#a recount would mean all ballots recounted and charged to the state not the campaign

[zimshan]

Attention Pennsylvania voters!

Senator Bob Casey’s race is now at a margin of 0.53%.

An automatic recount in PA is triggered with a margin of 0.5%. That’s a difference of 0.03% or a little over 2,000 votes. We need to make sure every ballot is counted here, and there’s thousands of uncounted ballots right now due to voter error.

Did you mail in a ballot? Check to see it was accepted here:

If it says anything other than accepted/counted/etc, your ballot needs your attention. A mistake in filling it out means that your ballot will not count unless you “cure” it. Check your county’s curing policies:

See full instructions for curing by county here.

You have until November 12 to cure your ballot in PA.

Do you know someone who mailed in a PA ballot? Please pass these links on to them. You may be the difference between their vote counting or not in a super close race.

Everyone else, you can help PA voters cure their ballots. If you live in Pennsylvania, you can help canvass in your county (see links in this thread). If you are in another state, you can sign up to call voters and help them cure by phone.

Want to help another state? Sign up for a shift through November 19.

[qqueenofhades]

Having seen what's currently happening in Venezuela, I feel so terrible for everyone to tried to vote Maduro out, and I worry about the US election. Will Trump and the GOP be able to do the same thing??

I agree that what's happening in Venezuela is bad and scary, but it's also not unexpected (unfortunately), and it doesn't correlate to the US election. It is very much a cautionary tale for us, but in the case of what could happen, not what has happened yet (and which we could and MUST still avoid). Here's why I think that.

First, Maduro is the heir of 25+ years of dictatorship (first the Chavez regime and then his), and that political machine has had a full generation to fix/control everything in Venezuela just as they want it. They've collapsed the economy, driven mass emigration/purges/brain drains, installed corrupt systems and destroyed civil society, staffed the government with cronies who will only ever do what Maduro personally says -- etc. In other words, exactly what Trump and the Republicans aspire to do here in America, but with 25 years' head start, so all those fixes are well entrenched. Outside observers were also warning well ahead of the Venezuelan vote that even an overwhelming majority for the opposition candidate might not be enough, because Maduro and co. can just fix the result however they want with imaginary fantasy numbers. (See Putin's "win" in the Russian presidential "election.") Because dictators all draw from the same playbook regardless of their professed ideological temperament, they always use the same tools.

Next, voting in Venezuela is all-electronic, which is obviously the easiest kind of voting to jigger, and which means that whatever the people actually select has little to no relevance to what gets published, recorded, or proclaimed. Now, despite the Republicans' constant screaming about ELECTION FRAUD, the 2020 elections in America were widely hailed as the safest, most accurate, and fraud-free in the nation's history. (For that matter, multiple investigations afterward have re-confirmed this, and the tiny handful of cases of election fraud that were found were committed by, you guessed it, Republicans.) This did not happen because of the Orange Fuhrer and co., who were busy trying to commit election fraud on their own behalves, but because America, however flawed, is still a participatory liberal democracy and citizens have the right to engage and to do so in a meaningful fashion. We had the entire investigation about how Russia meddled with the election in 2016, and changes were made. Cybersecurity experts were brought in; redundancies and failsafes were introduced; etc., and even the Russian campaign focused on psychological influence rather than actually, physically changing already-cast votes, because that is very, very hard to do in America. We are not an all e-voting nation; there are paper trails, hard-copy ballots, hand recounts, poll observers, election lawyers, and multiple other safeguards that exist. The Republicans have been attacking them as hard as they can, but they're still there.

Thirdly, the Evil Orange tried to fix the elections when he was the sitting president (don't forget the infamous "find me 11,780 votes" phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State that got him slapped with felony charges), but he couldn't do it even then. He also tried a coup as the sitting president, with full discretion as to whether, for example, the National Guard should be deployed to the Capitol on January 6, and that didn't succeed. As such, when he's a disgraced jobless felon who is not the commander-in-chief of the American military and holds no official or political role, he's definitely not getting it done now. There were reforms made to the Electoral Count Act to prevent another January 6, Biden and not Trump would be the president at any other attempted attack on the counting of electoral votes, and I can guarantee Biden would not sit around for three hours watching Fox News and cheering the rioters on if such a thing happened again. Trump has been threatening violence again because that's the only move in his playbook, and he wants to intimidate people into voting for him out of fear that he'll attack them if they don't give him what he wants, like any other psychopathic bully. But that does not mean he actually has the tools to successfully carry it off, and honestly, motherfucker? Try it one more fucking time. I double fucking dog dare you. Biden has 6 months left in his term and total immunity, according to your own SCOTUS. So.

Basically, Venezuela has already been a banana republic for 20+ years, the dictator has had a full generation to destroy it/remake it/turn it into his personal fiefdom, he allows elections only because he already knows they won't change anything or actually remove him from power, and that is precisely what Trump wants to do in the US -- but, and this is crucial, has not done yet. Which is why it is so, so important to Orange-Proof America and get rid of him once and for fucking all on November 5th. We can do it. So yes.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 20, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

So many stories landed today that some will have to wait. Tonight’s news, though, boils down to Republican attempts to retake control of the government in the 2022 elections…and, if Trump has his way, even earlier.

This morning, CNN revealed another bombshell story from the forthcoming book by veteran reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa: a six-point memo from pro-Trump lawyer John Eastman laying out a plan for then–vice president Mike Pence to steal the 2020 election for Trump.

The memo started by falsely claiming that seven states had sent competing slates of electors to the President of the Senate; in fact, Trump loyalists demanded their own electors, but each state had certified one official slate of electors. If Pence—or, if Pence recused himself, the then–Senate president pro tempore, Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley—rejected the ballots from those seven states, Eastman claimed, Trump would have ten more electoral votes than Biden and would win the election.

When Democrats howled, Pence could instead assert that neither candidate had a majority and throw the election into the House of Representatives, where each state would get a single vote. Since 26 of the 50 states were dominated by Republicans, Trump would win there, too.

“The fact is that the Constitution assigns this power to the Vice President as the ultimate arbiter,” Eastman wrote. “We should take all of our actions with that in mind.”

Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani tried to convince Republican senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to back the scheme; someone also ran the idea past Republican senator Mike Lee of Utah. Both dismissed it. But, notably, neither revealed this extraordinary attempt to destroy our democracy.

When Pence ultimately refused to go along, Trump turned on him and told attendees at the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally that “if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election.” He explained that “the number one, or certainly one of the top, Constitutional lawyers in our country,” had offered a plan, and that “Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us….”

Aside from the obvious, Eastman’s memo raises three interesting points. First, it refers to the idea that Pence might hand over the count to Grassley, a plan that needs more investigation. Second, it relies on the work of emeritus Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe, who tweeted that it took snippets of his work out of context to create “a totally fake web of ‘law’ that no halfway decent lawyer would take seriously…. Ludicrous but scary as hell. Think 2024. Those guys mean business....” And, third, it debunks the current right-wing talking point that Trump wanted only to question the results of the election. Clearly, he wanted to be declared the winner.

Even after President Joe Biden was sworn in, Trump supporters continued to insist that the election had been fraudulent. Famously, the Arizona state senate hired a company called Cyber Ninjas to reexamine the votes from Maricopa County, although the county board of supervisors, a majority of whom were Republicans, had already audited the ballots and the machines and found no problems. The county board strongly opposed the new “audit.”

The Cyber Ninjas examined ballots for bamboo to see if China had hacked the election, used insecure practices, rejected observers, and finally sent voting information to Montana for analysis. Documents released by the state senate under a court order in late August revealed that groups backed by pro-Trump loyalists Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, and two correspondents from the One America News Network paid for the Arizona investigation.

Last week, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that the state senate and the Cyber Ninjas had to release the records concerning their activities. Cyber Ninjas is refusing to do so, offering as a reason—among others—that it is busy writing its report (which is already four months late) and document production will take time away from that effort. Its lawyer says it will “produce documents out of goodwill and its commitment to transparency” when it has time, but does not recognize any legal obligation to do so.

Seeking an Arizona-type “audit” in Pennsylvania, Republicans in that state’s legislature last Wednesday voted to issue subpoenas for personal information of about 6.9 million state voters, including names, addresses, birth dates, driver’s license numbers, and the last four digits of Social Security numbers. Republicans say a private company needs that information to fix issues in election procedures uncovered in 2020, but the Republican leader of the investigation has declined to say how the information will be used.

Democrats sued Friday to stop the release of the voter information, and two Democratic representatives to Congress have asked the Department of Justice to investigate whether the subpoenas could violate federal laws by leading to voter intimidation.

A new story sheds more light on the election reform Republicans are talking about. On May 6, 2021, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis raised eyebrows when he signed a new election law in front of television cameras for the Fox News Channel, excluding all other media. While Republicans insisted they wrote new election laws to prevent voter fraud—despite the lack of evidence of any such widespread fraud—internal emails and text messages from Florida Republicans revealed today by Politico show that their concerns were actually about gaining advantage in the 2022 elections.

Joe Gruters, the state senator who chairs the Florida Republican Party, repeatedly said in public that the new bill would “make it as easy as possible to vote, and hard as possible to cheat.” But in private text exchanges with state representative Blaise Ingoglia, the former chair of the Florida party, Gruters called for getting rid of existing mail-in ballot requests, saying that keeping them would be “devastating,” since Democrats used them more frequently than Republicans. “We cannot make up ground,” Gruters wrote. “Trump campaign spent 10 million. Could not cut down lead….” Ingoglia told Politico: “This was a policy decision all along and had nothing to do with partisan reasons.”

