and legal threats targeting jurisdictions with large numbers of non-white voters, Adams first launched suits via the American Civil Rights Union (a right-wing group that fancies itself to be the analog to the American Civil Liberties Union), and then with PILF.

[“The rationale of removing voters from the rolls to protect against fraud is nonsensical,” says Stacey Abrams. “This is a pretext for blocking voices they do not want to hear.” (Photo of Abrams on election night 2018 from Abrams’ Facebook page.)]

Judicial Watch and PILF got a few big victories out of their threats and lawsuits, in 2018 and again last year. In 2018, the Supreme Court upheld a Judicial Watch settlement agreement with Ohio and allowed a massive voter purge—a decision that opened the floodgates for more of the same, permitting states to strike voters who haven’t voted in recent elections.

As 2020 began, counties in California and Kentucky were busy removing close to 2 million voters; ditto, Allegheny County, one of the largest Pennsylvania counties carried by Hillary Clinton in 2016. In three other large Clinton-voting Pennsylvaniacounties Judicial Watch dragged into court this year, the group claimed an almost comically high number of “ineligible” voters—800,000 in all, which would amount to more than 65 percent of all registered voters in the counties. “We 100-percent dispute the claims,” Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar, who was also sued, told state senators.

Most of this year’s election lawsuits are related to COVID-19—or, more precisely, they target attempts by states and municipalities to make voting easier and safer during the pandemic. The number of these cases is staggering: More than 200were still percolating through the courts in mid-August. Many have been brought by the Trump campaign, theRepublican National Committee, Judicial Watch, PILF, and the Honest Elections Project, all of whom have the same agenda: Keep voting restrictions in place. Three more states have switched to all-mail elections this year: California, Nevada, and Vermont. When lawmakers in Nevada, where Trump lost by just 27,000 votes in 2016, approved all-mail voting in a special session on the first Sunday of August, Trump called it “an illegal late-night coup” on Twitter, with the promise, “See you in court!” Two days later, still fuming, he posted a tweet falsely stating that voting by mail would mean a “Rigged Election.” It became the first tweet flagged by Twitter as untrue. The same day, the Republican National Committee, the Trump campaign, and Nevada Republican Party all filed suit against Nevada.

In most states, election officials and lawmakers have simply tried to ease restrictions that can make absentee voting difficult or confusing: early deadlines for requesting ballots, Election Day deadlines for having them returned or postmarked, requirements that witnesses or notaries sign the ballots, strictly limited forms of acceptable ID. In some cases, the question is whether vulnerability to COVID-19 counts as an “excuse” for needing a mail ballot. (Most states already allow no-excuse absentee voting, but a few—like emerging battleground Texas—do not.)

Graphic from the National Conference of State Legislatures.]

Justin Levitt, a Loyola University law professor who tracks all these cases, has not detected a pattern in the decisions. But as he’s noted, it’s already a win for right-wing organizations and the Republicans to keep elections officials tied up in courts—and election rules in a state of suspended uncertainty as states try, with chronically inadequate funding, to manage an election during a pandemic. “My usual election-cycle comment is that we’re trying to find enough duct tape to cover the holes in the bucket,” Levitt said recently. “This time, we’re trying to make the bucket out of duct tape.”

The uncertainty created by the lawsuits, combined with the disinformation about voting that will be plastered all over social media this fall, creates an indirect but powerful form of voter suppression in itself.“Voter suppression is a combination of things,” says Georgia state Rep. and voting-rights advocate Renitta Shannon. “It’s a chipping away of people either not being able to vote, or thinking it will be a major hassle. When people have a question about whether their vote is going to be counted, that [becomes] a reason not to vote.”

ON JUNE 5, Tom Fitton and J. Christian Adams were both invited to testify at a U.S. House hearing on “Protecting the Right to Vote During the COVID-19 Crisis.” It was another sign of how formerly fringe right-wing conspiracies had become thoroughly mainstreamed in Trump’s GOP. And it provided another platform to spread the falsehood that Democrats were using the pandemic to make real their fraudulent dreams. “It is now about five months until Election Day,” Fitton testified, “and the pandemic’s infection curve has flattened. Insisting now on all-mail-ballot elections seems less like a response to a health crisis and more like a partisan application of the immortal words of Rahm Emanuel: ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste.’”

Fitton’s coronavirus predictions would soon be disproved, but the notion of Democrats using mail ballots to commit grand theft in 2020—“using COVID to defraud the American people,” as Trump expressed it on the first night of the Republican National Convention—remains the central deceit of the right’s propaganda campaign. “The Democrats have cooked this thing up,” Rush Limbaugh bellowed in August, “because they don’t feel confident that they can win in a traditionally fair and normal election.”

[J. Christian Adams, president and general counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation in 2019 screencap.]

In many places, the relative unfamiliarity of mail voting is a boon to the fear-mongering. And with folks on the right having been treated to years’ worth of “voter fraud” talk, they’d been conditioned to take it seriously. “When they talk about voter fraud,” says Tomas Lopez, executive director of the progressive group Democracy North Carolina, “they’re talking about race, of course. They’re lamenting the fact that those people get a vote.”

Across platforms—Fox News, talk radio, social media, presidential briefings—the narrative being served up about mail voting has been remarkably consistent in all its main plot points. It’s almost as if Judicial Watch teamed with the Trump campaign and sent out a bullet-point memo, which kicks off with “stealing and rigging” and proceeds, from there, to the following talking points:

Even more “illegals” get to vote.“Here’s a shocking things for your audience to consider,” senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller, architect of the immigration policy that caged children at the U.S.-Mexico border, said in August on “Fox & Friends.” “Nobody who mails in a ballot has their identity confirmed; nobody checks to see if they’re even a U.S. citizen. 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.” (In reality, every state verifies the identity of the person requesting the mail-in ballot.)

