hans von spakovsky 2
RENAME 2 10 26
no lnx
some bad twt code?
7 22 bak
von Spakovsky
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MMA
Right-wing media figures urge immediate purges of voter rolls following Supreme Court’s election database decision
Written by Sophie Lawton
Published 10/01/26
After the Supreme Court ruling on the modified Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, right-wing media figures and election denial activists are calling on states to purge their voter rolls — even though there is a moratorium on the systematic removal of voters from voter rolls 90-days prior to election day, and evidence the database could boot eligible voters from the voter rolls.
What did the court say about the modified SAVE database?
The Supreme Court recently gave the Trump administration a win on its so-called election integrity efforts, ruling in favor of the government's attempt to weed out exceedingly rare cases of noncitizen voting using the modified SAVE database, which has been newly updated with data from the Social Security Administration. The database was “dramatically revamped” to allow searching through bulk uploads of voter lists for potential noncitizens.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson highlighted in her dissent that the newly shared SSA data that has been linked to the modified SAVE database “contains information about natural-born U.S. citizens as well as naturalized citizens and noncitizens," which she suggested could lead to citizens being pulled into bulk searches and potentially flagged for removal from the voter rolls.
There are already examples of citizens being inaccurately flagged by the modified SAVE database. In one review of registrants flagged by the database in Texas, “some 20% were later found to be citizens who were reinstated.”
The court's ruling also notes that the National Voter Registration Act does not allow states to conduct “any program the purpose of which is to systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters” less than 90 days prior to an election, but included the footnote:
We will consider the scope of this provision in Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota, et al., No. 25–1017, which asks whether the NVRA prohibits States from implementing programs within 90 days of federal elections to cancel the registrations of voters who are not U.S. citizens. The parties in this case do not ask us to address that question and have not briefed it, and we do not need to decide it here.
The Trump administration may use this nonanswer about the 90-day moratorium from the Supreme Court as an opportunity to ignore the moratorium and encourage states to do mass purges of voter rolls using the data from DHS.
All of this is to the delight of figures like Cleta Mitchell and Hans Von Spakovsky who agree: The voter roll purges must go on.
What are election deniers saying about the ruling?
Right-wing media figures with ties to the election denial movement have called for purges based on the Supreme Court’s ruling — despite the clear language barring such purges within 90 days of the election.
War Room host Steve Bannon introduced one of his segments about the ruling by calling it “a flashing green to go purge these voter rolls with 39 days left” and hosted guests who argued the 90-day moratorium is moot.
Former Justice Department official Jeff Clark — who in 2022 praised the election conspiracy theory film 2000 Mules — spoke with Bannon about the ruling on the evening of September 25, arguing that the 90-day moratorium from NVRA is “blown up” because of an Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act — or IIRAIRA — provision that he says is “very clear.” The passage Clark seems to be quoting apparently pertains to the sharing of information about citizenship and immigration status between government entities, not the removal of registered voters from the voter rolls.
Bannon asked Clark if states “can purge these voter rolls and do it right now for the 3 November election” despite the 90-day moratorium, to which Clark replied, “Yes.”
Clark also dismissed cases where individuals have been incorrectly flagged as noncitizens and barred from voting if they don't prove their citizenship fast enough, saying, “Tough.” He argued, “It's reasonable to expect people who want to vote … to come forth and prove that and to prove that on a timely basis.”
Video
Citation
From the September 25, 2026, evening edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
During the same edition Clark appeared on, election denial activist Cleta Mitchell made similar arguments, claiming that the 90-day moratorium was irrelevant because it “only applies to what the statute says is a systematic review and analysis of the voter rolls.” She called for a “very targeted process” of finding individuals who may be noncitizens. Mitchell encouraged people to use “citizen challenge laws” and go to their local election officials to demand “that those names come off before the election.”
Video
Citation
From the September 25, 2026, evening edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
During these interviews, Bannon raised the issue of whether Democrat-run states could be forced by DHS to use the SAVE database to clean their voter rolls. He asked Clark, “Practically, can the White House just tell people, Hey, the decree came out, and you're going to purge those voter rolls because the 90 days is not relevant?” Clark claimed the ruling will “disproportionately have an effect of making it harder to have the Democrats, you know, steal elections using illegals votes in red states than in blue states because, you know, it's not like Adrian Fontes in Arizona is going to be all hepped up about trying to get this information.” Mitchell argued that DHS “can make public the numbers, and they need to fight back when these blue state secretaries of state, these Democrat secretaries of state, who wanna act like there's nothing to see here. There's a lot to see here.”
Hans von Spakovsky — who has worked to “raise unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud throughout the course of his decades-long career as a conservative activist” — also offered up action items on “blue states” that do not purge their voter rolls during a radio interview this week. He claimed that “there's one current remedy which is the U.S. Department of Justice suing California under the National Voter Registration Act, which requires states to maintain accurate voter rolls.”
Von Spakovsky also put forward that passing the SAVE America Act would “force blue states to actually check for citizenship” and agreed with the host that placing ICE agents at polling sites would deter noncitizens from voting.
Newsmax's Carl Higbie monologued about the ruling, calling it a “major win for the midterm elections” and saying he is “interested to see if this cuts away any historical Democrat voting numbers.”
Whether they are willfully ignoring the 90-day moratorium provision, arguing it simply does not count, or conspiring to create work-arounds, these right-wing media figures are more than happy to have the Supreme Court backing up their efforts to create chaos during the November elections.
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an 10 24
The U.S. Naval Academy is under fire after it invited — then uninvited — a distinguished expert on authoritarianism and fascism to give a lecture.
**Dr. Ruth Ben-Ghiat** is a professor of history and Italian Studies at New York University, where her bio says she “writes about fascism, authoritarianism, propaganda, and the threats these present to democracies around the world.” She is the author of books on fascism and serves as an advisor to the nonpartisan nonprofit organization Protect Democracy. She is also an MSNBC opinion columnist, where she appears as a commentator, as she does on other news networks.
For weeks, since early October, right-wing media has been criticizing the U.S. Naval Academy for inviting her to speak.
The Daily Caller, founded by Tucker Carlson, described Dr. Ben-Ghiat as “an outspoken anti-Trump guest” who was invited to “give the keynote speech at a high-level lecture this month.”
“Ben-Ghiat announced that she’d be speaking at the event in an op-ed last month and further claimed that former President Donald Trump was an ‘authoritarian ‘and drew comparisons between him and world dictators,” The Daily Caller’s Jake Smith wrote in an opinion piece.
For weeks, since early October, right-wing media has been criticizing the U.S. Naval Academy for inviting her to speak.
The Daily Caller, founded by Tucker Carlson, described Dr. Ben-Ghiat as “an outspoken anti-Trump guest” who was invited to “give the keynote speech at a high-level lecture this month.”
“Ben-Ghiat announced that she’d be speaking at the event in an op-ed last month and further claimed that former President Donald Trump was an ‘authoritarian ‘and drew comparisons between him and world dictators,” The Daily Caller’s Jake Smith wrote in an opinion piece.
“Anti-Trump historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat is scheduled to lecture midshipmen on ‘authoritarianism,'” two Heritage Foundation officials, Mathew Lee and Wilson Beaver, wrote at The Daily Signal in a piece marked commentary. They called for the Naval Academy to retract the invitation to Dr. Ben-Ghiat.
The Heritage Foundation is the headquarters of **Project 2025**. The ACLU calls Project 2025, “a federal policy agenda and blueprint for a radical restructuring of the executive branch authored and published by former Trump administration officials in partnership with The Heritage Foundation, a longstanding conservative think tank that opposes abortion and reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, immigrants’ rights, and racial equity. Project 2025’s largest publication, ‘Mandate For Leadership,’ is a 900-page manual for reorganizing the entire federal government agency by agency to serve a conservative agenda.”
Dr. Ben-Ghiat in her Substack piece also wrote about Trump’s visit to Arlington National Cemetery, where a cemetery official was “pushed,” allegedly by Trump campaign staffers, according to an Army report. A judge on Tuesday ordered the Pentagon to release its records related to Trump’s visit there in August, by the end of this week.
“The conduct of Trump and his campaign on those hallowed grounds violated federal prohibitions against election-linked activities at military cemeteries,” Ben-Ghiat wrote. “The photos and videos they took there also showed graves of U.S. service members whose families had not given permission. Additionally, a Trump aide shoved an Arlington employee who was trying to enforce the rules, and Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung claimed she initiated the aggression and was having a ‘mental health episode.'”
“It seems counter-intuitive when you are running for president and commander-in-chief to insult the U.S. military,” she added. “But that hasn’t stopped Trump: insulting and mocking the military are among his most consistent habits.”
On Tuesday, in an opinion piece in the Baltimore Banner, Rick Hutzell slammed the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 for getting Dr. Ben-Ghiat’s lecture canceled. (The U.S. Naval Academy is based in Annapolis, Maryland.)
“If Trump wins, the right-wing thought police will come for the Naval Academy,” Hutzell wrote in a scorching editorial.
“You could hear the spittle fly as the Heritage Foundation shouted out its latest intellectual assault on the Naval Academy,” he wrote. “All over Ruth Ben-Ghiat and a lecture the midshipmen likely will never hear.”
“Her politics were the problem, not her lecture.”
“As controversies go, it was easy to miss this one. It all took place within the conservative media ecosystem. But it could foreshadow what might happen to the U.S. service academies if Trump is elected next month,” he added. “Deep within Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 925-page roadmap for the next Republican president, its authors say they want the service academies scrubbed of anything and anyone deemed insufficiently pure of thought — exactly what they did to Ben-Ghiat.”
Ben-Ghiat in an email told Hutzell: “The lecture had nothing to do with contemporary America and I was not going to mention Mr. Trump at all in this strictly nonpartisan event at an institution, the U.S. Naval Academy, which I greatly admire.”
Hutzell wrote that Heritage “Foundation ‘researchers’ Matthew Lee andWilson Beaver made the connection a month after Ben-Ghiat’s announcement and simply made up the rest, assuming she planned to attack Trump.” He also pointed to another piece at The Daily Signal by “Heritage Foundation mouthpieces Hans von Spakovsky and Cully Stimson,” and n0ted that “U.S. Rep. Keith Self — a West Point graduate who represents a district north and northeast of Dallas — wrote Vice Adm. Yvette M. Davids, the academy superintendent, and demanded that she cancel the lecture.”
READ MORE: ‘God, Religion and Teaching of the Commandments’: Eric Trump Says Dad Saved ‘Christmas’
He also reports The Daily Signal’s managing editor called for an apology from the Naval Academy, and Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee “called for an explanation.”
“The harrumph over Ben-Ghirat smacks of hamfisted stagecraft. It’s not about protecting young minds from learning what tools authoritarians use, it’s about preparing the case for an intellectual bloodletting,” Hutzell concluded.
Others lashed out at the Naval Academy.
“This is a shameful move by @NavalAcademy. If our armed services are truly training people to be loyal to the Constitution, not to an individual, this is one lecture they need to hear. Very disappointing,” declared attorney and former FBI Special Agent Asha Rangappa, a legal and national security expert.
She also blasted the “members of Congress who do not want students at service academies to learn what happens when you turn into Hitler’s generals,” likely a response to news of Trump allegedly praising Hitler and saying he had wanted “Hitler’s generals.”
Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, a professor of law and MSNBC/NBC News legal analyst, pointing to Ben-Ghiat being disinvited, warned: “This is exactly what she’s been warning about—caving in to the demands of authoritarian leaders, even before they’re in place. Dangerous & shameful.”
Historian and professor of strategic studies Phillips P. O’Brien, author of several books including, “How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II,” called Hutzell’s editorial a “terribly worrying story about how MAGA pressure is already leading to censorship in the US military. The US Naval Academy disinvited the distinguished historian @ruthbenghiat from delivering a major lecture because of Heritage-MAGA pressure.”
READ MORE: Trump’s Current Campaign Manager Shared Statements Blaming Him for J6 ‘Insurrection’
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MMA
Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky defends voter purges weeks before Election Day
10/23/24
rep. Chip Roy says election deniers and Project 2025 contributors helped draft SAVE Act
Civil rights groups have condemned the bill that would prohibit noncitizen voting, which is already illegal
Written by Madeline Peltz
Research contributions from Sophie Lawton
Published 09/04/24 mma
Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), author of the SAVE Act — a bill that would bar noncitizens from voting in federal elections, something which is already illegal — appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room and claimed he drafted the bill in collaboration with election deniers and Project 2025 allies. The House of Representatives is reportedly considering attaching the SAVE Act to a continuing resolution to fund the government, an effort that is unlikely to succeed.
Noncitizen voting is already illegal and exceedingly rare. Civil rights groups have condemned the SAVE Act as “both unnecessary and dangerous”, saying the bill “seeks to intimidate members of immigrant communities and communities from exercising their lawful right to vote.”
“I drafted that bill in the spring alongside our good friends Stephen Miller, our good friends Hans Von Spakovsky, Cleta Mitchell, other good friends of President Trump and patriots across the country who have been fighting for election integrity for years,” he told guest host and former Trump staffer Kash Patel.
Video
CitationFrom the September 3, 2024, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
Miller, Von Spakovsky, and Mitchell are all directly tied to Project 2025, the extreme right-wing initiative led by the Heritage Foundation that would provide policy and personnel to the next Republican administration.
Stephen Miller
Stephen Miller is one of Trump’s longest serving advisers and speechwriters. He was behind some of the administration’s most notorious policies, including the so-called Muslim ban and family separation policy. After Trump’s defeat, Miller launched America First Legal, a legal nonprofit attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion policies as part of the conservative culture wars.
Miller was directly involved in Project 2025 before recently attempting to distance himself. America First Legal was a member of the advisory board, and Miller appeared in a Project 2025 promotional video for its Presidential Administration Academy, an effort to recruit MAGA activists into government service, which was posted in September 2023.
Miller, an anti-immigrant extremist, has been a longtime proponent of the myth of noncitizen voting. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Miller pushed Trump’s fake electors scheme. In a December 2020 appearance on Fox News’ Fox & Friends, he said, “We have more than enough time to right the wrong of this fraudulent election result and certify Donald Trump as the winner of the election.”
Hans Von Spakovsky
Hans von Spakovsky is a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 author, who The Guardian has described as having “decades-long career,” going back to the 2000 presidential contest, promoting “unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud.” According to ProPublica, von Spakovsky “is a leading purveyor of the notion that voter fraud is rampant, claims that have been largely discredited.”
During the 2000 election, he advised a group that was advocating for purging voter rolls and honored a company “responsible for erroneously scrubbing thousands of disproportionately minority voters from Florida’s rolls.” In 2008, von Spakovsky withdrew from consideration from an appointment to the Federal Elections Commission under President George W. Bush after Democrats refused to bring up his nomination for a vote due to his controversial and politicized views on election administration. According to The Guardian, several former colleagues at the Justice Department objected to his nomination, claiming he “played a major role in the implementation of practices which injected partisan political factors into decision-making on enforcement matters and into the hiring process”.
Von Spakovsky wrote the chapter on the Federal Election Commission in the Project 2025 policy book Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise and has frequently appeared in the media to promote the project. He also has promoted the SAVE Act on War Room, claiming the Democrats’ answer that non-citizens voting is already a felony is a weak position by sarcastically saying, “I guess that means all our federal prisons must be empty because fear of the law is keeping all these criminals and other people from violating the law.”
Cleta Mitchell
Cleta Mitchell is a prominent election denier and contributor to Mandate for Leadership. She was previously a lawyer for former President Donald Trump, and has been described as one of two “legal architects” of Trump’s “failed bid to overturn the 2020 presidential election.” She is also the founder of the Election Integrity Network and a senior legal fellow at Conservative Partnership Institute. The Conservative Partnership Institute is a Project 2025 partner organization, and Election Integrity Network was originally founded as a project of CPI.
- According to The Intercept, Mitchell “played a central role” in Trump’s attempt to block Georgia’ certification of the 2020 presidential election.
- Mitchell was reportedly responsible for recruiting discredited lawyer John Eastman to Trump’s campaign in August 2020. Eastman went on to draft the memo that created the predicate for Trump to contest the election in the House of Representatives on January 6, 2021.
- She also reportedly “helped funnel money to groups working on the partisan Arizona ballot review that Trump and his allies have twisted to advance their false narrative” about voter fraud.
- On a February 2024 appearance on a right-wing radio program, Mitchell said Democrats want to garner votes in the presidential election through undocumented people voting, baselessly claiming it is “one of the reasons the Biden administration is allowing all these illegals to flood the country.”
The SAVE Act passed the House in July 2024. President Joe Biden has promised to veto the bill.
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Rep. Chip Roy says election deniers and Project 2025 contributors helped draft SAVE Act
09/04/24 mma
4 23 gmail
Heritage and its political arm, Heritage Action for America, have spent tens of millions of dollars promoting their own model bills that impose strict restrictions on voting. They have targeted the investment on key battleground states such as Arizona, Georgia and Michigan that could hold the balance of power in the 2024 presidential race.
Heritage began hosting annual gatherings of Republican secretaries of state at the start of the Trump presidency in 2017. February’s in-person conference was the first to be sponsored by three rightwing powerhouses of election denial and voter suppression – Heritage, together with the Public Interest Legal Foundation (Pilf), and the Honest Elections Project (HEP).
Pilf is a conservative legal group that sues election officials to force them to purge voter rolls, a process that has affected eligible US voters. The group is led by J Christian Adams, a former justice department lawyer who tried to use the Voting Rights Act to claim voting discrimination against white people.
Trump’s former lawyer Cleta Mitchell also sits on the Pilf board.
HEP is a conservative dark-money group closely tied to the Republican operative Leonard Leo who was instrumental in engineering the current conservative supermajority on the US supreme court. Reporting by ProPublica and the New York Times last year revealed that Leo has received control of a staggering $1.6bn to advance rightwing causes.
Concern about the potential of top election officials to subvert democracy intensified during the 2022 midterm elections when a number of individuals committed to Trump’s stolen election lie also ran for office. They formed the “America First Secretary of State Coalition” which became a conduit of far-right conspiracy theories linked to QAnon.
Most of those candidates failed in their bid to take over the reins of election administration in their states. But the Heritage conference suggests that the desire to deploy Republican secretaries of state as channels of voter suppression and election misinformation remains very much alive.
Though chief election officials are tasked with ensuring that ballots are fair and impartial, the Heritage conference was attended only by Republican secretaries of state.
The Guardian asked Heritage to explain why its conference was held in secret and with only Republican attendees. The group did not answer those questions.
Von Spakovsky said that the event was an “educational summit intended to provide information on current issues in elections and ensure that our election process protects the right to vote for American citizens by making it easy to vote and hard to cheat”.
He disputed the argument that security measures at the ballot box such as voter ID suppressed turnout. “The claim that secure elections somehow promote greater restrictions is outrageous and has been clearly disproven,” he said.
Von Spakovsky also pointed to Heritage’s election fraud database, which he said sampled “proven instances of election fraud from across the country”. The database records 1,422 “proven instances of voter fraud” stretching back to 1982 – a 41-year period during which billions of votes have been cast in the US.
Several of the participants at the conference have election denial and voter suppression track records. They include Florida’s secretary of state, Cord Byrd,who, soon after beingappointed by Governor Ron DeSantis last spring, refused to say whether Joe Biden had wonthe 2020 presidential election.
Byrd runs Florida’s “election integrity unit” that was set up by DeSantis last year to investigate election crimes, even though there is scant evidence of substantial voter fraud. More than a dozen citizens accused of illegally voting have been arrested at gunpointunder DeSantis’s crackdown on supposed voter fraud.
Another attendee – Jay Ashcroft, secretary of state of Missouri – has been a leading proponent of that state’s new restrictive voting law. His office has been named in numerous lawsuits in the last year for imposing extreme constraints on voter registration, including a recent lawsuit accusing Ashcroft of illegally blocking a ballot measure.
Tennessee’s secretary of state, Tre Hargett, another listed participant, has been accused by Democratic leaders in Tennessee of purging thousands of voters from the official rolls.
https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2022/03/28/revealed-the-biggest-voter-suppressor-youve-never-heard-of/
no lnx many
da Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, a major funder of rightwing groups promoting the Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election, is also pushing voter suppression policies in states across the country,the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has learned.
Based in Maryland, the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation (“the Foundation”) is led by its namesake, the daughter of Shelby Cullom Davis, who made a fortune on investments and insurance and once chaired the right-leaning Heritage Foundation. The Foundation disclosed net assets totaling $1.5 billion on its 2020 IRS filing obtained by CMD.
In analyzing the Foundation’s latest IRS filings between 2018 and 2020, CMD found that it gave $3.7 million to 13 voter suppression groups. Many of the grants are designated for “election integrity”—rightwing code words for restricting voting rights.
