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rerobinson03

Georgia Republicans Seek Cover From Trump's Fury Over Loss - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...epublicans-election-trump.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 03 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • The lawmakers will not fulfill Mr. Trump’s ultimate wish, expressed in a tweet earlier this week: that enough proof of fraud will be uncovered for him to prevail. But Georgia, perhaps more than any other state in the nation, continues to be haunted by a sort of zombie campaign to produce a Trump victory, one month after Election Day.
  • The effort, which also encompasses numerous lawsuits and an influential far-right disinformation campaign, will not change the election result, barring some Hail Mary upending of a race that has already been certified. But it may have other powerful consequences for the political future of Georgia — and by extension, the nation, given Georgia’s unquestionable new status as a battleground state.
  • On Wednesday, a group of 19 prominent Georgia Republicans — among them former Gov. Nathan Deal and two former U.S. senators, Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson — issued an open letter warning that the focus on fraud allegations could “detract” from the runoffs, which will determine which party controls the U.S. Senate.
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  • Their concerns came to life Wednesday afternoon at a park in the upscale Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta, where hundreds of Trump supporters gathered, waving American flags and Trump flags, to cheer two lawyers who have challenged the Georgia election results in federal court, Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood.
  • But in other ways, the momentum seemed to turn against Mr. Trump this week. On Tuesday, a top state election official, Gabriel Sterling, laced into the president, pleading with him to scale back the conspiratorial rhetoric that Mr. Sterling said was inspiring people to make violent threats against election workers.
  • Noting that the U.S. attorney general, William P. Barr, had just said that the Justice Department found no widespread fraud in the national race, Mr. Raffensperger said, “Our investigators have seen no widespread fraud either.”
  • The president may spout conspiracy theories and acrimony — he has publicly attacked Mr. Raffensperger and Mr. Kemp for not acceding to his wishes — but he is also the most popular figure in the Republican Party. Nationally, Mr. Trump’s sustained assault on voting integrity, while false, has persuaded many Republicans that there was something crooked about the election. And no one is sure whether, or for how long, he will continue to command the fealty of his party.
  • But the fact remains that Mr. Raffensperger and Mr. Kemp have refused to give Mr. Trump what he wants most: an opening that would allow the results to be overturned (Mr. Kemp has not only certified the state’s 16 electors; he has also refused to call a special session of the legislature, which people like Mr. Wood have demanded, and where the election results could ostensibly be overturned).
  • Aside from trying to assuage Mr. Trump, Republicans in Georgia also appear to be laying the groundwork for new limits on voting, and particularly on absentee voting. Mr. Trump has baselessly claimed that there was something fraudulent about the signature-matching system election officials used to verify the identities of absentee voters.
  • This week, Nse Ufot, chief executive of the New Georgia Project, said that Mr. Raffensperger was “resorting to desperate attempts to smear law-abiding organizations and scare eligible Georgians from registering to vote in critical upcoming elections.” Mr. Raffensperger’s office said on Wednesday that Ms. Ufot’s group had sent an absentee ballot registration form to his dead son.
  • “I would be highly surprised and very disappointed,” Mr. Chambliss, the former senator, said in an interview, “if Donald Trump came to Georgia this weekend and had any comments that weren’t positive about any Republican politician.”
katherineharron

More than 17 million people have *already* voted. The election is still 19 days away. - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

election

shared by katherineharron on 15 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • More than 17 million ballots across 44 states and DC have already been cast in the 2020 election, a stunning testament to what could be a a historically high voter turnout fueled by a series of state law changes that allow more mail-in balloting with the coronavirus pandemic still gripping the country.
  • In fact, in ALL of 2016, just over 46 million votes were cast early -- whether in person or by mail. That means that, even though we are still 19 days from the election, more than one-third (37%) as many early votes have already been cast in 2020 as were cast in the entirety of the early voting in the 2016 presidential race.
  • On Monday in Georgia -- the first day of in-person early voting -- some people waited in lines for as long as 11 hours to cast their ballot. In Texas on Tuesday, its first day of in-person early voting, thousands waited in long lines to have their voice heard. Early in-person voting begins in North Carolina on Thursday. (President Donald Trump will be in the state to rally supporters today.)
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  • And the data suggests that it is Democrats driving the early vote rise. In the 23 states that report ballots cast by party identification, 55% of the returned ballots are from Democrats while just 24% are from Republican and 16% are from voters with no party affiliation.
  • In 2016, the gap was just 2 points: 44% of Democrats planned to vote early as compared to 42% of Republicans In 2012, 37% of voters in each party said they planned to vote early.
  • According to Gallup polling data from earlier this month, more than 6 in 10 Democrats (62%) said they had either already voted or planned to do so before the election whether in-person or by an absentee ballot. Just 24% of Republicans said the same, a huge 38 point partisan gap that is wildly different than in past presidential elections.
  • "Republicans typically hold a slight edge in absentee ballot returns in Florida elections. But this year, there's been a stunning development."For the first time ever at this stage of a general election, Democrats here are outvoting Republicans — and by a mammoth 384,000-vote margin through Tuesday."
  • The pandemic, which appears to be ramping up again across the United States, has killed more than 219,000 Americans and sickened almost 8 million. Because of concerns about gathering in large groups indoors, many states have changed their election laws to allow no-excuse absentee voting. Trump's reaction to that has been to suggest, with no evidence, that mail-in balloting is rife with fraud and to encourage his supporters to vote on Election Day in person. Which they seem, judging by the Gallup numbers, to be planning to do.
  • Everyone -- Democrats, independents and Republicans -- who have already voted or plan to do so in the weeks leading up to November 3 are doing so in a national political environment that is decidedly tilted against Trump. Even if the landscape somehow turns for Trump in the next 19 days, he may -- given the avalanche of early votes -- already be too far behind to make it up among voters on Election Day.
tsainten

