SWING STATES

see tag

SOME ARE RED STATES?

see xian nat ziklag infiltration poll watch offical purge voter rolls eagleAI

superpac dark $ for last minute neg ads (and trad direct mail?) target swing states? eg preserve am chris swift boat lacivita

rww Rolling Stone: These Swing State Election Officials Are Pro-Trump Election Deniers

At least 70 pro-Trump conspiracists are election officials in key battleground counties — and they are poised to make a giant mess on Election Day.

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AN 10 26

Trump’s budget rips nearly $3 billion from swing state’s coffers

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AN 10 25

Devastating poll shows Trump 'underwater' in all 7 swing states he won

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an 11 24

Democrats may have lost the White House and their U.S. Senate majority, but one silver lining is that in nearly every battleground state, Republicans lost close Senate races.

According to USA TODAY, almost all of the Senate races in the states that decided the Electoral College majority — like Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — broke for Democrats. The lone exception is Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pennsylvania), with the Associated Press (AP) calling the race for Republican Dave McCormick. This may change, however, as NBC News has yet to call the race and Casey has yet to officially concede. With 126,000 more votes that have yet to be counted, Casey is only behind McCormick by 41,000 ballots.

While the AP has yet to call the Arizona Senate race, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona) currently leads Republican Kari Lake by roughly 30,000 votes. There are roughly 622,000 more outstanding ballots remaining. The bulk of those votes are in reliably Democratic Maricopa County, which houses Phoenix.

Some of the marquee Senate races that ended up in Democrats' favor include Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Michigan) defeating former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Michigan) in the Mitten State, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) winning a third six-year term over Republican businessman Eric Hovde in the Badger State and Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nevada) prevailing over Republican Sam Brown.

While red-state Democrats like Sens. Sherrod Brown (R-Ohio) and Jon Tester (D-Montana) lost their reelection battles, they still outperformed Vice President Kamala Harris by eight percentage points and 13 percentage points, respectively. And control of the House of Representatives still has yet to be determined, with neither party currently clinching the 218 seats needed for a majority in the lower chamber of Congress.

Democrats' strong performance in down-ballot races is particularly surprising given that President-elect Donald Trump swept Vice President Kamala Harris in almost all of those states (Arizona ballots are still being counted, but Trump is ahead). USA TODAY reported that even though Senate races are for federal office, voters often split tickets as they feel more personally connected to Senate candidates given their strong relationship with their home states.

"[V]oters in some places are making real distinctions to say this is not somebody who is aligned with Trump or represents him in the same way, or this is someone who has the state’s interest in mind in a way that other candidates don’t,” University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Barry Burden told the paper. “And that really is a different story from one state to the next.”

Democratic Senate candidates' success could also be chalked up to candidates staking out their own positions independent from President Joe Biden, whose popularity rating has been underwater for several years. While Gallego touted his positions on border security, Slotkin emphasized her pro-manufacturing industry positions, Rosen talked up her work with Republicans to improve Nevada's infrastructure and Baldwin embraced Wisconsin's farmers.

"[Swing state voters are] much more responsive to who the individuals are and to their performance in office and much less susceptible to the Washington style of defining politics," Burden said. He described voters who split their tickets between both parties as "more casual voters," though he observed that "they end up being the ones who make a big difference."

Click here to read USA TODAY's article in its entirety.

READ MORE:[Kari Lake gave election-denying speech in front of Confederate flag

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an 8 24

Many Democratic strategists and organizers have been warning that in the 2024 presidential race, they are not only fighting a policy battle, but also a legal battle — as they expect GOP nominee Donald Trump and his allies to fight the election results if Vice President Kamala Harris wins. And Democratic attorneys are anticipating a range of MAGA lawsuits.

The Wall Street Journal's Mariah Timms, in an article published on August 28, details the type of GOP lawsuits that Democrats are gearing up for.

Timms reports, "Lawyers are ramping up battles over who gets to vote and how those votes are counted in the presidential election. Democrats sued Georgia's state election board Monday, (August 26), about its contentious new rule for certifying results. Republicans filed lawsuits in North Carolina and Arizona challenging voter registration procedures there."

Many of the election and voting lawsuits Democrats expect from Republicans, according to Timms, are in key swing states like Wisconsin and Arizona.

"Election lawyers say that the volume of lawsuits is an unprecedented surge from previous contests," Timms explains, "but that the last-minute litigation follows a familiar playbook. The recent lawsuits return to battleground states where Donald Trump and his allies refused to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election — places where the race was won or lost on narrow margins and where the 2024 race between him and Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to be close."

Christian Slater, a spokesman for Democratic Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, told the Journal that "election deniers and frivolous lawsuits" in that state "will not stop the governor from fighting to ensure every eligible voter has the opportunity to have their voice heard at the ballot box." And Jim Messina, who managed former President Barack Obama's 2012 reelection campaign, is among the Democratic strategists who expects aggressive legal challenges from MAGA Republicans this year.

Messina told WSJ, "We are not messing around with this. Too much is on the line, and we’ve seen what Trump is capable of when he loses an election fair and square."

*Read the Wall Street Journal's full report at this link (subscription required).

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yikes see state GOP: how much xian nat'l wacko?

an kos 2 23

In today’s Republican Party it is no longer enough to deny that Donald Trump lost in 2020. The true Republican diehards demand that their leaders deny that Republicans ever lose any election.

That played out at the Michigan GOP convention over the weekend, with Trump’s pick for state party chair being defeated by a candidate who is even more extreme an election denier. It took three rounds of voting—counted by hand because Republicans have also made it an article of faith not to accept voting technology, even at their own convention—but Kristina Karamo prevailed over second-place finisher and Trump endorsee Matt DePerno.

Karamo ran for secretary of state in 2022, losing by 14 points. DePerno ran for attorney general, losing by 8.6 points. But DePerno conceded that he had lost, while Karamo refused to concede. At the state party convention, she made that part of her campaign message, saying, “Conceding to a fraudulent person is agreeing with the fraud, which I will not do.”

When it comes to 2020, DePerno has been an election denier in good standing, having made his name as a Republican and earned Trump’s endorsement on the basis of his quest to prove fraud in that election. He’s even faced a criminal investigation for tampering with voting machines in 2021. That is the kind of stuff that gets you Donald Trump’s endorsement to lead a state Republican Party. But apparently it is not enough for Michigan Republicans. “Matt ran out on us; he didn’t fight for us,” one delegate told The Washington Post.

Election denial isn’t Karamo’s only angle, though. At the convention, she said, “My goal number one as a Christian is to bring people to Christ, and secondarily to save our country.” A few nights earlier, in a speech to a far-right “patriot” group, she went into a little more detail.

“When we start talking about the spiritual reality of the demonic forces, it’s like, ‘Oh, my God, this is crazy, we can’t go there,’” Karamo said. “No. It’s like, did you read the Bible? Didn’t Jesus perform exorcisms? … Scriptures are clear. And so if we’re not operating as though the spirit realities of the world exist, we’re going to fail every time.”

The convention that elected Karamo to lead thestate party was attended by 2,000 delegates—but not one of the outgoing party co-chairs or any member of the state congressional delegation. But Karamo claimed the party would move forward unified. “We cannot wait to get work done as one Michigan Republican Party,” she said. “And we are going to beat the Democrats.”

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/qanon-followers/

no lnx twt

QAnon followers are focused on 'a new project' in swing states

Meaghan Ellis February 11, 2022

QAnon enthusiasts, who believe former President Donald Trump represents some form of new world order, are now focusing on a different plot in hopes of regaining control of the White House.

According to The Guardian, QAnon advocates have turned their attention toward Secretary of State election races in various swing states.So, why do these races have the attention of QAnon followers? They believe these particular races could be the key to ensuring there is not a repeat of the 2020 presidential election. In many swing states, Republican election officials refused to assist Trump in overturning the presidential election.

Now, QAnon believers and far-right extremists are adamant about putting people in place who align with Trump's beliefs. Alex Kaplan, a senior researcher at Media Matters for America who has studied the evolution of conspiracy theories, explained how QAnon's actions could create more problems in the very near future.

“This is the way that QAnon could trigger a constitutional crisis,” said Kaplan. “QAnon is linked to an effort to recruit and elect candidates to positions directly controlling election administrations, and given their ties to harming democracy, that is very concerning.”

