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martinelligi

Live: 1st Biden-Trump Presidential Debate : NPR - 0 views

  • There are five weeks to go until Election Day, but almost a million ballots have already been cast in this election, according to Michael McDonald, a turnout expert at the University of Florida who runs the U.S. Election Project, which tracks voting. That’s up from less than 10,000 early votes cast at this time four years ago.
  • Biden’s 2019 tax return shows taxable income of $944,737 and a federal tax bill of $299,346. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, reported $3,018,127 in taxable income and paid $1,185,628 in taxes.
  • There are five weeks to go until Election Day, but almost a million ballots have already been cast in this election, according to Michael McDonald, a turnout expert at the University of Florida who runs the U.S. Election Project, which tracks voting. That’s up from less than 10,000 early votes cast at this time four years ago.
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  • There are five weeks to go until Election Day, but almost a million ballots have already been cast in this election, according to Michael McDonald, a turnout expert at the University of Florida who runs the U.S. Election Project, which tracks voting. That’s up from less than 10,000 early votes cast at this time four years ago.
  • President Trump has baselessly claimed that widespread voter fraud is rampant in both in-person and mail voting systems, without providing any evidence. His challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, has accused Trump of eroding confidence in U.S. democracy, and has stoked fears about whether Trump will actually leave office if voted out.
  • There are five weeks to go until Election Day, but almost a million ballots have already been cast in this election, according to Michael McDonald, a turnout expert at the University of Florida who runs the U.S. Election Project, which tracks voting. That’s up from less than 10,000 early votes cast at this time four years ago.
  • “We don’t expect Chris or our other moderators to be fact-checkers.”
  • of the election, a subject on which the two candidates have divergent views. President Trump has baselessly claimed that widespread voter fraud is rampant in both in-person and mail voting systems, without providing any evidence. His challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, has accused Trump of eroding confidence in U.S. democracy, and has stoked fears about whether Trump will actually leave office if voted out.
  • President Trump has baselessly claimed that widespread voter fraud is rampant in both in-person and mail voting systems, without providing any evidence. His challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, has accused Trump of eroding confidence in U.S. democracy, and has stoked fears about whether Trump will actually leave office if voted out.
  • President Trump has baselessly claimed that widespread voter fraud is rampant in both in-person and mail voting systems, without providing any evidence. His challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, has accused Trump of eroding confidence in U.S. democracy, and has stoked fears about whether Trump will actually leave office if voted out.
  • There are five weeks to go until Election Day, but almost a million ballots have already been cast in this election, according to Michael McDonald, a turnout expert at the University of Florida who runs the U.S. Election Project, which tracks voting. That’s up from less than 10,000 early votes cast at this time four years ago.
  • “We don’t expect Chris or our other moderators to be fact-checkers.”
  • Trump’s and Biden’s records The Supreme Court: This issue has gained new importance with the announcement of Trump’s nominee to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. COVID-19: Daily cases are on the rise in nearly half of U.S. states. The economy: Expect this to be closely tied to the pandemic. Race and violence in U.S. cities: The framing of this topic has drawn criticism, but protests against racism and police brutality are ongoing around the country. The integrity of the election: See the latest on election security from NPR here.
  • Trump’s and Biden’s records The Supreme Court: This issue has gained new importance with the announcement of Trump’s nominee to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. COVID-19: Daily cases are on the rise in nearly half of U.S. states. The economy: Expect this to be closely tied to the pandemic. Race and violence in U.S. cities: The framing of this topic has drawn criticism, but protests against racism and police brutality are ongoing around the country. The integrity of the election: See the latest on election security from NPR here.
  • Biden’s 2019 tax return shows taxable income of $944,737 and a federal tax bill of $299,346. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, reported $3,018,127 in taxable income and paid $1,185,628 in taxes.
  • Biden’s 2019 tax return shows taxable income of $944,737 and a federal tax bill of $299,346. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, reported $3,018,127 in taxable income and paid $1,185,628 in tax
  • Biden’s 2019 tax return shows taxable income of $944,737 and a federal tax bill of $299,346. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, reported $3,018,127 in taxable income and paid $1,185,628 in taxes.
  • The New York Times reports that Trump’s tax returns show millions of dollars in losses and that Trump paid only $750 in income taxes in each of 2016 and 2017, and in 10 of the last 15 years paid no income tax at all. The report also raised questions about questionable tax deductions made by Trump that could run afoul of tax law.
  • The New York Times reports that Trump’s tax returns show millions of dollars in losses and that Trump paid only $750 in income taxes in each of 2016 and 2017, and in 10 of the last 15 years paid no income tax at all. The report also raised questions about questionable tax deductions made by Trump that could run afoul of tax law.
  • almost a million ballots have already been cast in this election, according to Michael McDonald, a turnout expert at the University of Florida who runs the U.S. Election Project, which tracks voting. That’s up from less than 10,000 early votes cast at this time four years ago.
  • There are five weeks to go until Election Day, but almost a million ballots have already been cast in this election, according to Michael McDonald, a turnout expert at the University of Florida who runs the U.S. Election Project, which tracks voting. That’s up from less than 10,000 early votes cast at this time four years ago.
  •  
    (My highlighter was not working at all but some important points in this article are:) -the moderator will not fact check -The topics covered will be Trump and Biden's records, COVID, SCOTUS, The economy, Race and violence in the USA, Integrity of election - Trump's tax records are likely to be scrutinized -Many sitting presidents do not do well in debates for re-election...will Mr. Trump?
Javier E