This summer, Judicial Watch bought at least 263 ads on Facebook (cost: $210,000) to drive home the same spurious claim delivered by Miller on Fox News.According to a tally from Media Matters for America, 144 of the ads, which were full of disinformation about “voter fraud,” claimed that “illegal aliens are voting,” while 119 got more specific, claiming that “25% of noncitizens are registered to vote.”

Ballots Are On the Loose.

On May 1, Trump retweetedMollie Hemingway, a writer for The Federalist, a right-wing publication, who had some “news” that sounded startling: “Nearly one in five of all absentee and mail-in-ballots between 2012 and 2018 remain unaccounted for, according to data from the federal Election Assistance Commission,” she wrote. Hemingway drew her figures from a new and scholarly looking report by PILF—J. Christian Adams’ organization—which claimed that 28 million absentee ballots had “gone missing” in recent election cycles. Those ballots represent a golden opportunity for mass-scale fraud, Adams said in a statement accompanying the PILF report—“28 million opportunties for someone to cheat.”

The “missing ballots” meme spread like wildfire. But as voting-rights advocates (and logical thinkers) pointed out, the ballots aren’t just floating around, waiting for noncitizens and Democrats to scoop them up and send them in; they simply hadn’t been returned by the voters who got them. Twelve million of the “loose” ballots, as they’re also called, had been sent by election officials in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington state, where everyone who registers automatically receives one. About 30 percent of voters in those states typically don’t return their ballots in a given election. “Where are they now?” said Paul Gronke, a Reed College professor who runs the Early Voting Information Center, of the so-called “missing” ballots. “Most likely, in landfills.”

Democrats Are Harvesting Those Loose Ballots.

Expect to hear several earfuls about “ballot harvesting” between now and November. It’s the hip, scary-sounding new catchphrase for voter-fraudsters, though the practice it describes is a routine feature of absentee voting in more than half the states: Basically, it just means that a third party can collect someone’s vote in its sealed envelope and hand-deliver it to an election office. The laws are meant to help people who live at great distances from polling places without transportation, or who are sick or shut in, to cast a vote. In March, Trump’s own ballot in the Florida primary was “harvested”—he gave it to an (unknown) third party, who delivered it directly to an elections office in Palm Beach. Nonetheless, as he tweeted on April 14, we must “GET RID OF BALLOT HARVESTING, IT IS RAMPANT WITH FRAUD.”

Democratic workers sometimes organize “community collections,” leading right-wing pundits to peddle fantastical visions of thugs pounding on doors and demanding people’s blank ballots for harvesting. The proof? Well, in Paterson, N.J., this spring, a postal employee noticed something odd in a local post office five days before an all-mail primary: 347 completed ballots bundled together. They were part of a scheme for which four perpetrators, including one city council member, have all been charged with fraud. Amid the controversy, Paterson’s election board disqualified 19 percent of the ballots in the primary—which, trickling up from Gateway Pundit, a conspiracy theory website, to the West Wing, served as evidence of the fraudulent potential of “harvesting.” “Look at Patterson[sic], N.J.,” Trump tweeted. “20% of vote was corrupted!” In fact, election officials said that most of the uncounted ballots were tossed out for the usual technical reasons—mainly for signatures that didn’t appear to match those on file. The only example of large-scale ballot harvesting occurred in a North Carolina congressional race in the 2018 midterms. It was organized by a paid GOP operative who’s facing both state and federal charges.

“THIS IS GOING TO BE the greatest election disaster in history,” Trump promised reporters in the middle of yet another rant against vote-by-mail in August. He failed to mention how hard he and his right-wing allies were fighting to make his apocalyptic predictions about the election come true—or how much his prospects for victory may hinge on it.

The right’s doomsaying about chaos and fraud at the polls have definitely penetrated the national consciousness. In August, a Pew poll found that nearly half of registered U.S. voters expect to “have difficulties casting a ballot” this year. That might not sound surprising—but it’s a sea change from 2018, when 85 percent expected voting to be “easy.”

When it comes to mail voting in particular, however, it’s only Republicans who are moved by the propaganda. When Pew asked Trump supporters how they planned to vote, 80 percent said they’d do it in person, while just 17 percent would vote by mail. By contrast, most Biden supporters—58 percent—said they’d be voting remotely.

Given those results, it’s no surprise that, in the 2020 battleground states, Democrats are outpacing Republicans in absentee ballot requests. Far more, in fact. Four years ago in Florida, Democrats requested 6,000 more absentee ballots than Republicans; by the end of August this year, ballot requests by Democrats had surpassed those from Republicans by 600,000. In North Carolina, where absentee voting has always been sparse, 177,000 Democrats had asked for ballots compared to 50,000 Republicans. “Everybody’s up,” said Michael Bitzer, a politics professor at Catawba College. “It’s just that Democrats and unaffiliated are through the roof, and Republicans are not even on the second floor.”