Finally, tonight, the immigration issue is back in the news. Republicans have tried to make immigration their key issue for 2022, but the terrible surge in coronavirus in Republican-dominated states like Texas has captured the news cycle. For the past few days, though, the rise in Haitian refugees on the U.S. southern border has reclaimed headlines. Haitians have long come to the southern border for admission to the U.S., but the recent earthquake in Haiti, along with the assassination of the country’s president and hopes that the Biden administration will be welcoming, has brought 12,000–15,000 Haitians in the past few weeks.

The situation there remains much as it has always been under Biden: the administration kept the public health guidelines established during the pandemic under former president Trump, and it is turning away most adult immigrants and refugees. It has been returning Haitians to Haiti by plane, with seven flights daily set to begin on Wednesday.

But right-wing media is, once again, insisting that Biden is allowing a flood of immigrants to overrun the U.S. At the same time, images of white border patrol agents on horseback riding down Haitian migrants, with their reins swinging, has horrified those who see in them the history of southern slave patrols hunting enslaved Americans. The Biden administration will have to thread a very thin political needle: disavowing the actions of the border patrol agents without opening itself to Republican attacks that it is “soft” on immigration. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has launched an inquiry into the agents’ behavior.

For his part, Trump does not want to wait until 2022 for a change in government. On Friday, he wrote to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger charging that 43,000 Georgia ballots were “invalid.” He called for Raffensperger to decertify the 2020 election “and announce the true winner,” warning that the nation “is being systematically destroyed by an illegitimate president and his administration.”

Trump is under criminal investigation in Georgia for his previous attempts to overturn the state’s election results.

—

Notes:

https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2021/09/20/devastating-florida-republicans-worried-about-2022-as-they-crafted-election-law-1391121

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21065006-arizona-senate-status-report-and-renewed-motion-to-consolidate#document/p328/a2054912

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/arizona-audit-2020-election-recount-gop-maricopa-county/

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cyber-ninjas-arizona-vote-audit-court-order_n_614678cce4b0efa77f80caf1

http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2021/images/09/20/eastman.memo.pdf

https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-speech-a-key-part-of-impeachment-trial

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/20/politics/trump-pence-election-memo/index.html

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2021/09/15/pennsylvania-election-audit-gets-off-to-wild-start-as-gop-subpoenas-personal-details-on-every-voter-in-state/

https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/pa-democrats-sue-over-gop-election-investigation/2963753/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/09/17/this-is-how-embarrassing-trumps-fraud-claims-have-gotten/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/20/us-begins-deportation-flights-haitians-texas-border-town

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/border-haitians-horses-agents/2021/09/20/c489c3ae-1a41-11ec-914a-99d701398e5a_story.html

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/17/politics/georgia-probe-trump-election/index.html

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

democracy was on the ballot and it won

I am a slow-boring-of-hard-boards realist about politics. I am delightedly surprised when I get what I want AT ALL. Months and months ago, I said that my number one issue in this election was the desperate need to put the brakes on democratic backsliding in the United States. I’m not sure how to process the fact that I’ve started to get what I wanted even before the transition.

There is a real path forward for democracy reform in this country. EVEN WITH an aspiring autocrat doing everything he could to rig this election, EVEN WITH a pandemic raging, EVEN WITH malicious foreign actors still trying cause problems, EVEN THOUGH we still have not restored the Voting Rights Act, EVEN WITH all the structural imbalances built into our creaky eighteenth-century constitutional system:

Voter participation went way up! People voted over the course of several weeks from the comfort of their own homes, or on weekends, or on Election Day. And because people took responsibility and spread out their votes like that, it was safer to go to polling places. That was a huge collective choice to prevent a lot of suffering and even some deaths.

A big part of why they could do that is the enormous number of citizens who rallied to work at the polls so that the retirees who usually do the job could sit this year out.

Cities and states around the country took the time they need to count carefully.

Media gatekeepers, for the most part, had the discipline and the patience to be helpful to users about what we knew and what we didn’t. If anything, they’re erring on the side of being too cautious. This is after weeks of most media gatekeepers having the discipline to debunk a disinformation campaign by Trump’s allies and Russian backers, instead of aggressively participating in it.

Social media companies took the most aggressive countermeasures yet against election misinformation.

The person who got the most votes is also the person who won the election, which is pretty cool!

That is a huge improvement from EVERY PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. Just in terms of how well the election itself was administered, my only major criticism is that we still did not do something called risk-limiting audits. In the case of an election, audits are basically a carefully calibrated statistical smell test. They’re not a recount. They are a reliable and cost-effective way of figuring out if a recount or some other type of scrutiny should be done for the sake of public confidence in the results – and that makes them a cost-effective deterrence against any bad actors who are considering sabotage. Audits are important whether an election goes your way or not, just like smoke detectors are important whether your building catches fire or not.

But that absolutely should not take away from the fact that we overcame all the new problems that were introduced this year and took some big steps toward solving a lot of old ones – despite the best efforts of Trump and all his enablers. Imagine what we could do under an administration that is helping democracy revitalization instead of aggressively hindering it.

The easiest way for us to make the most comprehensive change would be to win the Senate, which would allow a Biden administration to pass a revitalized Voting Rights Act and restore legitimacy to the federal courts. If you have any time or money to spare in the next few weeks, consider sharing it with the two excellent Democratic candidates in the Georgia Senate runoffs.

We should be realistic about the situation: we’re probably not going to get to do it the easy way, at least, not until after the midterms. But we’re not going to be doing it the hard way any more. The hard way is what we’re doing now. We’re about to get a Department of Justice that opposes civil rights violations and enforces what’s left of the current Voting Rights Act. The intelligence and military cybersecurity units are going to be able to work with the administration instead of around it. And we aren’t going to have to deal with a 24/7 fusillade of lies and voter intimidation coming from the Oval Office. To spin out the “it’s a marathon, not a sprint” metaphor: we’ve been running a marathon uphill carrying forty-pound backpacks. We’ve reached the top where the path levels out, and someone just took our bags and gave us protein bars.

And while we have our protein bars, let’s look around, because the view is as clear and as beautiful as it’s going to get. Donald Trump had every intention of wrecking American democracy, and the entire Republican party had every intention of supporting his aspiring dictatorship. And, while Trump himself is and always has been a clown, the person occupying the Oval Office is the most powerful person on the planet. Actually, that’s an understatement. Since Truman gave the order to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, our technology has grown stronger and our government has concentrated more and more power in the executive branch, which means that every holder of that office has arguably been the most powerful person in the history of the world. Every other holder of that office has at least wanted to think of himself as using that power for the advancement of democracy and humanity. Donald Trump affirmatively tried to use all that power to entrench himself there permanently.

We stopped him. We stopped him peacefully. We stopped him without further harming the many vulnerable people he holds hostage in a hundred different ways. We stopped him not by elevating an equal-but-opposite charismatic demagogue for a two-men-enter-one-man-leaves smackdown, but by building a vibrant, heterogenous coalition and finding competent, experienced, principled leaders who respect that coalition in all its raucous power. We stopped him, in short, by choosing to do democracy.

That feels good today and it’s enormously consequential. It is also proof of concept. It is something that can happen, because it has happened.

Something that political scientists and democracy advocates have been saying for the past few years is that Trump has been a propaganda gold mine for dictators. They use him as a cautionary tale against liberal democracy or even against hoping that things can ever get better: see, even the Americans are no better than we are! Dictators can artificially insulate themselves from accountability in the short term, which makes them ill-equipped to think about backfire. Train your people’s eyes on the aspiring American autocrat, and they can all see his humiliating fall.

To our sisters and brothers around the world, from Idlib to Hong Kong, from São Paolo to Moscow, and along every wide country road in between: this is the only true thing your oppressors have ever told you. We are no better than you are. We are no more suited for or entitled to liberation. Look what we have done. Imagine what you can do.

There’s kind of a false dichotomy going on where people swung from “Trump is going to successfully rig the election for himself” pessimism to “oh, Biden only ousted an incumbent by a freakishly large margin, it wasn’t an immediate electoral college landslide, why did Trump get so close.” This take has set in before deep blue California and New York have come close to completing their mail-in ballot counts, which tells you that it isn’t serious, but it’s also beside the point. Trump succeeded in making the election unfair. If he hadn’t illegitimately put a whole lot of thumbs on the scale in his favor, if we’d actually had the free and fair election we deserved, I think he probably would have lost in a landslide. We did the work and showed up in numbers that were ultimately too big to rig. That led to victory, although not a victory you can quantifiably measure against the dozen or so American elections that were more or less free and fair. That doesn’t mean the rigging didn’t happen or have any impact. It means we beat the spread. As the world’s most prominent train enthusiast once said, that is a big fucking deal.

A government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not perished from the earth. One day soon, it may even exist. That is our charge. That is our choice.

So take a moment to recharge. Enjoy the view. Breathe. We got work to do.

[hyunjoochung]

Raise Three Fingers for Democracy

Exhibition Information Board

Updated on May 4, 2021

Title: Raise Three Fingers for Democracy

An illegitimate takeover

On February 1st, democracy in Myanmar was taken hostage in a brutal coup. The proxy military party won a humiliating 33 of 476 seats in November elections that were declared free and fair by the election commission and international observers. After demands to seize the ballots to recount personally were rejected, they launched their coup in the early hours of the morning, arresting over 200 elected officials returning for parliament, including de-facto leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

Unprecedented nationwide protests broke out in a country still finding its democratic voice after a half-century of repression. A civil disobedience movement (CDM) formed. Doctors, teachers and government employees refused to work, joined by other essential sectors. Peaceful, creative protests filled the streets: families banging pots every night at 8pm, days of silence, highways blocked by 'broken down' cars.