The Inside Story of Michigan's Fake Voter Fraud Scandal - POLITICO - 0 views

  • In the end, it wasn’t a senator or a judge or a general who stood up to the leader of the free world. There was no dramatic, made-for-Hollywood collision of cosmic egos. Rather, the death knell of Trump’s presidency was sounded by a baby-faced lawyer, looking over his glasses on a grainy Zoom feed on a gloomy Monday afternoon, reading from a statement that reflected a courage and moral clarity that has gone AWOL from his party, pleading with the tens of thousands of people watching online to understand that some lines can never be uncrossed.
  • “We must not attempt to exercise power we simply don’t have,” declared Van Langevelde, a member of Michigan’s board of state canvassers, the ministerial body with sole authority to make official Joe Biden’s victory over Trump. “As John Adams once said, 'We are a government of laws, not men.' This board needs to adhere to that principle here today. This board must do its part to uphold the rule of law and comply with our legal duty to certify this election.”
  • As a Republican, his mandate for Monday’s hearing—handed down from the state party chair, the national party chair and the president himself—was straightforward. They wanted Michigan’s board of canvassers to delay certification of Biden’s victory. Never mind that Trump lost by more than 154,000 votes, or that results were already certified in all 83 counties. The plan was to drag things out, to further muddy the election waters and delegitimize the process, to force the courts to take unprecedented actions that would forever taint Michigan’s process of certifying elections.
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  • Not because it was going to help Trump win but because it was going to help Trump cope with a loss. The president was not accepting defeat. That meant no Republican with career ambitions could accept it, either.
  • At a low point in his party’s existence, with much of the GOP’s leadership class pre-writing their own political epitaphs by empowering Trump to lay waste to the country’s foundational democratic norms, an obscure lawyer from west Michigan stood on principle. It proved to be the nail in Trump’s coffin
  • Shortly after Michigan’s vote to certify, the General Services Administration finally commenced the official transition of power and Trump tweeted out a statement affirming the move “in the best interest of our Country.”
  • Still, the drama in Lansing raised deeper questions about the health of our political system and the sturdiness of American democracy
  • Why were Republicans who privately admitted Trump’s legitimate defeat publicly alleging massive fraud? Why did it fall to a little-known figure like Van Langevelde to buffer the country from an unprecedented layer of turmoil?
  • In conversations with more than two dozen Michigan insiders—elected officials, party elders, consultants, activists—it became apparent how the state’s conditions were ripe for this sort of slow-motion disaster
  • Michigan is home to Detroit, an overwhelmingly majority Black city, that has always been a favorite punching bag of white Republicans. The state had viral episodes of conflict and human error that were easily manipulated and deliberately misconstrued. It drew special attention from the highest levels of the party, and for the president, it had the potential to settle an important score with his adversary, Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer
  • Perhaps most important, Trump’s allies in Michigan proved to be more career-obsessed, and therefore more servile to his whims, than GOP officials in any other state he has cultivated during his presidency, willing to indulge his conspiratorial fantasies in ways other Republicans weren’t.
  • “Anybody can sue anybody for any reason. But winning is a whole different matter. And Trump didn’t have a realistic pathway here,” Brian Calley, the former GOP lieutenant governor, told me prior to the certification vote
  • “We have to see this for what it is. It’s a PR strategy to erode public confidence in a very well-run election to achieve political ends,” Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said in an interview last week. “This was not any type of valid legal strategy that had any chance at ultimately succeeding.”
  • Strangely liberated by his deficit of 154,000 votes, the president’s efforts here were aimed not at overturning the results, but rather at testing voters’ faith in the ballot box and Republicans’ loyalty to him.
  • where he can ultimately succeed—is in convincing unprecedented numbers of Americans that their votes didn’t count. Last month, Gallup reported that the public’s confidence in our elections being accurate dropped 11 points since the 2018 midterms, which included a 34-point decrease among Republicans.
  • That was before a daily deluge of dishonest allegations and out-of-context insinuations; before the conservative media’s wall-to-wall coverage of exotic conspiracy theories; before the GOP’s most influential figures winked and nodded at the president of the United States alleging the greatest fraud in U.S. history.
  • Trump failed to win Michigan. But he succeeded in convincing America that a loss, no matter how conclusive, may never again be conclusive enough.
  • The irony of Michigan’s electoral meltdown is that Election Day, in the eyes of veteran clerks and poll workers across the state, was the smoothest it had ever been
  • “You’re talking about election officials implementing new laws, running an election with a 60 percent mail vote, in the middle of a pandemic,”
  • “In terms of voters getting the ballots processed and counted in a reasonable time period, I thought they did a marvelous job. But it was a huge challenge.”
  • There’s always this rallying cry from Republicans—‘We win everywhere else, but lose Wayne County’—that creates paranoia. I still remember hearing, back on my first campaign in 2002, that Wayne County always releases its votes last so that Detroit can see how many votes Democrats need to win the state. That’s what a lot of Republicans here believe.”
  • The Republicans—House Speaker Lee Chatfield and Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey—were not interested. Spooked by Trump’s continued assault on mail voting, and aware that their own members in the Legislature were distrustful of the new “no-excuse-absentee” rules, Chatfield and Shirkey weren’t inclined to do the process any favors.
  • many Republicans didn’t believe the election would be terribly close to begin with
  • The common expectation was that the president would lose comfortably, by at least 4 or 5 points, a margin that would render any controversy about absentee voting meaningless.
  • Michigan Republicans were gripped by equal parts euphoria and panic. It was clear Trump was running far more competitively than they’d anticipated; he was on track to win Florida, Ohio and North Carolina, three states that tally their ballots quickly, meaning the spotlight would abruptly shift to the critical, slow-counting battlegrounds of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
  • it wasn’t until midnight that the urgency of the situation crashed over Republicans. Trump had built a lead of nearly 300,000 votes on the strength of same-day ballots that were disproportionately favorable to him. Now, with the eyes of the nation—and of the president—fixed on their state, Michigan Republicans scrambled to protect that lead.
  • Whitmer and Benson warned the GOP leaders that a protracted counting process, especially in the scenario of a competitive election, would invite chaos. Other states Trump carried in 2016, such as Ohio and Florida, allowed for pre-canvassing of absentee and other mail-in ballots so that voters would know which candidate carried the state on election night. Why couldn’t Michigan do the same?
  • Thomas had been “thrilled” with the professionalism he’d witnessed during Monday’s pre-processing session and Tuesday’s vote tabulating. Now, in the early morning hours of Wednesday, things were going sideways. Groups of Republican poll challengers were clustering around individual counting tables in violation of the rules.
  • “Reading these affidavits afterward from these Republican poll challengers, I was just amazed at how misunderstood the election process was to them,” Thomas chuckled. “The things they said were going on—it’s like ‘Yeah, that’s exactly what was going on. That’s what’s supposed to happen.’
  • His cushion over Biden had been whittled down to 70,000 votes. There remained hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots to be counted in the large, Democratic strongholds of Detroit, Lansing and Flint. The math was simply not workable for the president. Just before 9:30 a.m., Biden overtook Trump in the tally of Michigan’s votes—and suddenly, a switch flipped on the right.
  • After 24 hours of letting the democratic process work, Republicans around the country—watching Trump’s second term slipping through their fingers—began crying foul and screaming conspiracy. No state cornered the hysteria market quite like Michigan.
  • “The people outside that room were doing exactly what the law says you would eject people for doing—they were disrupting the election,” Thomas said. “Everyone else in the room—the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the ACLU, the nonpartisans—they all still had a full complement of challengers in the room. And the Republicans, by the way, had far more challengers in the room than they were entitled to.”
  • Truly egregious was Cox’s dishonesty. At the time of her tweet, several hundred of her party’s poll challengers, attorneys and representatives were already inside the TCF Center monitoring the count
  • By law, Republicans were allowed to have 134 challengers in the room, one for each tabulation table. In reality, the GOP had far more than that, according to sworn testimony from nonpartisan poll watchers inside the TCF Center. Because of the overflow, election officials ultimately decided to lock down the complex
  • In the days following Trump’s shameful address to the nation, two realities became inescapable to Michigan’s GOP elite. First, there was zero evidence to substantiate widespread voter fraud. Second, they could not afford to admit it publicly.
  • What made this behavior all the more confounding, Thomas said, is that the election was conducted more transparently than any he’d ever participated in. Each of the 134 tables had monitors placed at the end, “showing every keystroke that was made,” so that challengers could see exactly what was happening
  • But he came to realize that none of this mattered. Having dealt with Republican poll challengers for decades, Thomas said, it was clear the people who infiltrated TCF on Wednesday were not adequately trained or there for the right reasons.
  • “Unlike the people who were there Monday and Tuesday, these people Wednesday were totally unprepared. They had no idea how the system worked. They had no idea what they were there for,” Thomas said. “Many of them—not all of them, but many of them—they were on a mission. They clearly came in believing there was mass cheating going on in Detroit and they were on a mission to catch it.”
  • When Trump addressed the nation from the White House on Thursday night, insisting the election had been “stolen” from him, he returned time and again to alleged misconduct in Michigan’s biggest city. Detroit, he smirked, “I wouldn’t say has the best reputation for election integrity.” He said the city “had hours of unexplained delay” in counting ballots, and when the late batches arrived, “nobody knew where they came from.” He alleged that Republicans had been “denied access to observe any counting in Detroit” and that the windows had been covered because “they didn’t want anybody seeing the counting.”
  • All of this was a lie. Republicans here—from Ronna Romney McDaniel to Laura Cox to federal and local lawmakers—knew it was a lie. But they didn’t lift a finger in protest as the president disparaged Michigan and subverted America’s democratic norms. Why?
  • The true insanity was saved for Detroit. By early afternoon on Wednesday, hundreds and hundreds of Republicans had descended on the TCF Center, responding to an all-hands-on-deck missive that went out from the state party and was disseminated by local officials. Cox, the party chair, tweeted out a video of her comrades standing outside the locked-up downtown building. “Republican poll challengers blocked from entering the TCF Center in Detroit! This is egregious!” she wrote.
  • Tapped by the president-elect to take over the Republican National Committee—on the not-so-subtle condition that she remove “Romney” from her professional name—McDaniel morphed into an archetype of the Trump-era GOP sycophant. There was no lie too outlandish to parrot, no behavior too unbecoming to justify, no abuse of power too flagrant to enable
  • Longtime friends worried that McDaniel wasn’t merely humiliating herself publicly; she seemed to be changing in private. She was no longer coolly detached from the passions of politics. If anything, she was turning into a true MAGA believer.
  • There was some relief, then, when in recent weeks McDaniel told multiple confidants that she doubted there was any scalable voter fraud in Michigan. Nevertheless, McDaniel told friends and fellow Republicans that she needed to stay the course with Trump and his legal team. This wasn’t about indulging him, she said, but rather about demonstrating a willingness to fight—even when the fight couldn’t be won.
  • McDaniel’s thinking is actually quite linear. The RNC will vote in January on the position of chair. She is anxious to keep her job.
  • No matter how obvious the outcome—to McDaniel, to the 168 members of the RNC, maybe even to Trump himself—any indication of surrender would be unforgivable.
  • This is why McDaniel has sanctioned her employees, beginning with top spokesperson Liz Harrington, to spread countless demonstrable falsehoods in the weeks since Election Day. It’s why the RNC, on McDaniel’s watch, tweeted out a video clip of disgraced lawyer Sidney Powell claiming Trump “won in a landslide” (when he lost by more than 6 million votes nationally) and alleging a global conspiracy to rig the election against him.
  • With Trump entering the anguished twilight of his presidency, all that appears to matter for someone like McDaniel—or Cox, the state party chair, who faces an upcoming election of her own—is unconditional fidelity to the president.
  • Both Chatfield and Shirkey are talented and ambitious, self-grooming for future runs at higher office. Both could see the obvious problems of meeting with the president at such a precarious moment—and both could also see how spurning Trump could torpedo their careers in the GOP.
  • “Frankly, continuing to humor him merely excuses his role in this. The election wasn’t stolen, he blew it. Up until the final two weeks, he seemingly did everything possible to lose. Given how close it was, there is no one to blame but Trump.”
  • “But if they want a future within the party, it is required of them to demonstrate continued fealty. Principled conservatives who respect the rule of law and speak out suddenly find themselves outcasts in a party that is no longer about conservativism but Trumpism. Just ask once-conservative heroes like Jeff Flake, Justin Amash and Mark Sanford.”
  • Monica Palmer, one of the GOP canvassers, caused an uproar when she offered to certify the rest of Wayne County—precincts like Livonia—without certifying Detroit. (Livonia, which is 95 percent white, had more poll-book irregularities than Detroit, which is 80 percent Black.)
  • Tweeting out siren emojis, Jenna Ellis, the attorney for Trump’s campaign, announced: “BREAKING: This evening, the county board of canvassers in Wayne County, MI refused to certify the election results. If the state board follows suit, the Republican state legislator will select the electors. Huge win for @realDonaldTrump.”
  • the notion that legislators would under any circumstance be free to send their own partisans to the Electoral College had no basis in fact. Under Michigan statute, the only electors eligible to represent Michigan are those who will vote for the winner of the popular vote. There is no discretion for anyone—the governor, leaders of the legislature, canvassers at the county or state level—to do anything but follow the law.
  • “The unfortunate reality within the party today is that Trump retains a hold that is forcing party leaders to continue down the path of executing his fantasy of overturning the outcome—at their own expense,”
  • precautions were taken. In a savvy move, Chatfield and Shirkey prepared a letter addressing concerns over funding to deal with Covid-19 in Michigan. They also brought along their general counsels. These two maneuvers—one to soothe the outcry over Michigan lawmakers meeting with a president whose legal team was calling for them to overturn the state’s election results; the other to insulate them from improper discussions about doing exactly that—were sufficient to sidestep any major crisis.
  • Trump, perhaps sensing the nervous reticence of his guests, did not make the ask they feared. As the meeting went on, it became apparent to some people in the room that more than anything, Trump had called his Michigan allies to Washington to get an honest assessment of what had happened there. He wanted to know if there was any pathway to victory. They told him there was not.
  • “I don’t get it,” the president said, venting confusion and frustration. “All these other Republicans, all over the country, they all win their races. And I’m the only guy that loses?”
  • With all 83 counties boasting certified results, the only thing that stood between Joe Biden and his rightful claim to Michigan’s 16 electoral votes was certification from the state board of canvassers. In a rational political climate, this would not have been the subject of suspense. But the swirling innuendo and disinformation had long ago swept away any semblance of normalcy.
  • Already, one of the board’s two Republicans, Norm Shinkle, a career party fixture, had hinted he would not vote to certify the state’s result. Because the two Democrats would obviously vote in favor of certification, a manic gush of attention turned to the other Republican member, Aaron Van Langevelde.
  • By Sunday morning, speculation was rampant that Van Langevelde would resign from the board on Monday. This made perfect sense to Republicans and Democrats alike: Based on their fact-finding mission into the mysterious fourth board member, Van Langevelde was a bookish type, a rule follower, an obsessive student of world history (particularly the Roman Empire) who believes to his core in a conservative application of the law
  • He would be inclined, Lansing insiders figured, to vote in favor of certifying the results. But he would be disinclined to throw away his future in the Republican Party. A resignation from the board was his only way out.
  • Working off this expectation, a late lobbying blitz turned on Shinkle. In the 36 hours preceding Monday’s vote, he was inundated with calls and emails and text messages from high-ranking Republican luminaries around the state. Some, such as former congressman and House Intelligence Chair Mike Rogers, urged him to certify the results in accordance with Michigan law. Others, including McDaniel and Cox and other state party figures, pleaded with Shinkle to stand his ground and insist on a two-week delay.
  • The response they got was universal: He would promise to “do my best,” then he would offer a litany of unsubstantiated allegations of fraud. (Not everyone bothered contacting Shinkle: That his wife served as a plaintiff’s witness in Trump’s ill-fated lawsuit against Detroit struck many people not just as a conflict of interest, but as a clear indication he would never vote to certify.)
  • Some Republicans didn’t want to believe it. But for others, reality began to set in. They had grown so accustomed to Republicans falling in line, bending a knee to Trumpism, that the notion of someone acting on his own personal ethic had become foreign.
  • But the more they learned about Van Langevelde, the more he sounded like just that type of independent thinker. Some viewed his relative youth as an asset, believing he wouldn’t risk throwing away his future in the party. What they had failed to appreciate was that young conservatives were oftentimes the most disillusioned with the party’s drift from any intellectual or philosophical mooring.
  • Like a good attorney, Van Langevelde meticulously questioned a number of expert guest speakers to ascertain if they had dissenting views of the board’s authority under state law. Time and again, they affirmed his position. The body did not have power to audit or investigate or recount; that could be done only by distinct bodies after certification was complete. The job of the board of state canvassers was narrowly to examine the certified results from all 83 counties and then, based on the relevant vote totals, certify a winner of Michigan’s 16 electoral votes. The one time he was challenged—by Spies, the political superlawyer representing John James’ U.S. Senate campaign—Van Langevelde calmly brushed his recommendations aside, telling Spies, “I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with you on that.”
  • Within minutes of Van Langevelde’s vote for certification—and of Shinkle’s abstention, which guaranteed his colleague would bear the brunt of the party’s fury alone—the fires of retaliation raged. In GOP circles, there were immediate calls for Van Langevelde to lose his seat on the board; to lose his job in the House of Representatives; to be censured on the floor of the Legislature and exiled from the party forever. Actionable threats against him and his family began to be reported. The Michigan State Police worked with local law enforcement to arrange a security detail.
  • ll for doing his job. All for upholding the rule of law. All for following his conscience and defying the wishes of Donald Trump.
  • “It took a lot of courage for him to do what he thought was right and appropriate, given the amount of pressure he was under,” said Brian Calley, the GOP former lieutenant governor, who told me days earlier that he had never heard the name Aaron Van Langevelde. “He carried himself as well as anybody I’ve seen in that type of setting, including people with decades and decades of experience. He showed an awful lot of poise.”
  • The name Van Langevelde is already so infamous in Michigan Republican lore that those associated with him are at risk of being branded turncoats, too.
  • because of the sweeping transformation of the party—not just ideologically or stylistically, but mechanically, with MAGA loyalists now installed in state and local leadership posts across the country—the question of loyalty will continue to define the Republican identity for years to come.
  • That contours of that identity—what it means to be a Trump Republican—have gained clarity over time. The default embrace of nationalism. The indifference to ideas as a vision for governing. The disregard for institutional norms. The aversion to etiquette and the bottomless appetite for cultural conflict. Now there is another cornerstone of that identity: The subversion of our basic democratic process.
  • More than any policy enacted or court vacancy filled, Trump’s legacy will be his unprecedented assault on the legitimacy of the ballot box
  • Future iterations of the GOP will make casual insinuations of voter fraud central to the party’s brand. The next generation of Republicans will have learned how to sow doubts about election integrity in one breath and in the next breath bemoan the nation’s lack of faith in our elections, creating a self-perpetuating justification to cast suspicion on a process that by raw numbers does not appear conducive to keeping them in power.
  • “This is not some whacked-out fringe,” James said in one taping. “When half the votes in our state believe we just had the most secure election in U.S. history, and the other half believe they were cheated, we have a problem.”
  • James is right. We do have a problem. Our elections continue to be underfunded. Our election bureaus are chronically understaffed. Our election workers are badly undertrained. Our elections are prone to a significant amount of human error—and any municipal or county clerk will tell you that concerns over not catching those errors keep them up at night.
  • But errors are not fraud. And when James says he’s troubled that half of Michigan’s voters feel they were cheated, he would do well to remember that he was the one telling them they got cheated in the first place.
  • there is no denying the advent of a pattern. Republicans in Michigan and across America have spent the past three weeks promoting baseless allegations of corruption at the ballot box, the rabid responses to which they use as justification to continue to question the fundamental integrity of our elections. It’s a vicious new playbook—one designed to stroke egos and rationalize defeats, but with unintended consequences that could spell the unraveling of America’s democratic experiment.
  • “By capriciously throwing around these false claims, you can’t get to the heart of a really important issue. In fact, you lose any credibility to get to the heart of that issue,”
  • “And by the way, if you’re going to do an audit, you’d better do it statewide. This is not just a Detroit thing. There are sloppy Republican precincts all over the state.
  • There is no immediate way to make Americans appreciate this distinction, no instant cure for the flagging confidence in our elections.
  • there are obvious incremental steps to take in the name of transparency and efficiency. First among them, acknowledged Chatfield, the Michigan House speaker, is getting rid of the rules that led to the TCF Center circus in the first place.
  • one of the items where we should look at other states and see how they’ve done it well, is regarding the early processing of absentee ballots. We mishandled that this year. We should have allowed for early processing. We didn’t, and it became a spectacle.
  • For those Republicans left to pick up the pieces in the coming legislative session, there may be little incentive for bipartisan cooperation on a subject that now divides the two party bases as starkly as gun rights or tax rates. The backlash against absentee voting from Republican constituents was already fierce; in the wake of Trump’s defeat and the TCF Center conspiracies, Republicans might find it beneficial to avoid raising the issue at all.
  • There is little cause for optimism. If the majority of GOP politicians couldn’t be bothered to do the easy work of debunking crackpot conspiracy theories, how likely are they to do the hard work of hardening our democracy?
  • “A lot of our leaders in this country ought to be ashamed of themselves,” said Thomas, the nonpartisan elections guru who kept Michigan’s governing class guessing his political affiliation for the past several decades. “They have propagated this narrative of massive fraud, and it’s simply not true. They’ve leapt from some human error to massive fraud. It’s like a leap to Never Neverland. And people are believing them.
  • “The people of this country really need to wake up and start thinking for themselves and looking for facts—not conspiracy theories being peddled by people who are supposed to be responsible leaders, but facts,” Thomas said. “If they’re not going to be responsible leaders, people need to seek out the truth for themselves. If people don’t do that—if they no longer trust how we elect the president of the United States—we’re going to be in real trouble.”
katherineharron