Supreme Court to Let PA, NC Accept Absentee Ballots After Election Day - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...carolina-absentee-ballots.html

politics us history trump supremecourt

shared by tsainten on 29 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • In the Pennsylvania case, the court refused a plea from Republicans in the state that it decide before Election Day whether election officials can continue receiving absentee ballots for three days after Nov. 3.
  • In the North Carolina case, the court let stand lower court rulings that allowed the state’s board of elections to extend the deadline to nine days after Election Day, up from the three days called for by the state legislature.
  • “It would be highly desirable to issue a ruling on the constitutionality of the State Supreme Court’s decision before the election,” he wrote. “That question has national importance, and there is a strong likelihood that the State Supreme Court decision violates the federal Constitution.”
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  • The motion noted that four justices had already indicated where they stood when the court deadlocked on Oct. 19. Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said they would have granted a stay blocking the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision.
  • Neither side gave reasons
  • “the Constitution reserves a special role for state legislatures in federal elections,”
  • Republican lawmakers, the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign challenged the settlement in federal court, saying the board had exceeded its power. By a 12-to-3 vote, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled against them
  • “All ballots must still be mailed on or before Election Day,”
Javier E

Stolen Elections, Voting Dogs And Other Fantastic Fables From The GOP Voter Fraud Mythology - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...-the-gop-voter-fraud-mythology

voting elections gop voter fraud history Politics

shared by Javier E on 19 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • 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 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.
  • 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 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.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
anonymous

Republicans Aim to Seize More Power Over How Elections Are Run - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...republicans-election-laws.html

shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • 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. “It’s all about turnout and trying to retain power.”
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  • 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.
  • The push is intertwined with Republicans’ extraordinary national drive to make it harder for millions of Americans to vote, with legislative and legal attacks on early voting, absentee balloting and automatic voter registration laws.
  • The new legislation across the country would systematically remove the checks that stood in Mr. Trump’s way, injecting new political influence over electors, county election boards and the certification process. In doing so, the Republican effort places a few elected officials who refused to buy into the lies and falsehoods about the election in its cross hairs.
  • 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.“It will give the State Election Board the authority to replace a limited number, it appears, of county election superintendents, and that can be a very partisan tool in the wrong hands,” said David Worley
  • State Representative Barry Fleming, a Republican who has been a chief sponsor of the bills in Georgia, did not respond to requests for comment. In a hearing on the bill this month, he defended the provisions, saying, “We as legislators decide how we will actually be elected, because we decide our own boards of elections and those of the counties we are elected from.”
  • A new law in Iowa restricting access to voting also targeted county election officials. In addition to barring them from proactively sending out absentee ballot applications, the bill introduced criminal charges for officials who fail to follow the new voting rules.
  • “We can be fined heavily now, removed from office,” said one of those officials, Travis Weipert, the Johnson County auditor. “And instead of just saying, ‘Don’t do it again,’ they brought the hammer down on us.”
  • One bill gives the Legislature the authority to approve the state election manual, an essential planning document that is drawn up every two years by the secretary of state. It had previously been approved by the governor and the attorney general.The effort has been roundly criticized by election officials in the state.
  • Republicans are also introducing measures to give them more electoral oversight in some states, like Michigan and New Jersey, that have Democratic governors who would most likely veto such bills.
  • 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.
katherineharron

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

www.cnn.com/...index.html

georgia

shared by katherineharron on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • 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.
anonymous