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In addition, the Foundation’s IRS filings for those three years detail $24 million in contributions to DonorsTrust, the preferred donor conduit of the Koch political network. DonorsTrust pumped over $137 million into rightwing groups in 2020 alone—including millions to the same voter suppression groups funded by the Foundation—according to a CMD analysis of its last IRS filing.
Here are the voter suppression groups the Foundation supported between 2018 and 2020, presented in descending order of funding granted:
Lawyers Democracy Fund — $625,000
Over the three-year period (2018–20), the Lawyers Democracy Fund (LDF) received a total of $625,000 in Foundation grants for its “election integrity project.” LDF’s IRS filings show that the Foundation’s $200,000 grants in both 2018 and 2019 accounted for its entire revenue those years.
The Foundation’s 2019 IRS filing states that the $200,000 is for “educational initiatives, policy research activities and public interest litigation efforts with respect to the vital issues of electoral system integrity throughout the United States.” Its 2020 grant of $225,000 is similarly worded.
LDF President Harvey Tettlebaum was the former president of the Republican National Lawyers Association (2003–06) and LDF Secretary Elliot Berke currently serves as Georgia’s special assistant attorney general and on the Board of Advisors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
LDF advocates for strict voter ID laws and opposes all mail-in ballots and mandatory voter registration—policies that make it more difficult for people to exercise their right to vote.
Much of LDF’s public-facing work is in the courts. In January it helped overturn Pennsylvania’s no-excuse absentee voting law in Commonwealth Court and filed an amicus brief with Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) in the Supreme Court case Berger v. North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, arguing in favor of giving the state legislature the power to intervene to defend the constitutionality of North Carolina’s voter ID law.
LDF and two other grant recipients, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Honest Elections Project, also filed briefs in the case, which was argued on March 21. The groups are trying to get the Supreme Court to embrace the “independent state legislature doctrine,” a fringe theory that resurfaced during attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, by arguing that only state legislatures can control federal elections—without any limitations from state courts or constitutions.
As the ranking member on the U.S. House Administration Committee, Davis leads Republicans in their Faith in Elections Project to combat efforts by Democrats to safeguard elections and expand access to the ballot box.
American Civil Rights Union — $550,000
The American Civil Rights Union (ACRU), rebranded as the American Constitutional Rights Union in 2019, received $550,000 in grants from the Foundation for its voter suppression efforts. ACRU had $810,000 in revenue as of its last IRS filing and is led by Lori Roman, ALEC’s former executive director.
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ACRU received grants of $125,000 in 2018 and $150,000 in 2019 for “election integrity” and $300,000 in 2020 for a project to “protect elderly and military votes” and “voter educational initiatives.” The longtime voter suppression group launched its Protect Elderly Votes Project in April 2020 “to protect seniors from those who may wish to defraud them of their vote.”
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ACRU’s Project “applauded” the Racine Sheriff in Wisconsin for identifying what he claimed were eight cases of voter fraud at a nursing home in the area. The sheriff recommended criminal charges against five election commissioners, but prosecutors have not acted due to a lack of evidence.
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Two national leaders of misinformation about widespread voter fraud serve on ACRU’s policy board: Ken Blackwell, chairman of the MAGA Voter Suppression Center, and Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative.
Judicial Education Project / The 85 Fund — $450,000
The Foundation granted the Judicial Education Project—now rebranded as The 85 Fund—$450,000 in 2020 for “election integrity initiatives in various states.” The large grant likely went to the fund’s Honest Elections Project (HEP).
HEP is a dark money voter suppression group formed in February 2020 by Leonard Leo‘s network. Known as Trump’s “judge whisperer,” Leo worked behind the scenes during the Trump administration to organize a rightwing takeover of the U.S. Supreme Court.
In addition to pushing misinformation about voter fraud, HEP has placed ads opposing mail-in balloting and advocated for purging voter rolls. It is also developing model voter suppression policies for ALEC, and organized at least two multi-day voter suppression summits for ALEC members preceding its Annual Meeting, along with last year’s States and Nation Policy Summit.
CMD obtained memos that HEP distributed to ALEC members at the summit, loaded with rightwing spin on Congress’s Freedom to Vote Act, state election laws, and polling from HEP Action claiming that West Virginia voters oppose the Freedom to Vote Act and ending the Senate filibuster.
Blackwell and HEP’s Executive Director Jason Snead, a former senior policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation (where he developed the Heritage Election Fraud Database with Spakovsky), were among the speakers at the first voter suppression summit.
American Legislative Exchange Council — $440,000
The Foundation granted ALEC a total of $550,000 in 2020, with $440,000 of that designated exclusively for “accurate and verifiable voter rolls: an American public awareness campaign.” ALEC’s revenue for 2020 was just under $8 million.
In the past year, CMD has repeatedly blown the whistle on ALEC for falsely claiming that it does not work on voting issues. In September 2021, CMD obtained and published a video of CEO Lisa Nelson enumerating the states where ALEC was working on voting issues and stating that it would outsource actual model policy development.
“We don’t have model policy,” Nelson told the Council of National Policy audience. “We will be developing that at the Honest Elections Project [seminar]—through them.” ALEC held voter suppression summits with HEP at both of its national conferences in 2021.
In April 2021, The New York Times published details of a $24-million Heritage Action for America voter suppression plan (obtained by Documented) that described its efforts to work closely with ALEC to move legislation in “crucial states.”
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) also said at the time that he had spoken with state legislators through ALEC about passing state bills that restrict voting rights and impose greater legislative control over how elections are run. CMD research found that more than 100 Republican politicians connected to ALEC in just six battleground states were lead sponsors or co-sponsors of those bills.
When a broad coalition of more than 300 civil rights and democracy reform groups called for ALEC’s corporate members to leave the organization in June 2021 because of its voter suppression efforts, ALEC’s response was swift and righteous.
“ALEC doesn’t have ‘template legislation’ on voting because ALEC doesn’t work on voting issues,” its CEO Lisa Nelson wrote in a Real Clear Politics opinion piece. “The allegation is a literal fabrication.”
And, in a letter obtained and published by CMD, Nelson told ALEC members that “the assertions included in the coalition letter are categorically false…. ALEC does not create or promote policy models on election reform/security.”
The Foundation grant to ALEC—specifically earmarked for voting work—provides the latest evidence that ALEC is lying to both the public and its corporate members.
Public Interest Legal Foundation — $300,000
The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) received a total of $300,000 in 2019 and 2020 for “public interest litigation activities in connection with preserving the constitutional framework of the American elections project” and “election integrity.”
PILF is led by J. Christian Adams, who has moved the group to focus on the threat of “voter fraud,” despite lack of evidence that this is a widespread problem. PILF has filed numerous lawsuits across the country with the goal of purging state voter rolls, and saw its revenue climb to $3.8 million in 2020.
Its Board Chair Cleta Mitchell is a senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute, where she chairs its Election Integrity Network. She participated in the infamous call in which Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s victory in the state.
Blackwell, Spakovsky, and insurrectionist John Eastman are also PILF board members.
Texas Public Policy Foundation — $300,000
In 2019 and 2020, the Foundation distributed grants totaling $300,000 to the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) for “election integrity.”
With revenues of $17.7 million in 2020, TPPF launched an Election Integrity Project in March 2020 that spread the myth of widespread voter fraud and helped Texas Republicans put the right spin on the voter suppression bills passed there in 2021.
TPPF also spread misinformation about the For the People Act, the federal voter protection legislation that has stalled out in Congress.
Thomas More Society — $250,000
The Thomas More Society (TMS) received $250,000 in 2020 for its “election integrity initiatives.” The rightwing litigation outfit’s 2019 and 2020 IRS filings show its revenues almost doubled in that one year—from $9.6 million to $17.4 million.
TMS’s Amistad Project has played a key role in challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election alongside rightwing allies in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
TMS is a proponent of the election subversion strategy of giving state legislatures (such as in Michigan) the ability to certify electors.
Earlier this month TMS also released a report on its review of the 2020 election in Wisconsin, where it claimed it found evidence of voter fraud. The organization shared an office with former Wisconsin Supreme Court Judge Michael Gableman, who was hired by State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) to conduct an election review.
Eagle Forum Educational and Legal Defense Fund — $200,000
The Foundation distributed $200,000 in 2020 to the Eagle Forum Educational and Legal Defense Fund (EFELDF) for an “election integrity project.” EFELDF’s 2020 IRS filing is not publicly available but it brought in $1.3 million in funds in 2019.
EFELDF’s activities around elections and voting appear to center on filing amicus briefs such as the one in support of U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly in Kelly v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which asked the U.S. Supreme Court to forbid Pennsylvania from certifying its 2020 election results because the legislature allowed for no-excuse absentee voting.
Virginia Institute for Public Policy — $160,000
The Virginia Institute for Public Policy (VIPP) received $60,000 in 2019 for “election integrity programs” and $100,000 in 2020 for “the Tuesday Morning Group coalition impact and election integrity program.”
The organization’s latest publicly available IRS filing (2019) details the smallest total revenue—$141,501—among all of the Foundation’s grant recipients.
On its website, Virginia Institute claims its Tuesday Morning Group“has over 1,000 participants representing more than 260 organizations.” It’s unclear whether the Virginia Institute-led Virginia Fair Elections Coalition is an offshoot of this group or the same one but with a different name.
Virginia Institute published The Virginia Model on “election integrity” earlier this month, detailing an approach that Lynn Taylor, president of VIPP and chair of Virginia Fair Elections, credits with helping the GOP realize massive gains in the 2021 elections.
In listing the “experts” it consulted with, the Virginia Fair Elections Coalition cites J. Christian Adams from PILF, Cleta Mitchell from Conservative Partnership Institute, Hans von Spakovsky from the Heritage Foundation, Ken Cuccinelli from Election Transparency Initiative, and Chris Marston, general counsel for the Republican Party of Virginia. The Thomas More Society’s Amistad Project is also listed as a “partner.”
As a guest on Mitchell’s Who’s Counting podcast,Taylor and her host recently touted the efficacy of the Virginia model in achieving voter suppression goals.
Abby Spencer Moffat, the Foundation’s CEO, sits on VIPP’s board of directors.
Judicial Watch — $150,000
The Foundation gave Judicial Watch $150,000 in 2020 for “election integrity initiatives.” Tom Fitton leads the group, which reported $110 million (2020) in revenue and, like PILF, has focused its voter suppression efforts on purging voter rolls in the states.
The same year it received the grant, Judicial Watch published a “study” making dubious claims “that 353 U.S. counties had 1.8 million more registered voters than eligible voting-age citizens.”
While not directly addressing the study, the Brennan Center calls large-scale purges “risky because of the sheer numbers of records involved,” and cautions against using “third-party information” to remove voters because it does “not come directly from a voter” and “will inevitably include errors.”
Judicial Watch has also litigated to purge state voter rolls and filed amicus briefs supporting voting rights restrictions.
Americans of Faith — $100,000
The Foundation gave Americans of Faith (AOF) $100,000 in 2020 for an “election integrity project.” AOF has no web presence beyond a Facebook page that hasn’t been active since May 2020.
Its latest publicly available IRS filing (2019) shows that it brought in $1.1 million for the mission of “voter education.”
AOF is led by Ralph Reed, founder and president of the dark money group Faith & Freedom Coalition and a GOP operative. Faith & Freedom is a Christian right electioneering outfit that works to turn out Republican voters.
FreedomWorks Foundation — $100,000
FreedomWorks Foundation received $100,000 in 2020 “to be allocated exclusively toward the election integrity program.” Despite bringing in $8.3 million in revenue that year, FreedomWorks Foundation does not have a web presence.
Its larger sister organization, FreedomWorks, is a major rightwing group that launched the National Election Protection Initiative in March 2021. Led by Mitchell, it has focused on opposing federal voting rights bills, backing voter suppression legislation, and building state “election integrity” infrastructure in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
In 2020, the year its Foundation received the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation grant, FreedomWorks held “Election Protection” trainings for activists to counter “mail-in ballot fraud.”
Ballotpedia — $50,000
The Foundation granted Ballotpedia $50,000 in 2019 for “general support and the Election Integrity Content Project.” Officially registered with the IRS as the Lucy Burns Institute, Ballotpedia brings in over $8 million in revenue, and is run by rightwing operative Leslie Graves.
The group publishes pages on “election integrity” and “voter suppression” that may be part of the Foundation-funded content project.
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https://documented.net/investigations/exclusive-documented-obtains-recording-of-3-hour-long-voter-suppression-strategy-session-hosted-by-alec
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/alec-meeting-gerrymandering-audio-recording.html
slate no lnx audio
luxury cabanas atop Austin’s JW Marriott kept state legislators cool poolside as August-in-Texas temperatures soared above 103 degrees during each day of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s 2019 annual meeting. The gathered Republican officials could enjoy a $14 rooftop Peppered Paloma cocktail with Patrón silver, housemade grapefruit poblano soda, and Chilean salt, all while gazing over Lady Bird Lake and the nearby state Capitol, or catching a ballgame on the cabana’s 55-inch private TV.
Downstairs, meanwhile, five of the GOP’s most seasoned redistricting minds and über-lawyers would teach them the finer points of tilting maps and drawing districts that would allow them to retain such spoils for another decade.
Slate has obtained an exclusive audio recording of the closed-door panel called “How to Survive Redistricting,” moderated by influential Republican lawyer Cleta Mitchell. The panel’s four experts—Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation, North Carolina election lawyer Thomas Farr, former Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, and Texas state Rep. Phil King—are among the architects and defenders of some of the most notorious gerrymanders and voter suppression plans of this decade.
During the session, the legislators were advised to treat redistricting as “political adult blood sport,” trash potential evidence before it can be discovered through litigation, avoid the word gerrymander, and make deals with black and Latino legislators that guarantee them easy reelections by packing as many minority voters as possible into their districts, thereby making the rest of the map whiter and more conservative.
“You are going to be sued. Let’s start with that.” — Cleta Mitchell
Panelists offered complicated technical advice, such as adding a legal provision that would allow a legislature to defend its maps in court even if the state attorney general refuses. And then there was less-technical advice, like being sure to put “sharp” legislators on redistricting committees because they’ll spend a lot of time explaining the maps in court.
“You are going to be sued. Let’s start with that,” Mitchell told a packed room at the ALEC gathering, attended by more than 1,400 people, including Trump administration officials and top conservative lawmakers, thinkers, donors, and activists. Mitchell made light of ALEC’s reputation as a conveyor belt for cookie-cutter conservative legislation enacted by state after state. “Mindless state legislators, we’re just pouring in information and we’re indoctrinating you, pouring into your empty skulls!” she said, sarcastically. “We’re going to teach you how to gerrymander.”
And then she did. “Let us begin with the fact that, probably, your notes from this conference, and this workshop, will probably be part of a discovery demand,” Mitchell said on the recording, dropping the sarcasm. “My advice to you is: If you don’t want it turned over in discovery, you probably ought to get rid of it before you go home.”
View Transcript
Farr, the veteran North Carolina election lawyer whose nomination to the federal bench in North Carolina ended amid persistent allegations that he had defended efforts to suppress the black vote, compared lawsuits against GOP redistricting plans to a cancer diagnosis. “You better get some chemotherapy,” he said, “because if you don’t, things aren’t going to turn out real well for you.” He also told legislators that they needed to think about any trial as a play that he would direct as the counsel, and to be sure that they created a script that an attorney could work with before a judge.
Westmoreland, the former Georgia congressman who co-chaired a Republican 2010 redistricting initiative called REDMAP, told a story about giving black Democrats in his state mapmaking software and encouraging them to draw their “perfect district,” knowing that districts filled with minority voters would make surrounding districts whiter and more Republican.
“We ended up being very successful with it,” Westmoreland said.
Westmoreland recalled inviting the members of the “black caucus” to his office, “off campus,” to create their “perfect map.” One incumbent, he said, “finally fell into the trap and came over there and drew his perfect district.” To show the redistricting plan benefited black Democrats too, he “immediately got the local paper down there” to run an article on that lawmaker’s perfect district. Westmoreland then included a district as close as possible to that overwhelmingly black and Democratic one in the state’s official map. The legislator, he said, voted against the map and soon lost his seat.
“I promise you it’ll be beneficial to you,” he told the ALEC attendees. “They still want to be reelected. They still want to have the best district they can have.”
View Transcript
The speakers repeatedly insisted that there is no such thing as a nonpartisan redistricting process. Farr argued that maps can never be neutral. “Every time you draw a districting line, it benefits one party and hurts the other party,” he said.
The idea that Republicans are simply fighting similarly skewed Democratic gerrymanders has been debunked. According to a University of Southern California study, 59 million Americans live in states where at least one chamber of the state legislature is controlled by the party that won fewer votes in 2018. In every case, Republicans drew the lines, and hold minority control. That the process is inherently political has been disproved as well: Several states, including California, Iowa, and New Jersey, use independent commissions or various neutral or bipartisan processes that have successfully created fairer and more competitive maps. Three-quarters of the seats that flipped during the 2018 U.S. House elections were drawn by commissions or courts. Studies show that maps become more representative and equitable when more parties have a seat at the table.
Nevertheless, Farr urged these lawmakers to make their processes appear as open as possible, even though they are driven by partisanship behind closed doors.
The legislative record, he told them, must appear to be business as usual, following every statute, with every transcript and debate filed for the record.
Given that every map could end up in court, Farr advised extraordinary caution. “You never know what you might say, even if it’s unjust, that the left can take out of context and try to use to make the Republicans look like they’re evil.”
Then, in court, Farr could take it from there.
“It’s like I’m a director of a play,” he explained to the room. “I know what I want the play to look like for the judges when we actually have to go and defend what we’ve done in court, and so this is why you want to make it look like—I know most of you know this already—you’re very cordial, cooperative with the minority party or the opposing party. … The more you take the high road in the legislative process, the better it’s going to look in court when you have to defend what you’ve done.”
View Transcript
Republicans, Farr suggested, are outgunned by the litigation power and the expert witnesses on the side of fair maps. He complained that Republicans have only five or six expert witnesses, while Democrats have between 18 and 20 “really outstanding and smart people” able to explain “newfangled theories” about identifying gerrymanders.
Many of those expert witnesses create tens of thousands of neutral maps using nonpartisan, legal redistricting criteria. Courts in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Ohio were all persuaded to overturn maps as partisan gerrymanders by relying, in part, on simulated maps that demonstrate that the ones drawn by legislators are wild partisan outliers. This technological advancement offers the potential of using the same technology that partisans use to rig maps to strip their intent bare. For Farr, this is a great threat. He warned the legislators that computer-assisted maps would be the tactic deployed against their maps as partisan gerrymandering moves to state courts during the upcoming 2020 redistricting cycle—and that he would help them defeat those maps.
“Garbage in and garbage out,” he said. “You can read these things to get the results that you want.” Farr said that the professors working on these simulated maps were “very smart” and that the work is “very complex.” “You’ve got to get the right experts to look at their algorithm and all the backup that they have. But there’s a definite way to defeat the concept of computer-simulated maps.”
View Transcript
As Farr and Westmoreland taught lawmakers to conceal the true intent of their maps and appear to play by the rules, Von Spakovsky envisioned a longer game to change the rules of redistricting entirely.
Von Spakovsky, a member of the Trump-Kobach “election fraud” commission, urged GOP lawmakers to use citizenship data to redistrict state legislatures rather than count the total populations of districts, the latter being the constitutional standard for U.S. House districts and the longtime norm for states, as well. Most state legislatures, however, could redistrict state legislative lines based on citizen population, in most cases simply by passing a statute. (Recent revelations from the files of late GOP redistricting mastermind Thomas Hofeller demonstrated that Republicans attempted to place a citizenship question on the 2020 census to gather citizenship data for this purpose.)
“All of you need to seriously consider switching to using citizen population to do redistricting,” he said, asserting that the concept of “one person, one vote” was just something that liberal justices on the U.S. Supreme Court “created … out of whole cloth.”
Von Spakovsky also told lawmakers that census data is important for two reasons: the apportionment of U.S. House seats, and state and federal redistricting. Congressional apportionment based on total population, as the Constitution mandates, is “fundamentally unfair,” he said, because “states with large numbers of aliens, particularly illegal aliens, are getting more political power.”
“Liberals do not want you doing this,” he said, because “the higher the number of noncitizens in a district, the greater the chances they’re going to vote for a liberal.”
View Transcript
Von Spakovsky also praised Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority, 5–4 opinion earlier this year in Rucho v. Common Cause, which essentially closed the federal courts to partisan gerrymandering claims. But he warned that other legal avenues are still open to proponents of fair maps. “What you have to understand is this is not the end of this,” he said.