President Donald Trump's GOP wall is cracking as he fights election result - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • As President Donald Trump's lawyers cling to their far-fetched schemes to overturn the presidential election, it was increasingly clear Thursday that cracks are forming in Trump's Republican wall of support, as more GOP members stepped forward to say that President-elect Joe Biden should receive national intelligence briefings
  • There is still no sign that Trump and leading Republicans plan to actively congratulate Biden.
  • Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford told a local radio station Wednesday that the President-elect should begin receiving presidential intelligence briefings by the end of the week, a number of senior GOP senators spoke up Thursday to say they shared that thinking,
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  • Lankford noted that after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the bipartisan committee that investigated them found that the compressed time frame for the transition after the contested 2000 election may have contributed to the lack of preparedness for the attack.
  • In their report after the attacks, the commission said that the dispute over the election and the "36-day legal fight" following "cut in half the normal transition period." The loss of time, the commission said, "hampered the new administration in identifying, recruiting, clearing, and obtaining Senate confirmation of key appointees,"
  • The intermediary step by Republicans in the President's orbit illuminated the widening divide between the practical reality that Biden must be equipped with key national security knowledge to begin running the country in January and the political fiction being perpetrated by the President and his supporters.
  • Ohio's Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, who heads a state the President won last week, said on CNN's "New Day" that "we need to consider the former vice president as the President-elect."
  • Trump has showed little interest in addressing the most important issue facing the country: the record-breaking climb in US coronavirus cases.
  • The illusory quality of Trump's election fraud claims was once again underscored by a set of election integrity checks that are being conducted in Arizona, which CNN called for Biden late Thursday night.
  • post-election audits filed with the Arizona Secretary of State's office from more than half of Arizona's counties showed that there is no evidence of systematic voter fraud or major discrepancies that would affect the outcome of the race.
  • A group of national, state and private election officials said in a joint statement Thursday that there is no evidence that "any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised."
  • "The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result," the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Executive Committees said.
  • The most surreal feature of the suspended reality at the White House is still the behavior of the President himself. A leader who jealously dominated television coverage on the campaign trail and in office has not made public remarks for an entire week
  • "I'm worried about this virus, I'm not looking at what the merits of the case are. It would appear that Joe Biden is going to be the next president of the United States," DeWine said, adding that America needs to "come together as a country."
  • But the President's Twitter feed Thursday indicated that he was much more fixated on what he views as his mistreatment by Fox News, his once favored network, which he believes should be defending him more vociferously in the midst of the twilight zone that he has created by refusing to acknowledge Biden's victory.
  • The President, whom CNN quoted sources as describing as increasingly "dejected" on Thursday, continues to tweet falsehoods about election fraud.
  • there are few signs that his campaign has convinced any court to take his complaints seriously. In this odd limbo between defiance and admitting defeat, the President is wavering between fighting on and a recognition that his hold on power is coming to an end,
  • While his adult sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, have urged their father to continue challenging the election results, his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner have taken a more measured approach, CNN reported Thursday, encouraging the President to think about potential damage to his legacy as they weigh their own post-White House ambitions.
  • In addition to Biden's win in Arizona, the President trails in Georgia, where a hand recount is beginning, by 14,000 votes -- a cushion for Biden unlikely to be overturned.
  • Meanwhile, Biden's political choreography -- which late Wednesday included the naming of Ron Klain as his White House chief of staff -- and his departure to his family beach house to decompress after the election is meant to signal that his ascent to power is assured.
  • In what may have been a signal to establishment Republicans -- in a venue that the President himself might take account of -- former George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove wrote in a Wall Street journal op-ed that the election will not be overturned whatever the result of Trump's legal gambits.
  • Lankford, who referred to Biden as President-elect at his church last week, has said he will intervene if the victorious Democrat remains unable to access intelligence briefings.
  • "I've been a little concerned about it," Senate Armed Services Chairman Jim Inhofe said of the Pentagon firings, adding he'd been told "now it's come to an end."
  • As Republican lawmakers stake out safe ground -- trying to appear that they are still supporting the President's legal pursuits while also signaling that the transition should begin -- some Democrats have been hammering their GOP colleagues for indulging the President's election fantasies.
  • "These Republicans are all auditioning for profiles in cowardice," Schumer said.
  • On Thursday, the US broke the record for Covid-19 hospitalizations for the third consecutive day, surpassing 67,000 hospitalizations.
  • The glimmer of hope on the horizon continued to be Pfizer's promising announcement earlier this week that their vaccine trial is more than 90% effective with officials widely expecting that the company will apply for emergency use authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration before the end of this month.
  • "By the end of March to early April, we think across all of the vaccines that we have invested in, we have enough for all Americans who wish to get vaccinated," Azar said.
  • "If you think of it metaphorically, you know, the cavalry is coming here," Fauci said, touting the major positive impact that the vaccines will have."If we could just hang in there, do the public health measures that we're talking about," Fauci said. "We're going to get this under control, I promise you."
carolinehayter

Fact check: Trump lies a lot about the election - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • "I WON THE ELECTION!" President Donald Trump tweeted just before midnight on Sunday night. Trump did not win the election. So this was a fitting conclusion to his lie-filled weekend barrage of tweets, in which he continued to invent imaginary evidence in support of his attempt to deny Joe Biden's victory.
  • Almost nothing Trump is saying about the election is true
  • Twitter affixed a fact check label to more than 30 of his election-related tweets and retweets between Friday and Monday morning
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  • Trump repeatedly attacked the validity of the election results, tweeting that this was a "RIGGED ELECTION," a "Rigged and Corrupt Election" and a "Rigged Election Hoax." He also tweeted that this was the "most fraudulent Election in history" and that the results are "fake."
  • None of this is true. The election was not rigged, and there is no evidence of any fraud large enough to have changed the outcome.
  • Again, not true. Election Day glitches are unfortunate but normal, and there is no evidence of anybody trying to use voting technology to steal votes.
  • Trump tweeted that there are "millions of ballots that have been altered by Democrats, only for Democrats."
  • This is false. There is no evidence that millions of ballots were altered by Democrats. In fact, there is not currently evidence that ballots were improperly altered by anyone.
  • Trump tweeted, "All of the mechanical 'glitches' that took place on Election Night were really THEM getting caught trying to steal votes."
  • "The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history."
  • Trump quoted a 1994 article about absentee ballot fraud in a state Senate election in Philadelphia in 1993;
  • There is no evidence of people voting after the election was over.
  • Trump repeatedly criticized Georgia's ongoing audit of the presidential election there, in which all ballots are being recounted by hand. Trump tweeted, "The Fake recount going on in Georgia means nothing because they are not allowing signatures to be looked at and verified. Break the unconstitutional Consent Decree!"
  • Trump then tweeted, "Wow. This is exactly what happened to us. Great courage by judge!"
  • Trump alleged that there was "voting after the Election was over."
  • Trump tweeted, "700,000 ballots were not allowed to be viewed in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh which means, based on our great Constitution, we win the State of Pennsylvania!"
  • This is nonsense.
  • a Trump campaign lawyer has admitted in court that the campaign's observers were permitted to watch in Philadelphia. And even if, hypothetically, Trump observers had been improperly barred, nothing in the Constitution would make Trump the automatic winner of a state in which he trails by more than 65,000 votes as counting continues.
  • "NO VOTE WATCHERS OR OBSERVERS allowed."
  • Trump campaign observers were permitted wherever Biden campaign observers were permitted.
  • Trump claimed that the election was "stolen" in part by a voting equipment and software company, Dominion Voting Systems, he suggested is biased against him and also has "bum equipment."
  • There is no evidence of any wrongdoing by Dominion and no evidence that any issues with Dominion's technology affected vote counts
  • Again, the Trump administration said in the statement last week: "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised."
  • There is no evidence of a fraud scheme in Philadelphia in the 2020 election.
  • The Georgia audit is not fake in any way. While it's true that the state's recount process does not involve signature verification, voters' signatures were verified twice before the ballots were included in the count in the first place
  • Georgia residents' signatures are verified twice, first when they request an absentee ballot and second when they submit the ballot.
  • o individual ballot could be connected to an individual signature in a recount, even if someone wanted to violate the bedrock American principle of the secret ballot.
  • The "Consent Decree" Trump was complaining about is a March legal settlement, between the state and the Democratic Party, that did not prevent signature verification. Rather, it set rules for how and when Georgia voters must be contacted about ballots rejected because of signature issues (and other issues), so that they have time to fix these problems before the count is finalized.
katherineharron

Early voting broke records. Officials hope it will lead to a smoother Election Day - CN... - 0 views

  • Millions of Americans have already cast their ballots ahead of Election Day, smashing mail-in and early voting records and raising election officials' hopes that the eye-popping early vote totals will ease the potential for problems, chaos and conflict at the polls on November 3.
  • Since voting began in September, there have certainly been issues at the polls, including hours-long waits, allegations of voter intimidation and suppression -- as well as incidents like one in North Carolina on Saturday, where police used pepper spray to break up a march to a polling place
  • concerns persist that tensions over the bitter contest between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden could boil over on Election Day, whether at the polls or afterward when the results are tallied.
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  • Rising Covid-19 cases in nearly every state add another problematic layer to preparations for Election Day, escalating voters' fears about going to a crowded polling place and potentially threatening the loss of critical polling workers who test positive or have to quarantine.
  • The coronavirus pandemic led to a chaotic primary in several states during the spring, prompting many states to make major changes to their voting rules to encourage more ballots to be cast by mail or ahead of Election Day.
  • will turnout be significantly smaller than normal because so many voted ahead of time? Or is it merely foreshadowing a record-breaking overall vote total -- and there will be long lines on November 3, too, when voting will take longer than normal due to the pandemic?
  • In Texas, a federal judge set a hearing Monday on a Republican challenge to 100,000 votes cast in Harris County, the Democratic stronghold including Houston, via drive-thru voting centers.
  • Local election officials are hopeful that all of the early voting will make things smoother on Tuesday, even in places where lines were a major problem during the primary, like Detroit.
  • Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said at a news conference last week. "Because two thirds of our citizens will likely vote absentee or prior to Election Day, we will see a third of our citizens, probably about 2 million, vote in person on Election Day."
  • "Everyone spreading out when they vote has been key to safely voting during this pandemic," Sims said. "We do still expect steady turnout on Election Day."
  • The coronavirus pandemic, which took hold in the US just after Biden emerged as the winner of the crowded Democratic primary, scrambled many of the remaining primaries.
  • many states turned to expanding early voting, some allowing all voters to request an absentee ballot and others moving most of their election to vote by mail
  • two factors turned more voters to cast ballots early and in person. One was that Democrats began to shift their strategy on in-person voting, encouraging voters to vote early and in-person, due to a higher rate of ballot rejection to absentee ballots. The second was that the US Postal Service began to see service delays this summer under new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major Trump donor who had implemented cost-cutting measures.
  • Texas surpassed its 2016 vote total even before the weekend. More than 9.6 million people voted during the three-week early voting period that concluded Friday night, beating the state's 9 million turnout in 2016.
  • Despite massive turnout levels across the country, there are still millions of mail ballots in the key battleground states that were requested by voters but haven't been returned, according to the latest data from Edison Research.
  • In most states, information about unreturned ballots is public information, and is mined by political campaigns. Campaigns use this data to aggressively target their supporters, during the final stretch of the race, to cast their vote.
  • "We are now focused on building a reserve pool of 1,500 workers who can be deployed across the state on Election Day in the event there are any last-minute worker changes or shortages," Michigan Secretary of State spokesperson Tracy Wimmer told CNN on Friday.
  • In Kent County, which includes Grand Rapids, county elections director Gerrid Uzarski told CNN last week that "some" poll workers were quarantining after being exposed to Covid-19, and would no longer be working on Election Day. On top of those quarantining, Uzarski added that "some" other poll workers have decided that they do not want to risk coming into work on Election Day because of the rising cases across the state.
katherineharron