Gradually, and then systematically, this was met with horrible brutality. The same military that perpetrated a genocide against the Rohingya now issued orders to shoot protestors in the head. They raid homes at night, and have arrested over 5,000. They have killed over 700 people, including over 50 children, like 6-year-old Khin Myo Chit, shot in the belly to teach her family a lesson. They have tortured over 20 people to death in custody. The internet has been shut down to all but 0.5% of the population. Media outlets that refuse to publish propaganda have been outlawed.

Freedom of the press (54 words)

This now-illegal newspaper can give you a picture of what is happening right now. It’s journalists continue to report while on the run.

[QR code & Screen set to: Mizzima reporting from a safe house]

To understand the nature of the military and their police stooges, you only need a few entries on the lists of this civil organisation tracking and verifying killings, arrests, indefinite detention and warrants:

[QR code & Screen set to: Link to PDF]

Freedom of expression

But there is still hope. The majority resists. People continue the fight every day. A symbol of hope is #threefingers. Used before in other Asian countries where democracy is under threat (the milk tea countries), it has gained major prominence in Myanmar. A group of Myanmar artists, illustrators and creatives used images of this symbol of resistance from the very first day. Since, you can see it in marches, at funerals, through the prison bars, in messages of defection, in the United Nations General Assembly, and where support can be found. It can be carried with you everywhere, and it can mean everything to those who show it.

These artists who first raised these totems of democracy in Myanmar are now putting out the call for support. Already artists, illustrators and cartoonists from around the world, from the UK to Korea, to Australia, Thailand, Hong Kong and farther have begun to return the call. Now, they need more people to join in. The fall of democracy is a worldwide phenomenon – this is just the latest front. They need YOU to stand for democracy, and help them delegitimise this brutal regime.

At night, after a day of beatings, shootings, horrors, frightened of gunshots and raids, losing hope, the young people continuing this fight can look at these artworks, songs, dances or messages, and see hope, solidarity and others that still believe in what they are risking everything for.

Every #threefingers raised builds awareness and support for human rights, freedom and democracy in Myanmar.

Message from our founder

(VIDEO: “We Will Win” by Latt Thone Chuang)

Quote

“At a very basic level, art plays a very practical role. It gets people energized, it makes people emotional, and it gets people to organise and get things done.

Art helps to frame the direction of the protest movement.

Art can also create hope and resilience. It takes people to another level and can help uplift the mood of the people.

I believe art – in all its forms – can give strength to people.

That’s what art can do.

It’s important to keep creating because you can’t handcuff ideas.

You can’t kill art with bullets.

– Maw Khun Thit, Latt Thone Chaung

Night arrests

At night, gunshots and flashbang explosives can be heard across the town. Security forces raid homes, trying to arrest and intimidate dissenting voices. Having suspended laws requiring warrants to search, they leave family members with no knowledge of the charges, location, or condition of their loved ones. Communities set up unarmed neighbourhood watch groups, local men and women who stayed up all night, banging pots to warn of approaching security forces.

Killing children (104 words)

On 23 March, security forces entered the home of 6-year-old Khin Myo Chit and her family in Mandalay. They asked her father if anyone was hiding in the house, and accused him of lying when he said no. When the girl ran to her father's arms, they shot her. She died before they could reach medics. Her last words were: "I can't father, it's too painful". Her brother was arrested and the family are yet to learn of his charge or whereabouts. Khin Myo Chit is one of over 50 child fatalities. All but one on record was shot.

Ethnic minorities

The coup instigator, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, was found by UN Investigators as the perpetrator the Rohingya genocide and publicly stated he would 'clear up the Bengali problem'. The coup has led to the formation of a National Unity Government of protest leaders, a government that previously had to keep the military on side, and ethnic minorities targeted by the military including the Kachin, Karen and Chin. The Rohingya, the most known of these minorities internationally, are anti-military and are showing the three finger salute themselves.

Targeting poor communities

Since the start of the coup, many noticeable groups have been targeted: elected officials and election monitors, doctors for treating injured protestors, government employees and bank employees for refusing to work. But the violence has been worse in neighbourhoods where poor or factory workers live and work. With the least access to medical or legal help, and the least ability to escape or hide, they continue to risk the most for democracy.

Internet shutdown

Internet and mobile phones were inaccessible to all but the super rich until after 2014. A sim card cost over $3000. Then as democratisation opened up the country, it swelled to over 80% smartphone coverage. Over the last 2 years, Myanmar’s military has conducted the world’s longest internet shutdown over eight townships and a million people in Chin and Rakhine states, to suppress information about its actions there. Now this darkness is returning everywhere: just 0.5% of the population have access to the internet, only then to stop the banking system collapsing. And yet these short years of information have taken root – people know now that they deserve more.

Creative freedom in danger

For fifty years before 2012, art and expression was repressed in Myanmar. It left just one art school, teaching stuffy figurative pastiche. Censorship was visible every day, in newspapers with black bars, banned books, arrests of cartoonists or performers. Art lay dormant, but never died. In 8 short years, expression flourished fearlessly once more. Now over 35 artists, directors and performers have been arrested, and more than 200 are on the run from arrest warrants. Yet, they continue to speak out and use their expression to fight oppression.

Can you help them?

These artists need your words, pictures and actions to amplify their calls. They need you now to fight for democracy under threat in Myanmar and everywhere.

Message of hope

Quote 2 (with Nobel Aung artwork)

“The most inspiring thing has been the unity of people. We all have the same objective. This was apparent since the very first night of the coup. People continue to bang their pots and pans every night at 8 pm to make noise, every day even until now. We are not scared of guns anymore but the military is scared of the noise we make. We give courage and inspiration to each other.”

-Nobel Aung, illustrator and animator

Founder of Raise Three Fingers

Mandatories:

About:

Raise Three Fingers (formerly Art for Freedom MM) is a campaign founded by artists and creatives from Myanmar to bring the global art community together, stand up for democracy and highlight the humanitarian crisis unfolding since the military coup on February 1 2021.

Founders:

Art for Freedom MM

Using Art and Illustration to uphold human rights for Myanmar.

Latt Thone Chaung

We are here to celebrate all forms of creative protests against the military coup in Myanmar.

The Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation (UK)

Home to some of the UK’s finest cartoonists’ talent.

Collaborators:

Fine Acts - A global nonprofit creative studio for social impact

Human Rights Foundation - We partner with world-changing activists in creating innovative solutions to unite the world against tyranny.

Arts Help - Founded on the principle of art making the world a better place, Arts Help is the #1 art publisher, with a community of 2.5 million members.

[foreverlogical]

WASHINGTON (AP) — Getting nowhere in the courts, President Donald Trump’s scattershot effort to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory is shifting toward obscure election boards that certify the vote as Trump and his allies seek to upend the electoral process, sow chaos and perpetuate unsubstantiated doubts about the count.

The battle is centered in the battleground states that sealed Biden’s win.

In Michigan, two Republican election officials in the state’s largest county initially refused to certify results despite no evidence of fraud, then backtracked and voted to certify and then on Wednesday flipped again and said they “remain opposed to certification.” Some Republicans have called on the GOP statewide canvassers to so the same. In Arizona, officials are balking at signing off on vote tallies in a rural county.

The moves don’t reflect a coordinated effort across the battleground states that broke for Biden, local election officials said. Instead, they seem to be inspired by Trump’s incendiary rhetoric about baseless fraud and driven by Republican acquiescence to broadsides against the nation’s electoral system as state and federal courts push aside legal challenges filed by Trump and his allies.

Still, what happened in Wayne County, Michigan, on Tuesday and Wednesday was a jarring reminder of the disruptions that can still be caused as the nation works through the process of affirming the outcome of the Nov. 3 election.

There is no precedent for the Trump team’s widespread effort to delay or undermine certification, according to University of Kentucky law professor Joshua Douglas.

“It would be the end of democracy as we know it,” Douglas said. “This is just not a thing that can happen.”

Certifying results is a routine yet important step after local election officials have tallied votes, reviewed procedures, checked to ensure votes were counted correctly and investigated discrepancies. Typically, this certification is done by a local board of elections and then, later, the results are certified at the state level.

But as Trump has refused to concede to Biden and continues to spread false claims of victory, this mundane process is taking on new significance.

Among key battleground states, counties in Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin have all made it through the initial step of certifying results. Except for Wayne County, this process has largely been smooth. Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia still haven’t concluded their local certifications.

Then all eyes turn to statewide certification.

In Wayne County, the two Republican canvassers at first balked at certifying the vote, winning praise from Trump, and then reversed course after widespread condemnation. A person familiar with the matter said Trump reached out to the canvassers, Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, on Tuesday evening after the revised vote to express gratitude for their support. Then, on Wednesday, Palmer and Hartmann signed affidavits saying they believe the county vote “should not be certified.”

Time is running short for Trump. Across the nation, recounts and court challenges must wrap up and election results must be certified by Dec. 8. That’s the constitutional deadline ahead of the Electoral College meeting the following week.

Matt Morgan, the Trump campaign’s general counsel, said last week the campaign was trying to halt certification in battleground states until it could get a better handle on vote tallies and whether it would have the right to automatic recounts. Right now, Trump is requesting a recount in Wisconsin in two counties, and Georgia is doing an hand audit after Biden led by a slim margin of 0.3 percentage points, but there is no mandatory recount law in the state. The law provides that option to a trailing candidate if the margin is less than 0.5 percentage points.

Some in the Republican president’s orbit have held out hope that by delaying certification, GOP-controlled state legislatures will get a chance to select different electors, either overturning Biden’s victory or sending it to the House, where Trump would almost surely win.

But most advisers to the president consider that a fever dream. Trump’s team has been incapable of organizing even basic legal activities since the election, let alone the widescale political and legal apparatus needed to persuade state legislators to try to undermine the will of their states’ voters.