Gerrymandered maps could get challenged under state constitutions as a political question, he said, or in federal courts for unconstitutional use of race data and for diluting the votes of minorities contrary to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. He called this “the Goldilocks principle of redistricting,” noting that “you can’t use too much race,” but if you don’t use race at all, “Hispanics, African Americans are going to claim you didn’t create a district in which they can elect a candidate of their choice.”
To withstand these inevitable legal challenges, the panelists said, it is important to control not only legislative majorities but also the judges approving or rejecting redistricting plans.
“Always know who’s going to end up ruling on your maps,” Westmoreland, the Georgia lawmaker, advised. “It’s important to work with the judges, the judicial system. You need to work for your attorney generals. … You need to work with as many organizations that you can to make sure that not only you win the majority, but that you elect people that are going to be able to supervise what these maps, or what you, come up with.”
Enticing more “dance partners” from minority groups to protect their own seats is another key part of that plan.
“It’s not rocket science,” Westmoreland said. “It’s politics.”
Read the full transcript of the ALEC meeting here.
This story is part of Slate’s Who Counts? project, which investigates who has decision-making power in America and what happens to those who don’t. Read more from Dahlia
https://www.azmirror.com/2022/05/20/emails-show-ginni-thomas-asked-gop-lawmaker-shawnna-bolick-for-help-overturning-bidens-arizona-win/
dillon
the prominent wives of a U.S. Supreme Court justice and an Arizona Supreme Court justice were involved in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
Ginni Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, tried in the days after the election to convince two Republican state legislators to help her overturn Joe Biden’s victory in Arizona and instead award the state’s presidential electors to Donald Trump.
One of the legislators Thomas emailed was state Rep. Shawnna Bolick, a Phoenix Republican who is now running for Arizona Secretary of State. The Bolicks and Thomases are close: Bolick’s husband, Arizona Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick, is a longtime friend of Clarence Thomas, and the U.S. Supreme Court Justice is godfather to Bolick’s son.
Thomas also emailed House Speaker Rusty Bowers, who repeatedly told Trump and others in his orbit in the weeks after the 2020 election that he would not help in their efforts to overturn the results. Bolick, on the other hand, sponsored a bill just a few weeks later that would...
“Article II of the United States Constitution gives you an awesome responsibility: to choose our state’s Electors,” Thomas wrote in a Nov. 9 email to Bolick, the Post reported. “Please take action to ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen.”
Records show Bolick responded by directing Thomas to refer any complaints of fraud to the attorney general. Less than two months later, Bolick sponsored House Bill 2720, a wide-ranging election bill that included a provision giving the state legislature sweeping authority to disregard voters’ choice for president. In a key provision, the measure would have given lawmakers the power to “revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election” by a majority vote at any point before the president is inaugurated.
Bolick at the time protested that critics were twisting her bill’s intent, which she said was an effort to make the process more bipartisan and call the legislature into a special session.
Bolick declined to comment for this story, but pointed the Arizona Mirror to a statement she posted to Twitter that attacks the media.
“The dishonest media wants to distract attention from election fraud & our efforts to secure elections. Let’s cut through the conjecture & put this to bed,” she wrote. Bolick also singled out local journalists for sharing the Washington Post story or other stories on the emails.
If Bolick wins her four-way Republican primary in August and then defeats her Democratic opponent, as the state’s chief elections official she would be tasked with certifying all election results for both the 2024 and 2026 elections.
Bolick also was named as a chair for a working group created by the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that crafts model legislation for state legislatures to pass similar laws. The working group –– where Bolick served as chair leading up to the 2020 election –– partnered with GOP election attorneys, including Cleta Mitchell, one of the most prominent figures involved in Trump’s attempts to overturn the election results.
Their objective, according to reporting by Documented, was to start a letter campaign, emailing secretaries of state “questioning the validity of an election.” The effort sought to engage state legislators nationwide and allow them “to kind of exercise their political muscle” by raising unfounded questions about the election.
ALEC CEO Lisa Nelson told the group during one of its meetings, “obviously we all want President Trump to win and win the national vote. But it’s very clear from all the comments and all the suggestions up front that really when it comes down to is the states and the state legislators.”
Bolick told the Arizona Mirror she did not attend that meeting in question.
In addition to Mitchell, the group worked alongside Hans Von Spakovsky, an attorney for the Heritage Foundation, which crafts election legislation for states and has bragged about its voter suppression efforts in the past. Trump named Von Spakovsky, who has for decades falsely claimed there is widespread voter fraud among Democrats, to the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.
big lie? voter suppression 5
https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2021/11/16/alec-academy-featured-a-whos-who-of-voter-suppression-leaders/
an “Academy” for state lawmakers on voter suppression strategies run by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in July featured a veritable who’s who of the right-wing leaders behind this year’s disinformation campaign about voter fraud and assaults on voting rights across the country, documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) show.
While the July 26-28 session was ostensibly led by the dark money group Honest Elections Project, it was organized, hosted, and bankrolled by ALEC, despite repeated claims by its CEO, Lisa Nelson, that the group does not work on voting issues.
Nelson provided the formal welcome at the conference’s opening session, ALEC staff organized turnout, and ALEC provided two nights of accommodations at the five-star Grand America Hotel, five meals, and a $450 travel reimbursement for attendees. ALEC’s annual meeting was held at the same hotel immediately after the Academy.
An invite published by CMD in July stated that “13 legislators from across the country” would be in attendance, but the materials acquired by CMD do not include an attendance list.
Rather than email materials to ALEC lawmakers that may be subject to open records laws, ALEC distributed hard copies of the agenda at registration along with a “zip drive containing a resources document and a one-pager on your state’s election policies,” according to an email from Sarah Wall, ALEC’s manager of legislative outreach and coalitions, obtained by CMD. Wall’s email also lists Michael Bowman, president of ALEC Action, as a key contact for the event.
Nelson tipped her hand about ALEC’s voter suppression subterfuge in May at a meeting of the far-right Council for National Policy. Video of the event obtained by CMD shows Nelson speaking frankly about ALEC’s work on voting and revealing its plans to outsource model policy on the controversial topic to avert the spotlight. “We don’t have model policy. We will be developing that at the Honest Elections Project [Academy], through them,” Nelson said.
Honest Elections Project, the group ALEC chose to carry the ball on its voting agenda, is a dark money operation formed in February 2020 to push for voting restrictions and spread baseless and dangerous claims about election fraud, laying the groundwork for Trump’s attempt to overturn the election. It is a project of The 85 Fund, the new legal name for the Judicial Education Project, a group linked to Leonard Leo that played a central role in Trump’s effort to pack the federal judiciary with right-wing judges.
Speakers at the Academy featured many of the key strategists and leaders on the Right spreading misinformation around voter fraud, promoting Trump’s lies around the 2020 election, and pushing sweeping new voting restrictions.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita gave the keynote address. A proponent of Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen, Rokita recently testified in front of the U.S. Senate against strengthening the federal Voting Rights Act.
Rokita was one of only four state attorneys general to not sign a National Association of Attorneys General letter condemning the Jan. 6 violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and is a member of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA). RAGA was a member of the “March to Save America” coalition that organized the Jan. 6 rally, and its policy arm, Rule of Law Defense Fund, sent out robocalls urging supporters to “march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal.”
Agenda Focused on Election Legislation
Most of the Academy sessions focused on legislation, giving legislators a chance to discuss bills to restrict voting that have already been introduced and passed in their states this year and hear from Republican-aligned leaders about what more they think needs to be done.
By the time ALEC held its voter suppression Academy in July, 18 states had already passed 30 laws this year making it harder to vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
The Honest Elections Project’s Executive Director Jason Snead, who worked with ALEC to organize the event, laid out “priorities for election integrity across the states” and polling results in a breakfast session and appeared on another panel on how to “shore up” legislative control over election processes with Jason Torchinsky and Lee Goodman.
The Honest Elections Project has aggressively promoted a radical legal theory called the “independent state legislatures doctrine,” which holds that state courts don’t have the authority to review state election laws and would empower heavily gerrymandered state legislatures to determine election outcomes.
Republican legislators have already introduced and passed bills in 2021 “interfering with nonpartisan local election administration and consolidating power to administer and determine elections results themselves,” the Voting Rights Lab reported.
Snead is a former senior policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation where he developed its Election Fraud Database, which the Brennan Center for Justice says “grossly exaggerated” the extent of voter fraud.
Torchinsky is general counsel for the National Republican Redistricting Trust and has been defending ALEC against CMD’s state complaints alleging that ALEC illegally gave sophisticated voter management campaign software linked to the Republican National Committee to its legislative members.
Goodman is an elections attorney and a former Republican chairman and commissioner of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) between 2013 and 2018.
Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action, and Ken Blackwell, executive director of the MAGA voter suppression center at America First Policy Institute led another legislative session on “securing absentee ballots.”
Anderson bragged to Heritage donors in April that policies, “severely restricting mail ballot drop boxes” and “preventing election officials from sending absentee ballot request forms to voters” were among recommendations Heritage gave Georgia for its massive voter suppression bill.
Blackwell’s Center for Election Integrity recently published a “Top 25 Common-Sense State Election Integrity Reforms” fact sheet that includes these Heritage recommendations alongside other extreme voter suppression wish-list items, such as eliminating no-excuse absentee ballots and requiring an affidavit for absentee applications.
Blackwell also moderated a panel at the Academy with state legislators “discussing election challenges they’ve faced in their own states.”
Another panel over breakfast covered “things to consider with implementation of laws” related to election day voter registration, “election observer protections,” and organizing seniors to work the polls. Chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission Donald Palmer, a Trump appointee, and Cleta Mitchell, chair of the Conservative Partnership Institute’s Election Integrity Network, led the session.
Mitchell is a Big Lie fueler and Trump legal advisor who lost her job at Foley & Lardner following news that she participated in a January call in which Trump asked Georgia election officials to “find” enough votes to make him the winner of the state’s electoral votes.
“On Dec. 30, Cleta Mitchell wrote to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and offered to send some 1,800 pages of documents purporting to support claims of election fraud,” The Washington Post Magazine reported. Meadows is now a colleague of Mitchell’s at the Conservative Partnership Institute.
Three Republican secretaries of state, Tennessee’s Tre Hargett, Kentucky’s Michael Adams, and West Virginia’s Mac Warner, spoke on a panel about “what policies the states need to employ to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.”
“Easier to vote and harder to cheat” has been a favored talking point of Republicans in recent years.
All three are active in the Republican Secretaries of State Committee (RSSC), with Hargett serving as chair and Adams as vice chair. Republican secretaries of state produced a report on “Best Practices for Making It Easier to Vote and Harder to Cheat” for the Republican State Leadership Committee, obtained by CMD.
The RSSC holds monthly calls that Commissioner Palmer often attends. Secretary Warner and Palmer also participated in an “off-the-record” Election University session on June 21 as part of the U.S. House GOP’s “Faith in Elections Project,” as first reported by CMD.
ALEC Lawmakers Consider Litigation
ALEC’s Academy featured two panels on litigation. The first dealt with “anticipating challenges to the Voting Rights Act in Arizona,” legal challenges mounted by Democratic voting rights attorney Marc Elias, and redistricting fights, and was led by with Republican lawyers Torchinsky, Michael Thielen, and Brian Barnes.
Thielen is the executive director of the Republican National Lawyers Association and served on the national board of Lawyers for Trump in 2020. Barnes was involved in legal challenges to changes in voting procedures in North Carolina and Pennsylvania last fall.
Goodman and Utah’s former Solicitor General Tyler Green led the second panel on “operationalizing litigation challenges.” Noted in the description of the panel are “ways to challenge the scope of litigation attacks on new election integrity legislation (defense) as well as advance the ball on election integrity (offense).”
As of Oct. 3, “at least 43 voting cases have been filed in 12 states, and Georgia and Texas lead the way with ten new lawsuits each in 2021,” the Brennan Center reports.
Training Sessions on “the Left”
Two trainings focused on “the Left” filled out the remaining agenda at the ALEC Academy. Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow and manager of the Heritage Foundation’s “Election Reform Initiative,” and Ken Cuccinelli, former Trump staffer and chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative, led a session focused on “the Left’s attack on our election system” through “state-level attacks on election integrity legislation” and HR 1, the sweeping voting rights and campaign reform bill pending in Congress....Spakovsky, who was appointed by Trump to his voter fraud myth from the Right for well over a decade.president of the Scott Walter gave the keynote for a “Mapping the Left Lunch.” Walter and CRC received funding from the Bradley Foundation... ;inspired by CMD’s SourceWatch, called “Influence Watch.” The site was “constructed in partnership with Berman and Company,” run by PR spin doctor Richard Berman, and in collaboration with ALEC.
heritage
Hans A. von Spakovsky
@HvonSpakovsky
Manager, Election Law Reform Initiative and Senior Legal Fellow, Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies
gov abbott coke for votes?!
NBC News
Democrats rethink the U.S. voting system. What's in the massive H.R. 1.
Here's what's in H.R. 1 For the People Act, and why advocates say it's important that this voting rights legislation passes.
5 days ago
Vox
HR 1, Democrats’ massive voting rights bill, explained
The For the People Act still faces a steep climb in the US Senate.
2 weeks ago
Boston Herald
McCaughey: Pelosi’s HR1 bill a blatant power grab for Democrats
Nancy Pelosi's top priority is to turn America into a one-party nation ruled by Democrats. Her bill HR 1 trashes the U.S. Constitution in an ...
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Roll Call
Why Congress must pass HR 1 and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act
In the 2020 election, we used our vote, whether it was cast early, by mail or on Election Day, to determine the future for our family, community ...
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PolitiFact
Fact-checking misleading attacks on HR 1, Democrats' voting rights bill
A Facebook post claims Democratic legislation is aimed at protecting the Washington establishment and is anti-American,
1 month ago
Esquire.com
Trump's Delusional Attacks on H.R. 1 Show How Important This Bill Is
In surveys, a majority of Republican voters support the reforms included in the For the People Act. The House will vote on it this week.
2 weeks ago
brennancenter.org
Congress Must Pass the 'For the People Act'
Summary: Bold legislation introduced in the House (H.R. 1) and Senate (S. 1) would ensure that our democracy works for everyone.
1 month ago
The Hill
H.R. 1 isn't for the people, it's for the politicians | TheHill
Later today, Congress will vote on H.R. 1, the so-called “For the People Act.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi · Nancy PelosiThe Hill's Morning Report ...
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The Bulwark
H.R. 1 for Dummies
With the latest COVID relief package passed, H.R. 1—the For the People Act—becomes the most salient pending piece of legislation.
1 week ago
Fox News
Hans von Spakovsky: HR1/For the People Act imperils free and fair elections. Here are the worst 8 parts
H.R. 1, the deceptively entitled "For the People Act," has arrived in the U.S. Senate after a party-line vote in the House of Representatives.
H.R. 1 isn't for the people, it's for the politicians
Later today, Congress will vote on H.R. 1, the so-called “For the People Act.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is touting this sweeping legislation as a win for transparency and election integrity. But that could not be farther from the truth.
In fact, the worst kept secret in Washington right now is that H.R. 1 isn’t for the people at all, it’s for the politicians. House Democrats are leveraging legitimate concerns about election integrity to rush this dangerous bill through Congress. It won’t make our elections safer, instead it will give House Democrats an advantage in future elections by eliminating nearly every institutional guardrail that preserves the sanctity of the ballot box today. Pelosi is opening the floodgates for almost anyone to submit a ballot, or even multiple ballots, regardless of eligibility.
It is a new partisan low, even by Washington standards.
At a time when we need to restore faith in our elections, H.R. 1 is an unconstitutional federal power grab that will pave the way for a system rife with errors and abuse. Here’s how.
First, H.R. 1 would prevent election officials from maintaining accurate voter lists and make it harder for them to determine if voters are registered in multiple jurisdictions. This increases the likelihood that voter rolls are outdated and inaccurate or contain ineligible voters.
Second, the bill would dramatically expand automatic voter registration. People who never even provide their consent could be added to voter rolls. H.R. 1 goes so far as designating colleges as automatic voter registration agencies and making it easier to harvest ballots.
Third, H.R. 1 would make same-day voter registration the national standard. Ballots would be cast and counted before officials even have time to verify a voter is eligible or the information provided by them is accurate. The majority of states do not have same-day voter registration, but H.R. 1 would overrule them and mandate it anyway.
The bill would also prohibit commonsense voter ID rules, require no-excuse absentee and early voting, permit felons to vote, and allow people to vote at the wrong polling place.
H.R. 1 is a recipe for disaster. I would know, having prevailed recently in the race for New York’s 22nd District after an exhaustive count that went on for nearly 100 days. In the run up to the 2020 election, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo rushed through a series of executive orders that mirrored some of the exact policies now proposed in H.R. 1. The result in the 22nd District was one of the most poorly run elections in the country.
Trevor Noah opens Grammys saying he's 'hoping this is about what 2021...
Gun control groups focus all efforts on Senate
New York’s election debacle reveals H.R. 1’s real-world consequences. If you weaken election oversight, fail to protect ballot integrity, and force unfunded mandates on our communities like this bill does, the errors exposed in my race won’t be the exception, they will become the new norm. Republicans and Democrats alike have concluded that the mistakes made in New York’s 22nd District likely replicated themselves in contests throughout the state. If H.R. 1 had been law, more mistakes would have been made in this and other races. The new bureaucratic nightmare created by H.R. 1 would have made fair and transparent counts impossible.
It is clear we need reforms to increase transparency and restore confidence in our elections, but what Democrats are proposing would move us in the wrong direction. Election reforms must be targeted and respect the primary role of states in administering elections. Most of all, unlike H.R. 1, they must be fair and not deliberately benefit one party. The American people are demanding a commonsense framework for election reform that strengthens security without compromising integrity. H.R. 1 is focused on protecting House Democrats, not our sacred democratic principles.
Tenney represents New York’s 22nd District.
bit out of his wheelhouse? circle wagons on CTT?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/cover-up-house-democrats-subpoena-documents-nlrb-refused-to-share-in-ethics-investigation-propublica/
Starting in early spring, as the coronavirus took hold, a conservative lawyer at the forefront of raising alarms about voting by mail held multiple private briefings exclusively for Republican state election officials, according to previously unreported public records.
The lawyer, the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky, is a leading purveyor of the notion that voter fraud is rampant, claims that have been largely discredited.
Among the participants in these meetings has been an official from the office of Georgia’s secretary of state; the secretary, Brad Raffensperger, recently elevated concerns about voter fraud by contending that 1,000 Georgians had voted twice in elections this year.
gOP congressional staffers and a Trump administration appointee have also joined in these meetings, which were open to officials from states across the country, including Missouri and Nevada, the records show. No Democratic state election officials appear to have been invited.
The “goal” of the meetings, held remotely, is to “gather the chief state election officials together to strategize on advancing their shared goal of ensuring the integrity of the elections they administer in their home states,” an invitation to an early August event reads.
Most of the states declined to comment on the meetings, and it’s not clear what specifically was discussed. Von Spakovsky is highly influential in conservative circles. He has sent invitees copies of his published essays pushing for in-person voting and culling voter rolls as absentee balloting expands amid the pandemic, a situation that von Spakovsky argued will “make fraud far easier.”
The meetings come as voting access has become one of the central flashpoints of the upcoming presidential election. More Americans are expected to vote by mail this year than ever before because of the health risks posed by COVID-19. President Donald Trump has repeatedly and baselessly asserted that mail-in voting is rife with problems. Echoing von Spakovsky, he asserted on Twitter in July that the upcoming presidential vote will be the “most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history.”
Experts have said voting by mail carries little risk of fraud. Since it is widely believed that more Democractic voters will vote by mail than Republicans, von Spakovsky’s proposals, if adopted, could suppress Democratic turnout in one of the most consequential presidential elections in a generation.
Secretaries of state, who oversee statewide voting and work with county election officials, have broad leeway to act in ways that can limit or expand the franchise. While most are partisan elected officials, they are expected to carry out policies that benefit everyone.
The Heritage Foundation did not make von Spakovsky available for an interview and didn’t address detailed questions about the meetings. In a statement, the nonprofit’s media director, Greg Scott, said election security was “crucial to our country’s future.”
“The Heritage Foundation is committed to making sure elections are free and fair,” he said. “Every eligible voter’s vote should be counted and not canceled out by fraudulent acts.”
The remote gatherings are an outgrowth of private, in-person meetings von Spakovsky has held with Republican election authorities each year since Trump took office, the records show. Participants have hailed from at least a dozen states, including battlegrounds like Ohio and Georgia. They typically dovetail with the national conference of secretaries of state in Washington, D.C., and take place at Heritage’s headquarters. Those pre-pandemic meetings did not primarily address voting by mail.