This disparity, which is consistent in other battleground states, has saner Republican officials and activists deeply worried. What if the anti-mail campaign ends up backfiring, and suppressing their votes? And with the virus likely to still be raging come November, will GOP voters—seniors, in particular—actually take the risk to show up in person to vote? “What the president is doing when he keeps saying that this mail-in balloting thing is fraudulent, he’s scaring our own voters from using a legit way to cast your ballot,” Rohn Bishop, chair of the Fond du Lac County GOP in Wisconsin, told USA Today. “We’re kind of hurting ourselves.” When he tries to talk up absentee voting to fellow Republicans, Bishop said, he gets a lot of flak that he’s “ignoring voter fraud.” It’s not easy to argue when the Republican president keeps calling vote-by-mail “the greatest scam in history.”

The weird thing, said Bishop and other Republican state leaders, is that while the president continues to slam mail voting on a daily basis, the Trump campaign and RNC have told them to promote it. “I’m out there pushing it at the request of the campaign, because they asked me [to] do that,” said Lawrence Tabas, chair of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania, which Trump carried by less than 1 percent in 2016—and where Democrats have made 68 percent of all mail-ballot requests, while Republicans requested just 24 percent. “And then the president is publicly opposed to it,” Tabas added. “Let’s put it this way; it’s made my job more challenging.” The Pennsylvania GOP website urges Republicans to “Vote Safe: By mail. From home.”

GOP voters in California also heard that “safe, from home” message before they voted in this spring’s primary—from two of Trump’s family members, no less. Both daughter-in-law Lara Trump and Donald Jr. recorded robocalls in April urging mail votes for a Republican congressional candidate in a special election. “Nancy Pelosi and liberal Democrats are counting on you to sit on the sidelines this election, but you can prove them wrong,” Lara Trump said in one call. “You can safely and securely vote for Mike Garcia by returning your mail-in ballot by May 12.”

Both Lara Trump and Donald Jr. recorded robocalls in April urging mail votes for a Republican congressional candidate in a special election.

One major group on the right, Americans for Prosperity, is flexing its considerable muscle to counter the president’s message and urge right-wing voters to take advantage of either early or absentee voting this fall. Tim Phillips, president of the “grasstops” group, which underwrote the Tea Party movement, told Politico this spring that AFP “is absolutely going to up the percentage of dollars that go into absentee and early voting.” The group, which raked in $83 million in donations in 2018, has plenty to spend. It plans to target conservative voters in dozens of competitive congressional districts.

But Judicial Watch, PILF, the Honest Elections Project, and allied groups like True the Vote—which is recruiting ex-Navy SEALs to serve as GOP poll-watchers on Nov. 3—are delivering a contrary message: It’s perfectly safe to vote in person. “Don’t let the left scare you from voting on Election Day,” Tom Fitton said on a Judicial Watch podcast on July 31. The same message continues to blast out on conservative media. “If people can go to Home Depot and distance six feet,” Fox host Jeanine Pirro said this summer, “why can’t they go to the voting booth and distance six feet?”

Is there a coherent strategy here, somehow? Do the clashing messages make any strategic sense? Perhaps not. But some political observers suspect that Trump is setting up a way to delegitimize the results in November. If more Republicans do turn out in person, their votes will be among those tallied first—creating a chance that Trump may lead on election night, even if only half of the total vote, or less, is counted by then. In that event, Jamelle Bouie wrote this summer in his New York Times column, “There’s no mystery about what Donald Trump intends to do… . First, he’ll claim victory. Then, having spent most of the year denouncing vote-by-mail as corrupt, he’ll demand that authorities stop counting mail-in and absentee ballots. He’ll have a team of lawyers challenging courts and ballots across the country.”

It’s certainly plausible. Just as in 2016, Trump has refused to say he’ll accept the results—unless, that is, they show him winning. “You don’t know until you see,” he said this summer on Fox News. “It depends. I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election, I really do.”

In November 2018, when the Republican candidates for governor and senator in Florida held leads on election night that began to dissipate as the vote-counting continued, Trump telegraphed what he might say this November: “The Florida election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged,” he tweeted. “An honest vote count is no longer possible—ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!”

Attorney General William Barr has indicated that the Department of Justice would have Trump’s back if he tries to shut down the count. “I think the people who want to experiment with different ways of voting right now … are playing with fire and are grossly irresponsible,” Barr told Fox News’ Mark Levin in August. Sounding more like a Judicial Watch attorney than the attorney general of the United States, Barr called it “scary” that “most of those mailings go to a lot of addresses where the people no longer live. They’re misdirected. And I think they will create a situation—they could easily create a situation where there’s going to be a contested election.”

That is chilling to hear. It stirs up nightmare visions of Florida 2000 but on a national scale—and in a year that’s already been full of unrest. Realistically, though, it’s also a far-fetched strategy born of desperation. And there’s a much rosier scenario that is just as plausible as Bouie’s, if not more so.

Say this election proves to be less apocalyptic than Trump and the right are hoping—and say Trump is clearly a loser on election night. The president’s defeat, and the pandemic-inspired rise of mail voting, could begin to unravel the elaborate system of barriers to voting that Republicans have been erecting over the past decade. If Democrats retake a majority in the U.S. Senate, the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act will surely be one of the first measures to pass, restoring protections and federal oversight to elections. And if Republicans lose control of state houses they captured (which they are poised to do in several battleground states), Democratic majorities can begin to reverse the race-based voting restrictions that the GOP has been cooking up with relentless creativity since the Tea Party insurrection lifted them to unprecedented power in Congress and the states.

