wisc GOP
420 belated den of scum and villainy, see cheddar cheese mafia and midwest alec kochalypse govs
SEE STATE GOP WACKOS
see eric o'keefe
see fake elector GREEN BAY sweep I FELT LIKE A DRUG DEALER
bunch failed in trump admin?
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BIG win primary
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an 6 24
alternet-no lnx
Why this Trump ally is 'most important person charged' in Wisconsin scheme: legal expert
Maya BoddieJune 04, 2024
Attorney Kenneth Chesebro was one of three former President Donald Trump allies charged by the state of Wisconsin Tuesday in connection to the 2020 fake elector's scheme led by the ex-president's campaign in efforts to overturn the election.
The fake elector ploy architect was indicted alongside Wisconsin lawyer James Troupis and former Trump campaign official Michael Roman — each on one count of forgery. CBS News reports, "The three are set to make their initial appearances in Dane County Circuit Court on Sept. 19, court records show. The charge carries a sentence of up to six years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000."
MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin explained to host Katy Tur how the Wisconsin charges differ from 2020 election fake elector charges in Georgia and Arizona, and why Chesebro is the "most important person charged in this document today."
READ MORE:Kenneth Chesebro among Trump allies hit with new fake elector indictments in Wisconsin
Rubin explained, "There are five suits now with respect to these fake elector schemes. Ken Chesebro is charged only in two of them. He was charged in Georgia, where he pled guilty and, now today, he's charged in Wisconsin. I want to tell you what makes this different, because Ken Chesebro's involvement in Wisconsin is qualitatively different. First of all, Wisconsin is where it all began. This is the state for which he wrote the original memo about fake electors in early December of 2020."
The legal expert continued, "Secondly, he attended the meeting of fake electors in Wisconsin. He basically crashed it, even though he had no right to be there."
Tur asked, "Isn't the argument in Georgia that he never went to Georgia and he couldn't be involved in the conspiracy because he never stepped in the state?"
Rubin replied, "It may have been one of his arguments before he pled guilty, but now having pled guilty, whether or not he stepped into the state of Georgia is irrelevant."
READ MORE:Watch: Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro strikes last-minute plea deal with Georgia prosecutors
"But here, he was in Wisconsin?" Tur added.
Rubin emphasized, "But here he was in Wisconsin, definitely involved in the meeting itself, then with the Wisconsin documents don't reach Washington, DC, and aren't received by members of congress, the Wisconsin republican party has a part-time aide fly them out there, who is there to receive them from her? None other than Ken Chesebro. [I FELT LIKE A DRUG DEALER]
And finally, while he did conduct an interview with wisconsin investigators, they discovered that he lied to them about his Twitter account, something that Michigan investigators also discovered. So, unlike in other states where he is theoretically a cooperator and an unindicted co-conspirator, here, he's probably the most important person charged in this document today.
Watch the video below or at this link.
Why Kenneth Chesebro is 'most important person charged' in Wisconsin: legal expert
youtu.be
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AM PROSPECT
6 24
On Tuesday, Wisconsin became the fifth state to file criminal charges stemming from the plot by Republicans to overturn the 2020 election by submitting forged electoral certificates falsely claiming that Donald Trump had won the vote.
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul announced a felony indictment on June 4 against two attorneys, Kenneth Chesebro and Jim Troupis, and campaign aide Mike Roman, all of whom helped orchestrate the scheme to submit false paperwork claiming to represent that state’s electoral votes. The group was charged with conspiracy to commit forgery.
The indictments are another small step toward establishing the official record of the stunning and destabilizing events of the 2020 election, even in the face of a continuing barrage of disinformation from the Republican Party, and despite the plodding pace and laxity of law enforcement in one of the most important criminal cases in the country’s history.
A former adviser and assistant to then-President Trump, Peter Navarro, recently reported to prison to serve a sentence for contempt of Congress, after defying a subpoena to testify about the plot. Rudy Giuliani, another former adviser and Trump lawyer, was served with an indictment for his participation in the scheme in Arizona, after disclosing his location at a birthday party in a social media post that mocked law enforcement officials for being unable to locate him. And Trump himself was convicted last week for falsifying records in an effort to cheat in theprevious presidential election, in 2016. And that’s just since March.
Meanwhile, Republicans remain uniformly unbothered by the unprecedented, multipronged assaults on our democracy, and by Trump’s personal role. And they’ve continued to push false narratives about the former president being politically targeted, along with a need to protect against allegedly widespread voter fraud.
Still, the verdicts thus far, the plea deals, pending prosecutions, and indictments, as well as the public evidence, tell a different story. Taken together, they make it clear that there was an illegal scheme, involving the core of the Republican leadership, to overturn a legitimate election by fraud and by force—and that those efforts to disenfranchise voters were targeted against Black and Latino people specifically.
The broader scheme that resulted in the recent charges in Wisconsin, for example, didn’t question ballots across the state. It sought to disqualify votes only in Milwaukee and Dane Counties, where a supermajority of nonwhite Wisconsinites live. (Milwaukee County includes the city of Milwaukee, and Dane includes college town and liberal bastion Madison.)
That observation wasn’t lost on a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, who told Troupis in 2020 that Trump’s lawsuit asking the courts to scrap hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots solely in those counties “smacks of racism.”
The same goes for just about every other county and city whose voters were portrayed by Trump and his allies as potential criminals and somehow “illegitimate,” like Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix; Clark County, Nevada, which includes Las Vegas; and Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Detroit.