Lawsuits have been filed by Trump allies in Michigan and Nevada seeking to stop certification. Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani argued to stop vote certification in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, the first time he’d been in a courtroom in decades. And the same day, the Arizona Republican Party asked a judge to bar Maricopa County, the state’s most populous, from certifying until the court issues a decision about the party’s lawsuit seeking a new hand count of a sampling of ballots.

The party is also putting pressure on county officials across the state to delay certification, even though there hasn’t been any evidence of legitimate questions about the vote tally showing that Biden won Arizona.

“The party is pushing for not only the county supervisors but everyone responsible for certifying and canvassing the election to make sure that all questions are answered so that voters will have confidence in the results of the election,” said Zach Henry, spokesman for the Arizona Republican Party.

While most counties in Arizona are pressing ahead with certification, officials in Mohave County decided to delay until Nov. 23, citing what they said was uncertainty about the fate of election challenges across the country.

“There are lawsuits all over the place on everything, and that’s part of the reason why I’m in no big hurry to canvass the election,” Mohave County Supervisor Ron Gould said Monday.

Officials in all of Georgia’s 159 counties were supposed to have certified their results by last Friday. But a few have yet to certify as the state works through a hand tally of some 5 million votes.

“They are overwhelmed, and they are trying to get to everything,” said Gabriel Sterling, a top official with the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office. “Some of these are smaller, less resourced counties, and there are only so many people who can do so many things.”

In addition, a few counties must recertify their results after previously uncounted votes were discovered during the audit.

Once counties have certified, the focus turns to officials at the state level who are charged with signing off on the election. This varies by state. For instance, a bipartisan panel in Michigan certifies elections, but in Georgia it’s the responsibility of the elected secretary of state, who has already faced calls by fellow Republicans to resign.

In Nevada, Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske’s role in certification is largely ministerial, but she still got a batch of emails urging her not to certify “potentially fraudulent election results,” a spokeswoman said Wednesday. The Justice Department had been looking into one potential case of fraud in the state over voter rolls, but an AP analysis found the case doesn’t appear to hold much water.

In Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County, a Republican board member, Joyce Dombroski-Gebhardt, said she will not certify the county’s election without an audit of at least 10% of the votes to ensure that some voters did not vote twice.

Trump won the county, where the election board is made up of three Democrats and two Republicans. A Democrat on the board, Peter Oullette, said he had no doubt that the rest of the board will sign the certification on Monday.

Philadelphia also had plans to certify results on Monday.

And some delays could still happen given the crushing workload election officials faced this year during the pandemic, according to Suzanne Almeida with Common Cause Pennsylvania, a good government group that helps with voter education and monitors election work in the state.

“A delay in certification doesn’t necessarily mean there are shenanigans; sometimes it just takes longer to go through all the mechanics to get to certification,” Almeida said.

___

Cassidy reported from Atlanta. Associated Press writers Bob Christie and Jacques Billeaud in Phoenix; Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Scott Bauer in Madison, Wisconsin; Kate Brumback in Atlanta; and Ken Ritter in Las Vegas contributed to this report.

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[patriotsnet]

Are The Republicans Winning The Election

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/are-the-republicans-winning-the-election/

Are The Republicans Winning The Election

California Recall Lesson: Republicans Believe In Elections Only When They Win

Winning Elections: Why and How the Republicans Win

Republicans,;like totalitarians, believe in elections. But only if they always win.

New case in point? California, where voters on Tuesday appeared inclined to keep Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in a recall election.

Cue Larry Elder, the leading Republican to replace him, who started dropping unsubstantiated claims that the election was;rigged against him.

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The only proof Elder offered was the fact that California voters were poised to pick Newsom over him or anyone else on the long list of possible replacements.

How could that be? Republicans can only lose if theyre cheated, right?

I Do Not Buy That A Social Media Ban Hurts Trumps 2024 Aspirations: Nate Silver

sarah: Yeah, Democrats might not have their worst Senate map in 2022, but it will by no means be easy, and how they fare will have a lot to do with the national environment. And as we touched on earlier, Bidens overall approval rating will also make a big difference in Democrats midterm chances.

nrakich: Yeah, if the national environment is even a bit Republican-leaning, that could be enough to allow solid Republican recruits to flip even Nevada and New Hampshire. And then it wouldnt even matter if Democrats win Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

One thing is for sure, though whichever party wins the Senate will have only a narrow majority, so I think were stuck in this era of moderates like Sens. Joe Manchin and Lisa Murkowski controlling every bills fate for at least a while longer.;

sarah: Lets talk about big picture strategy, then, and where that leaves us moving forward. Its still early and far too easy to prescribe election narratives that arent grounded in anything, but one gambit the Republican Party seems to be making at this point is that attacking the Democratic Party for being too progressive or woke will help them win.

What do we make of that playbook headed into 2022? Likewise, as the party in charge, what are Democrats planning for?

With that being said, the GOPs strategies could still gin up turnout among its base, in particular, but its hard to separate that from general dissatisfaction with Biden.

Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger: National Gop Figures Didn’t Understand Our Laws

But Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, said on Wednesday that the system is working exactly the way it is intended.

“The irony of saying ‘fraudulent votes have been found’ â he has gained in the finding of these votes,” he said.

Raffensperger has said he’s been pressured by top Republicans to find ways of disqualifying ballots that hurt the Trump campaign.

“They say that as pressure builds, it reveals your character, it doesn’t change your character. Some people aren’t behaving too well with seeing where the results are,” Raffensperger told NPR’s Ari Shapiro on Tuesday.

“At the end of the day, I want voters to understand that when they cast their ballot in Georgia, it will be accurately counted. You may not like the results and I get that. I understand how contentious it is. But you can then respect the results.”

Poll workers check voters’ identifications on Election Day at the Orpheum Theater in Madison, Wis. The Trump campaign has announced it is filing for a recount in two Wisconsin counties.hide caption

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Poll workers check voters’ identifications on Election Day at the Orpheum Theater in Madison, Wis. The Trump campaign has announced it is filing for a recount in two Wisconsin counties.

President Trump’s campaign announced Wednesday morning it is filing a petition to formally ask election authorities to conduct a recount in two Wisconsin counties. President-elect Joe Biden won the state by a little more than 20,000 votes.

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Gop Scores An Early Win In 2024 Race

New Census figures show the gap between the popular vote and the Electoral College is widening.

As a result of Census Bureau population figures released Monday, if every state voted the same way in 2024 that they did in 2020, President Joe Biden would win three fewer Electoral College votes than he did in November. |

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President Joe Bidens path to reelection just got a little harder.

As a result of Census Bureau population figures released Monday, if every state voted the same way in 2024 that they did in 2020, Biden would win three fewer Electoral College votes than he did in November, while the Republican nominee would win three more.

The shift is only a marginal one it would only affect the closest of elections.

But that doesnt mean the new state numbers which are used to apportion the number of congressional districts each state gets, and thus the number of electoral votes wont alter the landscape in 2024 and 2028.

Here are five reasons why:

The gap between the popular vote and the Electoral College is widening.

Biden beat then-President Donald Trump by 74 Electoral College votes. A net gain of six votes for Trump wouldnt have mattered.

But in a close race like the one in 2000, where just five electoral votes separated George W. Bush and Al Gore the re-balancing of the Electoral College could tip the scales.

Thats significant for a party whose presidential candidates have won the national popular vote only once since 1988.

But thats right now.

The Numbers Are Grim Republicans Are Winning At Normalizing Voter Suppression

Voter ID laws which are sculpted to make it harder to vote are wildly popular with voters, according to surveys

Voter suppression has been around for as long as the republic. Stories of subterfuge and ballot box-stuffing schemes are such a part of American political folklore, theres an entire book about them. So in one sense, there is nothing particularly novel about Republican politicians efforts to rig the vote, or the important revelations that rightwing groups and corporate officials are coordinating state-level campaigns to make it harder to vote.

However, a new nugget of polling data illustrates that something more fundamental has happened: voter suppression is no longer a plot engineered in the shadows and denied in public, for fear of criticism by a population that considers such measures grotesque. Instead, voter suppression is having its coming-out party because more and more Americans now consider it to be a perfectly legitimate and even laudable campaign tactic.

The data point comes in a new CBS/YouGov survey, buried under the topline finding that almost two-thirds of Republican voters do not consider Joe Biden the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, despite Bidens electoral college and popular vote victories.

Nearly half of Republicans surveyed supported the latter move, with the strongest demographics in support being female Republicans, non-white Republicans and white Republicans with no college degree.

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Biden Avoids The Microscope

Another benefit Biden can enjoy from having his party control both chambers of Congress is that Republican investigatory powers will be greatly diminished. With Democrats in charge of Senate committees, embarrassing and potentially explosive investigations are unlikely to materialise.

Wisconsin Republican Ron Johnson will no longer run the Government Oversight Committee, so his planned forays into Hunter Biden’s China dealings and any connections to the incoming president will go away. The same applies to Lindsey Graham and the Judiciary Committee, which was expected to hold more hearings into the 2016 Russia election-meddling investigation and the origins of Robert Mueller’s special counsel probe.

Any new Democratic scandals that crop up should also avoid a full and potential politically damaging airing – a luxury Trump also enjoyed during his first two years in office and sorely missed during his final two.

The Trump-Russia saga in 350 words

Biden Flips Coveted Georgia The Last State To Be Called By The Ap

The full hand recount of the state’s 5 million presidential votes resulted in a narrowing of Biden’s lead over President Trump in Georgia, but not nearly enough to change the result. He started out with a 14,000 vote lead, and now leads by just over 12,000 votes.

The recount, formally known as a risk-limiting audit, is intended to verify the contest’s winner. As Georgia Public Broadcasting’s Stephen Fowler reported, four counties uncovered a few thousand previously uncounted votes, which subsequently cut into Biden’s margin of victory.