“What we’ve had is the 21st century equivalent of the Mississippi Plan of 1890,” says Carol Anderson, the Emory University historian and best-selling author of One Person, One Vote. That “plan” was the template for other states to “redeem” white supremacy after Reconstruction by disenfranchising Black men all over again, through tactics like poll taxes, literacy tests, and violent intimidation. The 2010s were eerily similar. “It’s been legislative evil genius,” Anderson says. “And so Jim Crow.”

Anderson is a serious historian, so she’ll make no predictions. But there is at least a fair chance that the latest manifestation of the Republicans’ long and fraudulent voter-fraud campaign—the demonizing of remote-voting during a pandemic—will backfire on them in a lasting way. The hollering won’t die down, of course; Trump himself will make sure of that. The voter-suppression industry—the Judicial Watches, the PILFs, the Honest Elections Projects—won’t disappear. Chief Justice John Roberts won’t suddenly start deciding in favor of voting rights. But the more Americans grow accustomed to voting by mail, and the more they keep demanding that it be made easier and more reliable, the harder their votes will be to suppress or toss out. Trump is right, after all, about one thing: Wherever remote voting becomes routine, turnout soars. And we all know who loses then.

Tags: Carol AndersonDonald J. TrumpJ Christian AdamsJamelle BouieJennifer TaftJustice John RobertsJustin LevittLaura IngrahamLawrence TabasLeonard LeoMark EliasMichael BitzerRohn BishopRon DeSantisStacey AbramsTim PhillipsTom FittonTony EversWilliam BarrWilliam Consovoy

1020 intercept

panic Over Mail-in Voting Only Feeds Trump’s Chaos, Says Top Pennsylvania Democrat

Ryan Grim

Voters in the Keystone State who request an absentee ballot but decide to vote in person are playing into Trump’s hands, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman warns.

https://theintercept.com/2020/09/30/philadelphia-early-voting-trump-poll-watchers

the MORNING AFTER President Donald Trump called for his supporters to “carefully watch” voting sites, his presidential campaign requested that Philadelphia immediately allow them to appoint poll watchers at early-voting centers.

Early voting in Philadelphia began on Tuesday. The city opened six early-voting sites at new satellite election offices and another at City Hall where voters can register, request, fill out, and submit mail-in ballots. Unlike early-voting centers, traditional polling locations are only open on Election Day, and people can vote in person as opposed to delivering their mail ballots.

the tactic of raising doubts about the integrity of the mail-in voting process is an effort to dissuade Democrats from using it, said Lt. Gov. John Fetterman. Absentee ballots, available to every Pennsylvania voter, can either be dropped off in person at election locations or set through the mail. But if a voter who requested an absentee ballot — more than 2 million have already done so, the overwhelming majority Democrats — decides instead they want to vote in person on Election Day, he warned, they’ll be turned away if they don’t bring their ballot — and the envelope it came in — with them to the polls. “That’s what they want,” he told The Intercept. “Let’s say half a million people out of 2 million say, ‘Oh my God, I don’t want to vote by mail anymore.’ Can you imagine that?” The simplest thing, he said, is to just follow the instructions on the ballot and vote by mail.

On Wednesday, at the weekly Philadelphia City Commissioners meeting, which is open for public comment, the Trump campaign’s Pennsylvania state director for Election Day operations, James Fitzpatrick, requested that the board allow the campaign to immediately appoint poll watchers at early-voting centers.

“I am a qualified Philadelphia elector, and I represent Donald J. Trump for president,” Fitzpatrick said. “Your office opened satellite offices around Philadelphia yesterday and has plans to open more,” he said. “Because voting is occurring at these satellite offices, the Trump campaign requests that we immediately be able to appoint poll watchers to observe the voting at these satellite offices. In the alternative, if these are satellite offices of the Board of Elections, we request the right to have our representatives observe the process from a public space within these satellite election officers. Voters deserve transparency and accountability.”

Officials do not respond directly to public comments at such meetings. Asked if the commissioners would allow the Trump campaign to appoint poll watchers, City Commissioner Lisa Deeleytold reporters, “They are not polling locations. Poll watchers are only appointed at polling locations. … It is a temporary election office where services are made available to citizens who would like to register to vote or request their mail-in ballot, and they vote their mail ballot there, or they can take it home and vote on it at their dining-room table,” she said.

During the first presidential debate on Tuesday night, Trump made numerous false claims about mail-in voting fraud and said, “I am urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully.” He also referred to poll watchers in Philadelphia, claiming that watchers were barred from observing early voting, failing to note that the satellite election offices are not actual polling locations. “As you know today there was a big problem. In Philadelphia, they went into watch — they’re called poll watchers. A very safe, very nice thing. They were thrown out. They weren’t allowed to watch. You know why? ’Cause bad things happen in Philadelphia. Bad things.” Earlier in the day, Trump tweeted, “Wow. Won’t let Poll Watchers & Security into Philadelphia Voting Places. There is only one reason why. Corruption!!! Must have a fair Election.”

Conservative Operatives Float Plan to Place Retired Military, Police Officers as GOP Poll Watchers on Election Day

One woman at an early-voting center in the city’s Overbrook neighborhood tolda Philadelphia Inquirer reporter on Tuesday that she was hired by the Trump campaign to observe voting and was not allowed inside. That’s because there are no polling locations currently open, and because the Trump campaign doesn’t have any poll watchers approved to work in the city, as the Inquirer reported. Also on Tuesday, a deputy sheriff removed Fitzpatrick from the satellite election office at City Hall, “where he was recording video on his cellphone, according to election and sheriff aides,” Politico reported. The Trump campaign has threatened legal action against Philadelphia County for denying admission to poll watchers at the satellite election sites.