If you’ll recall, the dog whistles being used at that time were often pitched at the tone of an emergency siren; the underlying racism was fairly obvious to many other observers.
Bob Bauer, then a senior legal adviser to President Joe Biden’s campaign, told NPR in November 2020 that there was nothing subtle about Trump’s “targeting of the African American community.”
“It’s quite remarkable how brazen it is,” Bauer said. “This is straight out, discriminatory behavior.”
The illegal plot to overturn the election is overwhelmingly a racist plot to return Black voters and other voters of color to second-class citizenship, stripped of their voting rights.
And here’s how Nevada’s attorney general, Aaron Ford, put it when I interviewed him that same month: “I can say, as succinctly as possible: These are Jim Crow-era efforts to disenfranchise voters.”
The “fake elector” scheme was a central component of Trump and his allies’ scattershot strategy to subvert the election result, according to the separate indictments and ongoing prosecutions brought by the Justice Department against the many co-conspirators.
The latest indictments in Wisconsin are the first in the state, which was where the plot actually originated before being attempted elsewhere.
The charging documents lay out the three defendants’ role in promoting the theory behind the unlawful scheme, and how they coordinated to transmit forged electoral certificates to a
as their bagman, ultimately delivering the fraudulent paperwork to Chesebro in Washington, D.C. The young woman received a selfie from Chesebro so that she could identify him, and later text-messaged the co-conspirators saying, “5 mins until I make the drop,” adding, “I feel like a drug dealer.”
The forged documents were delivered to a staffer for an unnamed Pennsylvania congressman; and the plan was supposed to culminate with then-Vice President Pence simply rejecting his legal duty to open the envelopes containing the electoral vote certificates, or reading out the results from the fake certificates instead, according to the indictments.
At this point, the Wisconsin case seems pretty airtight. Ten people who actually stood in as “alternate” (i.e., fake) electors have accepted a settlement in a different, civil lawsuit brought by two (real) Wisconsin electors and a voter. The Wisconsin fake electors even formally repudiated their false claims as part of the settlement, including admitting that they “were not the duly elected presidential electors,” and that their actions were “part of an attempt to improperly overturn the 2020 presidential elections.” One of the false electors, who is also a former chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party, has said they were “tricked by the Trump campaign” into signing a document claiming Trump won the state.
Chesebro and Roman have also been charged along with Trump in a racketeering indictment in Georgia; Chesebro has pleaded guilty in that case and agreed to provide evidence. (The case was temporarily put on hold Wednesday while the court reviews a conflict-of-interest allegation against the prosecutor, which likely pushes out that trial beyond the presidential election.)
The indictments in other states also shore up the allegations about the conspiracy, and they show the involvement of Republican Party leadership around the country.
State authorities in Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, and Arizona have also brought charges stemming from the plot. The former chairs of the Michigan Republican Party and the Georgia Republican Party have been charged for helping submit electoral certificates. And the indictments against Chesebro and others implicate the Republican National Committee as well.
The latest charging documents point out that “Trump, Michael Pence, and the Trump campaign filed lawsuits in Dane County Circuit Court and Milwaukee County Circuit Court, ‘seeking to invalidate a sufficient number of Wisconsin ballots to change Wisconsin’s certified election results.’”
The two cities are Wisconsin’s most diverse. The city of Milwaukee, for example, is majority-minority, with Black and Latino people accounting for about 59 percent of its population.
Those patterns hold in virtually all of the places targeted by the Trump campaign and Republican Party’s efforts. Both Maricopa County and Clark County, for example, are about 32 percent Latino, and Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Detroit are all plurality- or majority-Black.
Of course, the specter of massive voter fraud in those counties and cities was and is a myth, based on nothing more than racist tropes, and barely hidden by racially coded language.
Trump and his allies routinely invoke race, almost always to marginalize and degrade nonwhite people, but often without actually using explicitly racist or racial language. The illegal plot to overturn the election, in other words, is overwhelmingly a racist plot to return Black voters and other voters of color to second-class citizenship, stripped of their voting rights.
As part of the scheme, Trump and other defendants spread knowingly false claims of election fraud, including lies about two specific, Black Atlanta election workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss—facts that are a part of the federal and Georgia indictments.
Trump, for example, falsely claimed that Freeman, a temp worker in her sixties, was actually a “professional vote scammer” and “hustler.” He mentioned Freeman by name 18 different times in his now-infamous call in which he pressured and at times threatened Georgia officials to alter the election results.
While trying to overturn the election in 2020, Trump baldly asserted that Detroit and Philadelphia are “two of the most corrupt political places anywhere in our country, easily.” He has previously singled out Oakland and Baltimore, saying living in those cities is “like living in hell.” And the former president has also described Atlanta as “crime-infested” and a “Murder and Violent Crime War Zone.”
Trump’s lawyer, Giuliani, falsely claimed that there was video footage of Freeman and Moss acting suspiciously during the voting process, and compared them to drug dealers “passing out dope.”
Freeman and Moss have since faced horrific, racist death threats, as they explained during emotional congressional testimony in June 2022. Because of this, they sued Giuliani and were awarded $148 million in damages for defamation.
Giuliani also held a press conference in the midst of the unfolding scheme, where he claimed that people are still using the names of dead Black Philadelphians—mentioning Joe Frazier and Will Smith’s late father, specifically—to vote long after they are deceased.