Trump foments mistrust of election he claims won't be honest - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • President Donald Trump and top aides are responding to the uproar over his failure to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power by intensifying their efforts to create election chaos
  • And raising new concerns that the administration is leveraging executive power to bolster the President's political goals, the Justice Department said it was probing "potential issues with mail-in ballots" in Pennsylvania following the discovery of nine discarded ballots.
  • "We want to make sure the election is honest, and I'm not sure that it can be,"
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  • Trump may well win a legitimate mandate from voters in 40 days or Democratic nominee Joe Biden might claim an Electoral College majority that would make challenges to the vote in individual states moot.
  • But Trump's attitude is causing real harm now, even as Americans in some states cast early and mail-in votes. It is not only raising the prospect of a divisive post-election period in November -- it is making it more likely that Trump's supporters will view the election as invalid and will refuse to accept the result if he doesn't win.
  • "The President will accept the results of a free and fair election," White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said.
  • McEnany was effectively establishing a predicate for the President to claim the election is rigged. She also previously advanced the incorrect position that the result of the clash between Trump and Biden would only be fair if it was known on election night.
  • "The President says crazy stuff. We've always had a peaceful transition of power. It's not going to change," said Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska.
  • "Republicans believe in the rule of law, we believe in the Constitution, and that's what dictates what happens (in) ... our election process and so yes."
  • "If there's a court challenge to the election, it will be decided in court. And the loser of the challenge will accept the results," Graham said.
  • There is also a flurry of attempts by Trump's campaign and Republicans to use the instruments of local power to make it more difficult for people to vote. Trump is now demanding that his nominee to replace Ginsburg should be seated before the election in order to help adjudicate the winner.
  • One weakness of the White House approach is that in order for it to fuel credible legal challenges, there will need to be genuine evidence of fraud in mail-in voting.
  • On Thursday, for instance, the Justice Department said it was investigating alleged problems with mail-in voting in Pennsylvania. In a highly unusual move, it said nine military ballots were found and that seven "were cast for presidential candidate Donald Trump."
  • Indeed, Trump seized on the incident, saying the ballots were found in a wastepaper basket.
  • "They throw them out if they have the name 'Trump' on it, I guess," Trump said.
  • In the 2016 election, Pennsylvania cast 6 million votes, meaning that the nine ballots concerned here make up a tiny proportion of the total vote on which to base a case that the election is unfair. The US attorney said in a letter to county election officials that it appeared confusion was the cause of the prematurely opened ballots -- the envelopes appeared similar to the ballot application envelopes -- and did not allege any political motivation.
  • "It's clearly making people concerned about voting by mail, first of all the issue of 'will it be counted,'" Trevor Potter, the former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, told CNN Thursday.
  • "(It's) questioning the legitimacy ... that's really a PR gambit because legally a vote cast on an absentee ballot by mail is just as legitimate as one cast in person and both have the same security safeguards," the Republican lawyer said.
  • "This is the way democracy works: no winner is declared until every ballot is counted," Benson told CNN's Brianna Keilar.
  • "So we are going to respond to that as we always do with facts, data, truth and transparency."
Javier E

Stolen Elections, Voting Dogs And Other Fantastic Fables From The GOP Voter Fraud Mytho... - 0 views

  • Numerous studies have found that voter fraud is far from a major issue in the U.S., and in-person fraud of the sort Trump and Kobach like to talk about — things like non-citizens showing up to vote or people returning to vote multiple times under different names — is vanishingly rare. A 2007 study by NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice memorably found that an individual American is more likely to get struck by lightning than to commit in-person voter fraud.
  • as of last summer, 68 percent of Republicans thought millions of illegal immigrants had voted in 2016, and almost three quarters said voter fraud happens “somewhat” or “very often.” The same survey found that nearly half of Republicans believed Trump had won the popular vote.
  • The idea that Nixon gracefully and expeditiously chose not to fight the outcome is a myth, the historian David Greenberg demonstrated back in 2000. Nixon did, however, eventually give in — but in the process, he turned the notion that the Democrats had stolen the election into an article of faith among Republicans, especially conservative ones.
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  • or decades, complaints about “voter fraud” have been a core component of Republican right-wing folklore — and one of their most useful election-year tools, particularly in places where winning the white vote isn’t enough to win elections.
  • The effect was immediate. In 1961, the Republican National Committee launched a “ballot security program,” explained in a pamphlet published by its Women’s Division. Party workers were advised to place poll watchers outside the polls with cameras.
  • Ultimately, that year Barr reported that his workers had “discouraged or successfully challenged 50,000 illegally registered voters.” This claim was baldly fantastical. Meanwhile, in Arizona, future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist ran Operation Eagle Eye in Phoenix’s Maricopa County. Federal judge Charles Hardy later recalled that Eagle Eye workers in Democratic-majority precincts challenged “every black or Mexican voter,” demanding that they read a passage from the Constitution
  • Barr expanded Operation Eagle Eye to help Senator Barry Goldwater’s bid for the presidency in 1964. The RNC sent 1.8 million letters to registered voters nationwide — a practice called voter caging. If a letter couldn’t be delivered for any reason, it would represent a reason to challenge the voter as illegitimate.
  • One document from state-level GOP operations obtained by the Democratic National Committee instructed workers to stall lines in Democratic precincts. In another document, a state ballot security office in Louisiana explained that “all sheriffs in the state of Louisiana, except one, are sympathetic with Senator Goldwater’s election. We should take full advantage of this situation.”
  • Unsurprisingly, the effort did less to restore confidence than it did to stoke paranoia. In Houston, the Austin American newspaper looked for the more than a thousand “fictitious” or ineligible registrations claimed by the GOP county chairman. It found nothing but some simple clerical errors. In Long Beach, California, another newspaper investigation found that seven of eight people on a list of ineligible voters “were just as eligible as can be.” In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, annoyed voters called the police on the Eagle Eyes. In Miami, a circuit court judge enjoined Citizens for Goldwater for “illegal mass challenging without cause, conducted in such a manner as to obstruct the orderly conduct of the election.
  • the extent to which blocking voting opportunities for Democratic constituencies had become baked into conservative Republican culture became evident when Jimmy Carter proposed a package of electoral reforms in March of 1977. These included national same-day registration.
  • As historian Greg Downs recently wrote for TPM, the entire system of voter registration had been designed, back in the nineteenth century, to dampen democratic participation by immigrants and black Southerners that threatened native-born white dominance. A century later, conservatives went to the mat to preserve it.
  • At first, legislators from both parties enthusiastically endorsed same-day registration. Then, conservatives convinced the Republican Party establishment that, as the conservative newspaper Human Events put it, it would represent “Euthenasia for the GOP,” because “the bulk of these extra votes would go to the Democratic Party.” It pointed to a political scientist who said national turnout would go up 10 percent under the plan, but made it clear that the wrong people would be voting: most of the increase would come from “blacks and other traditionally Democratic voter groups.” The Heritage Foundation argued the reforms would “allow eight million illegal aliens in the U.S.” to vote
  • Weyrich made the dubious nature of the New Right’s definition of “free elections” more explicit. Speaking at an Evangelical gathering in 1980 alongside Reagan, he warned Christians against the “good government syndrome.
  • “I don’t want everyone to vote,” he said. “Elections are not won by a majority of the people… As a matter of fact, our leverage in the election quite candidly goes up as the voting population goes down. We have no responsibility, moral or otherwise, to turn out our opposition. It’s important to turn out those who are with us.”
  • The DNC and the New Jersey Democratic Party sued, and finally, as part of a settlement designed to stanch voter intimidation, the RNC entered a consent decree agreeing not to run any ballot-security efforts specifically targeting districts for their racial makeup.
  • The state Republican Party sent 125,000 postcards to recipients in Democratic areas who turned out to be 97 percent black, falsely claiming that a voter who had moved within 30 days of the election couldn’t vote, and noting that giving false information to an election official was punishable by up to five years in jail.
  • Both the 1986 and 1990 incidents led to new consent decrees. Neither dampened Republican enthusiasm to use fraud allegations as a political tool. In fact, by this time, it had become one of the conservative movement’s go-to responses to all kinds of perceived threats.
  • So too were ongoing Republican efforts to fight the liberalization of voter registration. In 1988, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell — having been first elected to the Senate in a close vote in 1984 — argued in the American Bar Association Journal against a bill that would require mail-in registration systems nationwide. Liberal registration systems might be fine in places like North Dakota and Minnesota, he wrote, but “for other states like mine, and regions where one party dominates and people are poor, election fraud is a constant curse.”
  • Taking a page from Reagan and Weyrich, McConnell wrote that “relatively low voter turnout is a sign of a content democracy,” an observation that was, he argued, “heresy to some, blasphemy to others, and worst of all, politically incorrect.” Motor Voter could “foster election fraud and thus debase the entire political process,” he wrote. And anyway, “We should ask ourselves: How easy should voting be? Is it too much to ask that people have a passing interest in the political process, 10, 20, or 30 days prior to an election and that they go down to the courthouse, or the library, to register?”
  • Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama was more explicit, alleging that the Motor Voter bill would register “millions of welfare recipients, illegal aliens, and taxpayer funded entitlement recipients.”
  • In 1992, George H.W. Bush vetoed Motor Voter, calling it an “open invitation to fraud and corruption.” But it passed the next year, essentially on a party line vote, and Bill Clinton signed it into law.
  • Motor Voter was responsible for tens of millions of new voter registrations. But its roll-out wasn’t smooth. Many states resisted implementing parts of it, particularly the part about letting people sign up to vote at the offices where they received government benefits. In 1994, McConnell pushed to remove WIC offices from the list of places where voter registration must be offered. This had nothing to do with his original opposition to Motor Voter, he insisted. He was just concerned that “WIC workers will have to spend valuable time and money on an activity that is totally unrelated to the mission of the WIC program.”
  • Between 1999 and 2000, the Jeb Bush administration carried out a voter purge with a sloppy vengeance. It contracted with a private company, DBT, to produce “scrub lists” of ineligible voters. In her recounting of this episode, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer notes that DBT received an award for “innovative excellence” in 1999 by a conservative group called the Voting Integrity Project, which had been pushing states to purge their rolls. DBT’s lists ended up including almost 1 percent of Florida’s electorate and nearly 3 percent of its black voters. But they were enormously messy.
  • voters were identified as candidates for the purge just because “their name, gender, birthdate and race matched — or nearly matched — one of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States.” DBT proposed refining its lists using address histories or financial records, but the state declined to take it up on the offer.
  • Similar purges went down across the country. A report drawn up by the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic staff after the 2000 election found that “voters in the majority of states reported being improperly excluded or purged from voting rolls.”
  • As Joshua A. Douglas, a University of Kentucky law professor, tells the story, Bond took the stage at an Election Night rally, pounding the podium and screaming “this is an outrage!” He blamed Ashcroft’s loss on votes cast by dead people and dogs. Specifically, Bond spoke frequently of a Springer Spaniel named Ritzy Mekler. As it turned out, someone had indeed registered Ritzy, but the dog never cast a vote. Later investigations found only six definitively illegitimate votes out of the more than 2 million cast in all of Missouri that year.
  • But the post-election chaos in Florida that year was, of course, of a whole different order, and would refocus the GOP for more than a decade on the potency of a handful of votes
  • Given the astoundingly slim final official margin of 537 votes, it was easy for observers to rightfully attribute the outcome to any number of efforts to skew the vote or accidents of history: If Republicans hadn’t convinced state officials to count overseas absentee ballots that didn’t comply with state laws, or if the state hadn’t disenfranchised thousands of people falsely judged to be felons, or if Ralph Nader hadn’t run, or if Palm Beach County hadn’t used weirdly designed ballots, everything might have been different.
  • for Republicans, one clear lesson from 2000 was that any move to keep potential Democratic voters away from the polls might win them an election.
  • Ultimately, the federal ID requirement wasn’t terribly onerous, but Minnite writes that it was significant; it “embedded a party tactic into federal law and signaled approval for a new partisan movement in the states to encumber voters with unnecessary identification requirements.”
  • In the next presidential election year, 2004, talk of voter fraud was everywhere. Conservative activists targeted the community group ACORN in multiple states where it was registering voters. (In several cases, the organization’s employees turned out to have forged the registration forms — but not in the hope of casting illegitimate votes. Instead, they were trying to hit a quota set by the organization that required volunteers to collect a certain number of registrations.) In Washington State, after a super-close gubernatorial election, Republican Dino Rossi refused to concede until nearly six months after his opponent was sworn in, claiming there was illegal voting. And back in Florida, the Bush campaign got caught with caging lists made up of mostly African-American voters that it planned to use to challenge people at the polls.
  • Rove was convinced that some U.S. attorneys weren’t doing enough to make hay over voter fraud charges. Between 2005 and 2006, the administration fired nine U.S. attorneys. It would become one of the major scandals of the Bush presidency.
  • One of the fired attorneys, David C. Iglesias of New Mexico, later explained that he’d been asked to resign after declining to file corruption charges against local Democrats. Another, John McKay of Washington, said he suspected his firing had to do with his decision not to call a grand jury to investigate voter fraud in the governor’s race in 2004, which Rossi lost by just a few hundred votes. The Washington Post reported that five of the 12 U.S. attorneys the administration dismissed or considered for dismissal in 2006 oversaw districts that Rove and his deputies saw as “trouble spots for voter fraud,” including New Mexico, Nevada, Washington State, Kansas City and Milwaukee
  • Gonzales and the Justice Department later acknowledged that they had fired U.S. Attorney Bud Cummings in Arkansas to make way for Tim Griffin, a former Rove aid who had been involved with the caging in Florida in 2004. Griffin ended up stepping down from the post in 2007 after the scandal broke, and Gonzales lost his own job later that summer.
  • Today, though, Griffin is happily serving as lieutenant governor of Arkansas. Gonzales avoided criminal charges and now serves as dean of Belmont University in Tennessee. Hans von Spakovsky and one of the conservative activists Bradley Schlozman had hired as a DOJ attorney, J. Christian Adams, reprised their Bush-era roles by becoming members of Trump’s voter fraud commission last year. Few of the other people responsible for spreading the voter fraud myth faced any consequences at all.
  • This past January, a judge allowed the 1982 consent decree that banned the RNC from racially motivated voter security operations to expire. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that Ohio could purge occasional voters from its voter rolls if they don’t return a mailed address-confirmation form.
Javier E