Georgia's election law: How the Supreme Court laid the path - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Georgia's voter restrictions were dashed into law Thursday by Republicans shaken over recent election losses and lies about fraud from former President Donald Trump, yet the measures also developed against a backdrop of US Supreme Court decisions hollowing out federal voting rights protection.
  • In another world, before the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, Georgia would have had to obtain federal approval for new election practices to ensure they did not harm Blacks and other minority voters.
  • And at another time, before the Roberts Court enhanced state latitude in a series of rulings, legislators might have hedged before enacting policies from new voter identification requirements, to a prohibition on third-party collection of ballots to a rule against non-poll workers providing food or water to voters waiting in lines. But the conservative court has increasingly granted states leeway over how they run elections.
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  • As the justices have turned away challenges to state policies, they have expressed sympathy for local officials who face potentially intrusive federal regulation and protracted litigation. Led by Roberts, the court has also dismissed concerns about the consequences for minority voters as it has curtailed the reach of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
  • That case from Shelby County, Alabama, centered on a provision of the 1965 act that required states with a history of discrimination to seek approval from the Department of Justice or a federal court before changing electoral policy. By a 5-4 vote, the court invalidated the provision that still covered nine states, including Georgia.
  • The justices are now considering, in a recently argued Arizona case, the strength of a separate Voting Rights Act provision that prohibits any measure that denies someone the right to vote because of race. Unlike the "pre-clearance" provision previously in dispute, this section of the law comes into play after legislation has taken effect and puts the burden on those protesting the law to initiate a lawsuit.
  • Resolution of that Arizona case, known as Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, will have repercussions for controversy over laws like Georgia's, which were immediately challenged Thursday night by advocates who say they will disproportionately hurt Blacks.
  • Across the country, Republican legislators have proposed voting changes that would reverse the pandemic-era steps that made it easier for people to vote last November, especially by mail, and led to record numbers of votes cast.
  • Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act soon after the Bloody Sunday march in Selma, Alabama. The law reflected the reality of the time that although the Fifteenth Amendment barred racial bias in voting, Blacks were still deterred from casting ballots through poll taxes, literacy tests and other rules.
  • Roberts has also made clear that he abhors remedies tied to race, saying in a 2006 voting-rights case: "It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race." Yet in the aftermath of the polarizing 2020 election, the country and the high court may be headed for a new chapter of voting-rights cases of a deeper partisan character, intensifying concerns about the future of the Voting Rights Act, as well as First Amendment guarantees of free speech and association.
  • Georgia's law, signed by Gov. Brian Kemp on Thursday, emerges from Republican efforts nationwide, particularly in battleground states that experienced record turnout and Democratic victories last November. Among its myriad provisions, the Georgia law imposes new voter identification requirements for absentee ballots and empowers state officials to take over local election boards.
  • The three voting rights groups that sued - the New Georgia Project, the Black Voters Matter Fund and Rise Inc. -- grounded their complaint in the Voting Rights Act and in the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
  • The challengers emphasized Georgia's history of racial discrimination. "(V)oting in Georgia is highly polarized, and the shameful legacy of racial discrimination is visible today in Georgia's housing, economic, and health disparities," they wrote, adding that the new law "interacts with these vestiges of discrimination" to deny equal opportunity in the political process. Lower federal court judges have struggled over the standard for assessing the denial of voting rights, and that dilemma is at the heart of the Supreme Court's new Arizona controversy.
  • In dispute are laws require ballots cast by people at the wrong precinct to be discarded and bar most third parties -- beyond a relative or mail carrier -- from collecting absentee ballots, for example, at a nursing home.
  • During oral arguments, Roberts and fellow conservatives focused on potential voter fraud and highlighted state authority for overseeing elections. Arizona officials argued that the measures would help prevent voter coercion and other irregularities, as the challengers contended that the new requirements would especially disenfranchise Native Americans and other minorities.
  • The high court's resolution of the Arizona controversy could have a dramatic impact on the raft of new legislation and ultimately how easy it is for minorities to register and vote. Resolution is expected by the end of June.
anonymous

Opinion | Cuomo Thought There Was No Limit to His Power - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cuomo-covid.html

Politics

shared by anonymous on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Cuomo Thought There Was No Limit to His PowerBesieged on multiple fronts, the governor is no longer holding forth; he’s just trying to hold on.
  • ret Stephens: I can’t believe I’m saying this, Gail, but Cuomo may make former Gov. Eliot Spitzer look good by comparison. At least Client 9’s behavior was, well, transactional, as compared to Cuomo’s creepy come-ons. And the cover-up of the nursing home Covid death count strikes me as possibly criminal and definitely worthy of impeachment. Especially since he was also trying to peddle a book about his Covid leadership skills while he was busy fudging the numbers.What’s your view?Gail: Have to admit it makes me sad. But the double whammy seems impossible to overcome. If it had just been the sex part we could have had some interesting conversations about what’s acceptable in an era that combines feminism with a fairly expansive view of what people — at least unmarried people — can and can’t do.Bret: “If It Had Just Been The Sex Part” could have been the title of a memoir by anyone from Caligula to Johnny Rotten. Sorry, go on.
  • ret: My gut reaction to your scenario is that it sounds very “Ooh la la,” like it could be a movie starring Cate Blanchett as Gov. Fatale, whereas Cuomo’s behavior is strictly “Ugh Yuck,” like it could be a movie starring Mickey Rourke. I just don’t think it works in quite the same way.Gail: If young workers in a state capitol started complaining that their female governor was touching them inappropriately, I sorta doubt the voters would see it as a glamorous movie.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Bret: One of the many reasons I despise Donald Trump is that he took perfectly legitimate policy issues, distorted and lied about them to suit his personal needs, and rendered them politically radioactive. Ballot integrity and public confidence in elections is a legitimate issue. In New York’s upstate 22nd district, we had a congressional race that took over three months to resolve because of a lack of uniform ballot-counting standards and a tidal wave of absentee ballots. In Pennsylvania, a state court ruled that the deadline for late-arriving mail-in ballots would be extended, resulting in the addition of about 10,000 ballots to the overall vote tallies and giving fodder to pe
  • Gail: Ballot harvesting is that system where a person receives an absentee ballot, fills it out, and then relies on somebody else to get it returned. That can be a good deed — or a system party workers use to control the voting. We just need to make sure it’s only used for good purposes. There was a big scandal in North Carolina a while back involving (cough, cough) Republicans.
  • Bret: Or Shere Khan from “The Jungle Book.” As for the bill itself, the most I can say on its behalf is that I’m happy Joe Manchin is in the Senate as a Democrat. We should not pay people more money to be on unemployment than to have a job, especially as the economy opens up again. We should not be sending benefit checks to people with upper middle-class incomes. We s
  • Gail: Well, we can still complain a little, right? Otherwise we’d have to change the name of The Conversation to Quiet Contemplation of a Perfect World.Bret: Agreed. Let’s keep finding things to complain about. You know, the masks are about to come off, which means the gloves are, too.
yehbru

Fourteen states have enacted 22 new laws making it harder to vote - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