Legal scholars Catherine Powell and Camille Gear Rich explained in a 2020 paper how Trump’s language in the Georgia phone call effectively remobilized the old racist trope of a political trickster known as the “welfare queen,” transforming her from a welfare-and-benefits fraudster into a voter fraudster, “still Brown, female, and poor, but now out to steal American democracy.”
Despite all the evidence—including public admissions of the conspiracy, if not all the details—we are still quite far from official legal accountability and consequences for what was a serious, internal attack on our democratic institutions. Still, the public record is clear enough, even today, as a matter of history, and the enforcement actions by officials in Wisconsin and elsewhere will continue to flesh out the details of the crimes.
POLITICS REPUBLICANS DONALD TRUMP ELECTION 2020 RACE & ETHNICITY ELECTORAL COLLEGE VOTING RIGHTS DEMOCRACY WISCONSIN GEORGIA
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alternet- 2 24 no lnv
Home | Wisconsin Ethics Commission recommends felony charges for Trump fundraising committee
Alex Henderson
February 23, 2024
Wisconsin is one of the key battleground states where President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will need to campaign extra hard if 2024 brings, as expected, a Biden/Trump rematch. If Trump is the nominee, the Biden campaign will no doubt be reminding Wisconsin voters of all the legal problems the GOP presidential frontrunner is facing — legal problems that may have become even more complicated now that the bipartisan Wisconsin Ethics Commission is recommending criminal charges against the Trump-associated Save America Joint Fundraising Committee.
The Washington Post's Patrick Marley reports that the Ethics Commission has "found probable cause that Trump's Save America committee and several state and local Republican officials committed felonies and recommended several district attorneys investigate and prosecute them, according to records released Friday, (February 23)."
The Wisconsin Ethics Commission, according to Marley, alleges that Save America was involved in "a scheme that they say was meant to circumvent campaign finance laws to take out a powerful GOP lawmaker who has turned against Trump."
READ MORE:Ex-federal prosecutor: Why 'criticism' of Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump 'lacks merit'
Marley reports, "The (Ethics) Commission's investigation centers on the 2022 primary race between Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, one of the most powerful Republicans in Wisconsin, and Adam Steen, a political newcomer who embraced Trump…. The Commission alleges Steen, Steen's campaign and three county Republican parties arranged to sidestep campaign finance laws by having donors give money to one of the county parties, which would then steer it to Steen's campaign or his vendors, according to the records released Friday.
READ MORE: Trump wants daughter-in-law to co-chair RNC — but 'didn’t even like her' for 'many years'
Read the Washington Post's full report at this link (subscription required).
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CNN 12 23
The 10 fake electors from Wisconsin disavowed their attempt to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020, recognized the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s victory, and pledged not to serve as real electors in 2024 or any election when Trump is on the ballot, or to act as sham electors in any future election, as part of a civil lawsuit settlement announced on Wednesday.
This is the latest measure of accountability for the Trump campaign’s seven-state plot to undermine the Electoral College and block the transfer of power. Federal prosecutors indicted Trump in connection with the scheme; the entire faux delegation from Michigan was hit with state charges; and so have three of the 16 fake electors from Georgia.
As part of the Wisconsin settlement, the 10 fake electors issued a statement acknowledging that the phony certificates they signed in December 2020 were “used as part of an attempt to improperly overturn” the lawful election results.
“We hereby reaffirm that Joseph R. Biden, Jr. won the 2020 presidential election and that we were not the duly elected presidential electors for the State of Wisconsin for the 2020 presidential election,” says a portion of their statement. “We oppose any attempt to undermine the public’s faith in the ultimate results of the 2020 presidential election.”
The agreement also requires the 10 GOP activists to provide “full cooperation” with any “ongoing or future” Justice Department probes related to the 2020 presidential election. Special counsel Jack Smith, who has investigated the 2020 election subversion, indicted Trump and interviewed some fake electors, but hasn’t charged any of them.
Wisconsin’s delegation of sham electors was led by Andrew Hitt, the state GOP chair at the time, and included Robert Spindell, now a member of the Wisconsin Election Commission. They both were part of Wednesday’s settlement.
The civil case is unrelated to any potential state criminal inquiry into the electors plot.
Two liberal-leaning groups filed the case: Wisconsin-based Law Forward and the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, at Georgetown University. The groups said the deal penalized people who “ignore our nation’s democratic ideals” and “helps ensure that a similar effort to subvert our democracy will never happen again.”
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an 12 23 no lnx
republican Scott Walker went down in history as one of the most anti-union governors in Wisconsin history. Act 10, aggressively pushed by Walker through the Wisconsin State Legislature, attacked collective bargaining for public-sector unions and required public workers to pay more for health care.
Act 10's critics challenged Act 10 in the courts. But in 2014, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, in a 5-2 vote, upheld the law as constitutional.
Since then, there has been a major change in the state's highest judicial body. Liberal Janet Protasiewicz, in April, enjoyed a double-digit victory in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race — giving liberals a majority.
In an article published on December 5, The Nation's John Nichols reports that Act 10's future may be in jeopardy given the Wisconsin High Court's new makeup.
"With the April 2023 election win by Justice Janet Protasiewicz," Nichols explains, "the (Wisconsin Supreme) Court now has a 4-3 majority that could well be inclined to reconsider the constitutionality of Act 10. And they will likely get a chance to do so."
Nichols elaborates, "Last week, a coalition of unions, including several affiliates of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, AFSCME, and the Teamsters, as well as SEIU Wisconsin and the Teaching Assistants Association (TAA/AFT) — which represents graduate student workers on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus and is the oldest graduate students union in the world — filed a lawsuit demanding that Act 10 be struck down."