Tuesday’s debate was not the first time that Trump encouraged his supporters to go to polling sites in an attempt to intimidate voters, a form of voter suppression that goes back to before the civil rights era. He did the same in 2016, along with David Duke and leaders of white nationalist groups. In August, Trump told Fox News he would send sheriffs and other law enforcement to polling places on Election Day, which he likely does not have authority to do.

Asked for comment, Fitzpatrick referred reporters to a letter he said the campaign sent by email to the county’s three commissioners on Tuesday. Deeley and her spokesperson said they had not yet received any letter and had no information on it.

In response to questions about concerns about voter intimidation and security at the satellite offices, Deeley said the city already had sheriffs stationed at some early-voting centers. The city plans to open more locations in the coming weeks.

A Republican National Committee staffer, identified by Fitzpatrick as Andre McCoy, was also at the Wednesday meeting. He would not speak to journalists and directed questions to Fitzpatrick, whom he left with. Fitzpatrick and McCoy referred questions to another person helping field questions from the press, who said they did not work for the campaign. Asked to comment, that person referred reporters to Trump campaign Deputy National Press Secretary Thea McDonald, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Republicans are paying close attention to the polls in Pennsylvania, a crucial swing state that Trump won by just 44,000 votes in 2016. Paid staffers from the RNC observed vote counts in Philadelphia following the June primary, The Intercept reported. The county was one of the slowest in the state to count ballots from the primary: The process took two weeks.

==-

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/conservatives-want-to-block-300m-in-election-funds-from-states-but-theyll-fail/

no lnx

after local election officials from more than 1,100 jurisdictions in 40-plus states applied for private grants to better run the presidential elections, a conservative public interest law firm has sued three swing states to block officials from using those funds, stating in their briefs that "they do not want progressive candidates to win."

In addition to alleging that county and local governments in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Minnesota lacked the authority to take the money from the Chicago-based Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL),the lawsuits from the Thomas More Society, the socially conservative firm, are claiming that the grants have a partisan benefit of favoring "progressive" candidates because some recipients included metro counties—which tend to be blue epicenters

"To be sure, CTCL is free to directly spend its $250 million private federal election grant fund to get out the vote in Pennsylvania; but, federal election law leaves discretion to the 'states,' not the counties and cities, on how to implement federal elections," the group's Pennsylvania lawsuit said. "The plaintiffs are injured by CTCL's private federal election grants because they are targeted to counties and cities with progressive voting patterns."

Election experts said that the lawsuits seeking to block governments from using funds donated by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his physician wife Priscilla Chan stood little chance of success. But the suits typified the outbreak of partisan litigation in 2020 where Democrats have sought to make voting in the pandemic easier, while Republicans have opposed those efforts—most notably, blocking federal funding, which led to the Zuckerberg-Chan grants.

"The [lawsuits'] arguments are patent nonsense," said Justin Levitt, who was deputy assistant attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration and now teaches constitutional law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

"It's possible that there are limitations in state law that I don't know about. But the arguments based on federal law are simply embarrassing," Levitt said. "They're [suing] based on the presumption that Congress, in granting states money for election administration, meant to preclude any other entities from getting any other money from any other place."

"The biggest problem with that argument is Congress neither said nor implied that anywhere," he continued. "Nor would there have been any reason for Congress to say that they, and they alone, were the only possible sources of money for local governments to run elections."

Tammy Patrick, a former Arizona elections official, a CTCL board member and now an adviser at the Democracy Fund, a bipartisan foundation, rejected the lawsuits' charge that the grants had a partisan agenda. Rather, the communities that were initially awarded funding were the cities and counties that had the hardest time this spring with holding an election in the pandemic. The metro areas saw the biggest disruptions, from exoduses of poll workers to last-minute polling place closures and relocations, to technical issues with new voting systems—all as record volumes of voters cast mail-in ballots for the first time...

Those are locations that in this global pandemic are seeing some of the largest shifts in the way in which they are conducting their elections. And they were struggling the most in the primaries," Patrick said. "We all heard about Wisconsin. We all saw the things happening in those early primaries… That's really where the focus was for the first [grantmaking] phase. And the second stage is wide open to any jurisdiction and they now have heard from, and have [acted on] grant applications, in 40-some states."

Patrick was not surprised by the litigation, as the 2020 election has seen more aspects of the fine print of election administration become focal points of lawsuits than ever. The litigation has made the job of running an election amid a health crisis more difficult, she said.

"There is litigation being proposed in this country on absolutely any facet of the election administration process and voter access that people can write down on a piece of paper as a lawsuit," Patrick said. "We're seeing litigation around this situation [CTCL grants], where our [state and federal] governments have failed to fully and adequately resource local election officials to be able to service their voters in a pandemic. We see litigation around how many drop boxes can be allowed [in Pennsylvania and Ohio]. We see litigation around being able to have poll workers in a park in Wisconsin on a Saturday to allow voters to drop off ballots."

"One might expect [lawsuits] in a presidential election," she continued. "But when you layer in the additional complexity that we are in a global pandemic, and Republican and Democrat and independent secretaries of state [and] local election officials are literally pleading with their state legislatures, with their governors, and legislative branches, and others, to allow them to service their voters well; to resource [assist] them properly; to allow them the policies they need in this moment; and [that the result] in too many places [is] they [local election officials] are being denied on all three of those fronts."