Jonathan Diaz, a lawyer for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan voting rights group, said it’s one thing for von Spakovsky to make dubious claims of voter fraud in public but “another thing entirely for him to be circumventing official channels and making these presentations in private, where they’re not subject to public scrutiny.”
Diaz added that election authorities need to be “transparent about the information they’re relying on to make decisions about the ballot.”
Von Spakovsky has hosted at least two of these remote meetings in recent months. In April, there was an hourlong “Election Administration Forum Conference Call” that covered, in part, the expansion of mail-in voting and “ways to message these concerns to your constituents,” according to the invitation. The event included the ranking member of the U.S. House of Representatives committee that oversees elections and five staffers, one of whom went on to work for the Trump campaign two months later. An August meeting, conducted through a secure, virtual video conferencing platform, was scheduled to last for two hours, according to an invitation.
A staffer from the Georgia secretary of state’s office participated in the April call. Before that, the secretary himself, Raffensperger, met with von Spakovsky in the summer of 2019 at Raffensperger’s request. At the Georgian Club in Atlanta, the two discussed a new law that involved replacing the state’s voting machines, according to Raffensperger’s deputy, Jordan Fuchs. That statute contributed to problems during what was widely viewed as a troubled June primary.
This month, around the time Raffensperger went public about double voting concerns in his state, he also appealed a federal judge’s ruling that the state must count absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day, the kind of policy change von Spakovsky has argued Democrats are using to “game the system” ahead of November.
“Hans, to our office, is the ultimate voter integrity activist,” Fuchs told ProPublica. While von Spakovsky “hasn’t driven any policy decisions” that have taken place under the secretary, Fuchs said that she briefed von Spakovsky on her office’s actions regarding double voting and absentee ballots.
There are indications that von Spakovsky has been influential within the Trump administration as well. During the August virtual briefing, state election administrators were told that Cameron Quinn, a Department of Homeland Security official, would now be their “liaison to the election community,” according to emails that a participant from Washington state sent to his colleagues.
Quinn has worked as an elections official in Virginia with von Spakovsky and has co-taught a law school course with him. During the meeting, she provided her cellphone number to the attendees.
The announcement of her role apparently came as a surprise to Washington officials, including the state’s director of elections, the emails show. The director, a member of a five-person committee that regularly interacts with DHS over election security matters, told her colleagues that there is a point of contact within the agency — and it’s not Quinn.
It turned out Quinn participated in the meeting without notifying her new boss beforehand, according to people familiar with the matter. Her appointment to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a division within DHS that monitors election systems for foreign hacking attempts and communicates with state officials about them, had only been announced within the agency a day earlier, they said.
It’s not clear whether Quinn is still in contact with state elections officials. A division spokeswoman confirmed Quinn was not yet an employee in the division at the time she participated in the meeting but declined to answer additional questions.
Beyond Quinn, it’s not clear whether any executive branch officials have participated in von Spakovsky’s remote briefings. But in 2019, during his annual in-person gathering, the then-head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, John Gore, and its chief of staff and counsel, Omeed Assefi, attended in their official capacities, according to an attendee list.
The division is responsible for protecting the rights of voters. An agenda from the event shows that Gore and von Spakovsky led an hourlong discussion on “election reforms in the states and messaging and update on civil rights division, U.S. Department of Justice.”
“This is highly inappropriate,” Vanita Gupta, who ran the division under President Barack Obama, told ProPublica. “That kind of closed-door session, where a head of the Civil Rights Division is secretly speaking about enforcement with partisan state officials, is unprecedented. The DOJ isn’t accountable to just one party.”
Gore declined to comment on what took place at the event or if he’d attended other von Spakovsky meetings in the past as head of the Civil Rights Division. The Justice Department didn’t respond to questions about the Civil Rights Division’s involvement in the meeting or Gore’s presentation at the 2019 event.
At the Heritage Foundation, von Spakovsky maintains a database of voter fraud cases and, emails show, regularly urges secretaries of state to contribute to it. At the moment, the database encompasses some 1,300 cases, stretching over a period that begins in 1982. As Reuters recently noted, billions of ballots were cast during that time.
Von Spakovksy’s writings on voter fraud carry the veneer of academic research. But when he was questioned about his work in a trial two years ago, he testified that none of it has undergone the stringent vetting process of peer review. The judge in that case dismissed his testimony, saying it was “premised on several misleading and unsupported examples” and included “false assertions.”
Before coming to the Heritage Foundation, von Spakovsky served on both the Federal Election Commission and in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, where he drew scrutiny after approving a voter ID law in Georgia that a federal judge likened to a Jim Crow-style poll tax. In May 2017, Trump appointed von Spakovsky to a voter fraud commission that disbanded less than a year later without producing any evidence of voter fraud.
Do you have access to information about efforts by outside groups seeking to influence how election officials will administer the vote on Nov. 3 that should be public? Email Mike Spies at mike.spies@propublica.org, Jake Pearson at jake.pearson@propublica.org or Jessica Huseman at jessica.huseman@propublica.org. Here’s how to send tips and documents to ProPublica securely.
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trumps-enablers-are-inflating-his-lies-about-vote-by-mail/
no lnx
Trump’s enablers are inflating his lies about vote-by-mail
President Donald J. Trump waves after talking with reporters on the South Lawn of the White House Monday, Nov. 4, 2019, and walks to board Marine One to begin his trip to Kentucky. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly April 24, 2020
Joe Biden is sounding the alarm.
“Mark my words, I think [Trump] is gonna try to kick back the election somehow, come up with some rationale why it can’t be held,” Biden said during a Q&A at a virtual fundraising event.
He noted Trump’s refusal to fund the U.S. Postal Service, which is struggling under the weight of the COVID-19 pandemic, as lawmakers across the country push for mail-in voting to keep the virus from spreading.
“Now what in God’s name is that about, other than trying to let the word out that he’s going to do all he can to make it very hard for people to vote?” Biden asked. “That’s the only way he thinks he can possibly win.”
After the debacle in Wisconsin, many states are pursing an expansion of mail-in voting. But Trump has led the charge against that option by spouting a whole series of lies. Jane Timm went through them one by one and fact-checked them all as false. Here’s the bottom line.
Richard Hasen, an election law expert and a professor at the University of California, Irvine, pointed to an exhaustive News21 review of voter fraud between 2000 and 2012, which found just 491 incidents of alleged absentee voter fraud among more than a decade of elections and 146 million registered voters.
“No means of voting is perfect, but the benefits of vote-by-mail — particularly during a pandemic — greatly exceed the risks of fraud associated with it,” he told NBC News.
But that isn’t likely to stop the president’s enablers. For example, Mark Hemingway has written a piece with this explosive title: “28 Million Mail-In Ballots Went Missing in Last Four Elections.”
Between 2012 and 2018, 28.3 million mail-in ballots remain unaccounted for, according to data from the federal Election Assistance Commission. The missing ballots amount to nearly one in five of all absentee ballots and ballots mailed to voters residing in states that do elections exclusively by mail.
In order to heighten the angst, Hemingway goes on to point out that “in 2016 Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by garnering over 2.8 million more votes than Donald Trump. But nearly 6 million unaccounted mail-in ballots were never counted in 2016.”
To his credit, Hemingway does note in the third paragraph that “there is no evidence that the millions of missing ballots were used fraudulently.” Nevertheless, he says that “the sheer volume of them raises serious doubts about election security.”
So what is Hemingway talking about when he refers to these 28 million missing mail-in ballots? The first thing to note is that he got his information from a report published by the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a group that claims that voter fraud is rampant in the U.S. and that large numbers of ineligible aliens are casting ballots. The president of PILF—J. Christian Adams—was appointed to serve on Trump’s voter fraud commission and one of their board members is Hans von Spakovsky, who has been advocating for voter suppression since he fought against motor-voter provisions in 1997.
The report on these so-called “missing ballots” makes it difficult to follow their numbers, but they suggest that over 40 million mail-in ballots are sent out every election. In looking at four elections (2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018), that would total over 160 million ballots, of which 28 million (or roughly 17.5 percent) went missing. They note that some never reached the intended targets (perhaps because of outdated addresses), some were never returned (ie, people chose not to vote), and some were rejected—usually due to signature errors.
It is interesting that PILF included “rejected” ballots among those they suggested are “missing.” Checking signature against voter registrations is one of the security measures utilized with vote-by-mail. While maintaining accurate addresses will always be a challenge for mailed ballots, the fact that some people chose not to take the opportunity to vote is hardly a problem, especially given that voter turnout has hovered around 50-60 percent in recent presidential elections (lower in midterms). So overall, if 82.5 percent of mailed ballots are returned as valid, that demonstrates pretty astounding success.
Of course, the whole point of reports like this is to scare people with numbers like 28 million “missing” ballots without any context whatsoever. Given what we’ve seen from Trump, it probably won’t be long before he adds to these lies and starts talking about 28 million people casting fraudulent mail-in ballots as a reason to either force people to vote in person during a pandemic, or, as Biden has warned, as an excuse to delay the election.
==
lee f
https://theintercept.com/2020/02/15/dark-money-irs-reporting-501c
DARK MONEY GROUPS backed by foreign corporate donors are supporting the Trump administration’s decision to roll back one of the last remaining ways for authorities to monitor the flow of unlawful campaign cash in American elections.
In recent years, 501(c) nonprofits have become the entities of choice for secret campaign spending. These nonprofit groups, which do not have to report any donor information to the public, can receive unlimited contributions from any source and, thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, spend unlimited amounts on elections.
Foreign spending, whether by a foreign national or a foreign-owned corporation, is still illegal under federal law. But the law has been poorly enforced, and the few instances in which penalties have been applied in recent years have come in reaction to publicly reported foreign corporate spending to Super PACs, such as The Intercept’s reporting on Chinese corporate donations in 2016 and the recent federal indictment over a shell company owned by a Russian national that gave to President Donald Trump’s Super PAC in 2018.
The one check on foreign contributions to dark-money groups has been the Schedule B form, which reports 501(c) donor information confidentially to the Internal Revenue Service. Under a new rule proposed last September by the Treasury Department and the IRS, nonprofits will no longer be required to report donor information, even to the government, allowing an unprecedented level of secrecy.
Lobbyists for foreign-funded groups have pushed the administration to move forward with the rule, which is close to being finalized. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobby organization in the world, spent over $10 million to influence the last 2018 midterm election cycle using its general fund. The group, which has foreign corporate donors, has lobbied in support of the IRS rule to repeal the Schedule B requirement, claiming in a letter to officials that the accidental leak of donors could reduce corporate free speech rights.
“Identifying, harassing, and intimidating the organization’s supporters is a chief means of silencing that organization’s speech,” wrote Caroline L. Harris, the Chambers’ chief tax policy counsel, and Ryan P. Meyers, the deputy general counsel of the group, in a regulatory letter to officials overseeing the rule change. “The Chamber applauds the work of Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in eliminating onerous reporting requirements.”
The National Association of Manufacturers, which counts several corporations based in foreign countries as members, in a letter to IRS officials, similarly called the Schedule B requirement an “unnecessary administrative filings that raise the potential for misuse in a way that chills protected speech.”
Both NAM and the Chamber of Commerce, which spends more than $160 million a year, are organized as 501(c)(6) trade associations and under no obligation to disclose donor money to the public — only to the government through the annual Schedule B form to its 990 annual filing. After the Citizens United decision, the two groups led an effort to defeat the DISCLOSE Act, legislation that would have forced groups engaged high-dollar election advocacy to reveal donor information. The Chamber also lobbied successfully to stop President Barack Obama from issuing an executive order to force government contractors to disclose grants to 501(c) groups.
Foreign-based firms such as Brazilian petrochemical firm Braskem, Al Zayani Investments in Bahrain, and Turkish conglomerate Tekfen are listed on the Chamber’s website as dues-paying members. Faced with criticism in the past that its foreign funding might bleed into the Chamber’s vast domestic lobbying and campaign spending budget, the group has claimed that any foreign donations are walled off from domestic funds, and that foreign donors make up a small percentage of its overall budget.
But the removal of the Schedule B requirement could make those claims impossible to verify. A large foreign national firm could provide multimillion-dollar donations for use in U.S. elections to the Chamber under the new rule and such giving would never be reported to government officials.
That’s precisely the danger of removing Schedule B forms, campaign finance experts warn. The Campaign Legal Center, a campaign finance watchdog that has filed the ethics complaints that led to enforcement action on foreign money in the past, cautioned the IRS that the rule would simply open the door to more foreign spending.
“Congress has failed to pass new transparency legislation, and the FEC has failed to enforce the transparency laws that are on the books,” said Brendan Fischer, director of Campaign Legal Center’s federal reform program. “As a result, the only donor disclosure reports that dark-money groups file with any federal agency are the confidential Schedule B reports filed with the IRS. These confidential donor reports are one of the few ways that federal agencies could detect and deter foreign money in U.S. elections.”
It’s not hard to comprehend the many ways in which completely secret legal entities could incentivize illegal election behavior. In 2016, reporters from the Telegraph conducted a sting operation on a Republican campaign operative working in support of Trump. The operative was offered a $2 million check from a Chinese businessman by the reporters. He responded by offering a plan for how to conceal the money, suggesting that it be routed through his consulting firm to a pair of 501(c)4 groups and then to a pro-Trump Ssuper PAC.
The FBI is also investigating the National Rifle Association over allegations that the group, which is organized as a 501(c)4, may have received financial support from Russian sources. McClatchy reported that counterintelligence officials believe that Russian interests may have contributed to the NRA’s $30 million election advertising campaign in 2016.
Foreign firms increasingly finance major American business associations. As The Intercept has previously reported, a major Chinese chemical company joined the American Chemistry Council, a 501(c)6 that routinely lobbies lawmakers and spends money in elections.
The Trump administration had originally tried to remove the Schedule B form last summer in a surprise decision. A federal judge in Montana, however, ruled that the IRS had failed to follow proper regulatory procedure and ordered the agency to conduct a formal rule-making to allow the public and stakeholders to weigh in on the change.
“The rise of ‘dark money’ in U.S. elections has made it easy for foreign entities to contravene these laws by funneling money into U.S. elections through groups that that [sic] do not publicly disclose their donors, such as 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations and 501(c)(6) trade associations,” wrote the Campaign Legal Center in a letter to the IRS. “This change would further enable foreign entities to donate millions of dollars to such organizations for the purpose of influencing U.S. elections without any risk of scrutiny by federal regulators.”
Republican-aligned think tanks have joined the business-backed push to eliminate the Schedule B. Several nonprofits backed by billionaire Charles Koch, including his marquee group Americans for Prosperity, testified on February 7 in support of the rule change. FreedomWorks, a conservative grassroots group backed by business interests, has also mobilized hundreds of letters to the agency.
Hans von Spakovsky, a former Federal Election Commission member now with the Heritage Foundation, appeared at the hearing alongside other conservative activists in support of the rule change.
Von Spakosvsky, an avowed critic of campaign finance regulations and voting rights laws, testified that “their claim that this will somehow allow foreign money to suddenly flood into American elections is absurd,” according to a transcript of his remarks. Von Spakovsky said the FEC had plenty of authority and expertise in combating foreign money during his tenure, despite the fact that the agency has historically only intervened to investigate foreign money through disclosed political action committees on a few occasions in its 45-year history. He did not cite any examples of the FEC investigating 501(c) groups.
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maybe not so much fail as punked? NY Mass AG's vs Exxon knew, 1st amend BS ploy
AN
http://www.alternet.org/environment/exxon-using-tobaccos-failed-free-speech-defense-decades-deception-climate-change
The past week has seen a barrage of opinion pieces carrying water for the fossil fuel industry, defending against the ongoing fraud investigations. The Washington Post had two pieces, Newsweek had one and the Financial Times had an editorial, in addition to op-eds in a couple of other conservative outlets. Of those six, half were penned by groups funded at least in part by fossil fuel companies.
The arguments are all by and large the same, claiming that the investigations infringe on fossil fuels companies’ right to free speech while steadfastly ignoring the fact that ExxonMobil funded climate denial to protect their business model. Only the Financial Times editorial actually acknowledges the “misleading claims from fossil fuel interests and their allies” but concludes that it is “because the stakes [of the debate] are so high that all arguments must be heard.” While that sounds fair at first Glantz, it quickly sounds silly when applied to a recent example: the tobacco industry’s denial of the fact that its carcinogenic product is addictive.
All but one of the pieces similarly ignored the tobacco industry precedent and the only person who mentioned it was one of the few voices not plugged into the professional denial apparatus.
As for the pros, Newsweek ran a blog post from the Hoover Institution, which rambled on about climate science that’s supposedly still uncertain, lamenting that fair debate is impossible if one side can bring the other to court. Not mentioned is how a fair debate can be possible if one side launches multi-million dollar PR campaigns to mislead the public about the science.
Feds Refer Exxon #Climate Investigation to FBI: https://t.co/MS5BfY7PNp via @EcoWatch pic.twitter.com/mBWybUPmVb
— DeSmogBlog (@DeSmogBlog) March 7, 2016
Heritage’s Hans von Spakovsky’s piece in the Washington Times misses the tobacco precedent, but went all the way back to the Spanish Inquisition for his First Amendment fear mongering. George Will used his column in the Washington Post to offer a lesson on how this campaign is part of a larger progressive strategy to shut down debate. But apparently it’s Will that needs a history lesson, as he uses as evidence a story about a 2013 IRS investigation accusing the agency of targeting conservatives. But that investigation “found no evidence” that the IRS actions were politically motivated. No doubt his column is similarly bereft of evidence.
The Washington Post also gave space to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) to defend itself by pretending it is being investigated for political dissent, not its years of Exxon funding for climate denial. Worth noting CEI’s careful phrasing about its relationship with Exxon, which CEI says “publicly ended its support for us after 2005.” With Donors Trust and others making it possible to anonymize giving, the key word is “publicly.”
Ironically, despite the admission that its Exxon funding is a perfectly legitimate reason to look into its communications, CEI considers its subpoena to be a fishing expedition. Meanwhile, CEI’s own coal-funded Chris Horner continues to engage in nuisance FOIAs for climate scientists.
Exxon’s defense is a hot topic in denierland, as it advances the narrative that the fossil fuel industry is an embattled population facing government persecution. But here’s a reality check: Before Honduran activist Berta Cáceres was murdered on March 2, she reported receiving 33 death threats after years of intimidation. Instead of investigating a man who had previously bragged about his plans to murder her, authorities claim the prime suspects are two of her fellow activists.
Heartbreaking! @GoldmanPrize Activist Berta Cáceres Murdered in Honduras https://t.co/Zj97cmwQi3 @FoEint @greenpeace pic.twitter.com/tAujvEGtMR
— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch) March 3, 2016
Looks like the fossil fuel industry isn’t the one facing persecution after all.
FoxNews.com op-ed attacking former Attorney General Eric Holder uncritically relied on, and linked to, a piece by white supremacist Jared Taylor that accused Democrats of subjecting “whites to outright racial plunder.” Fox News changed the link after Media Matters contacted the network.
Jeremy Carl, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, wrote a May 23 FoxNews.com op-ed complaining about a Starbucks policy allowing “anyone to spend time in its stores and use restrooms regardless of whether they make a purchase.” He also criticized the company for having engaged "Eric Holder as an adviser on diversity issues,” claiming he “has a long history of making accusations of racial discrimination, often unjustified.”
As one piece of evidence against Holder, Carl linked to a January 2015 opinion piece by Jared Taylor on the white supremacist website American Renaissance. Media Matters found the May op-ed while examining media outlets that have uncritically promoted or cited research by white supremacist media.
The Southern Poverty Law Center wrote that American Renaissance “has been one of the vilest white nationalist publications, often promoting eugenics and blatant anti-black and anti-Latino racists. In 2005 for example, after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Taylor wrote, ‘When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western Civilization—any kind of civilization—disappears.’” The Anti-Defamation League wrote that Taylor “upholds racial homogeneity as the key to fostering peaceful coexistence.”
Taylor’s piece was a review of conservative commentators John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky’s book Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department. The review began by attacking Holder as “a devious, power-hungry, racial zealot” who is “probably the most racially committed black ever to hold a cabinet job” and concluded that while the Republican and Democratic parties are similar, Republicans “are less likely to subject whites to outright racial plunder.”
[scrensht]
Media Matters contacted Fox News about the op-ed and asked if the network thought the research citation was appropriate. The company did not reply but changed the link so it now directs to the Amazon page for Obama’s Enforcer. The site has not noted the change or posted an editor’s note (the op-ed’s timestamp reflects the update).