In an official statement, union members cited "low pay, staffing shortages and worsening working conditions" as some of their reasons for filing their anti-Act 10 lawsuit.
READ MORE: Wisconsin court case could end 'virtually impenetrable' GOP 'near-supermajorities' in state legislature
The Nation's full report is available at this link.
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an 11 23
Many Democratic strategists and activists — as well as some right-wing Never Trump conservatives — were delighted when liberal Judge Janet Protasiewicz defeated, by double digits, far-right MAGA Republican Dan Kelly in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race in April. Wisconsin is considered a must-wing state for President Joe Biden in 2024, and now-Justice Protasiewicz has made it abundantly clear that she has no use for voter intimidation or election denialism.
But MAGA Republicans and 2024 GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump haven't given up on Wisconsin. In an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on November 21, journalist Bill Lueders describes efforts by MAGA Republicans, Trump allies and QAnon conspiracy theorists to rig Wisconsin in Trump's favor.
Lueders reports that this scheme was described on the November 8 episode of "The Coach Mel Show," hosted by pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theorist Melody Jennings. Her guest was Brett Galaszewski, who chairs the Milwaukee County Republican Party and is a member of the far-right Turning Point USA.
According to Lueders, Galaszewski "urged viewers to do three things: join the county party's newly formed 'Election Integrity Committee,' become a poll worker, and push to get the state's top elections official removed from office."
"Galaszewski (said) that his group has set out to recruit 'upwards of 2000 poll workers in Milwaukee County to make sure that we have our eyes and ears in all facets of next year’s election,'" Lueders notes. "The purpose of this effort, he explained, is to 'just shave off a small percentage of liberal votes' in order to shift the statewide outcome, because 'the left is going to try everything that they can to mess with this again.' Galaszewski also implored the show's audience to join the battle against Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator Meagan Wolfe."
Media Matters' Alex Kaplan has described that November 8 conversation as "yet another connection between the right-wing election denial and QAnon movements." And Lueders points out that QAnon members "believe the U.S. government is controlled by Satan-worshiping pedophiles who eat human flesh."
"(A) bill that passed the (Wisconsin State) Assembly with a lone recorded 'no' vote from Supreme Moore Omokunde, a Milwaukee Democrat, would require that election observers be placed no farther than three feet from where voters give their names and addresses and register to vote," Lueders explains. "Just imagine what that would be like: Republican election observers perched just over the shoulders of the QAnon poll workers who have signed up to 'just shave off a small percentage of liberal votes.' What could possibly go wrong?"
*Read Bill Lueders' full report for The Bulwark at this link.
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omg
https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2021/08/23/conservative-think-tank-end-wisconsin-elections-commission/
looks legit
conservative think tank — run by a former staffer for then-Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald and connected to former Gov. Scott Walker — has called for abolishing the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) and moving the administration of state elections to the elected secretary of state.
The think tank, the Institute for Reforming Government, called for the change to state election law in a news release Monday morning.
“It is time to abolish WEC and implement good government accountability when it comes to Wisconsin’s elections and work to restore confidence among Wisconsin residents,” Chris Reader, executive vice president of IRG, said in a statement. “When unelected bureaucrats oversee Wisconsin’s elections it can lead to the erosion of faith and confidence in our electoral system. Thirty-three other states have elected officials overseeing the election process, providing a good measure of accountability by empowering people across ideological spectrums to provide a check on who manages elections. This is a good government measure that will benefit all Wisconsinites.”
The think tank’s president is CJ Szafir, who previously worked on Fitzgerald’s staff and served as the executive vice president for the right wing legal outfit, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. Walker is named on the think tank’s website as its former national honorary chairman.
According to the think tank’s most recently available tax records, it paid Walker’s consulting firm, the Walker Group, more than $164,000 in 2019.
The call comes as Republicans continue an effort to delegitimize state election administration in the wake of the 2020 presidential election and former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen.
This weekend, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) met with Trumpto discuss an ongoing investigation into the election led by former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman. Gableman recently traveled to South Dakota for a conspiracy theory-laden convention, run by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, where lies were spread about the 2020 election.
Gableman was joined by a state lawmaker and Robert Spindell, a member of the Elections Commission who has frequently spread conspiracy theories about last year’s election as well.
The conservative group’s call to disband the Wisconsin Elections Commission — made up of six members, three appointed by Democrats and three by Republicans — comes just six years after Republicans themselves created the commission. Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls), who chairs the Assembly Campaigns and Elections Commission, has continued an effort to hold a “forensic audit” of the 2020 election — similar to the widely derided audit held in Arizona.
Fitzgerald, now a member of Congress, and Walker were behind the creation of the WEC in 2015 after they disbanded the Government Accountability Board (GAB) over some similar complaints to the present complaints about the WEC. The GAB was made up of members appointed by a panel of appellate judges and was responsible for administration of the state’s election, ethics and campaign finance laws.
Republicans disbanded the GAB after it began investigating Walker for violations of campaign finance laws through so-called John Doe investigations.
GOP leaders, including Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, directly cited those investigations as the reason for the disbanding of the GAB and the creation of two new commissions to take its place — the Wisconsin Elections Commission and Wisconsin Ethics Commission.
The legislation that created the WEC was introduced by then-Rep. Dean Knudson (R-Hudson). Knudson is now a member of the WEC and its former chair.