Jordan Shuber, the lead lawyer on the Pennsylvania lawsuit, directed all questions on the suits to Erick G. Kaardal, a Minnesota lawyer, who also signed the three states' complaints.

Kaardal did not respond to a phone call and email seeking comment. (The Minnesota group he represents has also sued to block a face mask requirement for the state's polling place voters. His firm was also involved in the failed effort to put rap star Kanye West as a 2020 presidential candidate on the Wisconsin ballot.)

Fortifying Election Preparations

The Zuckerberg-Chan donation of $250 million to CTCL for grants to local jurisdictions and an additional $50 million to the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) for grants to state election agencies was the highest-profile private effort to make up for a lack of federal funding to cover the unexpected costs of running an election amid a national health crisis.

An unprecedented number of local and state officials have embraced the funding. The CTCL grants, to 1,100 local government agencies that run America's elections, represent more than one-tenth of the country's election offices. CEIR's grants, primarily for public education purposes, have gone to about half of the states.

Experienced administrators know what they want to do. As before the pandemic, they must offer a variety of voting options: voting with mailed-out ballots, and in-person voting, either early or on Election Day. In early September, the Wisconsin Elections Commission issued its presidential election readiness assessment that contained reports in its appendix from metro-area officials on their plans. Those summaries listed needing more supplies, staffing, voting equipment, public education materials and postage to make voting efficient and safe. After Congress did not appropriate more funds for these purposes, the grants filled that void.

"The pressure these funds take off the shoulders of the front-line people trying to implement the law during this pandemic cannot be overemphasized," said one unidentified grantee in a September 25 program update on CTCL's website.

"Thank you so much. We are a small rural township, and this will be a huge help," said another grantee in that same September 25 update.

"Our job is to get funding into the hands of local election officials, then get out of their way," the update said. "We leave spending decisions to the discretion of each grantee jurisdiction, as long as the election activity falls under these four broad categories: Ensure Safe, Efficient Election Day Administration; Expand Voter Education and Outreach Efforts; Launch Poll Worker Recruitment, Training and Safety Efforts; [and] Support Early In-Person Voting and Vote by Mail."

Patrick offered more detail on how the funds would be spent. The grants were "not so much for large technology" acquisitions, she said, such as high-speed scanners for counting ballots or sorting returned absentee ballot envelopes—although some cities were using funds for that. Instead, most funds were "for the general support of hiring more poll workers than normal, hiring and having to pay for polling place facilities to be cleaned, and/or [renting] the facilities themselves because they have had so many denials [due to COVID-19 concerns]."

Still, Patrick said that some hardware to be acquired, such as a desk-size machine that opens envelopes and removes absentee ballots, would speed up the pre-ballot counting work.

"When you think of the alternative to a ballot extraction machine, it's two people, a Democrat and a Republican, sitting on either side of a table with letter openers opening up tens, if not hundreds or thousands of envelopes," she said.

The grants would hire more election workers to help with the routine tasks tied to sending out absentee ballots and processing them upon their return, Patrick said. Many of those tasks, unlike being a poll worker, did not require that much training because they were repetitive.

"Part of what some jurisdictions are using the additional funding for is to bring in more assistance, more physical human help, at every stage," she said. "It does allow them to move staff around so that they can have their permanent staff shift to the more complicated or complex jobs [such as authenticating voters or verifying signatures], and then have other individuals who don't have the same level of experience doing the more mundane tasks that our elections tend to rely upon, like taking a ballot out of an envelope and unfolding it."

Patrick said that it was not too late for local election officials to bolster their staffs and streamline their ballot-handling and vote-counting processes. The exception, she said, would be states that have already begun to process returned absentee ballots, as the equipment and the steps involved could not be altered once that process has begun.

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.

cf other penn? rept 9 votes, not all for trump BS

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trump-claimed-that-a-west-virginia-postal-worker-was-selling-voting-ballots-but-a-state-official-has-refuted-that-bogus-claim-report/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/right-wing-fraudsters-jacob-wohl-and-jack-burkman-get-criminally-charged-in-election-conspiracy

Right-wing smear artists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman will face four counts in an alleged criminal scheme to influence the 2020 election after Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filed charges on Thursday.

Nessel accused the pair of intimidating voters, conspiring to break election law, using a computer to commit an election crime, and using a computer to carry out a conspiracy.

The charges center on a robocall scheme the Nessel said was an attempt to "discourage voters from participating in the general election." According to the press release, the scheme targeted urban areas, including Detroit, and was focused on "areas with significant minority populations."

Wohl previously denied to CNN that he or Burkman were involved in any robocall schemes.

"It's believed around 85,000 calls were made nationally, though an exact breakdown of the numbers of calls to each city or state are not available," according to Nessel's office. Similar robocalls reportedly were made in New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, the last two of which are swing states in the presidential election.

The robocall allegedly attempted to make voters afraid to cast their ballots, telling them to not be "finessed into giving your private information to the man" [JOK SUPERFLY PIMP STRIKES AGAIN] and that they should "beware of vote by mail." The press release explained:

The caller, who claims to be associated with an organization founded by Burkman and Wohl, falsely tells people that mail-in voting, in particular, will allow personal information to become part of a special database used by police to track down old warrants and by credit card companies to collect outstanding debts. The caller also deceptively claims the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will use the information to track people for mandatory vaccines. However, none of that is true.

"This effort specifically targeted minority voters in an attempt to deter them from voting in the November election," said Nessel. "We're all well aware of the frustrations caused by the millions of nuisance robocalls flooding our cell phones and landlines each day, but this particular message poses grave consequences for our democracy and the principles upon which it was built."