Per The Guardian, QAnon's agenda and their strategic plot to control the outcome of elections was detailed by former Republican lawmaker and Trump loyalist, Jim Marchant who is currently running to become a high-ranking election official inNevada. Marchant revealed the moment he was propositioned by QAnon advocates and QAnon influencer Juan Savin aboutrunning for Secretary of State. It was at that moment when he realized those particular election races could be a key to controlling elections.

“I knew right then that they had figured out that we need to take back the secretary of state offices around the country. Not only did they ask me to run, they asked me to put together a coalition of other like-minded secretary of state candidates. I got to work, Juan O Savin helped, and we formed a coalition.”

Savin has also spoken out about the QAnon agenda. In January, Savin also shared details about the supposed "project" the movement had in place. Marchant explained, “We have a project that we are doing helping candidates across the country that we started here in Nevada that has prospered pretty well, with a number of Trump endorsements."

On Sunday, Savin also weighed in on “the secretary of state stuff”, as he boasted that “across the country we are gaining strength rapidly to get back into this game in an effective way. A lot of those offices that they thought they held and weren’t going to matter, we are going to flip those.”...

AHA ? : did talk radio supplant local news? radio and podcast blend, and often has video now; snn radio amplifies fake paper website [trump picks up boost/escalate, feedback back into eyeballs/ratings [then RNC/GOP $]

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/trump-election-claims/

Since the 2020 presidential election, conservative news outlets have been popping up in droves to continue circulating former President Donald Trump's big lie about the election.

So how are outlets continuing to do this? According to NPR, it is more of a trick of the eye. The publication https://www.npr.org/2021/07/02/1011916687/how-pro-trump-local-news-sites-keep-pushing-2020-election-misinformation.

While the publication appears to be just a local news outlet, NPR reports that it is actually flagship of a news syndicate, known as The Star News Network, which consists of several pro-Trump sites. Like The Georgia Star News, the network has created similar sites for states like Arizona, Ohio, and Florida.

Per NPR:

"Its part of the Star News Network - an expanding network of pro-Trump sites seeking to influence local politics with conservative opinion by mimicking the look and feel of local newspaper sites. The group operates eight state-focused news sites, including in key Electoral College states such as Michigan, Arizona, Ohio and Florida."

By focusing on states where Trump is still heavily favored among voters, the network can continue to circulate misinformation since the audience is still focused on what transpired during and after the election.

During a rally in Ohio Las weekend, Trump also added more fuel to the fire with more dangerous claims of voter fraud.

"The biggest tragedy of all is millions of Americans have lost confidence in their vote," Trump said." We can't let that happen. And that's why I say you have to know what took place in 2020 before you can vote in 2022 or 2024."

To name mafter worse, conservative publisher John Fredericks defended defended sites and the information they share.

"We work very hard to fund our operation through legitimate advertising of all kinds, people that want to reach our expanding audience," he said. "And if somebody needs to reach informed, motivated readers that want the truth, advertising is a great opportunity for them, is a great [return on investment] potential."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

'naked ballots' crisis triggered by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court just put 100,000 votes on the line in the key state

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/heres-a-breakdown-of-the-8-battleground-states-that-will-decide-the-presidential-election-analysis/

aha: omg vote by mail quashed in swing states! see vote by mail

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/why-experts-are-worried-about-absentee-voting-across-the-country/

More than 30 statewide elections will be held in the 91 days from May 19 to August 18, previewing how unfamiliar or difficult absentee voting may be across America this fall.

The next big test is June 2, when eight states and the District of Columbia hold their presidential primaries. Despite President Trump’s claims that absentee voting cannot be trusted, red-run states (Indiana, Iowa, South Dakota) holding primaries that day have more experience with voting by mail and voters dropping off ballots at polling places than blue states and territories (Maryland, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and D.C.). Only one state in this group, purple Montana, has held an election where most people voted absentee.

ext week, our team will be in court for the voters of Pennsylvania, challenging dangerous election practices that threaten the health and safety of voters and undermine the constitutional right to vote. African American and Latino citizens, who have historically struggled for the right to participate equally in our democracy, have been disproportionately affected by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, making the risks of voting in an overcrowded polling place particularly severe and disparate for these populations. That’s why Free Speech For People, on behalf of the Pennsylvania State Conference of the NAACP, has sued Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar to challenge numerous unsafe and unequal election practices that violate the Pennsylvania Constitution’s guarantees of free and fair elections and equal protection of the law.

But this case is bigger than Pennsylvania. Last month, the Trump campaign and the RNC filed a:{**motion to intervene**:(style="color:#103cc0;"):}:in this case. They, along with the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Republican Party of Pennsylvania, seek to oppose the Pennsylvania NAACP in this case and to block the remedies requested to help ensure a safe and secure election in Pennsylvania this November.

ny mag

at least two people with links to Kanye West’s nascent presidential campaign are also active in Republican Party politics.

One of West’s electors in the state of Vermont will also be a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Charlotte. Chuck Wilton, one of the three electors West’s presidential campaign named in a filing submitted with the Vermont secretary of State on Monday, was also elected by the Vermont Republican Party in May to serve as a delegate for President Trump at this year’s RNC. (Electors are the people who would – were the candidate to win the state – vote for them in the Electoral College.)

Asked by Intelligencer if he was the same person who was listed as a delegate, Wilton replied, “Yup, that would be me.” He said that he had been involved in politics in Vermont for years, and had been connected to the West campaign “through political contacts.”

“Somebody said that Vermont needs electors for certain people and [it was] something I said that I’m more than willing to do,” Wilton explained. He described himself politically as “conservative libertarian/center right,” adding that he was “not disappointed with [Trump] but wanted to search out some more alternatives to him.” Wilton said that he thought West was “center right” just like him.

The Republican National Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Wilton was the second person with ties to the GOP to be linked to the West presidential campaign on Monday. A prominent Republican operative, Gregg Keller, was listed as the campaign’s point of contact in a filing with the Arkansas secretary of State. Keller, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment, is the former executive director of the American Conservative Union and has worked for a number of prominent Republican politicians including Mitt Romney and Josh Hawley.

West has expressed his opposition to abortion on Twitter and at a campaign event in South Carolina last month, and met with Trump wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat at the White House in 2018. He has since backed away from his support for Trump, but did tell *Forbes* in July, “Trump is the closest president we’ve had in years to allowing God to still be part of the conversation.”

West’s campaign has faced a number of stumbles in recent weeks while trying to get the rapper on the ballot this November, but the campaign did successfully file to appear on the ballot in Arkansas, West Virginia, and Vermont on Monday. The signatures he submitted in the first two states still need to be validated. Vermont does not require any petitioning to appear the ballot.

The rapper is also pushing forward with efforts to get on the ballot :{in :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:**:{two key :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{swing states:(style="background-color:#ffcc66;"):}:**this week. In Wisconsin, which Donald Trump won by fewer than 23,000 votes in 2016, there are 45 people on the ground working to get West on the ballot. He needs to collect and submit at least 2,000 valid signatures in that state by Tuesday evening. In Ohio,West is pushing to collect the 5,000 valid signatures needed to appear on the ballot, which have to be submitted on Wednesday.

His campaign still faces a number of hurdles, including a hearing in New Jersey on Tuesday morning over allegations that signatures submitted to get West on the ballot in the state were forged.

West would need to appear on the ballot in some combination of states totaling 270 electoral votes in order participate in the presidential debates. The Commission on Presidential Debates, the nonpartisan group that has moderated presidential debates since 1988, requires candidates meet that threshold, as well as having at least 15 percent support in opinion polls. West is precariously short of missing the second threshold. And even if he manages to stay on the ballot in every state where he has submitted signatures, the rapper would need to almost run the table for ballot access in the remaining states — and would need to make the ballot in California, which requires nearly 200,000 signatures that must be submitted by Thursday.

The West campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/why-are-there-more-swing-states-these-days-what-we-are-witnessing-is-a-major-political-realignment-in-process/

wa mon nancy leT

wasn’t that long ago that presidential elections seemed to come down to who won Ohio and Florida. But in an era where political polarization is the hottest story, it is worth noting that the number of so-called “swing states” is growing.

The 2016 election was decided by less that 80,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—adding them to the list of states that could swing in 2020. More recently, we’ve been hearing a lot of chatter about the possibility that North Carolina, Georgia, and possibly even Texas could join the ranks. It is in that context that Ron Brownstein points to the possibility for anhistoric election in four southwestern states.