More Dangerous Than the Capitol Riot - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • a stunning 139 representatives—66 percent of the House GOP caucus—along with eight GOP senators, promptly voted to overturn the election, just as the mob and the president had demanded. Unlike the insurrectionists, they were polite and proper about it. But the danger they pose to our democracy is much greater than that posed by the members of the mob, who can be identified and caught, and who will face serious legal consequences for their acts
  • Donald Trump’s ignominious departure from office—whether he is impeached and removed, resigns, or simply sulks away in disrepute—will leave us to solve the problem of the politicians who worked hard to convince millions that the election had been stolen, and then voted to steal it themselves.
  • That mix of the serious and the absurd has characterized every step of Trump’s response to his defeat, the clownishness often hiding the gravity of the underlying reality. In the months leading up to January 6, the president attempted to coerce and threaten many elected officials and politicians into supporting his effort to overturn the election—including his own vice president, Republican senators, state election officials, and governors. His close allies openly voiced options such as staging a military takeover, suspending the Constitution, firing civil servants who wouldn’t go along, and executing the supposed traitors who refused to help the president steal the election.
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  • But the most important, most dangerous part of all this was Trump’s successful attempt to convince millions of his supporters that he’d won and was being cheated out of his win—and the fact that many leaders of the Republican Party, at all levels, went along. That claim is somewhat akin to a charge of child abuse—the very accusation is also a demand for immediate action to stop it. The mob that gathered last Wednesday took that accusation seriously, and acted to “stop the steal.”
  • There is a great desire to blame Trump—who is certainly very much to blame—and move on, without recognizing and responding to the dire reality: that much of the GOP enlisted in his attempt to steal an election.
  • The legislators were there to count the votes certified by the states—after months of review by election officials, and after endless court challenges were rebuffed—and, instead, they voted to throw them out. They did this after months of lying to the public, saying that the election had been stolen. They crossed every line a democracy should hold dear. To my knowledge, not one of them has yet apologized or recanted for their participation in what even some Republican senators are openly calling the “big lie.”
  • Some, like Senator Ted Cruz, have tried to cover up their attempt to overturn the election by saying that their constituents (and indeed tens of millions of Americans) believe that the election was stolen, and that they were merely honoring their beliefs. However, it was they, along with the president, who convinced those millions of people that the election was stolen in the first place, and that Joe Biden was not the legitimate president-elect
  • Some legislators have since tried to argue that they didn’t mean to “overturn” the election, that their action was more akin to a protest vote. This cannot be taken seriously. That’s like pulling a gun on somebody, walking away with their wallet, and then claiming that you never intended to shoot them if they hadn’t turned over their wallet.
  • A mugging is a mugging, and a mass of legislators claiming that the election was stolen and rejecting the results is an attempt to overturn the election. When the president himself refuses to concede, voting against the recognition of electoral votes cannot simply be a protest, and we don’t have to accept such absurdity at face value.
  • Already, there are signs that many in the GOP intend to respond to their loss in the Senate by doubling down on disenfranchising voters in the name of fighting the “election fraud” they falsely convinced millions is widespread
  • Today, by contrast, many GOP legislators have claimed for months that the election was fraudulent or stolen, and have explicitly and repeatedly called on their supporters to stop this fraud. The president not only refused to concede before they took their vote, but even as the storming of the Capitol was still under way, he once again claimed that he had won in a landslide.
  • A great misunderstanding about democracy is that it can be stolen or damaged only if formal rules are suspended or ignored. In fact, many authoritarian regimes are sticklers about formal rules, even as they undermine their meaning
  • We’ve already witnessed the hollowing out of some of the core tenets of liberal democracy—equal representation of voters, unimpeded access to the ballot—in many aspects of our electoral system. Republicans have pursued a project of minority rule for decades, exploiting structural features of American politics and opportunistically shaping rules in their own favor.
  • The Senate is structurally dominated by a minority—less than 20 percent of the population elects a majority of its members. Through gerrymandering and the uneven distribution of the population, the GOP does about 6 percent better in the median House district than it does in the national popular vote.
  • Some Republicans have raised the fact that the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, referred to Trump’s presidency as “illegitimate.” That may well be, but that happened long after the election was over and the transition was complete. She called Trump to concede less than 12 hours after the polls closed, and the Obama administration immediately started the transition process. There was no formal challenge that required suspending the session to debate whether to accept the actual results.
  • The Republicans who backed Trump’s effort to overturn the election may have known that it didn’t have a high chance of success, but that doesn’t change the nature of the attempt, especially given their lack of remorse or apology. Unless they are convinced that it was a mistake—unless they pay such a high political price for it that neither they nor anyone else thinks of trying again—they are likely to seize the next available opportunity to do the same. If a future election comes down to one state instead of three, if a future presidential candidate uses lawsuits and coercion more competently, or if a few election officials succumb to threats more easily, they’ll be in the game.
  • A line must be drawn. The increasing entrenchment of minority rule and democratic backsliding in almost every level of government was terrible enough, but now we’ve even moved past that.
  • Democrats will soon control the House, the Senate, and the presidency, making it possible for them to undertake crucial reforms on voting rights and electoral integrity. Perhaps some Republicans will decide to join them; if there ever were a time for putting country over party, this is surely it.
brookegoodman

Tulsi Gabbard, running for president, won't seek re-election to Congress - 0 views

  • Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard said Thursday that she will not run for re-election for her U.S. representative seat, saying she wants to focus on trying to secure her party’s nomination to challenge President Donald Trump.
  • "I believe that I can best serve the people of Hawaii and our country as your president and commander-in-chief,"
  • An Iowa Democratic caucus poll out this week put Gabbard at 3 percent, with former Vice President Joe Biden, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the top three spots.
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  • Clinton did not mention Gabbard by name but said she believes one candidate is "the favorite of the Russians."
  • Clinton was referring to the GOP grooming Gabbard, not Russians.
  • Gabbard reacted by tweeting that Clinton is “the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that sickened the Democratic Party for so long."
  • Trump attacked Clinton for the suggestion earlier this week, and said Clinton and other Democrats claim everyone opposed to them is a Russian agent.
  • ratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard said Thursday that she will not run for re-election for her U.S. representative seat, saying she wants to focus on trying to secure her party’s nomination to challenge President Donald Trump.Gabbard, who represents Hawaii, made the announcement in a video and email to supporters."I believe that I can best serve the people of Hawaii and our country as your president and commander-in-chief," Gabbard said in the video.Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered weekday mornings.Sign UpThis site is protected by recaptcha Privacy Policy | Terms of Service She also expressed gratitude to the people of Hawaii for her nearly seven years in Congress.In January, Hawaii state Sen. Kai Kahele, a Democrat, said he would run for Gabbard's seat, NBC affiliate KHNL of Honolulu reported.An Iowa Democratic caucus poll out this week put Gabbard at 3 percent, with former Vice President Joe Biden, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the top three spots.She is in a crowded field of Democrats seeking the nomination to run for president. Another candidate, U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, ended his long-shot presidential campaign Thursday.RecommendedvideovideoMcConnell: If the House impeaches Trump, Senate will hold trial 'until we finish'2020 Election2020 ElectionTim Ryan drops out of presidential raceHillary Clinton recently suggested that she believed Republicans were grooming one of the Democrats for a third-party candidacy. Clinton did not mention Gabbard by name but said she believes one candidate is "the favorite of the Russians."
katherineharron

A record number of women will serve in the next Congress - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • Mace defeated Democratic Rep. Joe Cunningham, becoming one of a record number of women who will serve in the 117th Congress — and a record number of Republican women who will serve in the House.
  • With races still to be called, at least 141 women will serve in Congress next year, breaking the record of 127 set in 2019, according to data from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
  • That includes at least 116 women in the House — smashing the record of 102 also set in 2019 — and 25 in the Senate, although that number could shrink with California Sen. Kamala Harris' ascendancy to the vice presidency.
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  • Four of the nine Republican women in the Senate were vulnerable in this year's elections, but only Arizona Sen. Martha McSally was defeated, while appointed Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler's fate will be determined in a January runoff.
  • There will be at least six new women of color in Congress — four Democrats and two Republicans — including Democrats Cori Bush, who will be Missouri's first Black congresswoman, and Nikema Williams, who was elected to the late Rep. John Lewis' seat in Georgia.
  • But the majority of the 24 non-incumbent women joining Congress in January are White, including 13 Republicans and five Democrats.
  • At least 91 White women will serve in the 117th Congress, up from 79 this year.
  • his year, though, it's Republican women who have made significant gains. After electing only one new Republican woman to the House in the midterms, Republicans this year have elected at least 15 non-incumbent women.
  • That means the number of Republican women in the House will at least double. (Currently there are only 13 women in the House GOP conference, and two of them did not run for reelection.) Democrats are adding nine new women, which balances out those they lost to defeat and retirement, increasing their numbers to 89 for now.
  • Whereas Democratic women have long been boosted by the pro-abortion rights group EMILY's List, which stands for "Early Money is Like Yeast," Republicans have lacked comparable infrastructure to invest in female candidates
  • That attitude, at least, began to shift after 2018, when New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, who had recruited more than 100 women as head of recruitment for the House GOP campaign arm, only to see one of them win, publicly sounded the alarm.
  • "It was the perfect storm. We had competitive seats that were winnable and we had incredible women in those districts with prior legislative experience and who knew how to put a campaign together," said Julie Conway
  • But by far the biggest reason for that success is that more Republican women raised their hands to run than ever before — in part because they saw what Democratic women did in 2018 — and more of them won primaries, which has traditionally been the biggest hurdle.
  • "Women around the country have watched other women before them be successful and realize, 'Hey, I can do it,'" said Iowa GOP Rep.-elect Ashley Hinson, who last week defeated Democratic Rep. Abby Finkenauer, one of the women who flipped a district in 2018.
  • But while the campaign committee still does not play in primaries, its leadership acknowledged it had to do better electing diverse candidates — rallying behind another woman, Indiana Rep. Susan Brooks, as the head of recruitment for 2020 — and now proudly touting female candidates' success this year.
  • Just as Democratic women were in 2018, Republican women this year were well-positioned to take advantage of a favorable environment.
  • "Being the first Republican woman elected to Congress in the state of South Carolina is deeply humbling," Mace said. "It reminds me that Democratic women do not hold a monopoly on breaking glass ceilings."
  • Women candidates often receive questions their male colleagues do not — like who's going to take care of their kids.
  • "The lady at the door, she thought I should be at home with my children. And I basically said, 'Well, I'm setting a good example for them.'"
  • The elected women agree the perspectives they bring to Congress are wanted — and needed.
  • Rep.-elect Carolyn Bourdeaux, the only Democrat who has so far flipped a competitive GOP-held district this year, won in the northeast Atlanta suburbs that are now the epicenter of the political battleground with the Senate majority hinging on two Georgia Senate seats.
  • "Many people here didn't even know that there were Democrats in their neighborhood," she said of the groundwork that that initial race laid.
  • Republicans have flipped eight Democrat-held seats, according to CNN projections so far, and women have delivered all but one of those wins. That means they're likely to face difficult reelections in the future, possibly against Democratic women.
  • "The whole idea of having 'girl seats' does not get us any closer to parity," she said.
  • A record 643 women ran for Congress in 2020 — 583 for the House and 60 for the Senate.
  • That is in part because as more women run for office, they are also more often running against each other, both in primaries and general elections. In 2016, women ran against each other in 17 House and Senate general election races, according to data from the Center for American Women and Politics. In 2020, that grew to 51 races with women challenging each other.
  • "I've already gotten texts from other women who are interested in running here in Iowa since the election last week," said Hinson
  • "I do feel like it's gotten better over the years, but I see it more often than not, and it's true on both sides of the aisle. That's why I'm always encouraging women to run."
katherineharron