US Politics Voting Restrictions

shared by yehbru on 31 May 21 - No Cached
  • State lawmakers have enacted nearly two dozen laws since the 2020 election that restrict ballot access
  • These 22 laws in 14 states mark a new record for restrictive voting laws since 2011, when the Brennan Center recorded 19 laws enacted in 14 state legislatures.
  • Most of the new laws make it harder to vote absentee and by mail, after a record number of Americans voted by mail in November.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Overall, since the election, the Brennan Center has identified at least 389 bills introduced in 48 states that include provisions that would restrict voting access.
  • In addition to the new laws, the Brennan Center's latest report identified 61 bills that were advancing through 18 state legislatures as of May 14.
  • More than half of the 61 advancing bills would restrict absentee and mail-in voting. About a quarter include provisions that target voter ID requirements and voter roll purges.
  • Delaware
  • Texas is a key state to watch with the most restrictive voting bills introduced overall, though it has not yet enacted any of those 49 bills.
aidenborst

Ranked choice voting: Why the process could take weeks to deliver New York City primary results - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

US politics history crisis Culture policy election Midterm New-York

shared by aidenborst on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Democrats running for New York City mayor will square off in a crucial debate Wednesday night, but they won't just be trying to convince voters that they're the best candidate for the job -- being someone's second, third, fourth or even fifth favorite could be almost as good.
  • Unlike past elections, Big Apple voters will pick their party nominees for mayor on June 22 using ranked-choice voting, and it could take weeks to determine the winners.
  • This will be the first time voters will be able to rank their top five choices in order of preference for mayor, public advocate, comptroller, borough president and city council instead of selecting just one candidate for each spot.
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  • As of Tuesday, 152,817 absentee ballots had been sent out by elections officials. Citywide, more than 12,000 had already been returned.
  • To calculate the winner, the first-choice votes of each ballot are counted. If no one receives a majority of the vote (which is unlikely in such a large field), the candidate with the least support is eliminated from contention, and votes for that candidate are redistributed to whomever the voter marked as their second choice. That process continues until a winner is determined.
  • The stakes are high. Thirteen candidates are running for the Democratic nomination for mayor, with the winner heavily favored in November's general election. (Two Republicans are vying for their party's nomination.)
  • Almost three-quarters of New York City voters picked ranked-choice voting for primaries and special elections in a 2019 referendum.
  • While the system is new to New York, it's been used in other places for years, according to FairVote, an organization that advocates for election reforms. New York City is the largest jurisdiction in the country to adopt ranked-choice voting, but it's been used for congressional and presidential elections in Maine since 2018. Alaska will begin using it next year.
  • "In order to do this process in the best way, we need to balance the public's right to know who won the election and the individual voter's right to cast absentee and affidavit ballots that will be counted and counted in an anonymous manner," Frederic Umane, the election board's president, said at a meeting last week.
  • Under the old system, if no primary candidate won 40% of the vote, the top two advanced to a runoff.November's general election will not use ranked-choice voting.
  • In April, the city launched a $15 million voter education plan, including advertising and community outreach.
  • In a statement announcing the initiative, Mayor Bill de Blasio committed to a "full court press to ensure every New Yorker has the information they need to make their voice heard."
  • "Studies have shown that a disproportionate number of Black Democrats, particularly older voters, vote for only one candidate, so a Black candidate that finishes ahead with first place votes can ultimately lose if White voters fully avail themselves of the RCV option," Hazel wrote. "In essence, those votes by White voters would count more than the older Black single candidate voters since the Black voters' second choices would not come into play."
  • Despite those concerns, Dukes wrote that she was committed to helping educate voters about the process to "ensure voters know what to expect when they go to the polls this June."
  • "We're hoping that it will be a positive experience in the end," Quigg said. "That people can see 'maybe my first choice candidate didn't win, but hey look my second or third choice candidate won and so that effort that I put into figuring that out made a difference.'"
  • "I think a lot of a lot of voters have sort of 2020 fatigue, if you will and are frankly, still a little traumatized from that election cycle. So, you know, a lot of people just haven't really been tuning in yet," she said. "I think a lot of New Yorkers want to participate, but they just need to know about it and they need to know that it's actually not that complicated."
katherineharron

Voting in Georgia US Senate race in Hancock County is more about fight to vote than right to vote - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