Democrats today are strongly positioned to oust Republican Sens. Martha McSally in Arizona and Cory Gardner in Colorado and hold their own open seat in New Mexico. If the party wins those three races, as most analysts today agree they are favored but not assured to do, it will control all eight Senate seats from Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada for the first time since 1941, according to Senate records…

The exclamation point on this shift is the polls showing former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, in a competitive position to potentially win all four of these key Southwest states, something no Democratic presidential nominee has done since Harry Truman in 1948. One has to reach back even further — to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936 — to find the last time Democrats carried each of these states in a presidential race while also holding all of their Senate seats.

Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada have been trending blue for a few cycles now. But it is very possible that Arizona could join them shortly. Brownstein gets into the weeds about why that is happening. It mostly has to do with population growth in the major metropolitan areas of those states—which trends blue. Recognizing something I wrote about a while ago, he says that could spell trouble for Republicans in Texas.

The scariest prospect for Republicans is that everything said above about Arizona and Colorado in particular could also apply to Texas, the foundation stone of the GOP’s national political strength. From Dallas/Fort Worth and Austin down south through Houston and San Antonio, the four metropolitan areas in what’s called the Texas triangle account for just over two-thirds of the state’s votes and jobs and more than three-fourths of its economic output.

All of them rank among America’s 10 fastest-growing cities, according to the census. (All are also big recipients of transplants from California, which sent over 86,000 migrants to Texas just in 2018.) And as they grow, they are shading more blue: In his narrow 2018 defeat, the Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke won the five counties encompassing those cities by nearly 800,000 votes, roughly six times then-President Barack Obama’s combined margin just six years earlier.

But there is another state that borders these three that could be swinging—although perhaps for very different reasons.

For some historical context, Utah’s electoral votes haven’t gone to a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson won there in 1964, routing Barry Goldwater 486-52.

So what’s up with all of that swinging? Based on the kind of political polarization we’re witnessing, you’d think that most states would be rock solid in one camp or the other.

One answer to that question is clearly the presidency of Donald Trump. While he has maintained his support among Christian nationalists and white working class voters, he is bleeding support from Independents as well as the Never Trumpers in the Republican Party. The latter is especially pronounced among white, college-educated suburban voters.

But many of these trends pre-dated Trump, which means that they are as much a rejection of the Republican Party as they are of the current president. For example, states in the southwest have been trending younger and more diverse for quite a while. You might recall that it was back in 2012 that Jeb Bush warned that Texas would turn blue if Republicans didn’t do a better job of reaching out to Latino voters. And as the metropolitan areas in various states continue to grow, it send states swinging.

What we are witnessing is a major political realignment in process and these kinds of movements take time. Christopher Hooks noted that during a previous political realignment, the Republicanization of Texas “took nearly a half a century to enact.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/new-2020-battlefronts-are-emerging-in-the-struggle-for-voting-rights-in-key-swing-states/

no lnx

New 2020 battlefronts are emerging in the struggle for voting rights in key swing states

Written by Steven Rosenfeld / Independent Media Institute April 17, 2020

When the 2020 election season resumes in Ohio on April 28 and continues in nearly half of the states through July, Americans will see if new voting regimens instituted in response to the pandemic will help voters or preview state-by-state partisan battles over voter turnout.

Already there are troubling signs that the past decade’s voter suppression battles will continue and accelerate in battleground states. Wisconsin’s April 7 primary, the month’s only presidential contest that was not postponed by the pandemic, is exhibit A. However, as 24 states and territories will hold primaries and caucuses in coming weeks, and other elections this summer, Republicans in some states are already tilting the rules and means of voting to favor their base in the fall.

“We know that primaries help us see voter suppression in early forms,because voter suppression is systemic,” said Stacey Abrams, founder of Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group now working in 18 battleground states. “What we have seen over the past few months is it is happening in almost every state where we are working.”

The partisan moves come as states like Ohio, Georgia, Nevada and others are reconfiguring voting options in the pandemic. The emerging policies include uneven outreach to voters about voting by mail, hurdles to obtain an absentee ballot, and few opportunities for in-person voting. These changes and others, including whether voters can fix problems if ballots are rejected, break from long-held voting habits. Taken together, they will be deeply disruptive and disenfranchising, according to advocates like Abrams and Democratic Party attorneys whose teams have begun to challenge them in court.

“What we are seeing is an unprecedented effort to prevent people from voting,” said Marc Elias, the Democratic National Committee’s top voting rights lawyer. “This predates [COVID-19]. We know that for the last several years, we have seen legislature after legislature controlled by Republicans simply make voting harder. And they don’t make voting harder for everybody. They make voting harder for minority voters and young voters.”

Elias has fought GOP-led voter suppression for decades. In a Friday media briefing with Abrams, he cited prior federal court rulings against Republicans—throwing out laws in North Carolina that targeted blacks with “surgical precision” and laws in Arizona that he said were driven by “racist tropes” to stop community groups from helping Native Americans to vote.

What unfolded in early April in Wisconsin after the pandemic broke was as dark as any of these past power plays, he said.

Wisconsin’s Warning

In Wisconsin, Republican legislators and the Republican National Committee, aided by conservative majorities on the highest state and federal courts, ignored Democrats’ concerns about public health, voting rights and election logistics. The fights between a Democratic governor and GOP-led legislature over postponing the election, last-minute court rulings ordering it to continue, and postal service delays with delivering ballots impacted turnout—even as hundreds of thousands of people voted by mail for the first time. Thousands more voters braved health risks and waited for hours to vote in person, as many polls were closed due to shortages of poll workers, especially in communities of color.

The starkest figure attesting to the ensuing voter suppression was that 1.3 million voters across the state had requested absentee ballots, but only 1.1 million ballots were returned by an April 13 deadline. The ballots had to be postmarked by April 7 to be counted. In 2016, Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 22,748 votes in Wisconsin. Trump’s margin was less than an eighth of the 197,489 voters who this April wanted, but failed, to vote absentee.

Before the pandemic, a senior Trump campaign lawyer declared that Trump would not be reelected without winning Wisconsin in November.

“Wisconsin is the tipping point to 270 Electoral College votes,” Justin Clark told a Republican National Lawyers Associationmeeting in the state last November, where he also said Republicans have “always been” the (modern) party of voter suppression. “If we don’t win Wisconsin, he’s done.”

More recently, the Republican National Committee and Trump campaign said that they would allocate $10 million to fight Democrats on voting rights in 2020.

Ironically, the effort by Wisconsin and national Republicans to tilt the April 7 election partly failed, when a wide majority of voters elected a liberal justice to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The reason that Republican legislators resisted postponing the election was to try to finesse a court majority, Wisconsin’s leading conservative pundit explained before the vote.

What happened in Wisconsin has many takeaways. Among those, it suggests that states with Democratic governors and Republican legislatures will disagree on the means and rules for voting in 2020—even in a pandemic.

That tension can be seen in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Kentucky, where decisions have yet to be made about the extent to which the states will shift to voting early or voting by mail in upcoming primaries, and the details of how those elections will be run.

In Nevada, tensions between Democrats (including the governor) and the Republican secretary of state over voter outreach and voting options in its June primary led Elias to sue on April 16 on behalf of state and national Democrats.

Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske wanted to send absentee ballot applications only to longtime voters and restrict in-person voting to one site in each county—including Las Vegas. The suit says those factors, atop state laws that ban volunteers from helping others to vote and allowing officials to disqualify ballots based on how signatures look, would “cause extensive disenfranchisement” on par with Wisconsin.

“Eighty-seven percent of the population of the state will have two voting locations,” said Elias, referring to Las Vegas and Reno. “In addition, when we talk about vote by mail and automatic vote by mail, the question is, ‘Who gets a ballot?’ ‘Who are those ballots automatically mailed to?’ So in the case of Nevada, they’re sending ballots only to what they refer to as ‘active’ voters. In Nevada, because it is a highly transient population… there were 50,000 ‘inactive’ voters in 2016 and 2018, who in fact voted. So those 50,000 voters wouldn’t get a ballot.”

Wisconsin’s primary was a mess. But it revealed little about the best ways to run the primaries that will soon be held and elections this summer and fall. Before the pandemic delayed spring primaries, some were likely to be chaotic anyway for reasons that have nothing to do with partisan voter suppression.

In states like Pennsylvania that have yet to hold primaries or caucuses, election officials planned to debut new voting technology. Earlier this year, introducing new systems in states such as Iowa, Nevada, South Carolina and California contributed to hours-long waits for voters, scrambled registration records, voting machinery failures and uncertain outcomes. But technical snafus were not the only cause.