More than 95 million Americans have voted with one day to go until Election Day - CNNPo... - 0 views

  • More than 95 million Americans have voted nationwide with one day left until Election Day, according to a survey of election officials by CNN, Edison Research and Catalist.   
  • Eighteen states and Washington, DC, have seen more than half of their registered voters cast ballots already.
  • Nationwide, the 95.5 million ballots already cast represents 70% of the more than 136.5 million ballots cast in the 2016 presidential election.  
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  • A significant majority of ballots cast so far in Pennsylvania -- 82% -- come from White voters. Black voters make up the second largest share of those early ballots at 11%, followed by Hispanic voters at 4% and Asian voters at 3%.
  • President Donald Trump, former Vice President Joe Biden, Vice President Mike Pence, and Sen. Kamala Harris will all appear in Pennsylvania at some point today.
  • More than 14 million ballots have already been cast in these five states, which could be crucial in determining the next president.
  • It's no coincidence that all the candidates are stopping in Pennsylvania today. There are a lot of voters who still have not cast a ballot in the state that was the lynchpin to Trump's 2016 victory.
  • Democrats have dominated the pre-election vote in the Keystone State. They currently make up 66% of those ballots.
  • Polling shows Republicans nationwide strongly prefer to vote in person on Election Day, which the Trump campaign thinks will be enough to recapture the state's 20 electoral votes.
  • At 83% of early voters so far, White voters make up a smaller share of the early voting electorate compared to the 88% they were at this point in 2016
  • So far, 13% of Pennsylvania's early voters are under 30, and 38% are 65 or older. More younger voters have been casting ballots in Pennsylvania as the campaign comes to a close. Last week, 11% of the commonwealth's voters were under 30, and 42% were 65 or older.
  • Texas and Hawaii have already surpassed their total turnout from the 2016 general election. In eight more states, the pre-election vote represents at least 90% of their 2016 total vote -- Montana, Washington, North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada, Florida, New Mexico and Tennessee.
  • Democrats hold a smaller lead over Republicans in pre-election ballots cast than they did on the day before the 2016 election. Back then, they had an eight-point lead. Currently, it's six points, with Democrats at 37% and Republicans at 31%.
  • Younger voters make up a larger share of North Carolina's early voters this year than at this point in 2016. Fifteen percent of the state's early voters so far are under 30, almost double the 8% at this time four years ago. That number continues to grow. One week ago, voters under 30 made up 12% of North Carolina's early voters.
  • Almost 56% of ballots already cast come from women in the Tar Heel State, and men comprise about 44%. This is roughly on par with the gender breakdown at this point in 2016.
  • Republicans want to hang onto Michigan's 16 electoral votes, while Democrats are working to bring the state back into the fold.
  • Black voters have expanded their share of pre-Election Day ballots cast from about 9% at this time in 2016 to 12% currently.
  • Women in Pennsylvania account for nearly 57% of ballots already cast, and men account for about 43%.
  • Slightly more than 56% of ballots cast so far in the Wolverine State are from women and almost 44% are from men.
  • Wisconsin has seen a large decrease in the share of early votes from people 65 or older, but the state hasn't seen as much of an increase from voters under 30.
  • By race, Wisconsin's early voters are similar to that of four years ago, with White voters representing the vast majority -- about 88% -- of those who've cast their ballots so far. Black voters represent about 5% of those early voters, Hispanic voters 3% and Asian voters 2% -- all on par with this time in 2016.
  • The racial breakdown of Ohio's early voters is almost identical to this time in 2016. Eighty-six percent of ballots already cast have come from White voters. Black voters comprise about 11% of those early ballots, with Hispanic voters accounting for about 2% and Asian voters about 1%. Younger Ohioans have increased their share of the early vote from 7% at this point in 2016 to about 12% now. These voters below the age of 30 have also continued to turn out during the last week of the campaign -- one week ago, they made up 9% of early voters.
carolinehayter

Analysis: This is exactly why Republican leaders need to speak up against Trump's elect... - 0 views

  • In the face of President Donald Trump's wild and fact-free claims about supposed voter fraud in the 2020 election, congressional Republicans -- and other elected GOP leaders -- have stood largely silent. And that silence has a price.
  • Witness two new national polls released on Wednesday that suggest that a majority of self-identified Republicans simply do not believe that President-elect Joe Biden won the 2020 race fair and square.
  • Seven in 10 Republicans in a new Monmouth University poll said they believed that Biden only won the election because of "voter fraud."
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  • 52% of Republicans in a Reuters-Ipsos national poll said that Trump had "rightfully won" the election while less than 3 in 10 (29%) said Biden had won.
  • as anyone who has followed the election on any mainstream media outlet knows, there is simply zero evidence of actual voter fraud or malicious machine malfunction anywhere in the country.
  • The problem is that lots and lots of Trump's most loyal supporters don't consume ANY news or information from ANY outlets that are not either the President's own Twitter feed or TV networks he has wrapped around his finger
  • not "overly concerned"
  • Trump will not stop. In fact, he is likely to make more and more outrageous claims as it becomes more and more clear to more and more people that he has lost.
  • And so, the information they are getting on this election comes in the form of misinformation. Trump tweeting about voting machine fraud (not true) or ballots being burned (not true) or Republican poll watchers being thrown out of voting sites (not true).
  • Given that reality, it is incumbent upon Republican elected officials to speak up. To say that the outgoing President is simply not telling the truth.
  • That this President is entitled to his own opinions but not his own facts.
  • The firing of a top election security official on Tuesday night who by all accounts did his job extremely effectively, suggests that Trump's dictatorial instincts are less and less constrained.
  • Trump can "say whatever he wants."
  • "not concerned about the President saying that he thinks he won the election. I think that's totally fair game. He can go out and make his argument."
  • This laissez-faire attitude is no longer acceptable in the face of data that makes clear that Trump's misinformation campaign is having its intended effect with Republican base voters.
  • This amounts to a direct threat to the peaceful transition of power that all of these Republican elected officials have long touted as the root of our American democracy. Now is the time to put some action behind those words. Because there can't be a single Republican elected official who can now claim with any credibility that this whole thing will resolve itself in the near future without active intervention on their part.
  • Trump is poisoning democracy with his baseless claims about the election. And the core of the Republican Party is believing the lies. It's past time for Republican elected officials to get out of their defensive crouch and tell their base voters that enough is enough. If they don't, it's not clear what the future of GOP will even be. A party that refuses to accept democratic elections that don't go their way? That's not how democracy works. Not at all.
clairemann

Supreme Court: Why Brett Kavanaugh could pick the next president if the election comes ... - 0 views

  • Here’s how grim the future of voting rights looks for both large-D Democrats and small-d democrats: the pivotal vote on the Supreme Court — the justice who is likely to decide all closely divided voting rights disputes in the near future — is Brett Kavanaugh.
  • credibly accused of attempting to sexually assault Christine Blasey Ford when they were in high school, denied the allegation then lashed out at Democrats who believed it disqualified him from serving on the nation’s highest court.
  • has staked out a position on voting rights that is less extreme than the views of many of his colleagues.
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  • he intends to banish to the sunken place longstanding doctrines protecting the right to vote. But Kavanaugh, at the very least, rejects some parts of the nihilistic approach shared by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch.
  • her approach to constitutional questions resembles that of Thomas and Gorsuch. Chief Justice John Roberts, who is himself frequently hostile to voting rights law, has written that he thinks his conservative colleagues are going too far i
  • was most visible in Andino v. Middleton, a recent decision that reinstated a South Carolina law requiring absentee voters to have another person sign their ballot as a witness.
  • he did not embrace the extreme position of Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch,
  • Kavanaugh handed down another opinion suggesting that, while he is not as hostile to voting rights as his most conservative colleagues, he still wants to make radical changes that would profoundly impact American democracy.
  • appears to be torn between a belief that well-established rules governing election disputes should be abandoned, and a competing understanding that it is unfair to disenfranchise voters who followed the rules that were in place at the time when those voters cast their ballots.
  • Purcell v. Gonzales (2006), a case which — at least according to Kavanaugh — established that “federal courts ordinarily should not alter state election rules in the period close to an election.”
  • “The Constitution ‘principally entrusts the safety and the health of the people to the politically accountable officials of the States,’” Kavanaugh wrote. Therefore, “it follows that a State legislature’s decision either to keep or to make changes to election rules to address COVID–19 ordinarily ‘should not be subject to second-guessing by an ‘unelected federal judiciary,’
  • Let state legislatures decide how elections will be conducted in each state, for better or for worse. And don’t intervene even if those decisions are likely to disenfranchise voters.
  • Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch took the extraordinary position that voters who failed to anticipate that the Supreme Court would change the rules after their unwitnessed ballot was already cast should have their ballots tossed out.
  • that the Supreme Court should take unprecedented steps to overrule state judges and other state officials who try to make it easier to vote. But he also did not join a recent opinion by Alito that suggested that the Court may step in after the election to toss out ballots
  • Democratic National Committee v. Wisconsin State Legislature, a case that determined that ballots that arrive after Election Day in Wisconsin shall not be counted, Kavanaugh pointed to a provision of the Constitution that provides that “the rules for Presidential elections are established by the States ‘in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.’”
  • “in accordance with the State’s prescriptions for lawmaking, which may include the referendum and the Governor’s veto.”
  • the Supreme Court of the United States has the final word on questions of federal law, but state supreme courts have the final say on questions of their own state’s law.
  • It could mean that a state governor cannot veto a state election law (because the governor is not the “legislature”). Or that a state constitution may not empower an independent commission to draw un-gerrymandered legislative maps (because the commission is not the “legislature”).
  • Kavanaugh appears to be largely indifferent to voting rights, and is willing to give state legislatures a great deal of leeway to disenfranchise voters.
  • On Wednesday night, the Supreme Court handed down orders in Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Boockvar and Moore v. Circosta, which concern whether late-arriving ballots should be counted in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. In both cases, state officials — but not the state legislature — decided that ballots that are mailed before Election Day and that arrive during a brief window after the election should be counted.
  • but they didn’t exactly tell the GOP “no,” either. The Court denied the GOP’s request to order, in advance of the election, that late-arriving ballots will not be counted. But an ominous opinion by Alito suggests that the Court might revisit this question after the election.
  • Alito wrote in a concurring opinion in Republican Party, which was joined by Thomas and Gorsuch. Nevertheless, he added that the case “remains before us” and could be decided “under a shortened schedule” after the election takes place.
  • Voters, in other words, might mail their ballots close to Election Day, believing that they can rely on state officials and lower courts that have said that these ballots will be counted, only to have the Supreme Court change the rules after the election is over — and order these ballots tossed out.
  • But Kavanaugh hasn’t yet shown the same willingness to disenfranchise people who followed the rules — or, at least, who followed the rules that were in place when those voters cast their ballots.
  • It may be a Biden blowout, or a fair-and-square Trump win. But if it’s close, and if Pennsylvania or North Carolina is pivotal, these are the competing considerations that Kavanaugh, likely the swing vote, will be wrestling with.
dytonka