voting

shared by katherineharron on 05 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In 2015, after a failed attempt to shutter almost every polling location in a county three times the area of Atlanta, the Hancock County Board of Elections and Registration tried to remove 174 voters, almost all of them African American, ahead of a Sparta city election. The board even sent deputies to homes, summonsing voters to prove eligibility.
  • The city's roll at the time included only 988 voters, so it meant about one in five potential ballots.
  • many county residents could have been disenfranchised, he said last month.
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  • With Georgia voters set to decide control of the US Senate in Tuesday's runoffs, the challenges to the voting rolls in Hancock County, whose residents have long fought for their right to vote, remain under the supervision of a court-appointed examiner. Legal experts say the US Supreme Court pulling teeth from the Voting Rights Act is to blame.
  • Black households had a median income of $22,056 ($37,083 for White); almost 34% of Black residents lived in poverty (22% for White); and 26% of Black households received food benefits (6% for White).
  • Ahead of the 2015 Sparta elections, the lawsuit said, BOER Vice Chairwoman Nancy Stephens, who is White, began filing voter challenges as a citizen, then voting on them as a board member. When concerns were raised, a local resident began filing challenges "in a format that closely resembled the format of those filed by the Vice Chair," the lawsuit said.
  • The challengers "consistently failed to provide credible evidence based upon personal knowledge that the challenged voters were not qualified to vote," the lawsuit said.
  • The BOER, responding to the lawsuit, "vigorously" and "strenuously" denied illegally targeting Black voters or violating state laws.
  • He went through the 2014 voting roll and pulled voters he knew were dead or had moved and submitted 14 challenges.
  • "Sitting after two of the meetings, I thought, 'What would they do if someone challenged some White voters?'" recalled Webb, who is Black.
  • Thornton can't understand why the BOER would claim he didn't live in the county, or why the board would try to remove him from the rolls. His catfish farm is in unincorporated Mayfield, 20 minutes outside Sparta, and he wasn't eligible to vote in the city elections.
  • BOER members didn't take Webb's challenges seriously and defended White voters.
  • The BOER determined before the hearing that four of Webb's challenged voters were dead and removed them from the rolls. Of the remaining challenges, the board nixed one voter from the rolls and moved another to inactive status. Both were Asian American, the lawsuit said.
  • "What they did was beyond voter suppression. If something is wrong with your voter registration, they should call you and tell you what's wrong. What they were doing is taking you off the rolls, and you wouldn't find out until the election," Webb told CNN. "They were making Black votes disappear."
  • Since the death of the Georgia civil rights icon US Rep. John Lewis, politicians and activists have called for Congress to honor Lewis by crafting an updated coverage formula, as permitted by the high court, but it hasn't come to pass.
  • Julie Houk with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who worked on the Hancock County case, disagrees with the Supreme Court's finding "that the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions."
  • The Lawyers' Committee has also challenged restrictive absentee ballot rules and fought voter purges, redistricting decisions and efforts to limit ballot drop boxes -- which tend to burden minorities the most.
  • In Macon-Bibb County, Georgia, Houk said, elections officials moved a Black voting precinct -- in a community that had rocky relations with law enforcement -- to the sheriff's office, which she called "very problematic" as it threatened to dissuade African Americans from voting.
  • In 2015, Georgia's then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp cited Shelby in informing counties they were "no longer required to submit polling place changes to the Department of Justice."
  • The ACLU of Georgia reported in September that of 313,243 voters removed from the state rolls in 2019, almost 200,000 were likely erroneously purged.
  • Two weeks before the November general election, ProPublica, in collaboration with public broadcasters, reported, "The state's voter rolls have grown by nearly 2 million since the US Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, but polling locations have been cut by almost 10%, with Metro Atlanta hit particularly hard."
  • This is why preclearance was so important: Discriminating against Black voters would've been rejected
  • The truth about 2015 "depends on what side you talk to," he said. No candidate could win in the city, now estimated at 89% African American, without securing a swath of the Black vote, said Haywood, who is White and is certain he was elected on his promise of reform, he said.
  • "We are way past problems with Black and White here," Haywood said. "Now, people are excited things are getting fixed."
  • Before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it had no Black elected officials until John McCown -- an activist more in the mold of Stokely Carmichael than Martin Luther King Jr. -- came to town, luring investment and ushering Black residents to power.
  • McCown remains revered among many Black residents, despite investigations into his alleged misspending of grant money and other improprieties. They consider his achievements landmarks, including an affordable housing project and job creators like a cinder block factory and Thornton's now-defunct catfish farm. McCown's antebellum home still stands, abandoned and in need of upkeep.
  • A 1976 plane crash killed McCown, and a federal investigation into his fundraising killed the county's resurrected prosperity, but his legacy survived in the Black leaders succeeding him. "He created a political strategy, and African Americans voted themselves into power," Thornton said. "It has come to a point where (Hancock County) is one of the most impoverished in America. There is a wives' tale -- I don't know if it's true or not -- that some political leaders in Georgia have always said that if we can't vote the people of Hancock County out, we'll starve them out -- and there's been a disproportionate lack of growth to this particular community."
  • The BOER "strenuously denied" that it was illegally targeting Black voters with its challenges but agreed to enter the consent decree and abide by the standards and procedures the decree lays out. The court also ordered the defendants to pay more than $500,000 in attorneys' fees and other expenses, court documents show.As part of the consent decree, the BOER agreed to "not engage in discriminatory challenges to voters' eligibility," and to adhere to certain procedures in such challenges, according to court documents. It also restored certain voters to its rolls and agreed not to take action on other voters restored to the rolls for at least two federal election cycles.
  • "It had a chilling effect on voters," she said. "A lot of folks decided voting wasn't worth it."
  • "It will affect several elections down the road because people will say that I'm not going to be bothered by this ever again. I'm not going to vote," Warren said. "You have virtually destroyed their whole trust in the system altogether."
  • The county has submitted voters it wants removed, as instructed, and during the November election, the NAACP "seemed to think everything went OK," he said. Spencer's team is "always concerned," he said, and events happening at the state and national level, including Georgia's secretary of state calling to end no-excuse absentee voting and President Donald Trump challenging elections results, only exacerbate his worry.
  • "I am definitely worried that once the consent decree ends that the BOER will start its same antics again," he said. "They can say, 'Hey, we'll get everybody except Johnny Thornton, and the other people that we go for might not have the legal means or expertise to push back or to fight against the system.'"
  • Warren, in addition to previously serving as Sparta's registrar, is a Black county resident who began filming BOER meetings in 2015 when he learned of the challenges. He had trouble last year, he said, when applying for a mail-in ballot. A county elections official told him his home wasn't his registered address, he said. He isn't alleging any misbehavior -- he was able to sort it out before the general election -- but such a county notice might have been enough to deter a less-resolute voter from casting her or his ballot. In poor, rural areas like Hancock County, minor hiccups such as a rainy day or a washed-out road can have major effects on voting.
delgadool