Another factor was voters’ habits. In Los Angeles, the nation’s largest election district, officials assumed that voters would take advantage of 10 days of newly instituted early voting. But most L.A. voters did not, which contributed to long delays on Super Tuesday. People tend to vote in the ways that they are familiar with—whether early, at polls, by mail, etc. That was another reason why the Democrats sued Nevada, Elias said.

“In Nevada, for example, 93 percent of the population voted in person in the last election,” he said. “This is a state with a strong culture of in-person voting. They have in-person vote-anywhere centers. Throughout counties, people vote early over an extended early voting period… So, against that backdrop, the Republican secretary of state announced that they were going to close all but one polling location in every county.”

Since the pandemic broke, the nationwide response—by governors, secretaries of state, state election directors, election boards, and county officials—has generally been to look to more absentee voting and less in-person voting. While the state-by-state details of how that will work are starting to surface, some trends are emerging.

Upcoming Primaries and Elections

States with histories of partisan voting rights fights are still seeing this tension. These states are not necessarily the presidential swing states, but increasingly purple states like Texas and Georgia. Even though Republicans hold the most powerful state posts, not all high-ranking GOP officials agree about how far election managers should go to facilitate voting by mail.

In Georgia, where there will be a contested Democratic U.S. Senate primary in June, the Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is sending absentee ballot applications to 6.9 million “active voters,” meaning any resident who has voted or contacted the state in the past five years. But 300,000 infrequent but still registered voters will not get one. Raffensperger’s decision drew criticism from both sides of the aisle. (Republican secretaries in Iowa and Nevada also are only sending absentee ballot applications to active voters.)

Georgia’s House Speaker told a radio host that Republicans could not win in high turnout elections—criticizing Raffensperger, who replied that this outreach was only for the primary. Days later, the secretary created an absentee ballot fraud task force, which Abrams said was intended to strike fear in voters. A decade ago, the state’s current governor, ex-Secretary of State Brain Kemp, “put 12 people in jail, facing 120 felonies, on false accusations of absentee ballot fraud,” Abrams said.

“That [task force] was designed to have a chilling effect on participation,” Abrams said. “We know that heading into this election, it is not simply the actions that are taken at the ballot box that will stop people from voting; it’s also creating a miasma of fear that tries… to target black, Latino, Native American voters, but also young voters, and scare people to not take advantage of these opportunities” to vote.

Georgia was not the only state with Republican disagreements.

In Texas, where negotiations between the state Democratic Party and Republicans broke down over the details of contacting voters and obtaining an absentee ballot, the Republican attorney general said that he did not consider the virus as an excuse to obtain an absentee ballot. The Republican secretary of state wanted to accept applications from any registered voter.

One-third of states require voters to declare an excuse to obtain an absentee ballot. Since March, however, many states have suspended that rule. This includes states where Republicans have governed for years, but these are not swing states. In these instances, the response to the pandemic has not followed the partisan cliché, where Republicans seek a smaller electorate while Democrats seek the opposite.

According to a detailed tally by Ballotpedia.org, at least a dozen top Republican state officials have used their authority to expand absentee voting in upcoming elections, with some saying that those steps may continue next fall. They are ignoring Trump’s rants about voter fraud and the need to suppress Democratic voting blocs—at least in their less nationally competitive states.

“There are Republicans who are quietly, with little fanfare and appreciation from liberals, who are very quietly ignoring what the president has been tweeting and are doing the right thing—because it is right for their voters,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former Department of Justice Voting Section attorney.

“Are they doing everything that liberals want them to do? Absolutely not,” he said. “Is it reasonable to expect the secretary of state, of the state that voted with the largest margin for Trump, West Virginia, to be a liberal Democrat? No. But is he [Mac Warner] making things worse or better with his actions with regard to what’s going on with the coronavirus? The answer is unquestionably better.”

Warner, like Republican secretaries of state or governors in Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Dakota, North Dakota and Vermont, has taken steps since mid-March to expand voting by mail, according to Ballotpedia. West Virginia, like half of these states, will send any voter an absentee application. Michigan, with Democratic statewide officeholders and a Republican-majority legislature, is taking the same approach for its upcoming elections.

Ohio: The Next Red Flag

Ironically, 2020’s next primary—Ohio on April 28—has also fallen victim to partisan power plays—inside the state GOP and with Democrats.

After Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and Secretary of State Frank LaRose won a court ruling to delay the March 17 primary due to the pandemic, LaRose wanted to hold it on June 2 to have more time to prepare for voting by mail. But Ohio’s Republican-majority legislature pre-empted LaRose.

It passed a bill to hold the primary on April 28. The legislation also did not extend voter registration deadlines and required voters to apply for an absentee ballot. Additionally, it said that only voters with disabilities or who could not receive mail could vote in person. Those conditions led a coalition of voting rights groups to sue, claiming that multitudes “of Ohioans will not get to vote through no fault of their own.”

Their lawsuit demanded the state extend voter registration, mail every voter a ballot, pay for the return postage, allow voters who do not get ballots to vote at county offices, and delay the primary. In early April, a federal court rejected the lawsuit, saying the legislature had the authority to make these changes. (The U.S. Supreme Court issued a similar ruling several days later that upheld the Wisconsin legislature’s decision to hold its April 7 election.)

However, LaRose, Ohio county election officials and the civil rights groups were somewhat in agreement about what would be needed to successfully transition to voting by mail—considering that only 21 percent of Ohioans voted that way in 2018. They did not agree on all points, but all said that more planning, outreach and logistics were needed. Instead, what is likely to unfold is many voters will be frustrated or disenfranchised, as they are not used to the new rules.

“I’m really concerned about the Ohio primary on April 28 and the fact that there are no meaningful ways to vote in person,” Becker said. “If they had moved it to June 2, as the secretary had requested, there would have been meaningful opportunities.”

Whether 2020’s remaining primaries and summer elections are deftly or clumsily managed remains to be seen. The details of how officials restructure the means and rules of voting will translate into which voters and voting blocs turn out. At best, voters will be empowered in a pandemic. But if drastic changes are imposed, the result could be state-by-state battles over voter turnout and voter suppression.

“It will be interesting to watch the upcoming primaries and see with more preparation what ends up happening,” Becker said. “My guess is more people vote in person than officials expect. It’s not magic that everyone just decides I’m a mail-in voter now.”

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

how many swing are xian?

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/christian-nationalist-david-lane-seeks-22-million-to-win-2020-battleground-states-and-eradicate-secularism

Christian nationalist political operative David Lane is seeking $22 million for a campaign to boost conservative Christian turnout in 10 battleground states—Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Iowa—this year. In a column published by Charisma, Lane claims that his American Renewal Project increased “Christian turnout” by 5 to 7 percent in half a dozen key states in 2016.

Lane has a much bigger vision than just helping put President Donald Trump back in the White House. Lane views politics as spiritual warfare necessary to defeat secularists and pagans and make America the Christian nation he says it was founded to be. He teaches that the U.S. has a national mandate to promote the Christian faith and calls the separation of church and state a lie.

In recent years, Lane has recruitedconservative pastors to run for office and mobilize their congregations as election volunteers. In his new column in Charisma, he imagines hundreds of conservative evangelical pastors running for office in the next few election cycles, “triggering a third great awakening” and “bringing about a full-impact collision between the two rival religions in America of Christianity and secularism.”

“Since each worldview is expansive and evangelistic, there will be no reconciliation of opposites with God; one will ultimately end in the eradication of the other,” Lane adds.

As Right Wing Watch has noted repeatedly over the years, Lane’s divisive Christian nationalist extremism hasn’t prevented Republican officials at all levels from embracing him and supporting his work. They don’t seem to be bothered by his anti-LGBTQ extremism either; he once urged conservative Christians to prepare for martyrdom in their fight to “save the nation from the pagan onslaught” of marriage equality and legal abortion. As a presidential candidate in 2016, Donald Trump attended one of Lane’s organizing events in Florida.

Here’s some more background on Lane from Right Wing Watch reporting in 2018, when Lane teamed up with California-based dominionists to try to “turn California around”:

nation’s leading law groups defending expanded voting rights Wednesday warned hundreds of election officials across the nation not to be intimidated by right-wing threats to more aggressively purge voter rolls, saying they would defend them in court if necessary.