Douglas, Walton, Fayette and Floyd counties all experienced issues with missing or unscanned votes related to human error â but the numbers weren’t significant enough to change the outcome of the election.

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There is no mandatory recount law in Georgia, but state law does allow for a recount if the margin is less than .5%. It currently stands at .2%.

Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced the hand audit last week, citing the close margin of the race.

The four counties with new vote totals must recertify their results. Statewide election results must be certified by Friday. The Trump campaign then has until Tuesday to request an additional recount, which would be by machine rather than by hand.

Trump has repeatedly questioned the integrity of Georgia’s vote counting, it both a “joke” and a process that led to “fraudulent votes” being found.

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Redistricting Is The Next Step On A Path To One

The redistricting process kicked off this week in Washington. The Census Bureau released initial data from the 2020 census Monday afternoon, , which means that congressional district boundaries will soon be redrawn to account for changes in population.

These changes will probably tend to benefit the Republican Party, as conservative states will get more seats for instance, Texas will gain two seats, while New York, California, and Illinois will all lose one. Republicans are also certain to use the process to try to gerrymander themselves as many additional congressional seats as possible by leveraging their control of a majority of state legislatures. And that is just the opening tactic in a long-term strategy to abolish American democracy and set up one-party rule.

Today in Michigan, gerrymandering means Republicans enjoy a 3.4-point handicap in the state House and a 10.7-point handicap in the state Senate; in Pennsylvania, it’s a 3.1-point handicap in the House and a 5.9-point handicap in the Senate; and in Wisconsin, a 7.1-point handicap in the House and a 10.1-point handicap in the Senate.

It’s impossible to gerrymander the Senate, of course, but luckily for Republicans that chamber is inherently gerrymandered due to the large number of disproportionately white, low-population rural states that lean conservative. The swing seat in the Senate is biased something like 7 points to the right.

A Late Surge In Latino Voters Helped Newsom Keep His Job

Who is Winning US Election 2020 | Full 360 Analysis | Analysts, Democrats, Republicans on NewsX

For weeks, Democrats openly worried that Latino voters were not going to show up in force for Gov. Gavin Newsom. That might have spelled doom for the party, which has relied on support from Latino voters to rise to its current grip on power in the state.

But early numbers suggest that it might have been history repeating itself: a late investment in Latino voter outreach, and a late uptick in interest and voting among Latinos. Though it was far from unanimous, the majority of Latino voters backed Mr. Newsom, with some Latino-heavy precincts defeating the recall by as much as 88 percent, according to an analysis by the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Early numbers, though, suggest that Latino voters may still not be showing up to the polls at the same rates as white, Black and Asian American voters. As of Tuesday morning, 30 percent of Latino voters who received their ballots by mail had sent them back, compared with 50 percent of white voters and 40 percent of Black voters, according to Political Data Inc., a Sacramento-based research group.

Historically, Latinos are more likely to vote late, and many observers thought it was possible to see a last-minute surge among those voters. Exit polling suggests that Latinos made up roughly 24 percent of all voters in the recall, and that about 60 percent of those Latino voters favored keeping the governor in office.

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Some Republicans Including Trump Make Baseless Pre

As Election Day dawned in California, some leading Republicans were preparing to declare the results marred by fraud.

Elder had already set up a link on his campaign website to a petition asking the state legislature to investigate voting fraud. In recent interviews he encouraged citizens to report voting issues to his campaign and said a team of lawyers was ready to act if needed.

The pre-election efforts to undermine confidence in the results were led by former president Donald Trump, who sent out a statement Tuesday morning warning of rampant voter fraud. In a Tuesday evening interview on Newsmax, Trump repeated his baseless claims, urging viewers to take a look at whats going on right now in California with the mail-in ballots and all the crap that theyre doing.

Shortly after 1 p.m. Tuesday outside a voting location at the Stanislaus County Fairgrounds in Turlock, Charlotte Dutra, 68, a retired human resources analyst for Turlock Irrigation District, said she is a proud Republican and voted yes to take out.

Dutra said she filled out her recall ballot and dropped it off in person. She said she believes there was fraud in the 2020 election, and shes still skeptical of election integrity in California because the current secretary of state was appointed by the White-privileged Gavin Newsom.

There is no evidence that there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Can Pence Affect The Outcome

While Pence has said he welcomes objections to the electoral college count, his role in the processopening envelopes and affirming the victoriesis largely ceremonial.

Last month, Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Republican from Texas, filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to give Pence the authority to overturn Bidens win, but Pence successfully requested the case be dismissed, with an attorney for the Department of Justice arguing he was not the right defendant.

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Newsoms Efforts To Combat Coronavirus Sway Some Voters

In a rapidly gentrifying part of Inglewood, Calif., Gov. Gavin Newsoms imposition of restrictions in response to the coronavirus pandemic swayed some voters as did Republican Larry Elders statements that children do not need to be vaccinated or wear masks.

Keeping a candidate in office thats going to protect health-care workers, protect children, enforce the mask mandate at this point Im on the front lines. I work at UCLA Health in a hospital setting as a manager and am in the thick of it, seeing children get sick, Jolie Emenike, 41, said about the issue that drove her to vote against the recall Tuesday morning.

I dont want to see the vaccine or mask mandates change, she said.

For Dan Sabin, too, the vaccine rules were top of mind, though his conclusion was different.

I was subject to a vaccine mandate when I was younger in Romania. We overthrew our government, but I still have the lasting effects of that mandate, said Sabin, 33. I definitely recalled Gavin Newsom.

Although he called mail-in ballots a massive risk, the software engineer said he trusts the election process.

Im not really sure. You have to trust the people that do the ballots, he said. Ultimately, the people that work in there are people in the community.

If Rep Liz Cheney Doesnt Have A Home In The Gop Who Does

To be sure, though, Fragas own research has found that white voters, regardless of how easy or hard it is for them to vote, consistently turn out at higher rates than voters of color, so we do want to be careful of not reading too much into this. Jennifer McCoy, a political scientist at Georgia State University who studies the effects of polarization on democracy, told me that she thought the current emphasis on voter restrictions boiled down to Republicans thinking they could appeal to Trumps base by codifying his baseless claims of voter fraud. know they have to attract Donald Trump supporters who now believe there is fraud, said McCoy. So a large part of the current efforts to change voter laws was a direct response to this last election. Large majorities of Republicans continue to believe Bidens win is not legitimate, and a that only 28 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning people agreed that everything possible should be done to make voting easy, a steep drop from 48 percent in October 2018.

The GOPs restrictionist bent sends the message that Republicans dont want Black and brown Americans to vote. In September 2020, 54 percent of Black respondents and 35 percent of Hispanic respondents told FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos they believed Republicans didnt want people like me to vote.

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Why Are Republicans Fighting So Hard For Georgia

While the presidential election results were full of disappointments for Donald Trump, losing Georgia may have been the unkindest cut.

Like Arizona, the state hadn’t been carried by a Democrat since 1992. But unlike that desert state, Georgia wasn’t considered an electoral battleground until the campaign’s final weeks.

That, along with the narrowness of the Biden lead in the state, may be why the Trump team has fought so furiously to flip the state to his column – even if it means going to war with local Republicans overseeing the state’s election.

The president’s efforts to cast doubt on the results in Georgia are complicated by the fact that the state’s two runoff contests in January will decide control of the US Senate. The more he feuds with his own party in the state, the greater the risk division will lead to Republican defeat.

Trump is making Georgia his first presidential visit since the election. The stated purpose is to campaign for the two Republican incumbent senators, but he is sure to continue to call into question the presidential verdict in the state.

Reversing the election results has proven to be a futile battle, but it seems the only thing worse for this president than actual defeat is appearing to accept it.

[day0one]

Trump’s ‘Most Important’ Speech Was Mostly False

In what he billed as perhaps “the most important speech I’ve ever made,” President Donald Trump continued his attempt to deceive the American public into believing the election was “rigged.”

Trump has presented no evidence for such an explosive charge. Nor have his lawyers, who have admitted as much in some of their many dismissed lawsuits. Instead, the evidence shows Trump is inventing and pushing conspiracy theories and other false and misleading claims in an unrelenting attack on U.S. elections.

We’ve fact-checked his false claims about voter fraud for months, and even years, dating back to the 2016 campaign, long before he lost his reelection bid to President-elect Joe Biden. But on Dec. 2, 49 days before he is set to leave office, Trump once again repeated a slew of assertions in a nearly 46-minute video he posted to social media.

The speech came one day after his own attorney general, William Barr, rebutted his claims, saying the Department of Justice and FBI “have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.”

Here are 19 false or misleading claims the president made during the speech. It is by no means an exhaustive list.

Not ‘overwhelming’ evidence: The president boasted that his legal team has collected “overwhelming” evidence of fraud. “Everyone is saying, ‘Wow, the evidence is overwhelming,’ when they get to see it,” he said. Judges, however, have found the evidence less than overwhelming.

For example, U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann criticized the Trump campaign for failing to provide evidence to justify blocking Pennsylvania from certifying its election results. In dismissing the case, Brann said: “One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption.” Brann continued, “Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence.”

The Trump campaign appealed Brann’s decision to the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, but the three-judge panel unanimously upheld the lower court ruling. Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee, wrote: “Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”

In Michigan, the Trump campaign sued to stop the counting of mail-in ballots in Wayne County, which includes Detroit and block the certification of the county’s election results. The lawsuit included an affidavit from a poll watcher who claimed she heard from another poll worker that other poll workers were told to change the dates on late ballots. The state judge who ruled against the campaign called the affidavit “inadmissible hearsay within hearsay.”