Burkman and Wohl have made themselves notorious with a series of stunts that included trying to smear former Special Counsel Robert Mueller and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg with bogus and sexual assault allegations.

1st debate "pollwatchers"

Desperate' Trump blasted for calling on supporters to engage in voter intimidation

Jake Johnson Common Dreams

September 30, 2020

Among the stream of authoritarian remarks President Donald Trump let loose during his disastrous performance at Tuesday night's presidential debate, one of the most alarming to voting rights advocates came at the tail-end of the 90-minute event, when the incumbent openly encouraged his supporters to "go into the polls and watch very carefully."

Though poll watching is authorized in states across the U.S., the activity is restricted by specific rules and guidelines aimed at preventing a candidate's backers from showing up at polling places and intimidating voters attempting to cast their ballots. The president's comments Tuesday night, observers warned, went well beyond a call for legally sanctioned and qualified election observers.

"He wasn't talking about poll watching. He was talking about voter intimidation," tweeted Nevada's Democratic Attorney General Aaron Ford. "FYI—voter intimidation is illegal in Nevada. Believe me when I say it: You do it, and you will be prosecuted."

Asked by debate moderator Chris Wallace whether he would pledge to "not declare victory until the election has been independently certified," Trump ignored the question and repeated a lie he first spread on social media ahead of Tuesday night's event.

"As you know, today there was a big problem," the president said. "In Philadelphia, they went in to watch. They're called poll watchers, a very safe, very nice thing. They were thrown out. They weren't allowed to watch. You know why? Because bad things happen in Philadelphia. Bad things. And I am urging my people—I hope it's going to be a fair election."

But as the Philadelphia Inquirer pointed out, "there were several reasons why elections staff did not allow members of the public to arbitrarily enter their offices."

"The Trump campaign has no poll watchers approved to work in Philadelphia at the moment," the Inquirernoted. "There are no actual polling places open in the city right now. And elections officials are following coronavirus safety regulations, such as those limiting the number of people indoors."

Trump says “I’m urging my supporters to go into the polls & watch very carefully because that’s what has to happen.… https://t.co/1w1MxbFAgO

— Kristen Clarke 866-OUR-VOTE (@Kristen Clarke 866-OUR-VOTE)1601435210.0

"Trump is brazenly demanding voter intimidation from his supporters," tweeted Sean Eldridge, founder and president of advocacy group Stand Up America.

In a joint statement following the debate, during which the president also repeated a number of falsehoods about mail-in voting, Eldridge and Indivisible co-executive director Leah Greenberg said that "the confusion and doubt that Donald Trump tried to sow about the election tonight is the behavior of a desperate man and a losing candidate."

"We are building a broad network of people who are working to make sure every vote is counted and preparing to mobilize if Trump attempts to undermine the valid results. The voters will have the last word," said Eldridge and Greenberg. "While we work to resoundingly defeat Donald Trump in this election, preparing to also protect the results of this election isn't just reasonable, it's necessary."

The Inquirerreported that on Tuesday afternoon, as early voting began in Pennsylvania, "a woman approached the supervisor at the entrance of the satellite office at Overbrook Elementary School" claiming that "she was there to monitor 'the integrity of the election'" and asking to be allowed inside the building.

"The woman did not present any sort of certificate of being an official poll watcher, but calmly stated that she had a right to be inside," according to the outlet. "The woman told the Inquirer she was 'hired by the Trump campaign to oversee the integrity of the election.' She said she was paid to monitor the West Philadelphia site. She would not provide her name or any further information, and she left the area shortly afterward."

"I'm urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully," complaining that poll workers in Pennsylv… https://t.co/rnexn9MfKU

— Jessica Huseman (@Jessica Huseman)1601433423.0

In a video posted online last week, Donald Trump Jr., the president's eldest son, called on Trump supporters to "enlist" in the campaign's "election security operation" and falsely claimed that the president's opponents "plan to add millions of fraudulent ballots that can cancel your vote and overturn the election."

On the second day of early voting in Virginia on September 19, Trump supporters heeded the campaign's repeated calls to show up at polling places en masse, offering a potential preview of the chaos the president is attempting to provoke across the country. As the New York Times reported, a crowd of Trump supporters gathered near a polling location in Fairfax and formed "a line that voters had to walk around outside the site."

"County election officials eventually were forced to open up a larger portion of the Fairfax County Government Center to allow voters to wait inside away from the Trump enthusiasts," the Times noted.

Bryan Graham, the chairman of the Fairfax County Democrats, tweeted at the time that "Republicans are straight-up attempting to intimidate voters at the Government Center. Circling the parking lots with their Trump flags and horns blaring."...

rww 920

Josh Bernstein Melts Down Over Mail-In Voting

[vid w/ amazing minuteman w/ covid mask bandana pretty scary]

radical right-wing commentator Josh Bernstein posted a on his YouTube channel Friday in which he warned that if Joe Biden wins the election in November, “the only thing that’s going to save this country is revolution.”

Bernstein, who has repeatedly falsely that Democrats are preparing to engage in massive voter fraud because “it is mathematically impossible” for Biden to win the election fairly, warned that a Biden presidency would result in a cavalcade of horrors, ranging from the dismantling of the Second Amendment to the wholesale confiscation of private wealth.

The only remedy,, will be violent revolution.