“There’s no rhyme or reason to the 248 jurisdictions that have been identified” by the Public Interest Legal Foundation(PILF), said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “They include communities both large and small. They include communities with substantial numbers of African-American and Latino and other minority voters. But what we do observe is there has been a renewed focus on purge programs as a tool for suppressing the rights of voters.”

The Public Interest Legal Foundation is led by J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department Voting Section attorney who joined the DOJ in 2005 to help implement the Bush administration’s national crusade against so-called voter impersonation fraud—a thoroughly debunked partisan crusade to disenfranchise blue voters. The Trump campaign in 2016 and his administration have revived this discredited narrative as a ruse for red-run states to impose additional barriers to likely Democratic voters. That partisan playbook includes purging legally registered voters, especially those who tend to vote only in presidential years.

“This summer the Justice Department issued a letter to election officials across the country, soliciting information on their, quote, [registered voter] list maintenance procedures,” Clarke said. “That letter was issued on the same day as the President’s Election Integrity Commission [where Adams is a member] issued a letter to state election officials seeking data on virtually every American voter across the country, among other things. So this appears to be part of a pattern that we are seeing across the country of using purge programs, and so-called list maintenance procedures, as a tool for restricting the rights of legitimately registered voters.”

The Lawyers’ Committee, Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School and Demos—all legal advocates that have defended the right to vote for years and fought voter suppression tactics in court—said Wednesday that they would be sending letters to the local offices targeted by PILF. Their letters will urge local election officials to not be intimidated by PILF’s threat of suits unless they proved, to PILF’s satisfaction, that they had purged sufficient numbers of legally registered voters.

PILF’s threats fit a pattern established by GOP vote suppressors to intentionally use dubious statistics and legal threats to remove otherwise legal voters, the lawyers said.

“Oftentimes the same groups or individuals that are asserting the need for purge programs are coupling that with misleading or inaccurate claims about potentially ineligible voters,” Jonathan Brater, Brennan Center Democracy Program counsel, said. “Whether that takes the form of this flawed methodology that is based on a crude comparison of Census data and registration lists, or shoddy claims about potential non-citizens or others who may be registered to vote.”

Top state election regulators in states like Florida, Georgia, Ohio, North Carolina and Kansas, all of whom are Republicans, have deliberately used shoddy data, or intentionally sloppy data mining producing false positives, to claim that their states’ voter rolls are overflowing with ineligible or illegal voters, and then removed thousands of perfectly legal voters. The Public Interest Legal Foundation follows this same script.

PILF’s latest letter to local election officials reads, “Federal law requires election officials to conduct a reasonable effort to maintain voter registration lists free of dead voters, ineligible voters, and voters who have moved away... Based on our comparison of publicly available information published by the U.S. Census Bureau and the federal Election Assistance Commission, it appears that your jurisdiction is failing to comply with these federal law requirements.”

The problem with PILF’s claim is that the Census data it cites, gathered once a decade, does not track the latest yearly demographic changes, such as people moving, the voting rights attorneys said. Thus, comparing old Census data to more recent voter registration lists is an apples-and-oranges comparison that creates inaccurate impressions that there might be error-plagued voter rolls. The Lawyers’ Committee’s Clarke said PILF uses this dubious methodology to accuse local officials of mismanaging voter lists—which are in a constant state of flux because people register, move and die—and thus bully local officials into purging otherwise legal voters.

“This action by PILF is a clear attempt to incite and bully election officials to institute voter purge programs in their respective jurisdiction,” Clarke said. “We will not stand by idly and wait for the fallout from PILF’s dangerous national campaign.”

She said the voting rights groups were concerned some local election officials had been successfully bullied by PILF. Some who opted to avoid a legal fight had entered into settlements with PILF. In those agreements, the right-wingers required the localities to use other problematic federal databases to screen and purge voter lists, such as a Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE system. The SAVE database provides immigration and citizenship status, but it is not complete, as there is no authoritative federal citizenship database. When Florida’s GOP election director tried to force county officials to use SAVE a few years ago, the local officials vigorously protested, objecting to the flawed data. That very rare display by election officials prompted Florida Republicans to back down and let the local officials do their jobs according to protocols established under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.

More recently, some localities targeted by PILF have buckled, the attorneys said. But others haven’t, forcing PILF to back off.

“There’s really no basis" for PILF's claims of sloppy voter rolls, Naifeh said. “It’s only when they get a sweetheart consent decree that we see the worst elements of these kinds of [voter purge] programs coming into play.”“They [local election officials] entered into consent decrees on behalf of supposed local election integrity groups, in Mississippi mainly, and a few in Texas,” Stuart Naifeh, Demos counsel, said. “And what they [PILF] have sought is things like we see in Ohio. They ask states to agree to purge people based on [recent] non-voting, and occasionally to use the SAVE database in certain places. And what we’ve seen is when these jurisdictions fight back, those things are not part of the settlements.”

But under the Trump administration, PILF—led by J. Christian Adams—has been targeting electoral districts inswing states.

“They have more recently targeted larger jurisdictions, such as Wake County, North Carolina; Broward County, Florida; and Alexandria, Virginia,” Naifeh said. “Though none of the larger jurisdictions they targeted have entered into consent decrees that contain these problematic practices. Alexandria, Virginia, got the case dismissed and the judge admonished them for not doing an adequate investigation and bringing the case solely on the basis of shoddy registration rate calculations. Wake County agreed to a settlement that essentially just required them to do what they already are doing. And Broward County, Florida, the case went to trial and there’s still no decision yet.”

...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/the-voting-wars-come-to-campus/

no lnx

The voting wars come to campus

Written by Daniel Block / Washington Monthly August 27, 2019

Texas: home of corn dogs, Matthew McConaughey, and some of America’s most restrictive voting laws. To register yourself, you have to print out a form and deliver it to the county clerk, because unlike most states, Texashas no online voter registration. To help register others, you must be certified as a “volunteer deputy registrar,” a process that requires either taking an exam or attending an often long and awkwardly timed training session. Your certificate is only valid in the county where it is obtained.

The state has also made it harder to cast a ballot. Between 2013 and 2016, Texas eliminated more than 400 polling locations, the largest drop in any state during that time. In 2013, after years of litigation, it implemented a strict voter ID law. The law, which lists seven kinds of acceptable IDs, became infamous for its brazenly partisan implications—handgun licenses are okay, for example, while student IDs are not.

All of which makes the following statistic so surprising: at the University of Texas at Austin, the state’s flagship university, undergraduate turnout increased from almost 39 percent to 53 percent between 2012 and 2016. Over that same time period, national youth turnout stayed roughly constant. The National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement at Tufts University, which calculates campus voting rates, has not yet released numbers for last year’s midterms. But at UT Austin’s on-campus polling locations, the number of early ballots cast was more than three times higher than it was in 2014. (Travis County only provides polling site specific data for early voting.)

The state of Texas is not alone in seeming to apply tougher voting rules to college students, who as a group are more left leaning than the overall electorate. In New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, and Arizona—all presidential battlegrounds—Republican-controlled legislatures have created particular obstacles for college voters. And yet, in the midst of this clampdown, there are clear signs that students and schools are surmounting voting barriers and countering their impact—and not just in Texas. At Arizona State University in Tempe, for example, despite a restrictive voter ID law and new limits on mail-in ballot collection, student voting rates went up by double digits between 2012 and 2016.

That’s because at institutions like UT Austin and ASU Tempe, students and staff work to make registering and voting as easy as possible, even as Texas and Arizona have made it harder. They find new, creative ways of registering students. They explain complex voting requirements. They work with local officials to increase polling access on campus. In doing so, they are supported by a growing network of national organizations that provide funding, share information, and help schools develop plans to simplify getting out the vote. (The Washington Monthly incorporates data from these organizations in its college rankings. Both UT Austin and ASU Tempe received perfect scores.)

These efforts appear to be making a difference. Nationwide, college voting rates increased by more than three percentage points between 2012 and 2016, more than the overall turnout increase. Between 2014 and 2018, youth turnout rose by nearly a third.

In an era of high partisanship and close contests, student voting can make a tremendous impact. In Arizona, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema won her U.S. Senate seat by 55,900 votes, roughly the size of ASU Tempe’s student population. In Texas, youth turnout tripled between 2014 and 2018, and Democrat Beto O’Rourke overperformed in counties with a high percentage of young voters. That means that UT Austin was at the vanguard of a trend that helped bring O’Rourke surprisingly close to unseating Ted Cruz from the U.S. Senate.