Media Matters later contacted Carl, who stated: “Obviously I would not have intentionally cited American Renaissance in any article I wrote — I wrote this article on a very fast same-day deadline at Fox News’ request and simply missed the sourcing. I suspect I missed it because the article was discussing work by Hans Von Spakovsky from Heritage, whom I do know and whose work I trust. I likely simply erred in assuming it was by Von Spakovsky.”
Carl, who agreed with Fox's decision to change the citation, also claimed “Holder has a history of numerous racist statements and actions is beyond doubt. I don’t apologize for saying that — then or now. One doesn’t need to link to American Renaissance to make that point, and obviously I would not have intentionally done so.” He additionally suggested that because Media Matters chose to contact Fox directly first rather than the author, it was evidence we are engaging in the “harassment of a critic of leftism" instead of a "pursuit of truth.”
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https://www.propublica.org/article/kris-kobach-voter-fraud-kansas-trial
In the end, the decision seemed inevitable. After a seven-day trial in Kansas City federal court in March, in which Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach needed to be tutored on basic trial procedure by the judge and was found in contempt for his “willful failure” to obey a ruling, even he knew his chances were slim. Kobach told The Kansas City Star at the time that he expected the judge would rule against him (though he expressed optimism in his chances on appeal).
Sure enough, yesterday federal Judge Julie Robinson overturned the law that Kobach was defending as lead counsel for the state, dealing him an unalloyed defeat. The statute, championed by Kobach and signed into law in 2013, required Kansans to present proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. The American Civil Liberties Union sued, contending that the law violated the National Voter Registration Act (AKA the “motor voter” law), which was designed to make it easy to register.
The trial had a significance that extends far beyond the Jayhawk state. One of the fundamental questions in the debate over alleged voter fraud — whether a substantial number of non-citizens are in fact registering to vote — was one of two issues to be determined in the Kansas proceedings. (The second was whether there was a less burdensome solution than what Kansas had adopted.) That made the trial a telling opportunity to remove the voter fraud claims from the charged, and largely proof-free, realms of political campaigns and cable news shoutfests and examine them under the exacting strictures of the rules of evidence.
That’s precisely what occurred and according to Robinson, an appointee of George W. Bush, the proof that voter fraud is widespread was utterly lacking. As the judge put it, “the court finds no credible evidence that a substantial number of noncitizens registered to vote” even under the previous law, which Kobach had claimed was weak.
Read More
Trump’s Voter Fraud Commission Is Gone, But Scrutiny Will Continue
The president dissolved the commission and indicated that the Department of Homeland Security will continue its mission. Experts say DHS won’t achieve the results he wants — and critics won’t back down.
A Short History of the Brief and Bumpy Life of the Voting Fraud Commission
It never made it to its third meeting, but the friction — and the lawsuits — live on.
For Kobach, the trial should’ve been a moment of glory. He’s been arguing for a decade that voter fraud is a national calamity. Much of his career has been built on this issue, along with his fervent opposition to illegal immigration. (His claim is that unlawful immigrants are precisely the ones voting illegally.) Kobach, who also co-chaired the Trump administration’s short-lived commission on voter fraud, is perhaps the individual most identified with the cause of sniffing out and eradicating phony voter registration. He’s got a gilded resume, with degrees from Harvard University, Yale Law School and the University of Oxford, and is seen as both the intellect behind the cause and its prime advocate. Kobach has written voter laws in other jurisdictions and defended them in court. If anybody ever had time to marshal facts and arguments before a trial, it was Kobach.
But things didn’t go well for him in the Kansas City courtroom, as Robinson’s opinion made clear. Kobach’s strongest evidence of non-citizen registration was anemic at best: Over a 20-year period, fewer than 40 non-citizens had attempted to register in one Kansas county that had 130,000 voters. Most of those 40 improper registrations were the result of mistakes or confusion rather than intentional attempts to mislead, and only five of the 40 managed to cast a vote.
One of Kobach’s own experts even rebutted arguments made by both Kobach and President Donald Trump. The expert testified that a handful of improper registrations could not be extrapolated to conclude that 2.8 million fraudulent votes — roughly, the gap between Hillary Clinton and Trump in the popular vote tally — had been cast in the 2016 presidential election. Testimony from a second key expert for Kobach also fizzled.
As the judge’s opinion noted, Kobach insisted the meager instances of cheating revealed at trial are just “the tip of the iceberg.” As she explained, “This trial was his opportunity to produce credible evidence of that iceberg, but he failed to do so.” Dismissing the testimony by Kobach’s witnesses as unpersuasive, Robinson drew what she called “the more obvious conclusion that there is no iceberg; only an icicle largely created by confusion and administrative error.”
By the time the trial was over, Kobach, a charismatic 52-year-old whose broad shoulders and imposing height make him resemble an aging quarterback, seemed to have shrunk inside his chair at the defense table.
But despite his defeat, Kobach’s causes — restricting immigration and tightening voting requirements — seem to be enjoying favorable tides elsewhere. Recent press accounts noted Kobach’s role in restoring a question about citizenship, abandoned since 1950, to U.S. Census forms for 2020. And the Supreme Court ruled on June 11 that the state of Ohio can purge voters from its rolls when they fail to vote even a single time and don’t return a mailing verifying their address, a provision that means more voters will need to re-register and prove their eligibility again.
For his own part, Kobach is now a candidate for governor of Kansas, running neck and neck with the incumbent in polls for the Republican primary on Aug. 7. It’s not clear whether the verdict will affect his chances — or whether it will lead him and others to quietly retreat from claims of voter fraud. But the judge’s opinion and expert interviews reveal that Kobach effectively put the concept of mass voter fraud to the test — and the evidence crumbled.
Perhaps it was an omen. Before Kobach could enter the courtroom inside the Robert J. Dole U.S. Courthouse each day, he had to pass through a hallway whose walls featured a celebratory display entitled “Americans by Choice: The Story of Immigration and Citizenship in Kansas.” Photographs of people who’d been sworn in as citizens in that very courthouse were superimposed on the translucent window shades.
Public interest in the trial was high. The seating area quickly filled to capacity on the first day of trial on the frigid morning of March 6. The jury box was opened to spectators; it wouldn’t be needed, as this was a bench trial. Those who couldn’t squeeze in were sent to a lower floor, where a live feed had been prepared in a spillover room.
From the moment the trial opened, Kobach and his co-counsels in the Kansas secretary of state’s office, Sue Becker and Garrett Roe, stumbled over the most basic trial procedures. Their mistakes antagonized the judge. “Evidence 101,” Robinson snapped, only minutes into the day, after Kobach’s team attempted to improperly introduce evidence. “I’m not going to do it.”
Matters didn’t improve for Kobach from there.
Throughout the trial, his team’s repeated mishaps and botched cross examinations cost hours of the court’s time. Robinson was repeatedly forced to step into the role of law professor, guiding Kobach, Becker and Roe through courtroom procedure. “Do you know how to do the next step, if that’s what you’re going to do?” the judge asked Becker at one point, as she helped her through the steps of impeaching a witness. “We’re going to follow the rules of evidence here.”
Becker often seemed nervous. She took her bright red glasses off and on. At times she burst into nervous chuckles after a misstep. She laughed at witnesses, skirmished with the judge and even taunted the lawyers for the ACLU. “I can’t wait to ask my questions on Monday!” she shouted at the end of the first week, jabbing a finger in the direction of Dale Ho, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs. Ho rolled his eyes.
Roe was gentler — deferential, even. He often admitted he didn’t know what step came next, asking the judge for help. “I don’t — I don’t know if this one is objectionable. I hope it’s not,” he offered at one point, as he prepared to ask a question following a torrent of sustained objections. “I’ll let you know,” an attorney for the plaintiffs responded, to a wave of giggles in the courtroom. On the final day of trial, as Becker engaged in yet another dispute with the judge, Roe slapped a binder to his forehead and audibly whispered, “Stop talking. Stop talking.”
Kobach’s cross examinations were smoother and better organized, but he regularly attempted to introduce exhibits — for example, updated state statistics that he had failed to provide the ACLU in advance to vet — that Robinson ruled were inadmissible. As the trial wore on, she became increasingly irritated. She implored Kobach to “please read” the rules on which she based her rulings, saying his team had repeated these errors “ad nauseum.”
Kobach seemed unruffled. Instead of heeding her advice, he’d proffer the evidence for the record, a practice that allows the evidence to be preserved for appeal even if the trial judge refuses to admit it. Over the course of the trial, Kobach and his team would do this nearly a dozen times.
Eventually, Robinson got fed up. She asked Kobach to justify his use of proffers. Kobach, seemingly alarmed, grabbed a copy of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure — to which he had attached a growing number of Post-it notes — and quickly flipped through it, trying to find the relevant rule.
The judge tried to help. “It’s Rule 26, of course, that’s been the basis for my rulings,” she told Kobach. “I think it would be helpful if you would just articulate under what provision of Rule 26 you think this is permissible.” Kobach seemed to play for time, asking clarifying questions rather than articulating a rationale. Finally, the judge offered mercy: a 15-minute break. Kobach’s team rushed from the courtroom.
...
It wasn’t enough to save him. In her opinion, Robinson described “a pattern and practice by Defendant [Kobach] of flaunting disclosure and discovery rules.” As she put it, “it is not clear to the Court whether Defendant repeatedly failed to meet his disclosure obligations intentionally or due to his unfamiliarity with the federal rules.” She ordered Kobach to attend the equivalent of after-school tutoring: six hours of extra legal education on the rules of civil procedure or the rules of evidence (and to present the court with a certificate of completion).
It’s always a bad idea for a lawyer to try the patience of a judge — and that’s doubly true during a bench trial, when the judge will decide not only the law, but also the facts. Kobach repeatedly annoyed Robinson with his procedural mistakes. But that was nothing next to what the judge viewed as Kobach’s intentional bad faith.
This view emerged in writing right after the trial — that’s when Robinson issued her ruling finding Kobach in contempt — but before the verdict. And the conduct that inspired the contempt finding had persisted over several years. Robinson concluded that Kobach had intentionally failed to follow a ruling she issued in 2016 that ordered him to restore the privileges of 17,000 suspended Kansas voters.
In her contempt ruling, the judge cited Kobach’s “history of noncompliance” with the order and characterized his explanations for not abiding by it as “nonsensical” and “disingenuous.” She wrote that she was “troubled” by Kobach’s “failure to take responsibility for violating this Court’s orders, and for failing to ensure compliance over an issue that he explicitly represented to the Court had been accomplished.” Robinson ordered Kobach to pay the ACLU’s legal fees for the contempt proceeding.
That contempt ruling was actually the second time Kobach was singled out for punishment in the case. Before the trial, a federal magistrate judge deputized to oversee the discovery portion of the suit fined him $1,000 for making “patently misleading representations” about a voting fraud document Kobach had prepared for Trump. Kobachpaid the fine with a state credit card.
More than any procedural bumbling, the collapse of Kobach’s case traced back to the disintegration of a single witness.
The witness was Jesse Richman, a political scientist from Old Dominion University, who has written studies on voter fraud. For this trial, Richman was paid $5,000 by the taxpayers of Kansas to measure non-citizen registration in the state. Richman was the man who had to deliver the goods for Kobach.
With his gray-flecked beard and mustache, Richman looked the part of an academic, albeit one who seemed a bit too tall for his suit and who showed his discomfort in a series of awkward, sudden movements on the witness stand. At moments, Richman’s testimony turned combative, devolving into something resembling an episode of The Jerry Springer Show. By the time he left the stand, Richman had testified for more than five punishing hours. He’d bickered with the ACLU’s lawyer, raised his voice as he defended his studies and repeatedly sparred with the judge.
“Wait, wait, wait!” shouted Robinson at one point, silencing a verbal free-for-all that had erupted among Richman, the ACLU’s Ho, and Kobach, who were all speaking at the same time. “Especially you,” she said, turning her stare to Richman. “You are not here to be an advocate. You are not here to trash the plaintiff. And you are not here to argue with me.”
Richman had played a small but significant part in the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump and others had cited his work to claim that illegal votes had robbed Trump of the popular vote. At an October 2016 rally in Wisconsin, the candidate cited Richman’s work to bolster his predictions that the election would be rigged. “You don’t read about this, right?” Trump told the crowd, before reading from an op-ed Richman had written for The Washington Post: “‘We find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in various close elections.’ Okay? All right?”
Richman’s 2014 study of non-citizen registration used data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study — an online survey of more than 32,000 people. Of those, fewer than 40 individuals indicated they were non-citizens registered to vote. Based on that sample, Richman concluded that up to 2.8 million illegal votes had been cast in 2008 by non-citizens. In fact, he put the illegal votes at somewhere between 38,000 and 2.8 million — a preposterously large range — and then Trump and others simply used the highest figure.
Academics pilloried Richman’s conclusions. Two hundred political scientists signed an open letter criticizing the study, saying it should “not be cited or used in any debate over fraudulent voting.” Harvard’s Stephen Ansolabehere, who administered the CCES, published his own peer-reviewed paper lambasting Richman’s work. Indeed, by the time Trump read Richman’s article onstage in 2016, The Washington Post had already appended a note to the op-ed linking to three rebuttals and a peer-reviewed study debunking the research.
None of that discouraged Kobach or Trump from repeating Richman’s conclusions. They then went a few steps further. They took the top end of the range for the 2008 election, assumed that it applied to the 2016 election, too, and further assumed that all of the fraudulent ballots had been cast for Clinton.
Some of those statements found their way into the courtroom, when Ho pressed play on a video shot by The Kansas City Star on Nov. 30, 2016. Kobach had met with Trump 10 days earlier and had brought with him a paper decrying non-citizen registration and voter fraud. Two days later, Trump tweeted that he would have won the popular vote if not for “millions of people who voted illegally.”
...
no lnx
On the courtroom’s televisions, Kobach appeared, saying Trump’s tweet was “absolutely correct.” Without naming Richman, Kobach referred to his study: The number of non-citizens who said they’d voted in 2008 was far larger than the popular vote margin, Kobach said on the video. The same number likely voted again in 2016.
In the courtroom, Ho asked Richman if he believed his research supported such a claim. Richman stammered. He repeatedly looked at Kobach, seemingly searching for a way out. Ho persisted and finally, Richman gave his answer: “I do not believe my study provides strong support for that notion.”
To estimate the number of non-citizens voting in Kansas, Richman had used the same methodology he employed in his much-criticized 2014 study. Using samples as small as a single voter, he’d produced surveys with wildly different estimates of non-citizen registration in the state. The multiple iterations confused everyone in the courtroom.
“For the record, how many different data sources have you provided?” Robinson interjected in the middle of one Richman answer. “You provide a range of, like, zero to 18,000 or more.”
“I sense the frustration,” Richman responded, before offering a winding explanation of the multiple data sources and surveys he’d used to arrive at a half-dozen different estimates. Robinson cut him off. “Maybe we need to stop here,” she said.
“Your honor, let me finish answering your question,” he said.
“No, no. I’m done,” she responded, as he continued to protest. “No. Dr. Richman, I’m done.”
To refute Richman’s numbers, the ACLU called on Harvard’s Ansolabehere, whose data Richman had relied on in the past. Ansolabehere testified that Richman’s sample sizes were so small that it was just as possible that there were no non-citizens registered to vote in Kansas as 18,000. “There’s just a great deal of uncertainty with these estimates,” he said.
Ho asked if it would be accurate to say that Richman’s data “shows a rate of non-citizen registration in Kansas that is not statistically distinct from zero?”
“Correct.”
The judge was harsher than Ansolabehere in her description of Richman’s testimony. In her opinion, Robinson unloaded a fusillade of dismissive adjectives, calling Richman’s conclusions “confusing, inconsistent and methodologically flawed,” and adding that they were “credibly dismantled” by Ansolabehere. She labeled elements of Richman’s testimony “disingenuous” and “misleading,” and stated that she gave his research “no weight” in her decision.
One of the paradoxes of Kobach is that he has become a star in circles that focus on illegal immigration and voting fraud despite poor results in the courtroom. By ProPublica’s count, Kobach chalked up a 2–6 won-lost record in federal cases in which he was played a major role, and which reached a final disposition before the Kansas case.
Those results occurred when Kobach was an attorney for the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform from 2004 to 2011, when he became secretary of state in Kansas. In his FAIR role (in which he continued to moonlight till about 2014), Kobach traveled to places like Fremont, Nebraska, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, Farmers Branch, Texas, and Valley Park, Missouri, to help local governments write laws that attempted to hamper illegal immigration, and then defend them in court. Kobach won in Nebraska, but lost in Texas and Pennsylvania, and only a watered down version of the law remains in Missouri.
The best-known law that Kobach helped shape before joining the Kansas government in 2011 was Arizona’s “show me your papers” law. That statute allowed police to demand citizenship documents for any reason from anyone they thought might be in the country illegally. After it passed, the state paid Kobach $300 an hour to train law enforcement on how to legally arrest suspected illegal immigrants. The Supreme Court gutted key provisions of the law in 2012.
Kobach also struggled in two forays into political campaigning. In 2004, he lost a race for Congress. He also drew criticism for his stint as an informal adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. Kobach was the man responsible for Romney’s much-maligned proposal that illegal immigrants “self-deport,” one reason Romney attracted little support among Latinos. Romney disavowed Kobach even before the campaign was over, telling media outlets that he was a “supporter,” not an adviser.
Trump’s election meant Kobach’s positions on immigration would be welcome in the White House. Kobach lobbied for, but didn’t receive, an appointment as Secretary of Homeland Security. He was, however, placed in charge of the voter fraud commission, a pet project of Trump’s. Facing a raft of lawsuits and bad publicity, the commission was disbanded little more than six months after it formally launched.
Back at home, Kobach expanded his power as secretary of state. Boasting of his experience as a law professor and scholar, Kobach convinced the state legislature to give him the authority to prosecute election crimes himself, a power wielded by no other secretary of state. In that role, he has obtained nine guilty pleas against individuals for election-related misdemeanors. Only one of those who pleaded guilty, as it happens, was a non-citizen.
Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback signs a bill granting prosecuting power to the secretary of state for cases of voter fraud in Topeka, Kansas, on June 8, 2015, as Kris Kobach, back center, looks on. (Chris Neal/The Topeka Capital-Journal via AP)
He also persuaded Kansas’ attorney general to allow Kobach to represent the state in the trial of Kansas’ voting law. Kobach argued it was a bargain. As he told The Wichita Eagle at the time, “The advantage is the state gets an experienced appellate litigator who is a specialist in this field and in constitutional law for the cost the state is already paying, which is my salary.”
Kobach fared no better in the second main area of the Kansas City trial than he had in the first. This part explored whether there is a less burdensome way of identifying non-citizens than forcing everyone to show proof of citizenship upon registration. Judge Robinson would conclude that there were many alternatives that were less intrusive.
In his opening, Ho of the ACLU spotlighted a potentially less intrusive approach. Why not use the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements System list, and compare the names on it to the Kansas voter rolls? That, Ho argued, could efficiently suss out illegal registrations.
Kobach told the judge that simply wasn’t feasible. The list, he explained, doesn’t contain all non-citizens in the country illegally — it contains only non-citizens legally present and those here illegally who register in some way with the federal government. Plus, he told Robinson, in order to really match the SAVE list against a voter roll, both datasets would have to contain alien registration numbers, the identifier given to non-citizens living in the U.S. “Those are things that a voter registration system doesn’t have,” he said. “So, the SAVE system does not work.”
But Kobach had made the opposite argument when he headed the voter fraud commission. There, he’d repeatedly advocated the use of the SAVE database. Appearing on Fox News in May 2017, shortly after the commission was established, Kobach said, “The Department of Homeland Security knows of the millions of aliens who are in the United States legally and that data that’s never been bounced against the state’s voter rolls to see whether these people are registered.” He said the federal databases “can be very valuable.”
A month later, as chief of the voting fraud commission, Kobach took steps to compare state information to the SAVE database. He sent a letter to all 50 secretaries of state requesting their voter rolls. Bipartisan outrage ensued. Democrats feared he would use the rolls to encourage states to purge legitimately registered voters. Republicans labelled the request federal overreach.
At trial, Kobach’s main expert on this point was Hans von Spakovsky, another member of the voter fraud commission. He, too, had been eager in commission meetings to match state voter rolls to the SAVE database.
But like Kobach, von Spakovsky took a different tack at trial. He testified that this database was unusable by elections offices. “In your experience and expertise as an election administrator and one who studies elections,” Kobach asked, “is [the alien registration number] a practical or even possible thing for a state to do in its voter registration database?” Von Spakovsky answered, “No, it is not.”