The current Wisconsin secretary of state is Democrat Doug La Follette. The office is largely responsible for maintaining government records, as Republicans took nearly all of the other responsibilities — and most of the staff — away from the office they now want to run elections under Walker, moving La Follette to a storage room in the Capitol basement. In 2015, a different right wing think tank, the MacIver Institute, called for abolishing the position.
The Institute for Reforming Government did not respond to a request for comment.
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nyt
The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the Green Party’s presidential candidate will not appear on the state’s presidential ballot, a decision that came as a sigh of relief to election officials who had worried that a wholesale reprinting of thousands of ballots could bring chaos to an already stressed electoral system.
The decision against the candidate, Howie Hawkins, also could provide a small but potentially significant lift to Joseph R. Biden Jr., whose Democratic allies had expressed concern that the presence of a third-party progressive candidate on the ballot could siphon votes away from Mr. Biden and help President Trump.
Both the Biden and Trump campaigns view a path to victory through Wisconsin, which Mr. Trump carried by less than 23,000 votes in 2016.
Days before the start of mail voting, the court ruled that Mr. Hawkins and his running mate, Angela Walker, had waited too long to appeal a decision from the Wisconsin Elections Commission that denied their placement on the ballot, giving the court no recourse.
“Given their delay in asserting their rights, we would be unable to provide meaningful relief without completely upsetting the election,” the court ruled.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission had denied the request on Aug. 20 because of a discrepancy in Ms. Walker’s address on petitions, and it took the Green Party candidates two weeks to file a request for review with the court. The request was filed on Sept. 3.
The court did not rule on the merits of the Green Party case, but concluded that the candidates’ delay in a situation with “very short deadlines” made it impossible to grant the motion without causing “confusion and undue damage to both the Wisconsin electors who want to vote and the other candidates in all the various races on the general election ballot.”
In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Hawkins said his campaign had been working to find a lawyer to take its case to the State Supreme Court and had reached out to a number of progressive lawyers before finally finding a firm that would take the case, acknowledging that the firm was a conservative one whose representation was being financed by an unnamed conservative benefactor.
More than a million Wisconsin voters have already requested absentee ballots, and the prospect of an enormous reprinting would have affected every county and municipal election official in the state....
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wisconsin judges who forced election to go on during pandemic all voted absentee themselves
Laura Clawson / Daily KosApril 15, 2020
Four Wisconsin state Supreme Court justices blocked Gov. Tony Evers’ effort to delay the April 7 election—and all four protected themselves by voting absentee. In fact, all seven justices voted absent
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/investigative-reporter-breaks-down-the-real-reason-republicans-threw-a-fit-in-wisconsin-trumps-gop-is-canceling-the-american-peoples-right-to-vote/
no lnx
Investigative reporter breaks down the real reason Republicans ‘threw a fit in Wisconsin’: Trump’s GOP is ‘canceling the American people’s right to vote’
President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence walk with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Senator Roy Blunt, R-Mo., Tuesday, March 10, 2020, upon their arrival to the U.S. Capitol for a Senate Republican policy lunch. (Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen)
Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon April 12, 2020
Encouraged by the pain, suffering, misery and distraction caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump is continuing his assault on American democracy and the rule of law.
His most recent move: removing at least seven inspectors general who provide independent oversight within various departments of the United States government.
Trump is a malignant narcissist with authoritarian tendencies and may well be a sociopath. Like a Mafia boss, he views personal loyalty as more important than loyalty to the Constitution and the rule of law. Aided by Attorney General William Barr, Trump appears poised to loot the coronavirus relief funds passed by Congress, harass and silence his political enemies, speed up the country’s downward slide into failed democracy, and unleash more cruelty against those Americans he deems to be insufficiently loyal or otherwise “undesirable.”
On Twitter, Walter Shaub, former director of the Office of Government Ethics, summarized recent developments:
A last line of defense in this war on ethics and law is the Inspector General community. They’re the eyes of the American people, objective investigators traditionally freed to pursue accountability by the safeguard of bipartisan congressional protection.
What began with the fall of the ethics program is entering the end game with the potential fall of the Inspector General community. The government is failing us, safeguards that took two centuries to build have crumbled, and fascism is eyeing this republic like lunch.
Shaub is perhaps being optimistic: Donald Trump and his allies, both foreign and domestic, are already gorging on democracy. Trump makes no effort to hide his contempt for American democracy. He is obvious and unapologetic.
Last week, Trump admitted that “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again” if Americans were universally permitted to vote by mail.
Trump is just channeling a belief that has long been expressed both in private and in public by Republicans and other members of the right-wing movement. On this, Trump and the Republicans are correct: According to public opinion polls and other research, the American people overwhelmingly reject their policies and goals.
Because democracy is antithetical to today’s Republican Party, Donald Trump has repeatedly condemned voting by mail because he believes it will be disadvantageous to his chances of winning another presidential term in 2020. In the final analysis, Republicans want to make voting more difficult even if it means more Americans will fall ill and die from COVID-19.
Last Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed Trump and the Republicans’ ongoing assault on American democracy. In a 5-4 decision, the court’s “conservative” majority ordered that Wisconsin’s primary election could not be delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic, and no extension would be allowed for mail-in ballots. This decision forced the people of Wisconsin — most notably nonwhite people, students, young people, and other Democratic Party’s base in cities like Milwaukee and Madison — to choose between their lives and their constitutionally guaranteed right to vote.