Opinion | Why Are Republicans So Afraid of Voters? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...voting-rights-republicans.html

politics election

shared by delgadool on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • there were reasonable concerns that many people would not vote at all. The numbers to date suggest that 2020 could see record turnout.
  • Why are so many Americans consistently missing in action on Election Day?For many, it’s a choice. They are disillusioned with government, or they feel their vote doesn’t matter because politicians don’t listen to them anyway.
  • For many more, the main obstacle is bureaucratic inertia. In New York City, a decrepit, incompetent, self-dealing board of elections has been making a mockery of democracy for decades. Just in the past four years, tens of thousands of absentee ballots have been sent to the wrong addresses, and hundreds of thousands of voters have been wrongly purged from the rolls. For the past few days, some New Yorkers have been forced to stand in line for four or five hours to cast their ballots.
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  • In Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin, Republicans have fought to prevent the counting of all mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, even if they are postmarked on or before Nov. 3.
  • This year, in the face of the unprecedented hurdles to voting introduced by the coronavirus pandemic, Republicans are battling from coast to coast to ensure that casting a ballot is as hard as it can be.
  • But across the country, the group most responsible for making voting harder, if not impossible, for millions of Americans is the Republican Party. Republicans have been saying it themselves for ages. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich, a leader of the modern conservative movement, told a gathering of religious leaders in 1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
  • The effort has been turbocharged by President Trump, who has spent the past year falsely attacking the integrity of mail-in ballots
  • Scholars, researchers and judges have said for years that voting fraud of any kind is vanishingly rare in this country. That hasn’t stopped Republicans from alleging that it happens all the time. They know that accusations of fraud can be enough by themselves to confuse voters and drive down turnout.
  • When that tactic fails, Republicans turn to another tried-and-true one: voter intimidation. Frightening people, particularly Black people, away from the ballot box has a long history in the United States.
  • He has urged his supporters to enlist in an “Army for Trump,” monitoring polls. “A lot of strange things happening in Philadelphia,” Mr. Trump said during a recent campaign stop in Pennsylvania. “We’re watching you, Philadelphia. We’re watching at the highest level.”
  • Representative democracy works only when a large majority of people participate in choosing their representatives. That can happen only when those in power agree that voting should be as easy and widely available as possible
  • A fair election would mean giving all states the necessary funds to implement automatic voter registration and to upgrade old voting machines. It would mean allowing people with criminal records to vote as soon as they have completed the terms of their sentences.
  • To help ensure that voting is easier for everybody, the federal government needs to take action. Currently, there are two comprehensive voting-rights bills in Congress, the Voting Rights Amendment Act and H.R. 1, also known as the For the People Act. The first bill would update the old map the Supreme Court invalidated in 2013 and would identify the states and localities that are racially discriminating against their voters today, requiring them to seek federal court approval before changing any election laws.The second bill would, among other things, create a national voter-registration program; make it harder for states to purge voting rolls; and take gerrymandering away from self-interested state legislatures, putting the redistricting process in the hands of nonpartisan commissions.
  • The House of Representatives passed both of these bills in 2019, with all Democrats voting in favor both times. The Voting Rights Amendment Act got the vote of a single House Republican. H.R. 1 got none.
  • That’s why, if either of these laws is going to pass, it will require, at a minimum, voting out Republicans at every level who insist on suppressing the vote. Only then can those who believe in representative democracy for all Americans reset the rules and help ensure that everyone’s vote counts.
  • What would a level playing field look like? For starters, it would have more polling places, more early-voting days and shorter voting lines. Since the Supreme Court gutted the heart of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, almost 1,700 polling places have been shut down, most of them in the states that had been under federal supervision for their past discriminatory voting practices. It’s no surprise that voters in predominantly Black neighborhoods wait 29 percent longer to cast ballots than voters in white neighborhoods.
katherineharron

Exit polls 2020: What they are and how they'll work in a pandemic - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

election

shared by katherineharron on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Exit polling traditionally involves interviews with a randomly selected sample of voters conducted as those voters leave their polling places. Unlike pre-election polling, where voters can only be identified using screening questions or a history of voting on a voter file, meeting voters where they are ensures that those included in the survey have actually cast their ballots.
  • carrying out a poll exclusively that way during a pandemic, when more than 90 million have already cast their ballots, would not be a representative measure of the full electorate.
  • To make the 2020 survey more representative, Edison Research has made modifications to the methodology it uses to carry out the exit poll for the National Election Pool, a news consortium made up of CNN, ABC News, CBS News and NBC News.
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  • This year's exit poll will still include in-person interviews with voters who cast their ballots on Tuesday.
  • interviews will be contactless. Voters will pick up paper questionnaires and single-use pencils from a table rather than taking them directly from the interviewer, and disinfecting wipes and hand sanitizer will be available for use by both voters and the interviewers manning the table
  • Those interviews are only one piece of the puzzle this year. The share of voters who cast their ballots before Election Day has been growing for two decades, and will rapidly accelerate in this year's election. In 2000, absentee and early voting represented about 16% of the total votes cast. In 2016, that figure was over 40%; this year, it is expected to top 60%.
  • To account for the large share of early in-person voters in critical states such as North Carolina, Florida and Texas, Edison Research has spent the past month conducting the same type of in-person interviewing that it does on Election Day at a random selection of early voting locations around eight states.
  • To account for the large number of by-mail voters, as well as early voters in states where in-person early voter interviewing is not possible, the exit polls will also include the results of telephone polls targeted at these voters. Edison Research has conducted such polling for use in exit polls in states with significant shares of absentee and early voters since 2004.
  • When all of these pieces are combined, the exit poll results presented on election night will reflect a complete picture of voters all across the country.
rerobinson03