There are ‘safeguards’: Trump wrongly claimed there were “no safeguards” used by states to check the identity of voters. “While it has long been understood that the Democrat political machine engages in voter fraud from Detroit to Philadelphia, to Milwaukee, Atlanta, so many other places,” Trump said, “what changed this year was the Democrat Party’s relentless push to print and mail out tens of millions of ballots sent to unknown recipients with virtually no safeguards of any kind.”

Only nine states and the District of Columbia sent mail-in ballots to all registered voters, and the states home to the cities mentioned by Trump — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia — were not among them. As for safeguards, most states use bar codes on mail-in ballots matched to a specific person in the voter files; ballot envelopes require personal information, such as date of birth or driver’s license numbers; and signatures are required and matched against ones on file.

Dominion Voting Systems: Trump again made the bogus claim that Dominion Voting Systems technology, certified by 28 states, switched votes. “Its name is Dominion, with the turn of a dial or the change of a chip, you could press a button for Trump and the vote goes to Biden,” Trump said. Multiple experts, including Attorney General Barr, have debunked this conspiracy theory.

Barr said the Department of Homeland Security and Justice Department looked into such claims and “we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.” A group of federal, state, and local officials overseeing the nation’s voting system also refuted such claims.

Trump added that “the only secure system is paper,” but 95% of ballots did have a paper record, said Christopher Krebs, the head of DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency whom Trump fired after the election. That’s up from 82% of ballots in 2016 and “one of the keys to success for a secure 2020 election,” Krebs said.

Vote counting: In describing Dominion as a “disaster,” Trump asked, “where are the votes counted?” He answered his own question by repeating a fantastical false claim: “Which we think are counted in foreign countries, not in the United States.”

“I don’t understand this claim,” Krebs said when asked about it in a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Nov. 29. “All votes in the United States of America are counted in the United States of America. Period.” Dominion said in a statement, “Votes are not processed outside the United States. Votes are counted and reported by county and state election officials — not by Dominion, or any other election technology company.”

Human error in Michigan: Trump inaccurately used a case of human error — by a Republican county clerk, no less — to falsely suggest widespread voter fraud. “In one Michigan County, as an example, that used Dominion systems, they found that nearly 6,000 votes had been wrongly switched from Trump to Biden, and this is just the tip of the iceberg,” Trump said. “This is what we caught. How many didn’t we catch?”

The facts: A day after the election, Antrim County in Michigan reported that Biden was ahead of Trump by about 3,000 votes, with 98% of votes counted. Election officials surprised that Biden could win a Republican-leaning county, found it was a case of human error and Trump was actually leading by about 2,500 votes. The county clerk “accidentally did not update the software used to collect voting machine data,” the Michigan Department of State, which oversees the state’s elections, said in a statement.  

Antrim County Clerk Sheryl Guy, a Republican, said the error in unofficial results would have been caught during the county canvass process when certifying votes. “I must emphasize that the human error did not in any way, shape or form affect the official election results of Antrim County,” she said at a state legislative hearing.

Poll observers present: Trump has repeatedly, falsely claimed that votes were counted without Republican poll observers present. His own lawyer admitted in court that observers were there. “In Pennsylvania, large amounts of mail-in and absentee ballots were processed illegally. And in secret, in Philadelphia, in Allegheny counties, without our observers present,” Trump claimed.

Trump campaign lawyer Jerome Marcus admitted under questioning by a Republican-appointed U.S. district judge that there were GOP observers present — saying there were “a nonzero number of people in the room.”

Half of Detroit registered voters voted: Trump falsely claimed that in Detroit, “there were more votes than there were voters. Think of that. You had more votes than you had voters.” Nearly 50% of the city’s 504,714 registered voters cast a ballot, according to the city’s unofficial election results.

Trump appears to be talking about a minor issue with out-of-balance precincts. In Detroit, the number of ballots cast versus the number of voters checked into polling precincts differed by a mere 357, Mayor Mike Duggan said on Nov. 18. Such discrepancies, which aren’t unique to this election, can occur through a scanner error or if a voter decides not to vote or spoils a ballot, meaning they ask to void the ballot and re-do their vote.

Trump lost the state by more than 150,000 votes.

‘Not credible’ allegations: Repeating unsupported allegations from a failed lawsuit, Trump said: “Other witnesses in Detroit also saw our election officials counting batches of the same ballots many times, as well as illegally duplicating ballots.” He also said election workers entered “fake birth dates into the system, in order to illegally count” ballots.

Trump is referring to a lawsuit brought by Republican poll challengers that alleged widespread fraud in the counting of ballots at the TCF Center in Detroit. The suit included seven affidavits that accused Detroit election workers of “counting the same ballot more than once,” using “false information to process ballots, such as using incorrect or false birthdays,” and “improperly duplicating ballots,” among other things.

In ruling against the Republicans, who were seeking to stop certification of the election results in the county, Wayne County Circuit Judge Timothy Kenny said the allegations made in the affidavits were “not credible” and represented a misunderstanding of the ballot tabulation process. Detroit election officials, he wrote, “offered a more accurate and persuasive explanation of activity” within the TCF Center.

Georgia signature checks: Trump wrongly claimed Georgia didn’t properly check signatures from mail-in ballots and misleadingly claimed the signature checks were left out of the recount. “In the recent recount in Georgia, which means nothing because they don’t want to check signatures and if you’re not going to check signatures in Georgia, it doesn’t work,” Trump said. “But we have a secretary of state, and a governor who made it very difficult to check signatures.” As we have written, Georgia election officials check signatures twice: once when a voter requests a mail-in ballot, and then again when the ballot is returned.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said Georgia strengthened its signature match for this election and trained election officials on Georgia Bureau of Investigation signature-matching techniques. Trump is correct that signature checks were not part of the hand recount. Once a signature is verified on the ballot’s outer envelope, the ballot itself is separated for counting. This protects voter privacy.

Rejected ballots in Georgia: Trump again falsely claimed that the percentage of ballots rejected in Georgia was suspiciously low. “In swing state after swing state, the number of ballots rejected has been dramatically lower than what would have been expected based on prior experience,” Trump said. “In Georgia, just 0.2%, that’s substantially less than 1%, of mail-in ballots have been rejected. In other words, almost none have been rejected. They took everything. Nothing was rejected, practically, compared to 6.4% in 2016.” As he has in the past, Trump is conflating the ballots rejected just for signature issues in this election with ballots rejected in past elections for all reasons — usually for arriving too late. The percentage of mail-in ballots rejected in Georgia due to signature issues this year was about the same as in the 2016 and 2018 general elections.

‘Cured’ ballots: Trump wrongly claimed that in Pennsylvania, Democrats were allowed to cure their ballots — meaning voters were notified about an error in their mail-in ballot so they could fix it — but Republicans were not. “Tens of thousands of voters across Pennsylvania were treated differently based on whether they were Republicans or Democrats,” Trump said. “Voters who submitted flawed ballots in some Democrat precincts were notified and asked to fix their ballots, while Republican precincts, and in particular Republican voters, were not so notified, which plainly violates the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution.”

As we have written, all counties got the same guidance the night before the election instructing them to notify political parties and update the ballot-tracking online system about ballot errors, thus allowing voters to cast a provisional ballot on Election Day. Some counties notified voters, and some didn’t. But that inconsistency didn’t fall strictly along partisan county lines.

On Nov. 27, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit rejected a Trump campaign lawsuit on this issue. According to an opinion written by Judge Bibas, who, again, was appointed by Trump, the campaign’s “claims have no merit.” The complaint, “never alleges that anyone treated the Trump campaign or Trump votes worse than it treated the Biden campaign or Biden votes.”

“A violation of the Equal Protection Clause requires more than variation from county to county,” Bibas wrote. “It requires unequal treatment of similarly situated parties. … To be sure, counties vary in implementing that guidance, but that is normal. Reasonable county-to-county variation is not discrimination.”

Vote ‘dumps’: Trump again claimed that in Michigan, early in the morning after Election Day, “a vote dump of 149,772 votes came in unexpectedly. We were winning by a lot. That batch was received in horror. Nobody knows anything about it.”

As we’ve written before, what appeared to be an unusually large uptick of about 140,000 votes for Biden was the result of a typo in unofficial results reported by Michigan’s Shiawassee County. The mistake was quickly corrected, the county’s elections clerk told us in a phone interview.

Wisconsin results: Trump again questioned how he lost Wisconsin even though he was ahead in the vote count on the night of the election.

“In Wisconsin, as an example, where we were way up on election night, they ultimately had us miraculously losing by 20,000 votes,” Trump said. “We’re leading by a lot and then at 3:42 in the morning, there was this, it was a massive dump of votes, mostly Biden, almost all Biden. And to this day, everyone’s trying to figure out, ‘Where did it come from?’”

As we’ve written before, Trump was seemingly ahead in Wisconsin at the end of the day on Nov. 3, but that was before many of the mail-in ballots were counted. State law prevented election officials from counting absentee ballots before polls opened on Election Day.

And no one is trying to determine where those absentee votes came from because the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has already explained what happened. “Biden overtook Trump in the early morning hours when Milwaukee reported its roughly 170,000 absentee votes, which were overwhelmingly Democratic. Then early morning returns from Green Bay and Kenosha on Wednesday added to his slender lead. Trump had nurtured a lead of more than 100,000 votes before those returns came in,” the newspaper reported.

Missed votes in Georgia: Trump falsely suggested that many votes from Trump supporters in Georgia remain uncounted. “Thousands of uncounted ballots were discovered in Floyd, Fayette, and Walton counties weeks after the election, and these ballots were mostly from Trump voters. They weren’t counted. They were from Trump voters,” he said.

It’s true that almost 6,000 previously uncounted or unreported votes in those counties (and Douglas County) were discovered by officials during Georgia’s hand recount of ballots after the election. But those votes for Trump and Biden have since been included in the overall tallies and didn’t change the outcome.