The Democratic Party’s leaders have apparently decided that expanded mail-in voting is a necessary measure, and the best way to defeat Donald Trump in the context of the coronavirus pandemic.
In reality, matters are not so simple.
Greg Palast is an investigative journalist whose work has been featured by the BBC, the Guardian, the Nation, Rolling Stone, as well as on Salon.
He is the author of the bestselling books “Billionaires & Ballot Bandits” and “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.” Palast is one of the country’s foremost experts on voter fraud and how elections are rigged to suppress and otherwise interfere with the will of the people in a democracy.
He warns that mail-in voting as it currently exists is likely to guarantee Donald Trump’s victory in the 2020 election. Palast also explains how the Supreme Court decision on the Wisconsin primary election was really about purging nonwhite voters in order to maximize Trump’s chances of winning that key battleground state.
Palast says, however, that the Democratic Party’s new mail-in voting proposals can be improved so that the will of the American people can be fully realized at the ballot box — which will likely ensure Trump’s defeat in November.
You can also listen to my conversation with Greg Palast on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
What is democracy? What does it mean to you?
To me, it’s very simple: Every citizen gets to vote, and every vote gets counted. If you don’t have those two things, you don’t have a democracy.
Donald Trump has repeatedly said that he opposes mail-in ballots and if mail-in ballots are allowed that no Republican will ever get elected in the United States again. What were your thoughts when you heard the president of the United States making such bold and obvious threats against the country’s democracy?
Of course, it shows Donald Trump’s totalitarian mindset. My second thought is that the Democrats are making a mistake by thinking, “Well, if Trump says mail-in ballots are a bad idea, then let’s make sure all Americans mail in their ballots.”
Just the logic of it. Donald Trump says, “I hate mail-in ballots,” and the Democrats are saying we must have expanded mail-in ballots because of the coronavirus. But how do we work through the puzzle that the Republican Party actually does much better with mail-in voting? Shouldn’t Trump be encouraging that way of voting, because Republicans have great experience in suppressing votes and other ways of rigging elections?
Republicans know that they can just throw out the mail-in ballots.
Remember, when a person fills out a mail-in ballot it is not the simple task of just picking a candidate, sealing the envelope and then mailing it. You must have the right envelope. You have to answer questions on the outside of the envelope. You have to have the correct postage. You have to have all this information. In many states there has to be a witness or a notary, which is not easy to do. The mail-in ballots in many states are not postage-paid. This is a big problem because, for example, Ohio has a little square where it says, “Put your stamp here.” Well, that envelope requires two stamps. But if you were to look at the envelope, most people would assume it is just one stamp.
There is no question that Republicans do much better with mail-in voting than the Democrats. Republicans are better with mail-in voting because more of them do it. So there is a practical advantage with experience. Ultimately, there should not have been in-person voting and elections held in Wisconsin on Tuesday. To do such a thing is insane. There have to be other and better ways to vote, especially given the coronavirus. These solutions include early in-person voting and improved mail-in voting.
For example, in Hollywood there is drive-up voting where a person does not have to leave their car. There should also be drop-off boxes and other ways to get a ballot other than waiting for a card that a person may never even see or get. The Republicans are using this trope where mail-in voting is a bad thing — if it benefits Democrats. Do not forget that Republicans actually use mail-in voting more and they are defeating the Democrats using it.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the coronavirus pandemic does not constitute an emergency sufficient enough to delay voting in Wisconsin and that people should not be given more time to mail in their ballots. To a reasonable observer the court’s decision makes no sense and is obviously endangering the lives of voters. What was the real motivation here?
The basic logic is there are five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court who can tell the other justices “Screw you! Case closed!”
Here is their real argument: “We’re Republicans. This is what we want. Period.”
Consider what happened several weeks ago. Mike DeWine, the Republican governor of Ohio, did not want the vote to take place. The Democrats sued to force him to hold the primary. Being the governor, he said, “Screw you. I’m not holding the election.” He shut it down.
When the Republicans decide to delay or not have an election it is fine with the U.S. Supreme Court. The Democrats could not even get a hearing with the court about what DeWine did in Ohio. But when the Republicans wants to stop a delay in Wisconsin, the Supreme Court intervened.
The big picture: Why is this all happening? What is this fight really about? The Republicans do not care about Bernie Sanders versus Joe Biden. That is a settled issue, it’s over. The Republicans threw a fit in Wisconsin because the real issue is the Wisconsin State Supreme Court.
The Republican legislature voted that the state must remove 232,000 voters, who they claim have moved. That is not true, of course. Those voters have not moved. Most of the people on that list have never moved anywhere. They have not moved out of their county. The governor and lieutenant governor are Democrats and they are not going to purge those voters. The Republicans then went to court to force the Democrats to make those voters ineligible. Tuesday was also the general election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. That was the real issue.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court is controlled by the Republicans, and the Democrats were trying to take it away from them. With the decision about the coronavirus and mail-in ballots, the Republican Party’s control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court is not locked in. The Republicans will be able to remove a quarter million people from the voting rolls — voters who are more likely to support the Democrats.
Donald Trump supposedly won Wisconsin by 22,000 votes in 2016. Now 10 times that number will be purged by Republicans. That will give Donald Trump the state of Wisconsin in 2020. That is what the controversy and the U.S. Supreme Court decision is really about.
This is all part of a much larger strategy where Republicans rig elections. In urban and predominantly black and brown areas of Wisconsin there were almost no voting machines. People were waiting in long lines and risking their lives because of the coronavirus pandemic.