Von Spakovsky and Kobach have been friends for more than a decade. They worked together at the Department of Justice under George W. Bush. Kobach focused on immigration issues — helping create a database to register visitors to the U.S. from countries associated with terrorism — while von Spakovsky specialized in voting issues; he had opposed the renewal of the Voting Rights Act.
Hans von Spakovsky, a member of the voter fraud commission (Douglas Graham/Roll Call/Getty Images)
Von Spakovsky’s history as a local elections administrator in Fairfax County, Va., qualified him as an expert on voting fraud. Between 2010 and 2012, while serving as vice chairman of the county’s three-member electoral board, he’d examined the voter rolls and found what he said were 300 registered non-citizens. He’d pressed for action against them, but none came. Von Spakovsky later joined the Heritage Foundation, where he remains today, generating research that underpins the arguments of those who claim mass voter fraud.
Like Richman, von Spakovsky seemed nervous on the stand, albeit not combative. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and a severe, immovable expression. Immigration is a not-so-distant feature of his family history: His parents — Russian and German immigrants — met in a refugee camp in American-occupied Germany after World War II before moving to the U.S.
Von Spakovsky had the task of testifying about what was intended to be a key piece of evidence for Kobach’s case: a spreadsheet of 38 non-citizens who had registered to vote, or attempted to register, in a 20-year period in Sedgwick County, Kansas.
But the 38 non-citizens turned out to be something less than an electoral crime wave. For starters, some of the 38 had informed Sedgwick County that they were non-citizens. One woman had sent her registration postcard back to the county with an explanation that it was a “mistake” and that she was not a citizen. Another listed an alien registration number — which tellingly begins with an “A” — instead of a Social Security number on the voter registration form. The county registered her anyway.
When von Spakovsky took the stand, he had to contend with questions that suggested he had cherry-picked his data. (The judge would find he had.) In his expert report, von Spakovsky had referenced a 2005 report by the Government Accountability Office that polled federal courts to see how many non-citizens had been excused from jury duty for being non-citizens — a sign of fraud, because jurors are selected from voter rolls. The GAO report mentioned eight courts. Only one said it had a meaningful number of jury candidates who claimed to be non-citizens: “between 1 and 3 percent” had been dismissed on these grounds. This was the only court von Spakovsky mentioned in his expert report.
His report also cited a 2012 TV news segment from an NBC station in Fort Myers, Fla. Reporters claimed to have discovered more than 100 non-citizens on the local voter roll.
“Now, you know, Mr. von Spakovsky, don’t you, that after this NBC report there was a follow-up by the same NBC station that determined that at least 35 of those 100 individuals had documentation to prove they were, in fact, United States citizens. Correct?” Ho asked. “I am aware of that now, yes,” von Spakovsky replied.
That correction had been online since 2012 and Ho had asked von Spakovsky the same question almost two years before in a deposition before the trial. But von Spakovsky never corrected his expert report.
Under Ho’s questioning, von Spakovsky also acknowledged a false assertion he made in 2011. In a nationally syndicated column for McClatchy, von Spakovsky claimed a tight race in Missouri had been decided by the illegal votes of 50 Somali nationals. A month before the column was published, a Missouri state judge ruled that no such thing had happened.
On the stand, von Spakovsky claimed he had no knowledge of the ruling when he published the piece. He conceded that he never retracted the assertion.
Kobach, who watched the exchange without objection, had repeatedly made the same claim — even after the judge ruled it was false. In 2011, Kobach wrote a series of columns using the example as proof of the need for voter ID, publishing them in outlets ranging from the Topeka Capital-Journal to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. In 2012, he made the claim in an article published in the Syracuse Law Review. In 2013, he wrote an op-ed for the Kansas City Star with the same example: “The election was stolen when Rizzo received about 50 votes illegally cast by citizens of Somalia.” None of those articles have ever been corrected.
Ultimately, Robinson would lacerate von Spakovsky’s testimony, much as she had Richman’s. Von Spakovsky’s statements, the judge wrote, were “premised on several misleading and unsupported examples” and included “false assertions.” As she put it, “His generalized opinions about the rates of noncitizen registration were likewise based on misleading evidence, and largely based on his preconceived beliefs about this issue, which has led to his aggressive public advocacy of stricter proof of citizenship laws.”
There was one other wobbly leg holding up the argument that voter fraud is rampant: the very meaning of the word “fraud.”
Kobach’s case, and the broader claim, rely on an extremely generous definition. Legal definitions of fraud require a person to knowingly be deceptive. But both Kobach and von Spakovsky characterized illegal ballots as “fraud” regardless of the intention of the voter.
Indeed, the nine convictions Kobach has obtained in Kansas are almost entirely made up of individuals who didn’t realize they were doing something wrong. For example, there were older voters who didn’t understand the restrictions and voted in multiple places they owned property. There was also a college student who’d forgotten she’d filled out an absentee ballot in her home state before voting months later in Kansas. (She voted for Trump both times.)
Late in the trial, the ACLU presented Lorraine Minnite, a professor at Rutgers who has written extensively about voter fraud, as a rebuttal witness. Her book, “The Myth of Voter Fraud,” concluded that almost all instances of illegal votes can be chalked up to misunderstandings and administrative error.
Kobach sent his co-counsel, Garrett Roe, to cross-examine her. “It’s your view that what matters is the voter’s knowledge that his or her action is unlawful?” Roe asked. “In a definition of fraud, yes,” said Minnite. Roe pressed her about this for several questions, seemingly surprised that she wouldn’t refer to all illegal voting as fraud.
Minnite stopped him. “The word ‘fraud’ has meaning, and that meaning is that there’s intent behind it. And that’s actually what Kansas laws are with respect to illegal voting,” she said. “You keep saying my definition” she said, putting finger quotes around “my.” “But, you know, it’s not like it’s a freak definition.”
Kobach had explored a similar line of inquiry with von Spakovsky, asking him if the list of 38 non-citizens he’d reviewed could be absolved of “fraud” because they may have lacked intent.
“No,” von Spakovsky replied, “I think any time a non-citizen registers, any time a non-citizen votes, they are — whether intentionally or by accident, I mean — they are defrauding legitimate citizens from a fair election.”
After Kobach concluded his questions, the judge began her own examination of von Spakovsky.
“I think it’s fair to say there’s a pretty good distinction in terms of how the two of you define fraud,” the judge said, explaining that Minnite focused on intent, while she understood von Spakovsky’s definition to include any time someone who wasn’t supposed to vote did so, regardless of reason. “Would that be a fair characterization?” she asked.
“Yes ma’am,” von Spakovsky replied.
The judge asked whether a greater number of legitimate voters would be barred from casting ballots under the law than fraudulent votes prevented. In that scenario, she asked, “Would that not also be defrauding the electoral process?” Von Spakovsky danced around the answer, asserting that one would need to answer that question in the context of the registration requirements, which he deemed reasonable.
The judge cut him off. “Well that doesn’t really answer my question,” she said, saying that she found it contradictory that he wanted to consider context when examining the burden of registration requirements, but not when examining the circumstances in which fraud was committed.
“When you’re talking about … non-citizen voting, you don’t want to consider that in context of whether that person made a mistake, whether a DMV person convinced them they should vote,” she said. Von Spakovsky allowed that not every improper voter should be prosecuted, but insisted that “each ballot they cast takes away the vote of and dilutes the vote of actual citizens who are voting. And that’s —”
The judge interrupted again. “So, the thousands of actual citizens that should be able to vote but who are not because of the system, because of this law, that’s not diluting the vote and that’s not impairing the integrity of the electoral process, I take it?” she said.
Von Spakovsky didn’t engage with the hypothetical. He simply didn’t believe it was happening. “I don’t believe that this requirement prevents individuals who are eligible to register and vote from doing so.” Later, on the stand, he’d tell Ho he couldn’t think of a single law in the country that he felt negatively impacted anyone’s ability to register or vote.
Robinson, in the end, strongly disagreed. As she wrote in her opinion, “the Court finds that the burden imposed on Kansans by this law outweighs the state’s interest in preventing noncitizen voter fraud, keeping accurate voter rolls, and maintaining confidence in elections. The burden is not just on a ‘few voters,’ but on tens of thousands of voters, many of whom were disenfranchised” by Kobach’s law. The law, she concluded, was a bigger problem than the one it set out to solve, acting as a “deterrent to registration and voting for substantially more eligible Kansans than it has prevented ineligible voters from registering to vote.”
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http://www.alternet.org/activism/trump-has-whos-who-vote-suppressors-working-keep-gop-majority-2018
On Wednesday, some of the most notorious Republican voter suppressors will be sworn in by Vice President Mike Pence for the White House’s ludicrously named Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.
“It is hard to imagine a list of people less credible on the issue of the extent of voter fraud in the United States, and who have done more to raise the scourge of voter fraud as a means to advocate for laws to make it harder for people to register and to vote,” wrote Rick Hasen on ElectionLawBlog.org on July 10. “This is not a list meant to inspire bipartisan cooperation on fixing election administration. It is assembling a rogues’ gallery of vote suppression.”
This gallery begin with the panel’s vice-chair, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has worked on limiting voting rights of non-whites almost as long as he has helped white supremacists draft anti-immigrant laws, starting a decade ago in Arizona. His anti-voter obsessions include pushing states to require new voters to submit paper documents proving U.S. citizenship when registering, as opposed to signing an oath under penalty of perjury. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law estimates 7 percent of the electorate doesn’t readily have such paper proof. (In Kansas, he passed this law, disenfranchising tens of thousands.)
Kobach also specializes in using shoddy data mining to try to identify people illegally voting more than once. Actual occurrences of this are so rare—less than one in a million voters—and infinitesimally small compared to the margins that determine who wins and loses. But Kobach’s operations, called the Interstate Crosscheck program, have identified hundreds of thousands of false positives in states like Georgia and North Carolina. That’s allowed Republicans to launch fabricated-but-hyped “voter fraud” investigations, and to not expeditiously process registrations from voter drives from groups tied to known Democratic constituencies.
He’s joined by Hans von Spakovsky, who recently was Heritage Foundation fellow but is most notoriously known for being a Justice Department appointee in the George W. Bush administration who was part of the cabal that fired seven federal prosecutors for failing to prosecute voter fraud. (They didn’t prosecute cases because what they found was so small time it wasn’t worth the government’s while.) Nonetheless, Heritage keeps producing its reports pretending voter fraud is a national scourge, such as this one, which lists 492 cases and 733 convictions of false voter registrations, non-citizen voting, fraudulent use of absentee ballots and duplicate voting from 1984 through 2017. What’s omitted in those fulminations is that’s one case for every 2 million presidential election voters, if you add up the numbers from 1984 to 2016 (approximately 980,000,000 votes).
Then there’s Ohio Republican ex-Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell, who did everything possible in 2004 in Ohio to disadvantage Democrats and ensure Bush’s re-election. Blackwell issued dozens of directives aimed at the fine print of election law to disenfranchise anyone not voting Republican, from requiring voter registration forms be printed on a certain weight paper stock—which was not what grassroots new voter drives were using—to disqualifying ballots if they were turned in at the wrong table in polling places—the so-called right church, wrong pew problem. He also disqualified multi-thousands of ballots and aggressively purged voters in blue epicenters.
There’s also J. Christian Adams, who left the Justice Department early in the Obama years because he said higher-ups would not allow him to go after voter fraud and Black Panthers in Philadelphia who were intimidating white voters. He has been a fixture on the right-wing talk circuit encouraging Tea Party spinoffs like True the Vote to try to recruit polling place vigilantes to challenge the credentials of suspicious-looking voters. He’s also made a career out of suing small counties for failing to maintain their voter lists—saying such bloated and outdated directories could become a conduit for illegal voting.
Now, there are some sober-minded and clear-eyed people on Trump’s commission, such as New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner—who has had that job since the late 1970s, and scoffed when top White House aides like Stephen Miller last winter said the president lost in New Hampshire because busloads of illegal voters came into the state. Former Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap is another reasonable longtime official.
However, nobody should have any illusions about what the Pence-Kobach crew is up to. In a March 28 letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions signed by two-dozen GOP anti-voter activists, including Kobach, Spakovsky and Adams, they laid out the classic Republican agenda of seeking to shrink the electorate outside the GOP’s aging white wealthy base, and make voting harder not easier.
Using the bland language of election lawyers, they sought an end to enforcing civil rights laws and want the federal government to allow states to add additional requirements to receiving a ballot—such as specific state-issued photo ID cards, even though not one state election laws lists such pieces of plastic as a requirement to be an eligible voter. Numerous studies have found restrictive voter ID laws shave two-to-three points off Democratic turnout, with even higher percentages among non-whites. Ending early voting option also reduced turnout.
Their March letter urged a “return to race-neutral Voting Rights Act enforcement,” “an end to politically-driven pursuits against state photo voter identification requirements, citizenship verification in voter registration, and common-sense adjustments to early voting periods,” and “return to enforcing Section 8” of the National Voter Registration Act (or Motor Voter law), which governs voter purges. They ended hyperbolically, declaring, “The American electorate is crying out to see protections against political enforcement of the law.” (As if these suggestions were not political.)
Already, Kobach’s commission—Pence is the titular head—has gotten into hot water by demanding states turn over their statewide voter files within two weeks, including private data that states do not routinely share or in some cases need legislative authority to do so. Dozens of states have balked, but that allowed Trump to tweet that states must be hiding something—these are the same states where he lied that millions voted illegally to yield Hillary Clinton a 2.9 million popular vote majority. They are not hiding anything, but Kobach knows that. It’s all a setup to create a pretext to newly police the process.
While presidential commissions had a long record of producing reports that are put on shelves and only gather dust, this commission could do great harm. That’s because even if Congress fails to adopt anything it suggests, elections are primarily run by the states. There are now red super-majority legislatures in Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Ohio—all states that could rubber stamp anything Kobach suggests to further suppress Democratic voters and preserve their party’s power.
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http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/inside-trumps-bogus-investigation-voter-fraud-lies-gops-long-crusade-keep-people
Rumor has it that even though he seemed to be reacting in response to questions from the press this week, Donald Trump has wanted to launch his “voter fraud” investigation ever since he realized he lost the popular vote by a huge margin — and people inside the administration were desperately trying to talk him out of it. I have no way of knowing whether this is true, but Trump has made it clear since the election that he believes there was massive fraud in November:..[twt cod]For the record, there’s no evidence that systematic voter fraud exists. None. Nonetheless, Trump repeatedly made the claim the election was “rigged” during the campaign, eventually saying that he would accept the election results — if he won. He even lied about that. He won, but he still won’t accept the results.
It's obvious that this obsession with voter fraud in the face of winning an election is another aspect of Trump’s bottomless narcissism. From what he said in his interview with David Muir on ABC, he believes that the problem only exists in places he didn’t win. He told Muir that every one of the alleged 2 million to 3 million illegal votes went to Hillary Clinton. But it’s important to recognize that Trump is felicitously playing into the hands of right-wing operatives who have been working to suppress the votes of Democratic constituencies for years. And they are very excited about this new “investigation.”
One of Trump’s advisers on immigration, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, has reportedly been encouraging Trump to initiate this investigation. He told the Wichita Eagle on Wednesday:
I’ve advised [Trump] on the issue of voter fraud in multiple forms. I’m not the only one, but he’s been very interested in finding ways to reduce voter fraud.
I know that he is interested in investigating the issue on a national scale, but I also know that he would like to see the Justice Department launch specific investigations where there is real serious, specific evidence of voter fraud.
There seems to be a plan to focus this “voter fraud” investigation on the big liberal states and urban areas that do not vote for Republicans. Indeed, this is something the right wing has been trying to do for years and it was that effort that led to one of the greatest political scandals of the George W. Bush administration: the U.S. attorney scandal. You may recall that this was all about trying to force federal prosecutors to pursue phony voter fraud cases in Democratic states, often against Democratic officials. When these prosecutors refused, they were fired and replaced.
I’ve written about Kobach for Salon before, both when he was a somewhat obscure figure in the conservative movement and again when he ascended to the highest levels of national politics. He has two missions in life, and they’re tied together. The first is to suppress the votes of Democrats and the second is to curb immigration. The Republicans see both of these goals as essential to their ability to win in the future since their base of white conservative voters is shrinking. Trump’s motives are simpler, as are his supporters': They believe immigrants and American-born people of color are cheating at the ballot box in order to gain “goodies” from the federal government, at the expense of hardworking real Americans.
But Kobach is not the only person pushing these two interconnected issues. There is an entire political industry devoted to it, from sophisticated election attorney networks like the Republican National Lawyers Association to grassroots organizations like True the Vote. And there are certain “experts” who have been around for a long while, pushing the issue whenever the opportunity presents itself.
One of them is a man with the striking name of Hans von Spakovsky. Those who follow voting issues are very familiar with him from his time in the Bush administration’s Department of Justice voting section, where he worked to undermine the Voting Rights Act and played fast and loose with ethical rules, as amply documented in a piece by Dahlia Lithwick at Slate. Von Spakovsky was serving as a recess appointment to the Federal Election Commission at the time and up for consideration as a permanent member. The Democratic Senate refused to confirm him, and not just because of his ethical lapses. He is a zealous activist for vote suppression all over the country.
He, too, has an attitude that often reveals his underlying motivations. He recently spoke with Breitbart News:
“Their attitude towards any voter fraud prosecutions has always been: if the defendants are black, well, you must be doing it for racist reasons,” he noted. “Remember, we saw that in the New Black Panther story out of Philly in 2008, when Eric Holder came in and immediately dismissed the voter intimidation case against them, despite the overwhelming evidence that the Black Panthers had been intimidating voters and poll watchers. It was dismissed by the Obama Justice Department because they didn’t believe that black defendants should be prosecuted. They don’t believe in the race-neutral enforcement of the voting and election law.”
The New Black Panther case was another cynical attempt by the right wing to turn the tables on Democrats and the Obama administration to show that African-Americans are the real racists. It was absurd but made for good copy and continued to provide cover for conservatives who seemed to see vote fraud in every urban neighborhood where black or brown people lived.
This week von Spakovsky wrote an op-ed for Fox News with fellow voter-fraud obsessive John Fund of the National Review, lauding President Trump for his decision to investigate. They relitigated the tiresome New Black Panther story and accused the Obama-Holder Justice Department of encouraging nonexistent systematic voter fraud by refusing to force states to purge voters from the rolls, quoting the same Pew study that Donald Trump cites as his expert source on the subject. (The author of the study has repeatedly made it clear that he did not find evidence of voter fraud. They keep citing it anyway.) In particular, they cited California as being a hive of fraudulent voter activity that requires federal intervention.
It’s unknown at this point who will be heading Trump’s “investigation” or what form it’s likely to take. (It’s always possible that more rational White House aides can talk the president out of this foolhardy and wasteful boondoggle.) But Kobach is definitely advising him informally and you can be sure von Spakovsky stands ready to help in any way he can, along with dozens of others who have been working on this so-called issue for many years. Their calling is keeping people from voting, and Donald Trump has given these zealots a new lease on life.
Heather Digby Parton
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han s http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435867/climate-change-rico-lawsuits-state-attorneys-generals-private-law-firms-vs-exxon
central to rico GW ctr attack:
han s http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435867/climate-change-rico-lawsuits-state-attorneys-generals-private-law-firms-vs-exxon
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/436163/climate-change-ever-chillier-free-speech
hans s
NS A. VON SPAKOVSKY & TIGER JOYCE
May 26, 2016 4:00 AM State attorneys general hire trial lawyers to stifle climate-science debate. ‘Progressive” government officials have launched an Orwellian effort to outlaw research that dares question the soundness of computer-predicted climate catastrophes or costly policy proposals aimed at mitigating climate change. Much has been written about how this attempt to criminalize inquiry and debate threatens fundamental First Amendment and due process rights. But how they are going about it is equally troubling. Some state attorneys general are hiring profit-seeking, private-sector personal-injury lawyers to do their legal dirty work. Moreover, any contingency fees collected by these lawyers through settlements arising from these cases could be used, in part, to fund the campaigns of allied politicians who embrace the “one, true belief” of man-made global warming. This is more than an attempt to suppress political and scientific dissent. Deputizing self-interested personal-injury lawyers with the awesome power of the state subverts the public interest.
We have seen this unseemly dynamic in action before. Two years ago, a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times series focused on the business model of the class-action specialists at Cohen Milstein, a law firm that seeks to create “big paydays by coaxing attorneys general to sue” large, sometimes politically unpopular corporations or industries. The firm brags about being the “most effective law firm in the United States for lawsuits with a strong social and political component.” Deputizing self-interested personal-injury lawyers with the awesome power of the state subverts the public interest. By e-mail, a Cohen Milstein spokeswoman said the firm did not participate in a then-secret but now widely reported Manhattan meeting of climate-change activists and political operatives in January. But it certainly appears as though the class-action bar’s interests were well represented during the discussions.