Gabriel Sterling, the voting systems implementation manager for the Georgia secretary of state’s office, said that after including those additional votes for both candidates, Biden’s lead over Trump narrowed from 14,156 votes to 12,781 votes.

Pennsylvania ballots: Trump suggested some issues with mail-in ballots — addressed by elections officials before Election Day — were evidence of fraud. They’re not.

“Many voters all across Pennsylvania received two ballots in the mail,” he said. In October, some voters in Allegheny and Fayette Counties received incorrectly printed ballots. In both cases, election officials issued corrected ballots and made clear: “Only one ballot will be counted for each voter,” as the statement from Allegheny County said.

The state also contacted in October about 4,300 voters who received two ballots, due to a printing error. Department of State spokesperson Ellen Lyon told reporters any duplicate ballots were “coded for the same voter, so if a voter tried to submit more than one, the system would literally prevent the second ballot from being counted.”

Trump further exaggerated: “In Fayette County, Pennsylvania, multiple voters received ballots that were already filled out.” In late October, the county’s district attorney’s office announced it was investigating two ballots that voters received that were already filled out. The Trump campaign cited that incident in a Nov. 9 lawsuit, which was dismissed by a federal judge and upheld by the unanimous 3rd Circuit.

Arizona: Trump repeated a claim from another dismissed lawsuit that wasn’t about fraud. “In Arizona, in-person voters whose ballots produced error messages from tabulation machines were told to press a button that resulted in their votes not being counted,” he said.

As we’ve written, Trump campaign lawyer Kory Langhofer stated in court that he was “not alleging fraud,” but instead was raising concerns about a “limited number of cases” involving “good faith errors.” There were 191 presidential ballots with “overvotes” — meaning more than one candidate for the same office was selected — in Maricopa County.

No witnesses for the Trump campaign could confirm that their votes had not been recorded, and the judge dismissed the campaign’s claims as moot and with prejudice, meaning the decision cannot be retried.

Trump lost Arizona by more than 10,000 votes.

The president added that Arizona’s “attorney general announced that mail-in ballots had been stolen from mailboxes and hidden under a rock.” The AG did announce that 18 ballots, which weren’t opened or filled out, had been found in a field on Oct. 30. Police hand-delivered them to the voters.

Voter rolls: As he has for years, Trump falsely equated errors on voter rolls with evidence of voter fraud. “This colossal expansion of mail-in voting opened the flood gates to massive fraud,” Trump said. “It’s a widely known fact that the voting rolls are packed with people who are not lawfully eligible to vote, including those who are deceased, have moved out of their state, and even our non-citizens of our country.” It is true that voter rolls contain errors, such as people moving to another state but not being removed from the old state’s voter rolls, or people dying but their names not being removed in a timely fashion. But that’s not fraud, unless or until someone tries to illegally vote in the wrong state, or for a deceased person.

As we have written, voting experts say that while the instances of voter fraud via mail-in ballot are more common than in-person voting fraud, the number of known cases is relatively small.

Wisconsin rolls: Trump claimed — with no evidence — that he “knew” a legal dispute over whether to remove more than 100,000 voters from Wisconsin voter rolls involved “illegal voters.” All those voters did was fail to respond within 30 days to a mailing saying it appeared they had moved and given them the opportunity to continue their registration if they had not. There’s no evidence they voted illegally. The case dates back to 2019 and concerns whether the state elections commission, which found errors in such residency-change lists before, had the authority to deactivate those voters. The state Supreme Court heard arguments in late September and has yet to rule on the case.

Not ‘statistically impossible’: Trump wrongly claimed that it was “statistically impossible” that he lost the presidential race even as Republicans had success in congressional races. “The tremendous success we had in the House of Representatives, and the tremendous success we’ve had so far in the Senate, unexpected success all over the country, and right here in Washington, it is statistically impossible that the person, me, that led the charge lost,” Trump said. It is statistically possible.

As John McCormack wrote in National Review, “the notion that down-ballot Republicans greatly outperformed President Trump is inaccurate.” As he noted, only one Republican won a Senate race in a state lost by Trump, Susan Collins in Maine. Republicans picked up seats — but not the majority — in the House. But while Republicans fared better than polls suggested they would, it is not unusual in recent elections for House GOP candidates to fare better against their Democratic opponents “than the Republican presidential candidate performed against his Democratic opponent,” McCormack wrote.

Election experts also attribute some of the disparity to “ballot roll-off,” which is when voters skip certain races. Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told us it’s not unusual for voters to “choose a candidate at the top of the ballot and then ‘roll off’ as they move down the ballot. There is nothing suspicious about lower participation in lower-level races.”

[expatimes]

Trump targets vote certification in late bid to block Biden

Getting nowhere in the courts, President Donald Trump's scattershot effort to overturn President-elect Joe Biden's victory is shifting towards obscure election boards that certify the vote as Trump and his allies seek to upend the electoral process, sow chaos and perpetuate unsubstantiated doubts about the count .

The battle is centred in the battleground states that sealed Biden's win.

In Michigan, two Republican election officials in the state's largest county initially refused to certify results despite no evidence of fraud, then backtracked and voted to certify and then on Wednesday flipped again and said they “remain opposed to certification”. Some Republicans have called on the GOP statewide canvassers to so the same. In Arizona, officials are baulking at signing off on vote tallies in a rural county.

The moves do not reflect a coordinated effort across the battleground states that broke for Biden, local election officials said. Instead, they seem to be inspired by Trump's incendiary rhetoric about baseless fraud and driven by Republican acquiescence to broadsides against the nation's electoral system as state and federal courts push aside legal challenges filed by Trump and his allies.

Still, what happened in Wayne County, Michigan, on Tuesday and Wednesday was a jarring reminder of the disruptions that can still be caused as the nation works through the process of affirming the outcome of the November 3 election.

A poll challenger looks at absentee ballots to be counted on Election Day being processed by poll workers, at the TCF Center in Detroit, Michigan, on November 2 [Rebecca Cook/Reuters]

There is no precedent for the Trump team's widespread effort to delay or undermine certification, according to University of Kentucky law professor Joshua Douglas.

“It would be the end of democracy as we know it,” Douglas said. "This is just not a thing that can happen."

Certifying results is a routine yet important step after local election officials have tallied votes, reviewed procedures, checked to ensure votes were counted correctly and investigated discrepancies. Typically, this certification is done by a local board of elections and then, later, the results are certified at the state level.

But as Trump has refused to concede to Biden and continues to spread false claims of victory, this mundane process is taking on new significance.

Among key battleground states, counties in Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin have all made it through the initial step of certifying results. Except for Wayne County, this process has largely been smooth. Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia still have not concluded their local certifications.

Then all eyes turn to statewide certification.

In Wayne County, the two Republican canvassers at first baulked at certifying the vote, winning praise from Trump, and then reversed course after widespread condemnation. A person familiar with the matter said Trump reached out to the canvassers, Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, on Tuesday evening after the revised vote to express gratitude for their support. Then, on Wednesday, Palmer and Hartmann signed affidavits saying they believe the county vote “should not be certified”.

Time is running short for Trump. Across the nation, recounts and court challenges must wrap up and election results must be certified by December 8. That is the constitutional deadline ahead of the Electoral College meeting the following week.

Matt Morgan, the Trump campaign's general counsel, said last week the campaign was trying to halt certification in battleground states until it could get a better handle on vote tallies and whether it would have the right to automatic recounts. Right now, Trump is requesting a recount in Wisconsin in two counties, and Georgia is doing a hand audit after Biden led by a slim margin of 0.3 percentage points, but there is no mandatory recount law in the state. The law provides that option to a trailing candidate if the margin is less than 0.5 percentage points.

A Trump supporter attends a 'Stop the Steal' protest after the 2020 US presidential election was called by the media for Democratic candidate Joe Biden [Jim Urquhart/Reuters]

Some in the Republican president's orbit have held out hope that by delaying certification, GOP-controlled state legislatures will get a chance to select different electors, either overturning Biden's victory or sending it to the House, where Trump would almost surely win.

But most advisers to the president consider that a fever dream. Trump's team has been incapable of organizing even basic legal activities since the election, let alone the widescale political and legal apparatus needed to persuade state legislators to try to undermine the will of their states' voters.

Lawsuits have been filed by Trump allies in Michigan and Nevada seeking to stop certification. Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani argued to stop vote certification in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, the first time he had been in a courtroom in decades. And the same day, the Arizona Republican Party asked a judge to bar Maricopa County, the state's most populous, from certifying until the court issues a decision about the party's lawsuit seeking a new hand count of a sampling of ballots.

The party is also putting pressure on county officials across the state to delay certification, even though there has not been any evidence of legitimate questions about the vote tally showing that Biden won Arizona.

“The party is pushing for not only the county supervisors but everyone responsible for certifying and canvassing the election to make sure that all questions are answered so that voters will have confidence in the results of the election,” said Zach Henry, spokesman for the Arizona Republican Party.

While most counties in Arizona are pressing ahead with certification, officials in Mohave County decided to delay until November 23, citing what they said was uncertainty about the fate of election challenges across the country.

“There are lawsuits all over the place on everything, and that's part of the reason why I'm in no big hurry to canvass the election,” Mohave County Supervisor Ron Gould said on Monday.

Officials in all of Georgia's 159 counties were supposed to have certified their results by last Friday. But a few have yet to certify as the state works through a hand tally of some five million votes.

“They are overwhelmed, and they are trying to get to everything,” said Gabriel Sterling, a top official with the Georgia Secretary of State's Office. "Some of these are smaller, less-resourced counties, and there are only so many people who can do so many things." In addition, a few counties must recertify their results after previously uncounted votes were discovered during the audit.