Trump tries to undermine democratic process at the end of the campaign - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • more than 91 million who already cast early ballots
  • Tuesday's moment of destiny -- and what could turn into a prolonged count owing to the crush of mail-in votes -- will decide whether Americans reject Trump after a single term or re-up for four more years of his brazen presidency.
  • The President on Sunday night hinted that he could seek to dismiss Dr. Anthony Fauci after the election after rejecting the admired infectious diseases specialist's science-based recommendations on the pandemic.
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  • Biden argues that Trump's denial and neglect of a pandemic that has killed more than 230,000 Americans and is getting worse by the day should deny the President reelection.
  • Counting in midwestern battlegrounds like Michigan and Wisconsin, where he is expecting to do well, could take longer and lead to the kind of disputed outcome that the President is threatening. Trump has already tried to discredit mail-in ballots, which take longer to count, while Republicans in Texas -- so far without success -- have been trying to invalidate ballots cast at drive-thru sites in the Houston area.
  • "We feel very confident about our pathways to victory," Biden senior adviser Anita Dunn told Jake Tapper on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday.
  • Trump, while trailing Biden, also has a clear, if narrower, chance to get to 270 electoral votes that relies on him sweeping through a swath of battlegrounds he won four years ago with what his campaign promises will be a huge Election Day turnout.
  • At a rally in Florida on Sunday night, Trump's crowd started a chant of "Fire Fauci" when the President complained that everyone heard too much about the pandemic.
  • But an air of foreboding is hanging over one of the most surreal elections in modern US history. Reports of delays in the delivery of mail-in votes in several crucial battleground states deepened anxiety over the possibility of protracted legal duels between the campaigns in the event of a close election.
  • In Texas, the state Supreme Court denied a petition by a group of Republicans seeking to invalidate nearly 127,000 ballots cast at drive-thru facilities in Harris County, a heavily Democratic area that surrounds Houston. Republicans have also filed suit in federal court, which has an emergency hearing Monday morning in Houston.
  • "I think it's a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election," Trump said in the crucial state of North Carolina, which he is battling to keep in his column despite demographic changes that give Democrats hope.
  • "I think it's a terrible thing when people or states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over because it can only lead to one thing, and that's very bad. You know what that thing is. I think it's a very dangerous, terrible thing," Trump told reporters.
  • But Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said on "State of the Union" that she was concerned that Trump could try to declare victory in her state if Election Day voting tallies showed him with a lead before early and mail-in votes were counted.
  • He took part in a "Souls to the Polls" get-out-the-vote event at a Baptist church in Philadelphia and then held a drive-in rally. He called out disparities in the impact of the virus on minorities and, in the cradle of the American experiment, he painted Trump as a threat to basic American freedoms.
  • "Let's not ever let anyone take our power from us. Let us not be sidelined, let us not be silent, there is too much at stake and the ancestors expect so much more from us than that," Harris said in North Carolina.
  • President Donald Trump is casting doubt on the integrity of vote counting and warning he will deploy squads of lawyers when polls close on Tuesday, as his latest attempts to tarnish the democratic process deepen a sense of national nervousness hours before Election Day.
  • The President's maneuvering, as he fights to the last moment to secure a second term, is taking place ahead of a court hearing in Texas Monday morning on a Republican request to throw out 127,000 drive-thru votes in a key county.
  • Fears are also growing that the President might try to declare victory before all the votes are counted as he and Democratic nominee Joe Biden launch a final-day swing through the battleground states that will decide one of the most crucial elections in modern US history.
  • Biden is leading in national polls and by a narrower margin in many key states and has multiple paths to victory.
  • Trump's route to the required 270 votes is thinner but still viable, meaning either candidate could win.
  • It is common for some states to take several days to finalize vote counts.
  • In an extraordinary departure from American political tradition, Trump has been arguing for months that the election is "rigged" against him, has made false claims that mail-in voting is corrupt and has refused to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power.
  • "I think it's a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election," Trump said in the crucial state of North Carolina, which he is battling to keep in his column despite demographic changes that give Democrats hope.
  • Some of the most crucial battlegrounds, like Pennsylvania and Michigan, have warned it could be several days before a final result can be declared.
katherineharron

Explaining the Supreme Court lawsuit from Texas and Trump challenging Biden's win - CNN... - 0 views

  • Although all 50 states have certified their election results and the Supreme Court swiftly rejected an emergency request from Pennsylvania Republicans to block election results in the commonwealth, the justices are now grappling with a new controversial bid from Texas, supported by President Donald Trump and 17 other Republican-led states.
  • They are asking the Supreme Court for an emergency order to invalidate the ballots of millions of voters in four battleground states -- Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania -- even though there is no evidence of widespread fraud.
  • They're asking for the court to block the electors from Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, pushing Biden back under the magic 270-vote total to win.
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  • Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the lawsuit Tuesday. The President on Wednesday filed a motion to intervene -- basically a request to join the lawsuit
  • On Tuesday, it rejected the plea from Pennsylvania Republicans to invalidate the state's presidential tallies. It issued one sentence and noted zero dissents. (Justices don't always have to make their votes public.)
  • since Republican delegations outnumber Democratic delegations, Trump would win.
  • "In a nutshell the President is asking the Supreme Court to exercise its rarest form of jurisdiction to effectively overturn the entire presidential election," said Steve Vladeck, a CNN Supreme Court analyst and University of Texas Law School professor.
  • The court has thus far shown no desire to intervene in the presidential election.
  • Trump has suggested publicly that he hopes his nominees -- Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch -- will side with him on any election dispute.
  • "Our Country is deeply divided in ways that it arguably has not been seen since the election of 1860," Trump's motion to intervene states. "There is a high level of distrust between the opposing sides, compounded by the fact that, in the election just held, election officials in key swing states, for apparently partisan advantage, failed to conduct their state elections in compliance with state election law."
  • The court could act after those filings arrive or wait until Texas files a brief replying to the arguments made by the battleground states. The justices acted quickly in rejecting the Pennsylvania lawsuit on Tuesday, but they could bide their time as they have in other election-related cases.
  • If the court refuses to take up the lawsuit, it's another nail in the coffin for Trump's hopes to reverse his election loss.
  • If it acts in the other direction, it will be another dramatic and unprecedented turn in the 2020 election, guaranteeing the President will continue to challenge Biden's victory.
  • "There's nothing unique about Texas' claims here, most of which have already been brought in other suits against the same four states," said Vladeck, noting that if Trump and other states are joining in, it could weaken the suggestion the Texas case is unique.
  • The GOP "used to be a party for states' rights," Ginsberg said. "I can't imagine something that is less faithful to the principle of states' rights than a Texas attorney general trying to tell other states how to run their elections."
  • Sen. John Cornyn, the senior Texas Republican, told CNN that "I frankly struggle to understand the legal theory of it. Number one, why would a state, even such a great state as Texas, have a say-so on how other states administer their elections?
  • "Using the Covid-19 pandemic as a justification," Paxton wrote, officials in the battleground states "usurped their legislatures' authority and unconstitutionally revised their state's election statutes." He said they had done so through "executive fiat." He pointed specifically to mail-in ballots, which he said were placed "in drop boxes" with "little or no chain of custody," which weakened signature verification and witness requirements, which he called "the strongest security measures protecting the integrity of the vote."
  • First the court would have to allow Paxton to file the suit. Then the court would have to block certification of the Electoral College vote, determine that the four states had allowed massive amounts of "illegal" votes, have the states revisit their vote counts and then resubmit the numbers.
  • The President's campaign has been represented by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and attorney Jenna Ellis. In the current motion, however, Trump is being represented by John Eastman.
  • Trump has also asked GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas -- the former solicitor general of the state -- to represent him at the Supreme Court in the unlikely event it hears oral arguments.
katherineharron

Georgia's new law suppressing the vote is a victory for Trump - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • Former President Donald Trump's campaign of lies about a stolen election just delivered a huge victory with a new Georgia law that could suppress the votes of many of the citizens who helped eject him from the White House.
  • The move confirms the Peach State as the epicenter of the fight for American democracy that raged through Trump's presidency and during the insurrection he incited against the US Capitol -- and now threatens to taint future elections as Republicans in multiple states pursue new laws to limit voting.
  • "What I'm worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It's sick. It's sick," President Joe Biden said at the first news conference of his presidency that afternoon. The Georgia law raises the question of whether election safeguards that prevented Trump's energetic efforts to rig the 2020 White House race after the fact in the state will stand firm in future elections amid false claims of electoral fraud by a president.
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  • GOP leaders justify the voter suppression measures by arguing that they are needed to crack down on fraud and to restore the public's faith that US elections are fair. But multiple courts and Trump's own Justice Department found there was no widespread electoral fraud in 2020.
  • The Georgia bill is only one example of GOP efforts in multiple states -- including many crucial electoral battlegrounds -- to hold back a diverse demographic tide in cities that favor Democrats, which critics see as an attempt to cement minority rule in the United States.
  • Georgia Republicans also lost two US Senate seats that handed Democrats control of the 50-50 chamber on the basis of huge Black turnout in runoff elections in January.close dialogSign up for CNN's CNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN's CNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. Please enter above Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.You're on the list for CNN'sCNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. close dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1245919 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1245919 *//* custom css from creative 47804 */@-ms-keyframes bx-anim-1245919-spin { from {
  • "This should be marked as Exhibit A in making the case that discriminatory voter suppression is alive and well, and makes clear why we need federal voting rights legislation to stop these laws in their tracks," Hewitt said. "We stand ready to take action and protect the fundamental right to vote through the courts."
  • as a remnant of the Jim Crow era that institutionalized racism and hinted that he could ultimately back abolishing the Senate filibuster to get the Democrats' House-passed bill through the chamber. But Biden declined to reveal his strategy for getting the voting rights bill into law.
  • Georgia's action threw a political grenade into the debate over a Washington campaign by many Democrats to abolish Senate supermajority rules that Republicans could use to block their sweeping election bill, known as the For the People Act.
  • In a statement to CNN, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who defied Trump's pleas in a telephone call to find votes to overturn Biden's victory, said he would still stand up for voter freedoms but did not criticize the law."In implementing this law, I will ensure that no eligible Georgia voter is hindered in exercising their right to vote, and I will continue to further secure our elections so that every Georgian can have confidence in the results of our elections," Raffensperger said
  • "As the FBI continue to round up seditionists who spilled blood to defend a lie about our elections, Republican state leaders willfully undermine democracy by giving themselves authority to overturn results they do not like," Abrams said in a statement. "Now, more than ever, Americans must demand federal action to protect voting rights as we continue to fight against these blatantly unconstitutional efforts that are nothing less than Jim Crow 2.0."
  • Black voters hampered by the restrictions of voting in urban areas have often found themselves lining up for hours to vote in inclement weather. The clear targeting of African American voters in Georgia and elsewhere recalls some of the ugliest racial episodes of America's past, and is fueling claims of open Republican racism.
  • Former President Donald Trump's campaign of lies about a stolen election just delivered a huge victory with a new Georgia law that could suppress the votes of many of the citizens who helped eject him from the White House.
  • Republican state lawmakers rushed through a broad law Thursday making it harder to vote that disproportionately targets Democratic and Black voters
  • The move confirms the Peach State as the epicenter of the fight for American democracy
  • The Georgia law raises the question of whether election safeguards that prevented Trump's energetic efforts to rig the 2020 White House race after the fact in the state will stand firm in future elections amid false claims of electoral fraud by a president.
  • "What I'm worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It's sick. It's sick," President Joe Biden
  • Republicans in multiple states pursue new laws to limit voting.
  • Georgia Republicans also lost two US Senate seats that handed Democrats control of the 50-50 chamber on the basis of huge Black turnout in runoff elections in January.close dialogSign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.//assets.bounceexchang
  • After leaving office, Trump demanded that Republican state legislatures pass laws to ban mail-in voting and to prevent courts from weighing in on electoral disputes.
  • the former President has made the acceptance of his false conspiracy theories about voter fraud in 2020 a litmus test for Republican candidates
  • Iowa has already passed a measure to limit absentee balloting and voting hours. Texas is taking steps to cut voting hours and absentee balloting in big Democratic cities like Houston. New voting laws are being pushed by Republicans in another swing state Trump lost, Arizona.
  • GOP leaders justify the voter suppression measures by arguing that they are needed to crack down on fraud and to restore the public's faith that US elections are fair. But multiple courts and Trump's own Justice Department found there was no widespread electoral fraud in 2020.
  • voter mistrust was largely fueled by Trump's blatantly false claims
  • Georgia's action threw a political grenade into the debate over a Washington campaign by many Democrats to abolish Senate supermajority rules that Republicans could use to block their sweeping election bill, known as the For the People Act.
  • The drama in the Georgia Legislature unfolded as Biden condemned restrictive state legislation as a remnant of the Jim Crow era that institutionalized racism and hinted that he could ultimately back abolishing the Senate filibuster to get the Democrats' House-passed bill through the chamber.
  • The law allows any Georgian to make unlimited challenges to voter registrations, and, incredibly, makes it a misdemeanor crime for anyone to offer food and water to voters stuck in long lines to cast ballots.
  • The clear targeting of African American voters in Georgia and elsewhere recalls some of the ugliest racial episodes of America's past, and is fueling claims of open Republican racism.
  • The Georgia law was quickly signed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who incurred the wrath of Trump last year for refusing to play along with his attempt to override Biden's victory by 12,000 votes in the state, which was confirmed by several audits.
  • "In implementing this law, I will ensure that no eligible Georgia voter is hindered in exercising their right to vote, and I will continue to further secure our elections so that every Georgian can have confidence in the results of our elections," Raffensperger said.
  • Kemp is up for reelection in 2022 and could face Democrat Stacey Abrams, a former state lawmaker and prominent voting rights advocate
  • "As the FBI continue to round up seditionists who spilled blood to defend a lie about our elections, Republican state leaders willfully undermine democracy by giving themselves authority to overturn results they do not like," Abrams said in a statement. "Now, more than ever, Americans must demand federal action to protect voting rights as we continue to fight against these blatantly unconstitutional efforts that are nothing less than Jim Crow 2.0."
  • the measure directly targeted voters of color who took part in record numbers in the 2020 election.
  • The For the People Act awaiting action in the Senate would create automatic voter registration nationwide and restore portions of the Voting Rights Act that were gutted by the Supreme Court. It would also strengthen mail-in voting and permit early voting across the country, while taking steps to cut wait times at the polls.
katherineharron