The increase in student voting is counterintuitive, but it fits a broader pattern. Even as franchise restrictions target certain communities, political scientists have found that they do not usually result in lower proportional turnout. There is little evidence that voter ID laws have led to markedly less voting among racial minorities, even though minorities are far less likely than white people to possess the kinds of identification these laws require. Researchers aren’t quite sure why. But several have suggested that the reason is counter-mobilization: the harder a state works to suppress turnout, the harder people fight back.

Trump beat Clinton by less than a point in Wisconsin. Since then, Democrat Tony Evers squeaked out a win for governor against Republican incumbent Scott Walker. That should firmly place the state in the “swing” column.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/why-many-2020-swing-states-are-on-track-for-another-massive-recount-crisis/

If the 2020 presidential election hinges on recounts in the closest battleground states, there could be a crisis even greater than the 2000 election where the U.S. Supreme Court ended a Florida recount in its infamous Bush v. Gore ruling.

That’s because the laws and timetables governing recounts in many swing states differ widely and aren’t necessarily geared toward transparent granular counting—and that’s apart from President Trump’s habit of attacking election outcomes he doesn’t like by claiming they were stolen.

“I see what the states have put out there. They have not proven realistic,” said Matthew Weil, senior associate director of the Democracy Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center, speaking of the policies and legal landscape that unfold after election night. The BPC is soon expected to issue a report on the topic. “It would be very helpful to really look at what a realistic and rational policy would be, and we can work toward that goal.”

Should presidential recounts occur, it appears that history will not repeat what happened in 2016—when courts shut down two of the three recounts filed by the Green Party: in Michigan and Pennsylvania but not Wisconsin. But the chances of voters seeing a convincing process may prove as frustrating as 2016.

“By conventional standards, the 2016 presidential recount was close, but not by recount standards,” said Chris Sautter, a nationally known lawyer specializing in post–Election Day procedures. “Nonetheless, a truly accurate recount to fully verify the results was not possible in any of the three states because laws in those states didn’t permit meaningful recounts, and because even had the laws permitted proper recounts, most of Pennsylvania and a few counties in Wisconsin did not use election equipment that produced paper records of each vote.”

In 2016, three purple states tipped the Electoral College and made Trump president. Millions of Americans were stunned. The Green Party’s presidential nominee, Jill Stein, stepped into the “what happened?” void, raising $7.3 million and filing for recounts in the states with the three closest margins: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

The recounts accomplished little of what recounts are supposed to do—validate or update the earlier results. They were blocked in Michigan, stopped in Pennsylvania after barely beginning, and, in Wisconsin, where they were completed after revealing inconsistencies in some vote-counting machinery, Trump emerged with several hundred more votes. Instead of resolving ambiguities and bringing legitimacy to the results, the narrative was dogged by suspicions of hacked machinery, slash-and-burn political rhetoric, contentious court battles and rulings, resistance to re-examining count votes by some local officials and wide media ridicule. These factors did little to satisfy Americans seeking answers.

Since 2016, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have updated some laws or counting protocols in response to the recount, but not all of those revisions are intended to open up the process. Looking more widely, most possible 2020 swing states each have different post–Election Day rules, counting timetables and deadlines, some of which are hard to meet without squeezing in a thorough recount.

With the possible exception of Florida, most of the several dozen recount-related bills now in legislatures were not from likely presidential battleground states, heading toward passage, nor involved big changes. Or, as in Arizona, there’s a proposed bill to make it more expensive to file for a recount if it’s not automatic—a deterrent to recounting.

Many voters do not realize that elections don’t end on election night, where the reported totals are unofficial and incomplete. After all of the ballots are collected and machinery is packed up, a process called the canvass begins. This involves elected officials and civil servants, typically at the county level, compiling and reconciling the totals from their various voting options (early, at precincts, etc.) and still-arriving mailed-in votes. This process typically concludes seven or 10 days later with local certification of winners. State certification follows soon afterward.

If the top contenders are less than 1 percent apart (this slightly varies state-by-state), a recount will be triggered. Depending on the margins, the government or candidates will pay for this. Recounts also follow differing rules depending on the state. Some, like in Florida, only count problematic ballots—with no votes or too many votes. (Election audits are generally not part of this phase, but occur after the election is officially over.)

To choose the president, states have to finish this process before the Electoral College meets about six weeks later. But post-election timetables vary. In Michigan, the process can take no more than 40 days. In Ohio, it’s 31 days. In Wisconsin, 24 days. In Nevada and Pennsylvania, it’s 21 days. In Florida, it’s 14 days—although there is legislation to add five days. These timelines were set years ago, before large numbers of voters started voting by mail, which takes time to process, and Congress created the provisional ballot safeguard (for people not on voter lists), which also must be verified before counting.

What can follow close contests can appear confusing and not inspire confidence. Before three simultaneous statewide recounts were triggered in Florida last fall, including for U.S. senator and for governor, the results kept changing as mail-in ballots came in. In Broward County, Republicans rallied outside of county offices and loudly accused the election workers inside of rigging the results. In Broward County, Palm Beach County and elsewhere, officials didn’t finish in time, which meant under law that the earlier unofficial results stood. Michigan has a similar law on the books.

“It’s very weird, from a government-administration perspective, to be putting out unofficial totals, and then people are seeing them shift,” Weil said. “We now see a lot of concern—i.e., ‘Is something going on if these numbers are shifting?’ Obviously, that’s a part of the process, but I do think we need to evaluate some of those reporting policies.”

The 2016 Recounts

What have 2016’s closest swing states done since that year’s presidential recounts?

To recap, several weeks after Election Day, the Greens filed for three recounts: In Michigan, where the results found Donald Trump led by roughly 11,000 votes; in Wisconsin, where he led by 23,000 votes; and in Pennsylvania, by 44,000 votes.

What followed were political brawls. In Michigan, there was fierce pushback by the GOP, where a red-run state government, and courts at the state and federal levels shut downthe process. Later studies by Michigan academics argued that Hillary Clinton would likely have won the state in a recount (but not the election) if half of Detroit’s ballots weren’t disqualified. A 1954 law disqualified ballots if the number of voters signing in at precincts did not match the reported vote total, or, as was seen in 2016, ballot storage boxes were banged up or damaged—as signs of possible tampering. Frustrations in Michigan’s governing circles with the city’s elections have kept the law on the books, retired state election officials have said.

Pennsylvania saw differently dissatisfying results in 2016. A full recount never occurred, as many counties had finished the canvass before the Greens filed—including a mountain of petitions submitted at the local level. The state’s courts, a silent blue executive branch and a federal court eventually shut it down. Late last fall, Greens settled a suit with the state where it pledged to use all paper-ballots for 2020.

Only Wisconsin finished its presidential recount, where Trump won 400 more votes, and counties, much to the Greens’ consternation, used different recounting methods—some scanning ballots, others counting by hand.

After 2016, the American Law Institute has convened a panel of election scholars to publish an update of what it considers the best principles and legislative language for states to resolve “ballot-counting disputes.” Their detailed report delves into the canvass, recounts and a final stage, contesting results. Its principles are clear: avoid ambiguity in the counting rules and procedures to maximize the legitimacy of the election. That means embracing a transparent process and exercising a “duty of non-partisanship” as a referee.

Should presidential recounts recur in these states in 2020, there will be some differences. To start, two of these states won’t let marginal contenders file. Wisconsinand Michigan have passed laws to block filings by candidates who do not stand a chance at winning—“a good faith belief that they would have had a reasonable chance of winning,” said Shawn Starkey, communication director for Michigan’s Department of State.

That policy was aimed at the next proverbial Stein, as were other changes to Michigan law. Depending on the number of votes separating the leading candidate and a petitioner, the per-precinct filing fees can range from $25 to $250, Starkey said. (Last fall, the state had 4,797 precincts, a number that fluctuates as local populations change.) Michigan also changed some deadlines in its canvass process after 2016. It gave counties one more day before starting that process after Election Day (by 9 a.m. on Thursday, not by 1 p.m. on Wednesday), but then required an “expedited” process if the presidential candidate’s lead was less than 25,000 votes statewide, he said. Counties also must report “any out-of-balance precincts that weren’t reconciled during the canvass.”