In rural areas of Wisconsin, where the virus has not yet hit in a real way, there is in-person voting. Republicans are more likely to mail in their ballots than Democrats and so they’ve already voted. Rural areas are also not as crowded at the polls. That makes it safer. Poll workers are older and they’re high-risk. They are also not reckless. There was a problem getting a sufficient number of polling officials and workers for Milwaukee. As such, the number of polling stations was reduced from 180 to three.
Because many people do not have cars, even getting to the polls in more populated urban areas during the coronavirus is dangerous. And there is the risk of going on mass transit as well. Tuesday’s election was a total fix by the Republicans. It was a joke of an election. The Republicans loved it. They do not want to expand mail-in voting.
On mail-in voting, make note of how Trump complained about the Democrats’ proposals. He was not complaining about mail-in voting in general. He was specifically condemning the Democrats’ proposals for mail-in voting. Trump knows that if instituted, the Democrats’ mail-in voting plan will wipe out the Republicans.
The Democrats want to make mail-in voting really work, and they want to extend early voting to a three-week period. That would also include evening voting. If the public is allowed to vote at different times, it will make it easier to keep a safe distance during the coronavirus epidemic. Voting will be much safer. What the Democrats want to implement about mail-in voting and other such changes is excellent.
But if there is mail-in voting as it is currently implemented in most states, Donald Trump cannot lose. The mail-in voting system as it exists will almost guarantee Trump and the Republican Party’s victory. Mail-in voting is a disaster for Democrats and it has always been a total disaster.
But Trump does have one thing right: If every eligible American votes then the Republicans are screwed.
If the Democrats know that they are heading for a mail-in election in 2020 because of the coronavirus, however, then they can improve the process and also have time to educate the public about this new and better system.
There is this hopelessly naïve and in many ways pathetic narrative being circulated by too many journalists and other political observers that any talk about Donald Trump canceling the 2020 presidential election is somehow ridiculous, that such a thing cannot happen in the United States. But many such people have zero credibility given that they also said that Donald Trump could not possibly be elected president. How do you evaluate these concerns?
What we are heading for in America is not Donald Trump canceling the 2020 presidential election but just canceling the American people’s right to vote.
Donald Trump can just hold a pretend election. America has a great deal of experience with doing such a thing. There is a massive system in place to purge voters. Many Americans will never receive their mail-in ballots. Ballots will never get counted. They also get disqualified for ridiculous reasons.
Every time there is an impediment to voting and registration in America it targets young people, black people and brown people. Low-income people are targeted. This is another version of Jim Crow racially segregated voter suppression and vote theft. Trump and the Republicans have many ways of holding an election and pretending that he was legitimately elected when, of course, he was not.
What are some specific tactics and strategies the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s agents can use to amplify their interference in the American people’s right to vote — and have their vote properly counted — in the 2020 election?
A study from MIT puts the loss of mail-in ballots at 22 percent. That is 25 million ballots if the United States goes to an 80 percent mail-in voting system.
The Republicans would not need to bring in new people or ramp up their voter suppression oppression. With the Electoral College, it is easy to steal an election. Stealing an election is much easier because in that system all one has to do is target the “battleground states” such as Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Places that we don’t think of as “swing states” — North Carolina and Georgia, for example — are gradually becoming “minority majority.” The Republicans know they are in trouble in Georgia. How do they keep control of the South? They manipulate the vote by purges, gerrymandering, tricks with mail-in voting and other techniques. The Republicans have many ways of keeping people from having their vote counted. Again, if the Democrats fix the system, they can lessen the impact of Republican Party interference and thus make sure that votes in support of the Democratic Party are fully counted.
What is the role of the coronavirus pandemic in the 2020 presidential election?
The coronavirus is voting for Donald Trump. If in-person, in-precinct voting is required and the coronavirus is present in that community, then people are going to be afraid.
There may be lingering fear of the coronavirus even if it is “officially” gone because no one trusts Donald Trump and his administration. That fear of the coronavirus is going to massively hurt the urban vote for the Democrats. If that happens, Trump wins again in 2020. If the United States continues with the mail-in system it currently has, then Donald Trump wins again in 2020. The coronavirus votes for Donald Trump. It is really that simple. The vote won’t even be close.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/republicans-arent-just-trying-to-cheat-at-elections-its-much-worse-than-that/
voter suppress
no lnx
Republicans aren’t just trying to cheat at elections — it’s much worse than that
Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon April 8, 2020
The Wisconsin Republican Party has been at the cutting edge of the efforts to make sure few, if any, Democratic voters ever make it to the polls again. Under the guidance of former Republican governor Scott Walker, a stalwart opponent of food having flavor, the state enacted a dizzying program of voter suppression, requiring people to have updated government-issued IDs while simultaneously making those IDs much harder to get, especially for people of color. They also suppressed the college student vote by banning most student IDs as a legitimate form of identification.
From the beginning of this war on voters, which has been spread out across the country, it’s been understood primarily as a partisan power grab, an attempt to keep certain constituencies from voting because they tend to vote for Democrats. Even Donald Trump, always saying the quiet parts out loud, said recently that if voting by mail becomes widespread, “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
This partisan understanding has, unfortunately, effectively muted both press coverage of this widespread voter suppression and public outrage. Covering this story necessarily requires portraying Republicans as villains and Democrats as victims, since that’s the truth. Unfortunately, mainstream journalists, always wary of being seen as “biased,” have almost universally reacted by underplaying this story, leaving it instead to left-leaning outlets like Mother Jones. Many Americans, drunk on the myth that all politicians are corrupt and always looking for an angle, tune out Democratic complaints about voter suppression as more partisan sniping.