Donald Trump undercuts American democracy as he clings to power - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • President Donald Trump is trying to steal a free and fair election that he lost by a wide margin to President-elect Joe Biden by tearing at the most basic principle of American democracy: He's trying to throw out hundreds of thousands of votes.
  • He asked state Republican leaders in Michigan to visit him Friday, hinting at a possible attempt to convince them to ignore Biden's big win in the state and send a slate of electors to the Electoral College that backs him and not the President-elect.
  • Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who rampaged through an unhinged news conference Thursday, is in effect baselessly arguing that troves of Democratic mail-in ballots, many of them cast by Black voters, are illegal and that Trump has therefore won the election with room to spare.
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  • "It changes the result of the election in Michigan if you take out Wayne County," Giuliani said
  • Giuliani's team is also making absurd claims of a massive, centralized, Democratic conspiracy involving long-dead Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, Cuba, China, the Clinton Foundation and George Soros to throw the election.
  • "The problem is, he's speaking for the President of the United States," veteran Republican elections lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg told CNN's Wolf Blitzer."It is a sweeping, totally unsubstantiated attack on one of the basic foundations of the country -- our free elections."
  • "I am worried that any lawmakers who attend this ridiculous meet and greet are really attending a conspiratorial meeting to steal the election," Tribe told CNN's Erin Burnett. "There's no question that the meeting that is being held is illegal. There is no question that it really is designed quite corruptly to take away people's right to vote."
  • "It's quite clear that Republican, as well as Democratic judges, are going to follow the law when there is no ambiguity," Tribe said. "The only guy who seems to be uninterested in the law is Rudy Giuliani, and God knows what he is auditioning for."
  • Trump would need to cancel out Biden's victories in multiple states to come anywhere near the 270 electoral votes to clinch the presidency.
  • CNN election law expert Rick Hasen wrote on his website that the President's meddling with the Wayne County election officials "is very dangerous for our democracy, as it is an attempt to thwart the will of the voters through political pressure from the President."
  • Republicans, like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who have given the President latitude to challenge the result without mounting a credible case, now begin to look as though they are facilitating his most extreme assault yet on US democracy.
  • "That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history. And possibly the craziest. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you're lucky," Krebs wrote.
  • President-elect Biden, watching from Wilmington, Delaware, as he builds out his Cabinet, said that Trump was sending "incredibly damaging messages" to the rest of the world about how democracy works.
  • "It's going to be another incident where he will go down in history as being one of the most irresponsible presidents in American history. ... It's just outrageous what he's doing."
  • The US on Thursday hit another one-day record for new cases -- more than 182,000, according to tallies from Johns Hopkins University.
  • while the optimism of officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx over a coming vaccine were genuine, their warnings that Americans should not gather this Thanksgiving as the virus rages comprehensively debunked Trump's claims the pandemic is already over.
  • After hundreds of voters called into the canvass board Zoom meeting to express outrage about the potential effort to disenfranchise Detroit-area voters, the two GOP board members relented and voted to certify the results Tuesday night, but they then filed affidavits Wednesday asking to "rescind" their action -- which is not expected to have any practical effect on the certification.
  • CNN's Dana Bash and Gloria Borger, for instance, quoted sources as saying that the President, who believes that the Russia investigation dented his own legitimacy, is now trying to ruin Biden's presidency. And in the end, the courts -- and the institutional system that Trump has relentlessly pummeled over the last four years -- still seem likely to hold firm against his power-hungry schemes.
  • He made a racist argument that election results should be overturned by tossing out hundreds of thousands of votes in large cities dominated by Black voters, including Detroit and Philadelphia, where he claimed the number of voter fraud cases "could fill a library."
  • "The only surprise I would have found in this is that Philadelphia hadn't cheated in this election, because for the last 60 years, they've cheated in just about every single election. You could say the same thing about Detroit," Giuliani said at one point. "Each one of these cities are cities that are controlled by Democrats, which means they can get away with anything they want to do."
  • One affidavit Giuliani highlighted has already been rejected by a judge, and many have been vague, contradictory and devoid of evidence, showing isolated incidents or suspicions of illegal behavior not rooted in facts.
  • Highlighting the Trump campaign's naked effort to disenfranchise voters, the judge explicitly noted that there was no evidence of fraud related to the ballots the Trump campaign was seeking to throw out: "There exists no evidence of any fraud, misconduct, or any impropriety with respect to the challenged ballots," Baldi wrote in his opinion. "There is nothing in the record and nothing alleged that would lead to the conclusion that any of the challenged ballots were submitted by someone not qualified or entitled to vote in this election."
  • "Having failed to make even a plausible case of widespread fraud or conspiracy before any court of law, the President has now resorted to overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election," Romney said in a statement posted to Twitter.
  • "It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American President."
katherineharron

Election officials contradict Trump's voter-fraud conspiracy theories - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • A group of national, state and private election officials said in a joint statement Thursday that there is no evidence of any voting system being compromised in the 2020 election despite President Donald Trump's deluge of election fraud conspiracies.
  • "The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result," the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Executive Committees said.
  • "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised."
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  • Trump has refused to accept the results, instead pushing baseless conspiracies that his second term is being stolen.
  • This includes falsely claiming during an election night address that he had already won reelection
  • internal debate continues to rage over the wisdom of continuing with the legal challenges and requests for recounts in several states.
  • Since last week, the President has been advised on numerous occasions that it's highly unlikely he will prevail in the courts, but he has plowed ahead anyway.
  • the President is sowing distrust in the electoral process by making claims that votes were changed and calling for hundreds of thousands of votes to be thrown out.
  • "CISA sees its first principle as protecting democratic processes, not protecting an individual," the official said.
  • "While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too," the election officials said in concluding their statement.
  • "When you have questions, turn to elections officials as trusted voices as they administer elections."
cartergramiak

2020 Election Live Updates: Trump Says 'Unsolicited Ballots' Will Be the Cause of Elect... - 0 views

  • Trump Says ‘Unsolicited Ballots’ Will Be the Cause of Election Night Delays. They Won’t.
  • But two tweets from President Trump Thursday morning erroneously sought to blame states that are automatically mailing out ballots to registered voters for the likely delays and baselessly stated that the results “may NEVER BE ACCURATELY DETERMINED,” an assertion dismissed by elections experts.
  • There is absolutely no evidence that states that automatically send out mail-in ballots to all voters have had issues with accuracy, and some such as Colorado, Washington and Oregon have been conducting their elections mostly by mail for years.
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  • Battleground states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Florida and North Carolina are no-excuse absentee states.
  • “We certainly have seen very active, very active efforts by the Russians to influence our election in 2020,”
  • Amy Dorris, a former model, alleges that Trump sexually assaulted her at the U.S. Open.
  • Arizona, the poll found, is one of the few battlegrounds in which a third-party candidate is likely to play a significant role on the presidential level. The Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen gets between 3 and 4 percent of the presidential vote, depending on the turnout model used.
  • “Look at her. … I don’t think so,” he said.
  • All of this rancor comes as absentee voting is already underway in multiple states. By the end of this week, voters will be able to cast in-person ballots in eight states.
  • Mr. Ratcliffe, a former Republican congressman from Texas who fiercely defended the president during the Russia investigation, has downplayed such threats, an approach the president prefers.
  • Joseph R. Biden Jr. holds a four-point edge over President Trump among registered voters in Arizona, though that advantage fades when the sample focuses only on likely voters, according to a Monmouth University poll released Thursday.
  • The woman, Amy Dorris, a former model, said she was invited, along with her boyfriend at the time, to Mr. Trump’s private box to watch the tennis match. Ms. Dorris was 24.
  • The news for Mr. Biden was a little rosier when the poll examined critical regions in the state.
  • In Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, Mr. Biden held a 6-point lead among likely voters — a nine-point swing from 2016, when Mr. Trump won the county by 3 percentage points.
  • Only one Democratic presidential candidate has prevailed in Arizona in the past 70 years: Bill Clinton in 1996.
  • “Joe Biden just has a fundamentally different view of what it means for the economy to be doing well than Donald Trump does,” she continued. “Joe Biden believes the economy is not doing well unless middle-class families and working people are doing well.”
  • “If Joe Biden gets elected, we can kiss goodbye to the economy that we’ve been enjoying,” a woman who describes herself as a small-business owner says in one ad. “He’s going to raise taxes, he’s already said that.”
  • On Tuesday night, President Trump returned to the theme during a town-hall-style meeting broadcast on ABC, where he was taken to task by Ellesia Blaque, an assistant professor at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania. She told him she had a congenital illness, demanded to know what he would do to keep “people like me who work hard” insured.
  • “We’re going to be doing a health care plan very strongly, and protect people with pre-existing conditions,” Mr. Trump told her, adding, “I have it all ready, and it’s a much better plan for you, and it’s a much better plan.”
  • And with tens of thousands of Americans losing their coverage to a coronavirus-induced economic turndown, fears of inadequate or nonexistent health insurance have never been greater.
  • MIAMI — Jeff Gruver voted for the first time ever in March, casting an enthusiastic ballot for Bernie Sanders in Florida’s presidential primary.
  • Mr. Gruver does not have the money. And he does not want to take any risk that his vote could be deemed illegal. Like more than a million other ex-felons, he has learned that even an overwhelming 2018 vote approving a state referendum to restore voting rights to most people who had served their sentences does not necessarily mean that they will ever get to vote.
  • Mike PenceTo be determined.
  • “I think he made a mistake when he said that,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “It’s just incorrect information.” A vaccine would go “to the general public immediately,” the president insisted, and “under no circumstance will it be as late as the doctor said.” As for Dr. Redfield’s conclusion that masks may be more useful than a vaccine, Mr. Trump said that “he made a mistake,” maintaining that a “vaccine is much more effective than the masks.”
  • “So let me be clear. I trust vaccines. I trust the scientists. But I don’t trust Donald Trump,” Mr. Biden said. “And at this moment, the American people can’t either.”
  • Attorney General William P. Barr has ratcheted up his involvement in partisan politics in recent days, floating federal sedition charges against violent protesters and the prosecution of a Democratic mayor; asserting his right to intervene in Justice Department investigations; warning of dire consequences for the nation if President Trump is not re-elected; and comparing coronavirus restrictions to slavery.
  • “Because I am ultimately accountable for every decision the department makes, I have an obligation to ensure we make the correct ones,” he said.
ethanshilling

Republicans Push for Greater Power Over How Elections Are Run - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In the turbulent aftermath of the 2020 presidential contest, election officials in Georgia, from the secretary of state’s office down to county boards, found themselves in a wholly unexpected position: They had to act as one of the last lines of defense against an onslaught of efforts by a sitting president and his influential allies to overturn the will of the voters.
  • Buried in an avalanche of voting restrictions currently moving through the Georgia Statehouse are measures that would give G.O.P. lawmakers wide-ranging influence over the mechanics of voting and fundamentally alter the state’s governance of elections.
  • “It’s looking at total control of the election process by elected officials, which is not what it should be,” said Helen Butler, a Democratic county board of elections member.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • It’s not just Georgia. In Arizona, Republicans are pushing for control over the rules of the state’s elections. In Iowa, the G.O.P. has installed harsh new criminal penalties for county election officials who enact emergency voting rules.
  • Nationwide, Republican lawmakers in at least eight states controlled by the party are angling to pry power over elections from secretaries of state, governors and nonpartisan election boards.
  • In Georgia’s new voting bill, the State Legislature is looking to strip Mr. Raffensperger of his role as the chair of the State Election Board and make him an ex-officio member without a vote.
  • If the bill becomes law, the State Election Board, under control of the Legislature, would have more authority over these county boards, including the ability to review and fire their members.
  • Jon Greenbaum, the chief counsel for the nonpartisan Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said Republicans were engaged in an “all-out effort to change the voting rules in lots of ways that would allow for greater opportunity for them to challenge the eligibility of electors,” and that the party would “add micromanagement by state legislatures to the process of running an election.”
  • State Representative Barry Fleming, a Republican who has been a chief sponsor of the bills in Georgia, did not respond to requests for comment.
  • Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican, has not weighed in publicly on the changes to election administration and oversight.
  • The threat of increased punishment seemed to be directed at three county election officials in the state, who last year chose to mail absentee ballot applications to all registered voters in their counties, drawing the ire of state Republicans.
  • Bobby Kaufmann, the Republican state representative in Iowa who sponsored the voting bill, said the county auditors’ actions were “as much the inspiration for the bill as anything,” pointing to their decisions to mail out ballots with prepopulated information.
  • In Arizona, the Republican-controlled Legislature is pursuing multiple paths to tip the scales of election oversight.
  • Ms. Hobbs, who was the target of many Republican attacks after the 2020 election, said that purely partisan politics were at play in the bills.“The Legislature wasn’t interested in control over elections until I got here and happened to have a ‘D’ by my name,” she said.
  • Efforts in other states to muddle with the mechanics of elections have gone beyond state legislatures. In Michigan, the state Republican Party has indicated that it is unlikely to ask a G.O.P. member of the State Board of Canvassers who chose to certify last year’s election results to return to his post.
  • It is nearly assured that almost all of these bills will face legal challenges from Democrats, who have signaled that combating the efforts to restrict voting will be a top priority through both federal legislation and the courts.
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