Millions of Votes Are in Postal Workers' Hands. Here Is Their Story. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vote-mail-postal-service.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • On the eve of the election, more than 90 million voters have been sent absentee or mail ballots, and 60 million of them have already been returned.
  • For postal workers there, shepherding the votes is the latest challenge in an already exhausting year.
  • The U.S. Postal Service is one of the nation’s largest employers, but the pandemic has made the federal workers who are closest to us more remote.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Starting eight days before the election, local post-office managers must use “extraordinary measures” to accelerate the movement of ballots — expediting their processing, taking them straight to local election offices and even delivering them on Sundays if need be.
  • For the people who keep post offices running, workdays lengthened to 12, 14 or even 16 hours.
  • The modern style of voting by mail, in which people can receive a ballot and return it from home, became common starting only in the 1980s;
  • large Western states began allowing people to request absentee ballots without giving a reason, so that no one would have to drive long distances to cast a ballot in person.
  • Postal workers bristle at the accusation that they might be mishandling citizens’ ballots. The employees of the Postal Service, unlike those at private companies, aren’t judged on whether they bring in more revenue or cut costs.
  • Their mandate is to uphold what they call their universal service obligation, a commitment to deliver mail to and from every part of America,
  • There is only one Postal Service, but election rules are different in every state. Some states will count every ballot that is postmarked by the day of the election; others will count only those that have made it all the way to election offices.
mattrenz16

As Trump Sows Doubts on Mail, Democrats Push More In-Person Voting - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...emocrats-in-person-voting.html

shared by mattrenz16 on 02 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Democrats in Philadelphia will push supporters to vote in person if they have not already requested a ballot.
  • The sudden shift in tactics in the biggest city in Pennsylvania, a critical swing state, reveals unease over President Trump’s war on mail-in voting and a rash of court rulings that are still altering the regulations that will govern how ballots are cast and counted in November.
  • The events gather groups of voters to drop off their absentee ballots in person at elections offices or drop boxes.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Many state parties and officials continue to view voting by mail as essential amid the coronavirus pandemic.
  • As the president falsely claims that mail balloting is rife with fraud, and as the election system has been overtaxed by the vote-by-mail surge, voters across the country have been left to navigate a confusing process.
  • In Madison, Wis., by far the state’s most Democratic stronghold, the city clerk’s office received so many phone calls from voters worried about the Postal Service that on Saturday it dispatched 1,000 poll workers to more than 200 city parks. Their job was to collect ballots in an event the city called “Democracy in the Park.”
  • municipal fire stations next week.
  • Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans in absentee ballot requests in key battleground states; in Pennsylvania, nearly 1.5 million Democrats have requested a mail-in ballot, three times the requests from Republicans.
  • “I think Trump and the Republicans in general are trying to screw up mail-in voting,” said Mr. Velchoff,
  • On Thursday, the Biden campaign said it would begin door-to-door canvassing in battleground states.
  • “Our thought has always been that if we get 1,000 Democrats to vote by mail that wouldn’t have voted otherwise, and we lose 10 percent due to mistakes, we still gained 900 votes,” Mr. Bright said.
  • Officials there recently warned that a decision from the State Supreme Court instructing officials to discard so-called “naked ballots” — those that arrive without a secrecy envelope — could risk up to 40,000 votes in the city. That’s a significant amount in a Democratic city where Mr. Biden needs to run up the margins to have a chance at winning back Pennsylvania.
  • In Wisconsin, Republicans have sought to block officials from conducting mass ballot collections.
  • In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott issued a proclamation on Thursday restricting counties to just one ballot drop-off site each, requiring some of the state’s largest and most Democratic counties to close facilities on Friday.
xaviermcelderry

As Counting Begins, a Flood of Mail Ballots Complicates Vote Tallies - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mail-ballot-counting-vote.html

election mail-in-ballot

shared by xaviermcelderry on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Voters returned nearly 64 million mail-in ballots before Election Day, a pandemic-driven record that is certain to make for a more complicated vote count this year but could also reshape American elections for years to come.
  • Some battleground states, like North Carolina, have been processing ballots for weeks. Elections officials there expect at least 97 percent of votes to be counted on Tuesday night. But in one of the most hotly contested states, Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign and Republican allies blocked counties from processing votes ahead of the election.
  • “I believe the usage of mail balloting in this election will continue a trend towards expanded mail balloting that we’ve seen across the country. In particular, states with permanent absentee ballot lists will likely see their numbers swell, which may eventually lead the way to all-mail ballot elections,” said Michael McDonald, a professor of political science at the University of Florida.
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  • This year’s mail-in vote totals will climb well past the nearly 64 million that election officials had recorded through Monday. Some ballots have already arrived at election offices around the country but have not yet been entered into the system. Others have been mailed, but not yet delivered.
  • Dr. McDonald, who tracks election statistics, says that, as of Tuesday, just over 28 million absentee ballots requested by voters had not been entered as returned to election officials. In an analysis posted on his website, he said that those ballots are rightly a concern to Democrats, but that there still may be time for many of them to be counted.
saberal