The 1950s-era law that disqualified Detroit’s ballots—and would let the first unofficial results stand if a recount wasn’t finished—remains on the books, Starkey said. (In early March, a bill was introduced to amend that law; but it was sitting in a committee.) With regard to auditing the voting machinery or first tabulations, the state currently does not start those until “after the canvass process and official results certification,” he said. In other words, Michigan has not made recounting an easier or more open process.

Wisconsin and Pennsylvania

Wisconsin’s GOP-run government also blocked future Green-style recounts after 2016. But its state election agency, the Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC), has since taken steps to make results more trustworthy before officially declaring winners. Before the November 2018 election, the WEC doubled the number of wards—the most local election jurisdiction—required to double check their preliminary results, “including at least one in each of the 72 counties,” said WEC spokesman Reid Magney. “Wisconsin has several different makes and models of voting equipment in use, and each type will be audited at least five times.”

Those audits, which involved manually reviewing and counting votes, looked at 135,712 ballots in November, a March 11 report submitted to the WEC said, noting that “was the largest audit of its kind undertaken in the State of Wisconsin.” The report said that the “only noted issue arose” when an older touch-screen electronic voting system used in rural counties saw jams of printers that were supposed to produce a paper record.

“The audit results indicated there were no identifiable bugs, errors, or failure of the tabulation voting equipment,” the report said. “While there were discrepancies identified during the audit, they were the result of human error that occurred as part of the process conducting the audit. Additionally, the results of the audit did not identify programming errors that impacted how the audited voting equipment counted votes.”

The WEC could not order every county to participate in its pre-certification audits, said Magney. But nine counties took part, he said, including some of the biggest population centers. If Wisconsin held the key to who would prevail in 2020’s presidential election, it’s possible an absence of consistent statewide protocols could become an issue in post-election litigation. But Wisconsin has made the process more accountable than what existed in 2016, even though marginal candidates can no longer file for a recount.

In Pennsylvania, the prospective presidential 2020 recount landscape is not yet clear. Last November, the state settled a lawsuit with the Greens where it pledged to replace all of its voting machinery before 2020’s election with paper ballot–based voting systems. (There’s an open question if electronic ballot-marking devices, which some counties are acquiring and critics say can be hacked, would violate that settlement. The Greens’ attorney did not return a request for comment.) That settlement also requires the state to implement pre-certification audits by 2021; however, that would be after the next presidential election.

Stepping back, Pennsylvania is undergoing a makeover of its voting systems and rules. In July 2018, Governor Tom Wolf, a Democrat, announced the state was stepping upcybersecurity surrounding election systems. The current legislative session has numerous bills introduced to open up the voting process, primarily by joining other states that use voting by mail and vote centers. There are no recount-related bills, however.

Compared to the latest policies in Wisconsin, the state’s recount laws are fairly strict. Pennsylvania’s recounts are triggered if the leading candidate’s margin is less than 0.5 percent, and it has to take place by the third Wednesday after Election Day and completed by the next Tuesday—a tight 21-day window. A state elections agency spokeswoman said it was too soon to say what changes might be coming before 2020.

“It’s a little too early for us to predict what changes are coming in Pennsylvania in 2020,” Ellen Lyon, deputy director of the office of communications and press for its Department of State, said. “Several state legislators have election reform bills out there, in addition to the governor’s plan, but they haven’t been acted on yet.”

Other Swing States

Perhaps most notable is what may unfold in Florida, where several bills are moving that would make any recount, including for president, more thorough and transparent. There’s legislation to extend its recounting period, because last November several counties could not finish their recounts in time. There is also legislation to allow the most granular vote auditing system now available to be used in recounts. That approach rescans every paper ballot and then compares those results to earlier tabulations. Should this bill pass and be signed into law, Florida would be in a class by itself among swing states for recounts.

But stepping back from that prospect, the big picture surrounding the nation’s vote verification landscape is uneven, as the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Weil said. In state after state, regulations and timetables can be out of sync with the pragmatic details of conducting modern elections. The BPC has convened three task forces to improve the “voting experience,” with one focused on vote counting. Weil said the goal is making elections more trustworthy, not making do with today’s status quo.

“There are a lot of people out there helping election officials work within the system that exists in their state, and fewer looking at the policies that are clearly prescribing what their options are—and maybe those options are not the best options,” Weil said. “I think we need to make sure that the laws line up to ensure that election officials are fully successful, because at this point in a lot of states, either they are pushing up against the laws, or they have resigned themselves to the fact that their laws are never going to allow them to do what makes the voting experience better.”

Will the vote counting landscape be better in 2020 if there are presidential recounts? As Kevin Kennedy, Wisconsin’s retired state election director, said, “Unless it’s a very close election, nobody’s paying attention.” But if there is a contested outcome, by the time the canvassing and recounting begins, it would be too late to improve the process.

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_state

Election analytics website FiveThirtyEight identifies the states of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan,Minnesota, Ohio, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin as "perennial" swing states that have regularly seen close contests over the last few presidential campaigns.

The Lawyers’ Committee, Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School and Demos—all legal advocates that have defended the right to vote for years and fought voter suppression tactics in court—said Wednesday that they would be sending letters to the local offices targeted by PILF. Their letters will urge local election officials to not be intimidated by PILF’s threat of suits unless they proved, to PILF’s satisfaction, that they had purged sufficient numbers of legally registered voters.

PILF’s threats fit a pattern established by GOP vote suppressors to intentionally use dubious statistics and legal threats to remove otherwise legal voters, the lawyers said.

Top state election regulators in states like Florida, Georgia, Ohio, North Carolinaand Kansas, all of whom are Republicans, have deliberately used shoddy data, or intentionally sloppy data mining producing false positives, to claim that their states’ voter rolls are overflowing with ineligible or illegal voters, and then removed thousands of perfectly legal voters. The Public Interest Legal Foundation follows this same script.

More recently, some localities targeted by PILF have buckled, the attorneys said. But others haven’t, forcing PILF to back off.

But under the Trump administration, PILF—led by J. Christian Adams—has been targeting electoral districts in swing states.

The voting rights groups said they would be sending letters to the 248 localities targeted by PILF, reminding them about the legal process for removing voters and offering to help if sued by PILF.

“We’re issuing letters that essentially do three things,” said Clarke. “One, we impart an accurate overview of the National Voter Registration Act and caution that any premature attempt to purge voters from the rolls may run afoul of the NVRA. Two, we include a request for data and documents from the jurisdictions, to ensure transparency with respect to any actions that they may have already taken in response to the letters from the Public Interest Legal Foundation… And then finally we let them know that we are available to provide support and counsel to them, should it be necessary if the Public Interest Legal Foundation takes legal action, as they’ve threatened to do in their letter.”

“We know that there are election officials who share our consternation about the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s actions,” she said. “Alex Pedilla, Secretary of State for California, has been dismissive of the foundation’s request, and noted that it is request based on bad data and a flawed methodology. Part of the end goal here is to ensure that jurisdictions can know they can turn to us for legal support, should they face action at the hands of the Public Interest Legal Foundation.”

cpac

http://www.c-span.org/video/?406536-107/interview-ed-morrissey

2o14 senate CREDO SuperPAC is the only major progressive organization that is building independent, local, on-the-ground voter mobilization campaigns with volunteer offices in the five pivotal states of Colorado, North Carolina, Michigan, Kentucky and Georgia.; mayday.

The new ad from Americans for Prosperity knocking Obama's green-energy spending will run in eight battleground states.

Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a conservative group funded partially by the billionaire Koch brothers, unveiled a $6.1 million advertising campaign Thursday that knocks President Obama over green-energy spending.