A draft agenda for the meeting obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, shows a determination to use their powers to push a political agenda. Among their goals: “To establish in public’s mind that Exxon is a corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos,” and “To drive Exxon and climate into center of 2016 election cycle.” But money is a big motivator as well. Fox News reported that an e-mail from U.S. Virgin Islands attorney general Claude Earl Walker was most enthusiastic about “identifying other potential litigation targets” and ways to “increase our leverage.” An $800 million settlement from Hess Oil Company has apparently only whetted Walker’s appetite for squeezing money out of big oil. And the beauty of this win, he noted, was that the settlement money was used to create an “environmental response trust” — so that they can keep the lawsuits coming. On cue, at a March 29 news conference, New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman announced a newly formed cabal of state AGs that would investigate — and possibly prosecute — corporations that contribute to research organizations whose work expresses skepticism about man-made climate change and the multi-trillion-dollar policy “cures” prescribed by global-warming warriors. The “AGs United for Clean Power,” Schneiderman said, decided to “step into this battle with an unprecedented level of commitment and coordination” against “well-funded, highly aggressive and morally vacant forces that are trying to block every step by the federal government to take meaningful action” against climate change [emphasis ours].
Speaking of morally vacant, where on the moral spectrum might these inquisitors locate the shredding of the Constitution? Do they believe their power to hire political patrons, issue government subpoenas, and impose mounting legal expenses, fines, and settlements on inconvenient climate heretics is divinely derived? Which brings us back to Claude Walker and Cohen Milstein. One of the “AGs United,” Walker hired the firm to investigate possible violations of the Virgin Islands’ version of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) — the statute famously used to prosecute the Mafia in the 1970s. Cohen Milstein’s first act was to unleash subpoenas on ExxonMobil and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, seeking decades’ worth of climate-change research and communications with scores of third-party think tanks, foundations, universities, scientists, and others.
But ExxonMobil and CEI are fighting back. They argue that Walker’s delegation of prosecutorial power to profit-seeking private-sector lawyers and the burdensome subpoena demands violate their constitutional rights to free speech, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, and due process of law. And they’ve gotten a governmental boost of their own. The attorneys general of Alabama and Texas are now seeking to intervene in the case on ExxonMobil’s behalf, arguing that Cohen Milstein’s “contingency fee arrangements [with Walker] cut against the duty of impartiality by giving the attorney that represents the government a financial stake in the outcome.” We can’t know how the courts will ultimately decide these issues. But we do know that pay-to-play relationships between state attorneys general and the plaintiffs’ lawyers they help enrich (and upon whom they then rely for campaign support) are inherently corrupting. Efforts to crush climate-change dissent for political and financial gain is a disgraceful assault on the Constitution — one that should offend every American who cherishes the freedoms enshrined within it. — Hans von Spakovsky is a senior legal fellow at Th Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435867/climate-change-rico-lawsuits-state-attorneys-generals-private-law-firms-vs-exxon
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435867/climate-change-rico-lawsuits-state-attorneys-generals-private-law-firms-vs-exxon
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AN
http://www.alternet.org/environment/exxon-using-tobaccos-failed-free-speech-defense-decades-deception-climate-change
he past week has seen a barrage of opinion pieces carrying water for the fossil fuel industry, defending against the ongoing fraud investigations. The Washington Post had two pieces, Newsweek had one and the Financial Times had an editorial, in addition to op-eds in a couple of other conservative outlets. Of those six, half were penned by groups funded at least in part by fossil fuel companies.
The arguments are all by and large the same, claiming that the investigations infringe on fossil fuels companies’ right to free speech while steadfastly ignoring the fact that ExxonMobil funded climate denial to protect their business model. Only the Financial Times editorial actually acknowledges the “misleading claims from fossil fuel interests and their allies” but concludes that it is “because the stakes [of the debate] are so high that all arguments must be heard.” While that sounds fair at first Glantz, it quickly sounds silly when applied to a recent example: the tobacco industry’s denial of the fact that its carcinogenic product is addictive.
All but one of the pieces similarly ignored the tobacco industry precedent and the only person who mentioned it was one of the few voices not plugged into the professional denial apparatus.
As for the pros, Newsweek ran a blog post from the Hoover Institution, which rambled on about climate science that’s supposedly still uncertain, lamenting that fair debate is impossible if one side can bring the other to court. Not mentioned is how a fair debate can be possible if one side launches multi-million dollar PR campaigns to mislead the public about the science.
Feds Refer Exxon #Climate Investigation to FBI: https://t.co/MS5BfY7PNp via @EcoWatch pic.twitter.com/mBWybUPmVb
— DeSmogBlog (@DeSmogBlog) March 7, 2016
Heritage’s Hans von Spakovsky’s piece in the Washington Times misses the tobacco precedent, but went all the way back to the Spanish Inquisition for his First Amendment fear mongering. George Will used his column in the Washington Post to offer a lesson on how this campaign is part of a larger progressive strategy to shut down debate. But apparently it’s Will that needs a history lesson, as he uses as evidence a story about a 2013 IRS investigation accusing the agency of targeting conservatives. But that investigation “found no evidence” that the IRS actions were politically motivated. No doubt his column is similarly bereft of evidence.
By Sam Kazman and Kent Lassman April 22
Sam Kazman is general counsel and Kent Lassman is president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
With seven state attorneys general and Al Gore sharing a New York City stage , there was no doubt about it: It was showtime for a whodunit. The crime being investigated? Dissent.
The March 29 news conference unveiled, according to New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, an “unprecedented” coalition to fight not only climate change but also allegedly deceptive speech about climate change. The group, which dubbed itself AGs United for Clean Power, promised to “use all the tools at our disposal” to battle for progress on “the most consequential issue of our time.”
Schneiderman was blunt about his goal of shutting down debate: “You have to tell the truth. You can’t make misrepresentations of the kinds we’ve seen here.”
This isn’t a law-and-order drama. It’s politics clothed in messianic garb, and its primary tools are censorship and intimidation.
The AGs are following a familiar script here: target an unpopular, deep-pocketed business, harass that business’s potential allies with overly broad investigations, run roughshod over the target’s First Amendment protections and settle once the politically weakened company tires of fighting the endless resources of the state.
ExxonMobil was singled out by name at the news conference, but the coalition appears to be following the script perfectly. Now it’s on to the fishing-expedition stage.
On April 7, our organization, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, was subpoenaed by coalition member and U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker for all CEI material on climate change and energy policy, as well as information on our supporters, over 10 years beginning in 1997. The subpoena’s purported focus is on our contacts with ExxonMobil, a former CEI donor that publicly ended its support for us after 2005. Nonetheless, the subpoena calls for practically all of our material on climate change and energy policy, as well as information on any donors who directly or indirectly supported that work.[NOTE horner is still foiaing sci right now?]
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That’s one hell of a burden to slap on a nonprofit. The coalition’s purported justification is that the risks of global warming are so important and the scientific basis for them so settled that disputing them constitutes fraud. But the rhetoric of the AGs is blissfully oblivious to the First Amendment.
Court rulings make it clear that broad subpoenas aimed at restricting speech, especially in the context of policy debates, are invalid. Time and again, the Supreme Court has held that the remedy for unwanted speech is more speech in response. The chief law-enforcement officers of several states should know better, but their reaction to a dissenting policy position is punitive, coercive and unconstitutional.
As for breaching donor confidentiality, the obvious aims here are intimidation and to limit future use of the constitutionally protected right of anonymous donation. In 1958, in NAACP v. Patterson, the Supreme Court held that such attempts were illegal under the First Amendment’s right of association.
You might think that if the law is that clear, we have nothing to worry about. But fighting a subpoena is incredibly costly and time-consuming, especially when the attorneys general behind them have promised to “use all the tools” at their disposal, courtesy of their states’ taxpayers.
Regardless of where you stand on global warming policy, the notion of a multi-state campaign to end the debate ought to make you worry. After all, there are many science-driven policy debates out there, on topics ranging from genetically modified food to population control. It is not as if the government has a sterling reputation when it comes to science. From Galileo to today’s food plate, we know government politicizes science. It ought not to punish dissent, too.
Read more on this topic:
Robert J. Samuelson: The war against Exxon Mobil
The Post’s View: 2015: A year of progress and buffoonery on climate change
Sheldon Whitehouse: The fossil-fuel industry’s campaign to mislead the American people
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AN
http://www.alternet.org/environment/exxon-using-tobaccos-failed-free-speech-defense-decades-deception-climate-change
he past week has seen a barrage of opinion pieces carrying water for the fossil fuel industry, defending against the ongoing fraud investigations. The Washington Post had two pieces, Newsweek had one and the Financial Times had an editorial, in addition to op-eds in a couple of other conservative outlets. Of those six, half were penned by groups funded at least in part by fossil fuel companies.
The arguments are all by and large the same, claiming that the investigations infringe on fossil fuels companies’ right to free speech while steadfastly ignoring the fact that ExxonMobil funded climate denial to protect their business model. Only the Financial Times editorial actually acknowledges the “misleading claims from fossil fuel interests and their allies” but concludes that it is “because the stakes [of the debate] are so high that all arguments must be heard.” While that sounds fair at first Glantz, it quickly sounds silly when applied to a recent example: the tobacco industry’s denial of the fact that its carcinogenic product is addictive.
All but one of the pieces similarly ignored the tobacco industry precedent and the only person who mentioned it was one of the few voices not plugged into the professional denial apparatus.
As for the pros, Newsweek ran a blog post from the Hoover Institution, which rambled on about climate science that’s supposedly still uncertain, lamenting that fair debate is impossible if one side can bring the other to court. Not mentioned is how a fair debate can be possible if one side launches multi-million dollar PR campaigns to mislead the public about the science.
Feds Refer Exxon #Climate Investigation to FBI: https://t.co/MS5BfY7PNp via @EcoWatch pic.twitter.com/mBWybUPmVb
— DeSmogBlog (@DeSmogBlog) March 7, 2016
Heritage’s Hans von Spakovsky’s piece in the Washington Times misses the tobacco precedent, but went all the way back to the Spanish Inquisition for his First Amendment fear mongering. George Will used his column in the Washington Post to offer a lesson on how this campaign is part of a larger progressive strategy to shut down debate. But apparently it’s Will that needs a history lesson, as he uses as evidence a story about a 2013 IRS investigation accusing the agency of targeting conservatives. But that investigation “found no evidence” that the IRS actions were politically motivated. No doubt his column is similarly bereft of evidence.
The Washington Post also gave space to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) to defend itself by pretending it is being investigated for political dissent, not its years of Exxon funding for climate denial. Worth noting CEI’s careful phrasing about its relationship with Exxon, which CEI says “publicly ended its support for us after 2005.” With Donors Trust and others making it possible to anonymize giving, the key word is “publicly.”
Ironically, despite the admission that its Exxon funding is a perfectly legitimate reason to look into its communications, CEI considers its subpoena to be a fishing expedition. Meanwhile, CEI’s own coal-funded Chris Horner continues to engage in nuisance FOIAs for climate scientists.
Exxon’s defense is a hot topic in denierland, as it advances the narrative that the fossil fuel industry is an embattled population facing government persecution. But here’s a reality check: Before Honduran activist Berta Cáceres was murdered on March 2, she reported receiving 33 death threats after years of intimidation. Instead of investigating a man who had previously bragged about his plans to murder her, authorities claim the prime suspects are two of her fellow activists.
Heartbreaking! @GoldmanPrize Activist Berta Cáceres Murdered in Honduras https://t.co/Zj97cmwQi3 @FoEint @greenpeace pic.twitter.com/tAujvEGtMR
— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch) March 3, 2016
Looks like the fossil fuel industry isn’t the one facing persecution after all.
The Voter-Fraud Myth
The man who has stoked fear about impostors at the polls.
by Jane Mayer October 29, 2012
Teresa Sharp is fifty-three years old and has lived in a modest single-family house on Millsdale Street, in a suburb of Cincinnati, for nearly thirty-three years. A lifelong Democrat, she has voted in every Presidential election since she turned eighteen. So she was agitated when an official summons from the Hamilton County Board of Elections arrived in the mail last month. Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, is one of the most populous regions of the most fiercely contested state in the 2012 election. No Republican candidate has ever won the Presidency without carrying Ohio, and recent polls show Barack Obama and Mitt Romney almost even in the state. Every vote may matter, including those cast by the seven members of the Sharp family—Teresa, her husband, four grown children, and an elderly aunt—living in the Millsdale Street house.
The letter, which cited arcane legal statutes and was printed on government letterhead, was dated September 4th. “You are hereby notified that your right to vote has been challenged by a qualified elector,” it said. “The Hamilton County Board of Elections has scheduled a hearing regarding your right to vote on Monday, September 10th, 2012, at 8:30 A.M. . . . You have the right to appear and testify, call witnesses and be represented by counsel.”
“My first thought was, Oh, no!” Sharp, who is African-American, said. “They ain’t messing with us poor black folks! Who is challenging my right to vote?”
The answer to Sharp’s question is that a new watchdog group, the Ohio Voter Integrity Project, which polices voter-registration rolls in search of “electoral irregularities,” raised questions about her eligibility after consulting a government-compiled list of local properties and mistakenly identifying her house as a vacant lot.
The Sharp household had first been identified as suspicious by computer software that had been provided to the Ohio Voter Integrity Project by a national organization called True the Vote. The software, which has been distributed to similar groups around the country, is used to flag certain households, including those with six or more registered voters. This approach inevitably pinpoints many lower-income residents, students, and extended families.
True the Vote, which was founded in 2009 and is based in Houston, describes itself as a nonprofit organization, created “by citizens for citizens,” that aims to protect “the rights of legitimate voters, regardless of their political party.” Although the group has a spontaneous grassroots aura, it was founded by a local Tea Party activist, Catherine Engelbrecht, and from the start it has received guidance from intensely partisan election lawyers and political operatives, who have spent years stoking fear about election fraud. This cohort—which Roll Call has called the “voter fraud brain trust”—has filed lawsuits, released studies, testified before Congress, and written op-ed columns and books. Since 2011, the effort has spurred legislative initiatives in thirty-seven states to require photo identification to vote.
Engelbrecht has received especially valuable counsel from one member of the group: Hans von Spakovsky. A Republican lawyer who served in the Bush Administration, he is now a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank. “Hans is very, very helpful,” Engelbrecht said. “He’s one of the senior advisers on our advisory council.” Von Spakovsky, who frequently appears on Fox News, is the co-author, with the columnist John Fund, of the recent book “Who’s Counting?,” which argues that America is facing an electoral-security crisis. “Election fraud, whether it’s phony voter registrations, illegal absentee ballots, vote-buying, shady recounts, or old-fashioned ballot-box stuffing, can be found in every part of the United States,” they write. The book connects these modern threats with sordid episodes from the American past: crooked inner-city machines, corrupt black bosses in the Deep South. Von Spakovsky and Fund conclude that electoral fraud is a “spreading” danger, and declare that True the Vote serves “an obvious need.”
Mainstream election experts say that Spakovsky has had an improbably large impact. Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine, and the author of a recent book, “The Voting Wars,” says, “Before 2000, there were some rumblings about Democratic voter fraud, but it really wasn’t part of the main discourse. But thanks to von Spakovsky and the flame-fanning of a few others, the myth that Democratic voter fraud is common, and that it helps Democrats win elections, has become part of the Republican orthodoxy.” In December, Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, wrote, “Election fraud is a real and persistent threat to our electoral system.” He accused Democrats of “standing up for potential fraud—presumably because ending it would disenfranchise at least two of its core constituencies: the deceased and double-voters.” Hasen believes that Democrats, for their part, have made exaggerated claims about the number of voters who may be disenfranchised by Republican election-security measures. But he regards the conservative alarmists as more successful. “Their job is really done,” Hasen says. “It’s common now to assert that there is a need for voter I.D.s, even without any evidence.”
In Hamilton County alone, the new citizens’ groups have challenged more than a thousand names since March. Some challenges, such as those aiming to disqualify college students who failed to include their dorm-room numbers on their registration forms, were tossed out immediately. But the board accepted nearly two hundred challenges, including those to twenty-six voters registered at a trailer park that no longer existed.
In Ohio, if voters whose eligibility has been challenged come to the polls in November, they may be forced to use a provisional ballot, which will be counted only if officials sanction it—after Election Day. Some experts worry that voters who have been needlessly challenged will feel too intimidated even to show up. “People have other things to do with their lives than respond to inaccurate complaints accusing them of being criminals,” Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said.
Alex Triantafilou, a Republican member of the county’s Board of Elections, maintains that the challenges have been nonpartisan. But Caleb Faux, a Democrat on the board, says, “I don’t buy it. The True the Vote people are clearly going after Democratic voters: African-Americans, students, and other groups they think are likely to vote Democratic.”
Von Spakovsky recently sat down with me in a conference room at the Heritage Foundation, wearing rimless eyeglasses and a sports jacket with a crisp white pocket square. In our conversation, and in later phone calls and e-mails, he expressed himself with lawyerly reserve. He said of True the Vote and its affiliates, “They’re doing a great job.” Earlier this year, he noted, the Pew Center on the States found that more than 1.8 million people who had died were still registered to vote in America, and that 2.75 million people were registered to vote in multiple states. How many of these errors translate into fraudulent votes? “It is impossible to answer,” he said. “We don’t have the tools in place.” But he cited a 2000 investigation, by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, of voting records in Georgia over the previous two decades; the paper reported that it had turned up fifty-four hundred instances of dead people being recorded as having voted. “That seems pretty substantial to me,” he said.
He did not mention that the article’s findings were later revised. The Journal-Constitution ran a follow-up article after the Georgia Secretary of State’s office indicated that the vast majority of the cases appeared to reflect clerical errors. Upon closer inspection, the paper admitted, its only specific example of a deceased voter casting a ballot didn’t hold up. The ballot of a living voter had been attributed to a dead man whose name was nearly identical.
On the appointed day this fall, Teresa Sharp drove to Cincinnati and appeared before the Board of Elections. Dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, and accompanied by six family members, Sharp moved to the front of the room when her name was called. She then “slammed her purse and papers on the table,” according to Faux, who was present.
Sharp told me, “It was like a kangaroo court. There were, like, ninety-four people being challenged, and my family and I were the only ones contesting it! I looked around. The board members and the stenographer, they were all white people. The lady bringing these challenges, she was white, and reminded me of Gladys Kravitz”—the nosy neighbor on the sitcom “Bewitched.”
When Sharp heard her house described as a vacant lot, and learned that Marlene Kocher—the member of the Ohio Voter Integrity Project who had filed the challenge against her—had not bothered to visit her address, she exploded. “This lady has nothing else better to do?” she said. “I think she needs to get a life!”
Faux recalled that Kocher “apologized and kind of shrunk back.”
“We made a mistake,” Mary Siegel, a leader of the Ohio Voter Integrity Project, who has been involved in a local Tea Party group, told me. “We’re just here to protect the voter. We have no idea when we look at the registrations what color or creed or party you are. We just look at where your property is and how many people are living there.”
Sharp said, “I think they want to stop as many black people as they can from voting. I won’t even know until Election Day if I got the right to vote. But if they tell me I can’t vote—it is over. They are going to have to call the police. I am going to jail!”
At the Heritage Foundation, von Spakovsky emphasized that his devotion to safeguarding voter integrity had nothing to do with racial discrimination or partisan gain: “I’m not in this because I’m on a team. I believe in having fair elections, and I would never be willing to do anything that would encourage or allow cheating in an election. My interest is in making sure that the person who people vote for the most wins.”
Yet many Democrats see his cause as a voter-suppression effort in disguise. Thirty-three states have passed some form of voter-I.D. law, the most severe versions of which demand government-issued cards with photographs and expiration dates. A driver’s license typically qualifies, but many students, elderly people, and poor urban residents do not have one.
According to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal nonprofit institute at N.Y.U. Law School, eleven per cent of the voting-age population lacks the kind of I.D. cards required by the strictest states. Eighteen per cent of Americans over the age of sixty-five do not have such documentation; among African-Americans the figure is twenty-five per cent. Von Spakovsky criticized the study for focussing not on registered voters but on all Americans who are eligible to vote. He cites rival studies indicating that the number of registered voters without I.D.s is negligible.
The vast majority of the lawmakers who have pushed for voter I.D.s have been Republicans. As Bill Clinton has put it, “This is not rocket science. They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate”—when many young and minority voters stayed home—“than the 2008 electorate.” Clinton said that the “effort to limit the franchise” was the most determined “since we got rid of the poll tax and all the other Jim Crow burdens on voting.”