“I am personally trying to scare the living shit out of you on purpose,” Bernstein said. “Why? Because I want you to understand what is at stake here. I can’t be any clearer than my message is now. And yes, you should be frightened. But more importantly, you should be motivated—which I know you all are—but more importantly, it is your responsibility to get other people that you know to not only see this video so they understand what’s at stake, but anyone out there that doesn’t want to vote for Trump, they’re signing their own death warrant,as far as I’m concerned. And not just their own, but for their country.”

“Everything, folks, is on the line. Everything,” he added. “If, God forbid, they figure out how to steal this election, the only thing that’s going to save this country is revolution. And trust me, it will happen. There’s no question about it. And when it happens, we will have a new America. Yes, there will be blood spilled, unfortunately,but they’re bringing it upon us.”

mma 920

we've already documented the right-wing lies about absentee and mail-in voting at length, and how those lies have permeated Facebook.

A new Media Matters study shows that such lies are also all over YouTube. We assessed the top 100 YouTube videos about mail-in voting (as identified through a search on the tool BuzzSumo) with at least 10,000 views from right-leaning, left-leaning, and nonaligned YouTube channels over a six-month period between March 1 and August 31:

Right-leaning channels posted 39 of the top 100 videos during the six-month period, and these videos accumulated over 8.6 million views -- nearly half of the total views (47%).
Left-leaning channels posted 22 of the top 100 videos during the six-month period, and these videos accumulated over 4.2 million views (23% of the total) -- less than half as many views as right-leaning channels.
Nonaligned channels posted 33 of the top 100 videos during the six-month period, and these videos accumulated over 5.6 million views (30% of total views).
The top 100 videos about voting by mail that accumulated at least 10,000 views came from 52 different channels.

Watch: The rank hypocrisy of the Judicial Crisis Network

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/heres-the-truth-about-the-white-house-and-dojs-9-discarded-ballots-in-pennsylvania/

no lnx twt

here's the truth about the White House and DOJ's 9 discarded ballots in Pennsylvania

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement September 27, 2020

Major news is coming in over the "case" of the nine "discarded" ballots from Luzerne County, Pennsylvania that President Donald Trump revealed to Fox News Radio on Thursday.

Here's what appears to have happened, and we're going to bullet point this so it's easy to follow.

The ballots were discarded by a temporary, or "contract" worker assigned to sort the mail who appears to have been following direction.

The ballots were military ballots, not absentee or other by-mail ballots.

The county immediately reported what happened to federal officials, who appear to have immediately politicized the issue.

"Because these ballots were returned in envelopes similar to absentee ballot requests, elections officials opened them," The Washington Post reports. "If the ballots weren't then enclosed in another envelope which shielded the actual vote being cast, they may have been considered 'naked ballots,' a term used to describe mail ballots returned without the voter's intent being protected.

The Trump campaign and the Pennsylvania GOP in a lawsuit argued that "naked ballots" should not be counted. They won that lawsuit. These nine ballots appear to be "naked ballots," and that appears to be the reason they were thrown out.

Here's how MSNBC's Chris Hayes sums it up: It's the GOP's fault.

The contract worker has been told to not return.

Buzzfeed adds it appears the DOJ violated its own policy by issuing a press release about the "discarded" ballots, and even worse, suggesting this is a case of election fraud, and even worse than that, suggesting one candidate over another was favored.

MSNBC adds that county officials were not aware of who the ballots were for until the DOJ's press release was issued.

Attorney General Bill Barr personally briefed President Trump about the discarded ballots. Trump and his White House press secretary then politicized the event.

The county elections supervisor was exceedingly thorough. "Garbage from the Elections Bureau from September 14 through September 16, the time the independent contractor was on County property, was put in a dumpster and secured by County staff," a local Pennsylvania news report states. "The trash was then searched by the FBI, the Luzerne County District Attorney's Office, the Pennsylvania State Police and county staff. All contents relating to the matter were taken by the FBI."

omfg

declares vote void in advance, campaign look at electors, will not pledge peaceful trans

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/get-rid-of-the-ballots-trump-badly-bungles-a-question-on-whether-hell-accept-a-peaceful-transfer-of-power/

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trump Praises “Good Genes” of White Audience, Cites Eugenics Theory

trump already ‘laid out the roadmap’ to cheat in the upcoming election: analyst

AlterNet Staff September 23, 2020

John Heilemann, the national affairs analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, explained how President Donald Trump has already laid out his “roadmap” to cheat in plain sight for the upcoming…

david n

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/how-fascism-ascends-2020-election-may-be-the-crisis-of-democracy-that-opens-the-door-to-a-coup/

...trump] refused to say that he would make a peaceful transition, and threatened to “get rid of the ballots”—loses the popular vote on Nov. 3 to Joe Biden, as polls currently indicate, he appears poised to dismiss millions of mail-in votes. He would likely do this through the courts that he has assiduously packed over the past three years, particularly via the Supreme Court seat he and his fellow Republicans are intent on seizing just prior to the vote. The legitimacy of both our system of elections and the foundational courts that embody the rule of law will have been not just undermined, but potentially destroyed.

Fascism, historians tell us, has only ever arisen in mature democratic states, and the main condition that permits it to seize power is a crisis of legitimacy for its major democratic institutions. The election of 2020 may well bring the crisis that does the trick for America....

Barr’s Justice Department busted for helping Trump delegitimize absentee ballots

Joshua Holland September 25, 2020

On Thursday, the US Attorney’s office in central Pennsylvania released a highly unusual statement. “Since Monday,” it read, “FBI personnel working together with the Pennsylvania State Police have conducted numerous…