Thet, which will run in eight battleground states, alleges that the administration sunk billions of dollars into renewable energy projects that created jobs in foreign countries...The ad will run for two weeks in the swing states of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, and Virginia

http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/224055-koch-backed-group-take-aim-at-obama-on-energy-with-61-million-ad-buy

Other key findings:

• Top battleground states this election have a mix of Villains and Heroes:

o Colorado: Four members of Colorado’s delegation are Dirty Air Villains: Reps Scott Tipton (RCO3),

Doug Lamborn (R-CO5), Cory Gardner (R-CO4) and Michael Coffman (R-CO6). Three

members are Clean Air Heroes: Senators Mark Udall (D-CO) and Michael Bennet (D-CO), and

Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO1).

o Florida: Florida is represented by fifteen Dirty Air Villains: Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and

Reps. Sandra Adams (R-FL24), Vern Buchanan (R-FL13), Ander Crenshaw (R-FL4), John Mica

(R-FL7), Richard Nugent (R-FL5), Bill Posey (R-FL15), David Rivera (R-FL25), Tom Rooney

(R-FL16), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL18), Dennis Ross (R-FL12), Steve Southerland (R-FL2),

Cliff Stearns (R-FL6), Daniel Webster (R-FL8) and Allen West (R-FL22). Florida has four Clean

Air Heroes: Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) and Reps. Theodore Deutch (D-FL19), Debbie

Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL20), and Alcee Hastings (D-FL23).

o Illinois: Illinois’ delegation includes seven Dirty Air Villains: Reps. Peter Roskam (R-IL6), Joe

Walsh (R-IL8) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL11) (each of whose districts overlap with the 18th

dirtiest MSA in the US for soot pollution) and Randall Hultgren (R-IL14), Donald Manzullo (RIL16),

Robert Schilling (R-IL17) and John Shimkus (R-IL19). Illinois also has five Clean Air

Heroes: Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Reps. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL4), Michael Quigley D-

(IL5), Bobby Rush (D-IL1) and Janice Schakowsky (D-IL9).

o Iowa: Iowa has three Dirty Air Villains, Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) and Reps. Tom Latham

(R-IA4) and Steve King (R-IA5). The state has one Clean Air Hero, Senator Harkin (D-IA).

o Michigan: Michigan has eight Dirty Air Villains: Reps. Dan Benishek (R-MI1), Bill Huizenga

(R-MI2), Justin Amash (R-MI3), Fred Upton (R-MI6), Tim Walberg (R-MI7), Mike Rogers (RMI8),

Candice Miller (R-MI10) and Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI11). The state has five Clean Air

Heroes: Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) and Reps. Hansen Clarke (D-MI13), John Conyers (D-MI14),

Dale Kildee (MI-5) and Sander Levin (D-MI12).

o Nevada: Nevada has one Dirty Air Villain, Rep. Joseph Heck (R-NV3), and one Clean Air Hero,

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV).

o New Hampshire: New Hampshire has one Dirty Air Villain, Rep. Frank Guinta (NH-1), and one

Clean Air Hero, Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH).

o New Mexico: New Mexico has one Dirty Air Villain, Rep. Steve Pearce (R-NM2). New Mexico

has three Clean Air Heroes, Senators Tom Udall (D-NM) and Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), and Rep.

Ben Lujan (D-NM3).

o North Carolina: North Carolina’s four Dirty Air Villains are Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) and

Reps. Renee Ellmers (R-NC2), Virginia Foxx (R-NC5) and Patrick McHenry (R-NC10). North

Carolina’s four Clean Air Heroes are Senator Kay Hagan (D-NC) and Reps. Brad Miller (DNC13),

David Price (D-NC4) and Melvin Watt (D-NC12).

o Ohio: Ohio’s fourteen Dirty Air Villains include Senator Rob Portman (R-OH), Speaker of the

House John Boehner (R-OH8) and Reps. Steve Chabot (R-OH1) (whose district includes the

Cincinnati-Middletown-Wilmington, OH-KY-IN MSA which ranks 21st in the nation for Ozone

pollution and eighth for year-round particulate pollution), Jean Schmidt (R-OH2) (whose district

includes the Cincinnati-Middletown-Wilmington, OH-KY-IN MSA which ranks 21st worst for

Ozone pollution and 8th for year-round particulate pollution), Michael Turner (R-OH3), Jim

Jordan (R-OH4), Robert Latta (R-OH5), Bill Johnson (R-OH6), Steve Austria (R-OH7), Patrick

Tiberi (R-OH12), Steven LaTourette (R-OH14) and Jim Renacci (R-OH16) (both of whose

districts overlap part of the Cleveland-Akron, OH MSA which is the nation’s 14th most polluted

for year round soot), Steve Stivers (R-OH15) and Bob Gibbs (R-OH18.) Ohio’s three Clean Air

Heroes include Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Reps. Betty Sutton (D-OH13) and Dennis

Kucinich (D-OH10).

o Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania’s eleven Dirty Air Villains are Senator Patrick Toomey (R-PA) and

Reps. Mike Kelly (R-PA3), Glenn Thompson (R-PA5), Patrick Meehan (R-PA7) and Joseph Pitts

(R-PA16) (whose districts include the Philadelphia-Camden-Vineland, PA-NJ-DE-MD MSA

which is ranked 16th worst for ozone pollution and 10th worst for year-round particulate pollution

and #22 for Short-term particulate pollution), Michael Fitzpatrick (R-PA8), William Shuster (RPA9),

Thomas Marino (R-PA10), Lou Barletta (R-PA11), Charles Dent (R-PA15) and Timothy

Murphy (R-PA18)( whose district includes the Pittsburgh-New Castle, PA MSA which is ranked

20th for ozone pollution and 6th for Year-round particulate pollution and #6 for Short-term

particulate pollution). Pennsylvania’s four Clean Air Heroes are Robert Brady (D-PA1), Mike

Doyle (D-PA14), Chaka Fattah (D-PA2) and Allyson Schwartz (D-PA13).

o Virginia: Virginia’s six Dirty Air Villains are Reps. Scott Rigell (R-VA2), Randy Forbes (RVA4),

Robert Hurt (R-VA5), Bob Goodlatte (R-VA6), House Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA7) and

Morgan Griffith (R-VA9). Virginia’s three Clean Air Heroes are Reps. Gerry Connolly (DVA11),

James Moran (D-VA8) and Robert Scott (D-VA3).

o Wisconsin: Wisconsin’s five Dirty Air Villains are Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Reps. Paul

Ryan (R-WI1), James Sensenbrenner (R-WI5), Sean Duffy (R-WI7) and Reid Ribble (R-WI8).

Wisconsin’s Clean Air Hero is Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI2).

===

The 2008 presidential election was held on November 4, 2008. The two major candidates were Republican U.S. Senator John McCain of Arizona and Democratic U.S. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. The following is a list of the states with the lowest margins of victory (less than 5%) in 2008, sorted by the margin percentages and color-coded for John McCain or Barack Obama:

Ohio- 3.82% 198,847 votes
Florida- 2.51% 200,654 votes
Indiana- 0.96% 26,163 votes
North Carolina- 0.32% 14,177 votes
Missouri- 0.14% 4,355 votes
Montana- 3.44% 16,181 votes

2004

Colorado - 4.67% 99,523 votes
Nevada - 2.59% 21,500 votes
Ohio - 2.11% 118,775 votes
New Mexico - 0.79% 5,988 votes
Iowa - 0.67% 10,059 votes
Wisconsin - 0.38% 11,384 votes
New Hampshire - 1.37% 9,274 votes
Pennsylvania - 2.50% 144,248 votes
Michigan - 3.42% 165,437 votes
Minnesota - 3.48% 98,319 votes
Oregon - 4.16% 76,332 votes

API targetting 2012

The ads are running in Missouri, Massachusetts, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Maine and Nevada from March 24-27. Six of those states will see fiercely-contested Senate races this November. The seventh, North Carolina, will likely see a close Senate race in 2014. The 2012 races are:

– MA: Sen. Scott Brown (R) won a 2010 special election and is seeking a full term

– ME: Sen. Olympia Snowe (R) is retiring, leaving an open seat

– MO: Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) is seeking re-election

– NE: Sen. Dean Heller (R) is seeking a full term

– VA: Sen. Jim Webb (D) is retiring, leaving an open seat

– WV: Sen. Joe Manchin (D) won a 2010 special election and is seeking a full term

Some of the ads mention both of the state’s senators, but others mention only one senator.

In the four states that have an incumbent running for re-election — Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada, and West Virginia — the API ads mention that senator alone. And the North Carolina ads mention only Sen. Kay Hagan (D), the incumbent up for re-election in two years. In the two states with an open-seat election — Maine and Virginia — the ads mention both senators.

Sen. Brown’s campaign conceded the ads have an effect on the Massachusetts senate campaign, in his favor. The Massachusetts Republican will make a donation to a charity of his opponent’s choosing, in accordance with an agreement between their two campaigns.

purple states:

Purple states

Nevada (R + 2.004) - 6 electoral votes
West Virginia (R + 0.902) - 5 electoral votes
Arkansas (R + 0.080) - 6 electoral votes
Colorado (D + 0.238) - 9 electoral votes
Florida (D + 0.320) - 29 electoral votes
Missouri (D + 1.156) - 10 electoral votes
Ohio (D + 1.432) - 18 electoral votes

(combined 2012 Electoral Votes: 83)