Republicans who support tighter voter security say that they are not seeking political advantage. But last summer Pennsylvania’s Republican House Leader, Mike Turzai, was caught on tape boasting to colleagues that the state’s new I.D. law was “going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” Earlier this month, a state judge suspended the controversial law’s implementation until after the 2012 election; a federal court has done the same with South Carolina’s new I.D. law.
Congressman John Lewis, the Democrat from Georgia, says of recent efforts to tighten voting requirements, “I thought we’d passed this long ago. But it seems we must fight this fight over and over.” In the nineteen-sixties, Lewis was beaten by police while demonstrating in support of civil-rights legislation, including the Voting Rights Act. He said of von Spakovsky, “He’s been the moving force behind photo I.D.s. I don’t know if it’s something in the water he’s been drinking . . . but over the years he’s been hellbent to make it more difficult—always, always—for people to vote. It’s like he goes to bed dreaming about this, and gets up in the morning wondering, What can I do today to make it more difficult for people to vote? When you pull back the covers, peel back the onion, he’s the one who’s gotten the Republican legislatures, and the Republican Party, to go along with this—even though there is no voter fraud to speak of. He’s trying to create a cure where there is no sickness.”
Earlier this year, at a panel sponsored by the conservative organization Judicial Watch, von Spakovsky said that it was “preposterous” for anyone to liken the nationwide crackdown on voter irregularities to “the restoration of Jim Crow.” In support of his views, he cites a liberal icon: the former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. In 2008, Stevens helped uphold Indiana’s strict voter-I.D. law in the face of a challenge from Democrats. He wrote, “Examples of such fraud in other parts of the country have been documented throughout this Nation’s history by respected historians and journalists,” demonstrating “that not only is the risk of voter fraud real but that it could affect the outcome of a close election.”
Nearly all scholars of America’s system of locally run elections acknowledge chronic problems, including administrative incompetence, sloppy registration rolls, unreliable machinery, vote buying, and absentee-ballot fraud. But Robert Brandon, the president of the Fair Elections Legal Network and a longtime reformer, says that the current debate, “which is about people impersonating another voter, is silly.” He adds, “You can’t steal an election one person at a time. You can by stuffing ballot boxes—but voter I.D.s won’t stop that.”
Von Spakovsky offered me the names of two experts who, he said, would confirm that voter-impersonation fraud posed a significant peril: Robert Pastor, the director of the Center for Democracy and Election Management, at American University, and Larry Sabato, a political-science professor at the University of Virginia. Pastor, von Spakovsky noted, had spoken to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights about being a victim of election fraud: voting in Georgia, he discovered that someone else had already voted under his name.
When I reached Pastor, he clarified what had happened to him. “I think they just mistakenly checked my name when my son voted—it was just a mistake.” He added, “I don’t think that voter-impersonation fraud is a serious problem.” Pastor believes that, compared with other democracies, America is “somewhere near the bottom in election administration,” and thinks that voter I.D.s make sense—but only if they are free and easily available to all, which, he points out, is not what Republican legislatures have proposed. Sabato, who supports the use of voter I.D.s under the same basic conditions, says of the voter-impersonation question, “One fraudulent vote is one too many, but my sense is that it’s relatively rare today.”
Hasen says that, while researching “The Voting Wars,” he “tried to find a single case” since 1980 when “an election outcome could plausibly have turned on voter-impersonation fraud.” He couldn’t find one. News21, an investigative-journalism group, has reported that voter impersonation at the polls is a “virtually non-existent” problem. After conducting an exhaustive analysis of election-crime prosecutions since 2000, it identified only seven convictions for impersonation fraud. None of those cases involved conspiracy.
Lorraine Minnite, a public-policy professor at Rutgers, collated decades of electoral data for her 2010 book, “The Myth of Voter Fraud,” and came up with some striking statistics. In 2005, for example, the federal government charged many more Americans with violating migratory-bird statutes than with perpetrating election fraud, which has long been a felony. She told me, “It makes no sense for individual voters to impersonate someone. It’s like committing a felony at the police station, with virtually no chance of affecting the election outcome.” A report by the Times in 2007 also found election fraud to be rare. During the Bush Administration, the Justice Department initiated a five-year crackdown on voter fraud, but only eighty-six people were convicted of any kind of election crime.
Hasen, who calls von Spakovsky a leading member of “the Fraudulent Fraud Squad,” told me that he respects many other conservative advocates in his area of expertise, but dismisses scholars who allege widespread voter-impersonation fraud. “I see them as foot soldiers in the Republican army,” he says. “It’s just a way to excite the base. They are hucksters. They’re providing fake scholarly support. They’re not playing fairly with the facts. And I think they know it.”
Von Spakovsky is the son of a German mother and a Russian father who met in Bavaria, just after the Second World War, at an American-run camp for displaced persons. They immigrated to the United States in 1951. His father, Anatol, was a White Russian who fought Communism twice: first against the Bolsheviks, in Russia, and later against Tito, in Yugoslavia, where he lived before heading to Bavaria. “He escaped death many times,” von Spakovsky recalled. “He taught me to stand up for what I believe in, no matter what the cost, and I have taken that to heart.” Von Spakovsky says that his heritage has made him especially appreciative of American democracy and sensitive to what he calls its “fragility.”
In America, his parents settled in Huntsville, Alabama, where his father taught philosophy at a local college and wrote poetry. “He was the most intelligent and cultured person I have ever known,” von Spakovsky said, adding that family dinners were more stimulating than the local schools he attended. Although the civil-rights movement created tumult in Alabama during his childhood, he says that he has no memory of it.
After graduating from M.I.T. and Vanderbilt Law School, von Spakovsky became the in-house counsel at a life-insurance company in Atlanta, and volunteered to become a Republican poll watcher at an inner-city housing project. “I was expecting a very boring day,” he says. Instead, he observed election officials asking voters which party they belonged to, “which, of course, you’re not supposed to do in a general election. So the very first time I’m a poll watcher, I walk in and something illegal is going on.”
It was 1992, a turning point in American election law. Throughout the nineteen-eighties, civil-rights groups brought discrimination cases against local election officials, particularly in the South, alleging that bureaucratic barriers—such as requiring people to register at local clerks’ offices—served mainly to intimidate new voters, many of whom were minorities. Voting-rights activists pushed for national legislation that would encourage mass enfranchisement, such as permitting people to register when they got a driver’s license, or to register by mail. Congress passed a bill with these provisions, but President George H. W. Bush vetoed it. Soon after Bill Clinton took office, in 1993, he signed the bill, which became the National Voter Registration Act—also known as the motor-voter law. As minority-voter registration surged, conservatives began warning that permitting more lenient forms of registration opened the door to fraud.
In 1997, von Spakovsky agitated against the National Voter Registration Act and in favor of strict requirements, including the presentation of birth certificates, for voter I.D.s, in order “to prevent impostors from voting.” He became a Republican appointee to an election board in the Atlanta area, which had a fast-growing, increasingly black population. Writing for the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a conservative research center, he warned that aspects of the National Voter Registration Act might “destroy the security and integrity of the voter-registration system.” The article also recommended regular purges of voter rolls.
By 1999, von Spakovsky had begun attracting national attention. He was the chairman of the Fulton County Republican Party, and served on the advisory board of the Voting Integrity Project, or V.I.P.—a new group, based in Arlington, Virginia. V.I.P. called itself a nonpartisan election-reform group, but it had deep ties to the Republican Party and to the national conservative movement. One of its founders, Helen Blackwell, was married to Morton Blackwell, a former Reagan aide and the founder of the Leadership Institute, an organization that trains ultra-conservative young activists. (In 2009, one of them, the guerrilla videographer James O’Keefe, took undercover footage meant to suggest pervasive criminality at ACORN, the progressive nonprofit group, some of whose employees had pleaded guilty to voter-registration fraud. Although the footage was widely condemned as misleading, the controversy helped lead to ACORN’s demise.)
V.I.P. embraced von Spakovsky’s call for voter-roll purges. In 1999, the group met with and gave an award for “innovative excellence” to a company called Database Technologies, which was designing the State of Florida’s procedure for scrubbing its voter rolls of felons and other ineligible people. In 2000, Database’s process led, notoriously, to the erroneous disenfranchisement of thousands of voters—most of them Democrats and many of them black. Asked about this, von Spakovsky said, heatedly, “I was in Atlanta, and I had nothing to do with the company that Florida hired to clean up its election rolls.”
Von Spakovsky did, however, get directly involved in the infamous recount of the Presidential vote in Florida. Serving as a volunteer observer for the campaign of George W. Bush, he spent time in Jacksonville, where black leaders protested that their voting rights had been denied, and in Palm Beach County, where twenty-eight thousand ballots went uncounted, because examiners concluded that they had not been filled out properly. According to the Palm Beach Post, nearly half of those discarded ballots came from predominantly black and elderly precincts. Von Spakovsky, for his part, recalled the drama on the ground as less than thrilling: “It was a lesson in how really boring vote counting can be.”
After the recount trauma, the Bush Administration announced its crackdown on election fraud, and hired von Spakovsky as a lawyer in the Justice Department’s newly invigorated voting section, which enforces the Voting Rights Act. He was soon promoted, becoming counsel to the assistant attorney general in charge of the civil-rights division.
The crackdown was infused with partisanship. In 2006, the Justice Department fired two U.S. Attorneys, in part because top Administration officials felt that they were too soft on potential Democratic voter fraud in New Mexico and Washington. In 2008, documents unearthed by an inspector general revealed that the push to prosecute had as much to do with political gain as with the pursuit of justice. Republican officials in New Mexico pressured David Iglesias, the U.S. Attorney for the state, to prosecute Democrats before the 2004 election. A lawyer for the state Republican Party wrote that the voter-I.D. “issue should be used (now) at all levels,” adding, “You are not going to find a better wedge issue.” But an election-fraud task force that Iglesias formed with the F.B.I. found no crimes to prosecute. Because of his failure to find fraud, the inspector general concluded, Iglesias was fired. (He is now a prosecutor in Guantánamo Bay.) John McKay, the U.S. Attorney in Washington State, was also fired after failing to find prosecutable voter fraud.
In 2006, President Bush appointed von Spakovsky to the Federal Election Commission while the Senate was in recess. When he came up for confirmation, six career lawyers in the voting section wrote a scathing letter of protest, saying that he had a “cavalier” disregard for legal precedent. They noted that a federal court had struck down Washington State’s attempt to implement his recommendation that eligible citizens be kept “off the rolls for typos and other mistakes by election officials.” They accused von Spakovsky of overruling their judgment that a strict voter-I.D. law in Georgia would result in substantially fewer black voters, and of using a pseudonym to publish an essay in support of voter-I.D. laws while the department was weighing the case. A judge in Georgia struck down the law, likening it to a poll tax. (After considerable modifications, the law was authorized.)
Joe Rich, the former chief of the voting section, repeatedly clashed with von Spakovsky and his allies. “I worked at the Justice Department for thirty-six years, twenty-four of them under Republican Administrations,” Rich told me. “The disdain and antagonism that they had for the experience, expertise, and dedication of career civil-rights attorneys was something I had never experienced before. It was just awful.”
Among the lawmakers who spoke out against von Spakovsky’s appointment to the F.E.C. was Barack Obama, then a Democratic senator from Illinois. He put a hold on the confirmation, effectively blocking it. After two years in limbo, von Spakovsky withdrew his name from consideration, and joined the Heritage Foundation, where he continued to inveigh against voter fraud.
In the spring of 2008, as Obama was clinching the Democratic nomination for President, von Spakovsky issued a lengthy report on electoral fraud, titled “Stolen Identities, Stolen Votes.” In an op-ed piece on the Fox News Web site, he argued that “one doesn’t have to look far to find instances of fraudulent ballots cast in actual elections by ‘voters’ who were the figments of active imaginations.” Yet the most recent evidence he cited in his report was decades old: a grand-jury report documenting criminal collusion, from 1968 to 1982, among Brooklyn election officials and local machine politicians.
Richard Hasen asked to see the grand-jury report, but von Spakovsky did not respond. (“What am I—his research assistant?” he asked me.) Hasen has another explanation for von Spakovsky’s refusal to produce the document: “He must have known it was weak.” Hasen eventually hunted down his own copy. On his blog, he observed, “Most of this fraud took place forty years ago,” adding, “When election officials collude with those committing fraud, a voter-I.D. requirement would not help in the slightest.” Asked about this, von Spakovsky said, “That’s not what the grand jury said. They recommended voter I.D.s.” The report recommends nine specific procedural changes to help prevent corrupt behavior by election officials, but says of voter identification only that it should be studied as one of several “possible remedies.”
The election of 2008 was a milestone in terms of turnout. The percentage of African-Americans who voted (sixty-five) rivalled the percentage of whites who voted (sixty-six). Penda Hair, the co-director of the Advancement Project, a progressive voting-rights advocacy group, says that this statistic discomfited Republicans. “Conservatives were looking at it and saying, ‘We’ve got to clamp things down,’ ” Hair said. “They’d always tried to suppress the black vote, but it was then that they came up with new schemes.”
After Obama took office, von Spakovsky expanded his campaign for voter-I.D. laws and other ballot-security measures. One receptive forum, where he spoke repeatedly, was the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC—a conservative, corporate-funded group that drafts legislative models for thousands of state lawmakers. In 2009, after the Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s voter-I.D. law, ALEC drafted a sample voter-I.D. bill for other states to copy. An accompanying essay in the organization’s newsletter explained how to frame such restrictions so that they would pass muster with the courts. Copycat bills emerged in state legislatures across the country. In 2011 and 2012, Republicans proposed sixty-two such laws, in thirty-seven state legislatures. News21 has reported that more than half of these bills were sponsored by associates of ALEC. Lisa Graves, the executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, which runs a Web site called ALEC Exposed, says, “Unlike a think tank, ALEC operationalizes the agenda, nationally.”
Von Spakovsky said, “The idea that there’s some deep conspiracy is just laughable.” His own work, however, has suggested that liberals engage in conspiracies. “Who’s Counting?” opens with an insinuating account of how Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat, was elected to the Senate in 2008. According to the book, there is “compelling” evidence, compiled by a citizens’ watchdog group, that “1,099 ineligible felons voted illegally” in the contest—“more than three times” Franken’s victory margin. The subhead of the chapter is “Would Obamacare have passed without voter fraud?”
Fox News and other conservative media outlets have promoted this argument. However, Mike Freeman, the Hennepin County Attorney, who oversees Minneapolis, told me, “Those numbers are fraudulent. We investigated, and at the end of the day, out of over four hundred allegations in the county, we charged thirty-eight people. Their research was bad, sloppy, incredible. They are just liars.” Some of the targeted voters weren’t actually felons; others were on probation and hadn’t realized that they remained ineligible to vote. To be convicted of voter fraud, a suspect needs to have criminal intent.
Von Spakovsky told me, “It doesn’t matter whether they”—the felons—“intended it or not. The point is they did vote.” The subject of electoral fraud is now front and center in Minnesota: in November, the state will have a referendum on a state voter-I.D. law.
Von Spakovsky has also presented a more recent case as a scandal. Last year, in an op-ed piece that was nationally syndicated, he wrote, “A 2010 election in Missouri that ended in a one-vote margin of victory included 50 votes cast illegally by citizens of Somalia.” He told me that these voters “could only speak Somali, even though to become a U.S. citizen you must learn English.” Once again, when the case was examined by a judge, no fraud was found. Although the judge’s ruling had been issued before the column appeared, von Spakovsky didn’t mention it. He told me that the omission was justified, because the judge hadn’t investigated “the citizenship issue.” Yet the voters’ citizenship was never in doubt. Translation assistance is available at the polls—citizens sometimes have shaky English—and the court had found merely that election officials had not made the voters take an oath before receiving help, as state law required. The judge determined that such a mistake “should not result in the disenfranchisement of the voters.”
With legions of citizen watchdogs on the lookout for fraud, voters confused about the documents necessary to vote, and the country almost evenly divided politically, von Spakovsky is predicting that November 6th could be even more chaotic than the 2000 elections. He will play a direct role in Virginia, a swing state, where he is the vice-chairman of the electoral board of Fairfax County. Joining us at the conference table at the Heritage Foundation, John Fund, von Spakovsky’s co-author, told me, “If it’s close this time, I think we’re going to have three or four Floridas.” Von Spakovsky shook his head and said, “If we’re lucky only three or four.” If there are states where the number of provisional ballots cast exceeds the margin of victory, he predicts, “there will probably be horrendous fights, and litigation between the lawyers that will make the fights over hanging chads look minor by comparison.” Pursing his lips, he added, “I hope it doesn’t happen.” But, if it does, no one will be more ready for the fight. ♦
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/29/121029fa_fact_mayer?printable=true&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+trblogposts+%28Hottest+blogosphere+items%29
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von Spakovsky, a Heritage Foundation fellow, last week argued that the Supreme Court should count the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's votes in cases in which the justices have already cast preliminary votes.
During an interview with American Family Radio’s Sandy Rios, von Spakovsky noted that after hearing oral arguments, the justices meet and cast votes in the case before writing the decision.
"So that’s the point at which they know how a case is going to be decided and the chief justice then makes assignments of who will write the majority opinion etc.," von Spakovsky said, according to audio posted by Right Wing Watch. "I think the chief justice has an absolute obligation to give credit to Scalia’s vote in those cases that have already been decided, even if he didn’t write his opinion yet, because they know how he would have voted."
Von Spakovsky is a former Bush administration official known for stoking unfounded fears of widespread voter fraud. He served in the Justice Department under former President George W. Bush, but his appointment to the Federal elections Commission was derailed by Senate Democrats in 2008.
He gave the example of Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a case challenging teacher's unions ability to charge non-members "agency fees," which are used to fund collective bargaining for employees.
"That case was argued on January 11, so they know how Justice Scalia cast his vote in that case and I think the chief justice should give credit to it," von Spakovsky said.
He is not alone in this theory. Arizona attorney Kory Langhofer on Sunday argued that Scalia's preliminary votes in cases already heard by the Supreme Court should count.
Hans von Spakovsky - Heritage Foundation
www.heritage.org/about/staff/v/hans-von-spakovsky The Heritage Foundation
Hans A. von Spakovsky is a Manager, Election Law Reform Initiative and Senior Legal Fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
Hans von Spakovsky - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_von_Spakovsky Wikipedia
Hans Anatol von Spakovsky (born March 11, 1959) is an American attorney and a former member of the Federal Election Commission (FEC). He was nominated ...
Early career · Justice Department tenure · Federal Election Commission
Hans von Spakovsky, Author at The Daily Signal
dailysignal.com/author/hansvonspakovsky/
Hans von Spakovsky is an authority on a wide range of issues—including civil rights, civil justice, the First Amendment, immigration, the rule of law and ...
Hans A. von Spakovsky Archive - National Review Online | National ...
www.nationalreview.com/author/hans-von-spakovsky National Review
Prior to entering public service, Hans von Spakovsky worked for 17 years as a government affairs consultant, in a corporate legal department, and in private ...
Hans von Spakovsky (@HvonSpakovsky) | Twitter
https://twitter.com/hvonspakovsky
1166 tweets • 3 photos/videos • 2623 followers. "Latest Assault on Religious Freedom: Illinois Abortion Bill Restricts Doctors & May Violate Federal Law ...
Hans A. von Spakovsky - PJ Media
https://pjmedia.com/columnist/hans-a-von-spakovsky/ PJ Media
Hans A. von Spakovsky is a Senior Legal Fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Along with John Fund, he is the coauthor of “Who's Counting? How Fraudsters and ...
The Voter-Fraud Myth - The New Yorker
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/29/the-voter-fraud-myth The New Yorker
Oct 29, 2012 - Hans von Spakovsky, a Republican lawyer who served in the Bush ... Von Spakovskyand Fund conclude that electoral fraud is a “spreading” ...
Hans Von Spakovsky: 'Obligation' To Count Scalia's Vote In Pending ...
talkingpointsmemo.com/.../hans-von-spakovsky-count-scalia-vo... Talking Points Memo
Feb 24, 2016 - Hans von Spakovsky, a Heritage Foundation fellow, last week argued that the Supreme Court should count the late Supreme Court Justice ...
Hans von Spakovsky | Fox News
www.foxnews.com/archive/hans-von-spakovsky Fox News Channel
Hans A. von Spakovsky is a former Justice Department official. He is the co-author, with John Fund of "Obama's Enforcer: Eric Holder's Justice Department" ...
Hans von Spakovsky | Media Matters for America
mediamatters.org/people/hans-von-spakovsky Media Matters for America
Hans von Spakovsky has been featured on Fox News and on National Review Online for years, demonstrating an unending willingness to distort the truth in the ...
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