But what’s happening in Wisconsin this week defies the usual partisan understanding of voter suppression. Wisconsin Republicans are exploiting the coronavirus to keep everyone from voting. It’s a preview not just of the way Republicans will use this crisis to shut down voting in particular instances, but an expansion of their anti-voting views in general.It’s starting to look like the Republican war on voting isn’t just about partisan gain, but even more about a deep hostility to democracy itself, and an objection to very idea of letting the people choose their leaders.
On Monday, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, signed an executive order delaying the election scheduled for April 7 until June. His reason was simple enough: People can’t maintain state-mandated social distancing and also vote. In addition, the majority of poll volunteers are over 60 and in a high-risk group and can’t come out at all. Many polling locations had already been closed due to staffing shortages, which ensures that crowds will be even thicker at the ones that remain open, leading to more danger of spreading the coronavirus.
Republicans in the state sued to end Evers’ order, and the conservative-controlled state Supreme Court sided with them, so now the election will go forward as originally scheduled. In addition, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that absentee ballots have to be postmarked today — even though many voters haven’t even gotten their ballots yet.
This decision will “disenfranchise untold thousands of Wisconsin voters and consign an unknown number of Wisconsinites to their deaths,” Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, said in a statement.
But what’s particularly strange about the Republican insistence on holding election today, in a naked bid to reduce the Badger State turnout to practically nothing, is that it’s not at all clear this will benefit Republicans in the short term.
It’s true that, typically, higher voter turnout tends to benefit Democrats over Republicans. That’s because Democratic-leaning voters significantly outnumber Republicans, but Democrats tend to be younger and less well-to-do on average, and therefore are more likely to skip voting. That’s why voter suppression techniques typically focus on making it hard for younger or poorer people to vote.
But no one can be sure that the coronavirus voter suppression will work the same way, because the people at most risk tend to be older — and therefore more likely to vote Republican. And while there are some general election races on the ballot, including important judicial contests, the most high-profile race is still the Democratic presidential primary, which could create more incentive for Democrats to risk coming out while Republicans sit at home.
That fact hasn’t slowed down Wisconsin Republicans one bit, however. It’s not hard to grasp the reason: This isn’t just about winning elections by cheating, as it’s commonly understood. It’s also about a deep loathing among conservatives for the very idea of democracy, and a compulsive need to shut as many people as possible out of the process of choosing their own leaders.
This is also true on a national scale. There’s increasing pressure, in the wake of the coronavirus, to make mail-in ballots the norm across the country, as it is in states like California and Oregon. Republicans, however, have made no bones about the fact that they will fight any and all such measures until the end of time.
That makes sense as a partisan move in normal times, because the evidence is clear that Democrats fare well in states with mail-in ballots. But in the age of the coronavirus, the most obvious beneficiaries of universal mail-in ballots would voters over 65, a demographic in which Trump won 52% of the vote in 2016. Meanwhile, the group that would feel the least fear about showing up to the polls, because they’re far less likely to face serious complications from COVID-19, is voters aged 18 to 29, most of whom voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Ultimately, it seems that taking a stand against democracy itself matters more to Republicans than worrying about how the coronavirus crisis has shifted partisan incentives.
This fits an overall pattern of Republicans instinctively choosing authoritarianism over democracy at every turn.Attorney General Bill Barr, for instance, has spent his career pushing for a virtually unlimited level of presidential power and a deep hostility toward allowing Congress to hold the president accountable — even though such unlimited powers would be held by the next Democratic president as well. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s single-minded focus on packing the judiciary with conservative judges is about his desire to monopolize power, of course, but it also bespeaks an enthusiasm for the fact that federal judges don’t have to answer to the public and can rewrite the law without fear of losing an election.
The rise of authoritarianism on the right has coincided with conservatives’ growing realization that Republicans can’t win elections fair and square anymore. But it’s also true that for the right authoritarianism is a reward in and of itself, so much so that Republicans are willing to risk short-term electoral losses for the long-term goal of whittling down democracy into nothingness.
The Republican war on voting, therefore, shouldn’t be understood purely through the lens of electoral gamemanship. That allows both journalists and ordinary voters to treat voter suppression less seriously, as another form of politics as usual. Instead, it’s important to understand that Republican politicians see fewer people voting as an important goal, in and of itself. They’ve largely focused on keeping Democrats from voting up till now, but it sure looks like they’d be just fine with a situation where barely anyone, of any party, voted at all.
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trms had head of legis in full ppe saying perfectly safe mofo
republicans can’t seem to help themselves from weaponizing this public health crisis to advance their own self interest and cement their grip on power. And they’re getting help from right-wing judges – including the far-right majority on the U.S. Supreme Court!
Yesterday, the Wisconsin GOP – with the help of the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court – forced Wisconsin voters to choose between risking their health and the health of others and exercising their right to vote ... during the pandemic ... with the number of polling places drastically reduced so, for instance, voters in Milwaukee, who usually have nearly 200 polling places, would have to crowd into FIVE.
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aN 420
‘enormous gamble’: Wisconsin Republicans slammed for discouraging mail-in voting ballots during deadly coronavirus pandemic
In Wisconsin, Gov. Tony Evers and other Democrats have — in response to the coronavirus pandemic — been encouraging alternatives to in-person voting. But they have run into a bricK...
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