Wisconsin's Top Court Rules Against Reprinting of Ballots, Avoiding Election Chaos - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...llots-reprinting-election.html

politics

shared by saberal on 15 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • The decision could help Joe Biden.
  • The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the Green Party’s presidential candidate will not appear on the state’s presidential ballot,
  • Days before the start of mail voting, the court ruled that Mr. Hawkins and his running mate, Angela Walker, had waited too long to appeal a decision from the Wisconsin Elections Commission that denied their placement on the ballot, giving the court no recourse.
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  • concluded that the candidates’ delay in a situation with “very short deadlines” made it impossible to grant the motion without causing “confusion and undue damage to both the Wisconsin electors who want to vote and the other candidates in all the various races on the general election ballot.”
  • More than a million Wisconsin voters have already requested absentee ballots,
  • Every voter in Wisconsin who was planning to vote by mail might be affected by a delay in the mailing of ballots,
  • Mr. Hawkins defended his decision to be represented by a conservative law firm. “Republicans have played these games before,” he said. “If we had the money and we could get a lawyer ourselves, we would do it that way.”
  • As of this week, 1,013,458 of the state’s 2.7 million active registered voters had requested absentee ballots in Wisconsin for the November election, according to data from the state Elections Commission.
  • roughly 73,000 ballots had already been sent to voters for November,
  • The Elections Commission ruled last month that neither Mr. Hawkins nor Mr. West had qualified for the ballot, citing deficiencies in their applications. Late on Friday, a Wisconsin Circuit Court upheld the commission’s decision to keep Mr. West off the ballot.
  • but those living overseas or serving in the military might face the most severe impact, because of longer delivery times. Under federal law, overseas ballots are supposed to be mailed to voters by Saturday.
cartergramiak

2020 Election Live Updates: Trump Says 'Unsolicited Ballots' Will Be the Cause of Election Night Delays. They Won't. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-vs-biden

trump us policy

shared by cartergramiak on 17 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The news for Mr. Biden was a little rosier when the poll examined critical regions in the state.
  • 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.
hannahcarter11

Warnock leading Loeffler, other Georgia Senate runoff race deadlocked: poll | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...te-runoff-race-deadlocked-poll

georgia senate runoff poll Senate control

shared by hannahcarter11 on 04 Dec 20 - No Cached
    • hannahcarter11
      hannahcarter11 on 04 Dec 20
       
      It's interesting how race factors in here. The disparity in the poll points in the Black vote shows just how pivotal the Black vote is in Georgia.
  • Men gave Perdue a 10-point lead over Ossoff and Loeffler a 9-point lead over Warnock. Women gave Ossoff an 11-point lead over Perdue, as well as a 19-point advantage for Warnock.
  • . If either Republican wins, the GOP will retain control of the Senate.
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  • However, if both Democratic candidates win, the parties will be evenly split in the upper chamber, allowing Vice President-elect Kamala HarrisKamala HarrisBiden says GOP senators have called to congratulate him Biden says family will avoid business conflicts Biden says China must play by 'international norms' MORE to cast a tie-breaking vote on legislation.
  • Democrat the Rev. Raphael Warnock holds a lead over GOP Sen. Kelly LoefflerKelly LoefflerTop Senate GOP super PAC raises million ahead of Georgia runoffs Republican senators introduce bill to protect government workers from being targeted at home Republicans scramble to counter calls to boycott Georgia runoffs MORE (Ga.) in a poll of one of two Georgia runoff races that will determine the balance of the Senate.
  • Warnock leads Loeffler 52 percent to 45 percent
  • Democrat John Ossoff is narrowly leading Sen. David PerdueDavid PerdueRepublican senators introduce bill to protect government workers from being targeted at home Republicans scramble to counter calls to boycott Georgia runoffs Georgia Republicans push for photo ID for future absentee voting MORE (R-Ga.) 50 percent to the Republican’s 48 percent in the state’s other runoff election that will take place in January.
  • White voters in the Peach State gave Perdue a 43-point lead and Loeffler a 37-point lead, according to the poll.
  • Among Black voters, Ossoff led in his runoff race with an 87-point advantage and Warnock with an 83-point advantage.  
xaviermcelderry

Supreme Court Won't Extend Wisconsin's Deadline for Mailed Ballots Past Election Day - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-court-wisconsin-ballots.html

election voting court

shared by xaviermcelderry on 27 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • he Supreme Court refused on Monday to revive a trial court ruling that would have extended Wisconsin’s deadline for receiving absentee ballots to six days after the election.
  • The vote was 5 to 3, with the court’s more conservative justices in the majority. As is typical, the court’s brief, unsigned order gave no reasons.
  • The Democratic Party of Wisconsin immediately announced a voter education project to alert voters that absentee ballots have to be received by 8 p.m. on Election Day, Nov. 3. “We’re dialing up a huge voter education campaign,” Ben Wikler, the state party chairman, said on Twitter. The U.S. Postal Service has recommended that voters mail their ballots by Oct. 27 to ensure that they are counted.
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  • Cases from North Carolina and Pennsylvania are pending before the court, the latter a second attempt after a 4-to-4 deadlock last week. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was confirmed and sworn in to the Supreme Court on Monday night, could cast the decisive vote in that case
  • “That extension of Wisconsin’s ballot-receipt deadline ensured that Covid-related delays in the delivery and processing of mail ballots would not disenfranchise citizens fearful of voting in person,” Justice Kagan wrote. “Because of the court’s ruling, state officials counted 80,000 ballots — about 5 percent of the total cast — that were postmarked by Election Day but would have been discarded for arriving a few days later.”
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