President Donald Trump waves to supporters from his motorcade [Julio Cortez/AP Photo]

Once counties have certified, the focus turns to officials at the state level who are charged with signing off on the election. This varies by state. For instance, a bipartisan panel in Michigan certifies elections, but in Georgia it is the responsibility of the elected secretary of state, who has already faced calls by fellow Republicans to resign.

In Nevada, Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske's role in certification is largely ministerial, but she still got a batch of emails urging her not to certify “potentially fraudulent election results,” a spokeswoman said on Wednesday. The Justice Department had been looking into one potential case of fraud in the state over voter rolls, but an AP analysis found the case does not appear to hold much water.

In Pennsylvania's Luzerne County, a Republican board member, Joyce Dombroski-Gebhardt, said she will not certify the county's election without an audit of at least 10 percent of the votes to ensure that some voters did not vote twice.

Trump won the county, where the election board is made up of three Democrats and two Republicans. A Democrat on the board, Peter Oullette, said he had no doubt that the rest of the board will sign the certification on Monday.

Philadelphia also had plans to certify results on Monday.

And some delays could still happen given the crushing workload election officials faced this year during the pandemic, according to Suzanne Almeida with Common Cause Pennsylvania, a good government group that helps with voter education and monitors election work in the state.

“A delay in certification doesn't necessarily mean there are shenanigans; sometimes it just takes longer to go through all the mechanics to get to certification, ”Almeida said.

. #world Read full article: https://expatimes.com/?p=14356&feed_id=18326

[dailynewswebsite]

Trump’s encouragement of GOP poll watchers echoes an old tactic of voter intimidation

President Trump in the course of the Sept. 29, 2020 debate with Joe Biden. Olivier Douliery/Pool through AP

In the course of the first presidential debate, Donald Trump was requested by moderator Chris Wallace if he would “urge” his followers to stay calm throughout a protracted vote-counting interval after the election, if the winner had been unclear.

“I’m urging my supporters to enter the polls and watch very rigorously as a result of that’s what has to occur, I’m urging them to do it,” Trump stated. “I hope it’s going to be a good election, and if it’s a good election, I’m 100 % on board, but when I see tens of hundreds of ballots being manipulated, I can’t go together with that.”

This wasn’t the primary time Trump has stated he desires to recruit ballot watchers to observe the vote. And to some, the picture of hundreds of Trump supporters crowding into polling locations to observe voters seems to be like voter intimidation, a apply lengthy used within the U.S. by political events to suppress one aspect’s vote and have an effect on an election’s end result.

Within the historical past of voter suppression within the U.S. – together with makes an attempt to cease Black and Latino individuals from voting – Republican techniques within the 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial race are value highlighting. That incident sparked a court docket order – a “consent decree” – forbidding the GOP from utilizing a wide range of voter intimidation strategies, together with armed ballot watchers.

The 2020 presidential election would be the first in almost 40 years carried out with out the protections afforded by that decree.

The Nationwide Poll Safety Activity Drive

In November 1981, voters in a number of cities noticed posters at polling locations printed in vibrant purple letters. “WARNING,” they learn. “This space is being patrolled by the Nationwide Poll Safety Activity Drive.”

And voters quickly encountered the patrols themselves. About 200 had been deployed statewide, lots of them uniformed and carrying weapons.

In Trenton, patrol members requested a Black voter for her registration card and turned her away when she didn’t produce it. Latino voters had been equally prevented from voting in Vineland, whereas in Newark some voters had been bodily chased from the polls by patrolmen, one in all whom warned a ballot employee to not keep at her submit after darkish. Related scenes performed out in at the least two different cities, Camden and Atlantic Metropolis.

Weeks later, after a recount, Republican Thomas Kean gained the election by fewer than 1,800 votes.

Democrats, nevertheless, quickly gained a major victory. With native civil rights activists, they found that the “poll safety” operation was a joint undertaking of the state and nationwide Republican committees. They filed go well with in December 1981, charging Republicans with “efforts to intimidate, threaten and coerce duly certified black and Hispanic voters.”

In November 1982, the case was settled when the Republican committees signed a federal consent decree – a court docket order relevant to actions wherever within the U.S. – agreeing to not use race in choosing targets for poll safety actions and to chorus from deploying armed ballot watchers.

That order expired in 2018 after Democrats didn’t persuade a choose to resume it.

As a professor who teaches and writes about New Jersey historical past, I’m alarmed by the expiration as a result of I do know that Republicans in 1981 relied not solely on armed ballot watchers but in addition on a historical past of white vigilantism and intimidation within the Backyard State. These points resonate right now within the midst of the Black Lives Matter motion and continued GOP makes an attempt to suppress the 2020 vote in quite a few states.

U.S. Rep. John Lewis with Home Democrats earlier than passing the Voting Rights Development Act to remove potential state and native voter suppression legal guidelines, Dec. 29, 2019. The Senate has not taken up the invoice. AP Photograph/J. Scott Applewhite

The Republican ‘poll safety’ plan

Thought of an early referendum on Ronald Reagan’s presidency, New Jersey’s 1981 gubernatorial race held particular which means for Republicans nationwide. Kean – with marketing campaign supervisor Roger Stone on the helm – promised company tax cuts and relied closely on Reagan’s endorsement.

To safe victory, state and nationwide Republican get together officers devised a undertaking they claimed would stop Democratic dishonest on the polls.

In the summertime of 1981, the Republican Nationwide Committee despatched an operative named John A. Kelly to New Jersey to run the poll safety effort. Kelly had first been employed by the Republican Nationwide Committee in 1980 to work within the Reagan marketing campaign, and he served as one of many RNC’s liaisons to the Reagan White Home.

Later, after he was revealed because the organizer of the Nationwide Poll Safety Activity Drive – and after The New York Instances found that he had lied about graduating from Notre Dame and had been arrested for impersonating a police officer – Republicans distanced themselves from him.

In August 1981, underneath the guise of the Nationwide Poll Safety Activity Drive, Kelly despatched about 200,000 letters marked “return to sender” to voters in closely Black and Latino districts. These whose letters had been returned had their names added to an inventory of voters to be challenged on the polls on Election Day, a tactic often known as voter caging.

Within the Newark space, Kelly produced an inventory of 20,000 voters whom he deemed probably fraudulent. He then employed native operatives to arrange patrols, ostensibly to maintain such fraud at bay. To run the Newark operation, he employed Anthony Imperiale.

Newark’s white vigilante

Imperiale, in flip, employed off-duty law enforcement officials and workers of his personal enterprise, the Imperiale Safety Police, to patrol voting websites within the metropolis.

The gun-toting, barrel-chested former Marine had first adopted the safety position throughout Newark’s 1967 rebellion – 5 days of protests and a lethal occupation of the town by police and the Nationwide Guard following the police beating of a Black cab driver. In the course of the rebellion, Imperiale organized patrols of his predominantly white neighborhood to maintain “the riots” out.

Quickly, Imperiale turned a hero of white backlash politics. His opposition to police reform earned him widespread assist from legislation enforcement. And his battle towards Black housing growth in Newark’s North Ward delighted lots of his neighbors. By the tip of the 1970s, Hollywood was making a film primarily based on his actions.

Actress Frances Fisher arrives to talk at a downtown rally in Los Angeles, California on Might 19, 2016, to convey consideration to voter suppression. Frederic J. Brown/AFP through Getty Pictures

After serving as an impartial in each homes of the state legislature, Imperiale turned a Republican in 1979. Two years later, he campaigned with Kean. As soon as in workplace, the brand new governor named Imperiale director of a brand new one-man state Workplace of Neighborhood Security – an appointment typically interpreted as reward for Imperiale’s management of the poll efforts in Newark, however stymied when Democrats refused to fund the place.

Final result and legacy

Regardless of Kean’s slim margin of victory, Democrats on the time had been cautious to not declare that Republican voter suppression efforts had determined the election. (In 2016, the previous Democratic candidate claimed they did certainly make the distinction.)

Quite, the state and nationwide Democratic committees introduced go well with towards the Republican Nationwide Committee to make sure it couldn’t once more use such strategies wherever. For almost 40 years – by means of amendments and challenges – the ensuing consent decree helped curtail voter suppression techniques.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

Because the decree’s expiration in 2018, Republicans have ramped up their recruitment of ballot watchers for the 2020 presidential election. Final November, Trump marketing campaign lawyer Justin Clark – calling the decree’s absence “an enormous, enormous, enormous, enormous deal” for the get together – promised a bigger, better-funded and “extra aggressive” program of Election Day operations.

The Trump marketing campaign is claiming, as Republicans did in 1981, that Democrats “might be as much as their outdated soiled methods” and has vowed to “cowl each polling place within the nation” with employees to make sure an sincere election and reelect the president.

This November, Republican techniques in 1981 are value remembering. They reveal that the safeguarding of polling locations from supposedly fraudulent voters and of public locations from Black our bodies share not solely a logic. In addition they share a historical past.

That is an up to date model of an article initially revealed on August 10, 2020.

Mark Krasovic doesn’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or group that might profit from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their educational appointment.

from Growth News https://growthnews.in/trumps-encouragement-of-gop-poll-watchers-echoes-an-old-tactic-of-voter-intimidation/ via https://growthnews.in

[mhsn033]

Best health In WI’s primary, 23,000 ballots were rejected. Trump won there by 22,000 votes.

Best health

This spring, surely one of many most scrutinized swing states within the country got a style of what elections glance adore when an incredible majority of voters are vastly vastly very a lot surprised to physically head to the polls.

As correctly as to the lengthy traces viewed one day of Wisconsin one day of its nerve-racking April well-known, the pronounce moreover noticed a deluge of absentee ballots. That inflow, primarily based utterly totally on a file by the Wisconsin Election Charge, came with a evident ballotrejection statistic: Virtually 23,000 votes solid by mail in April were tossed because they were leisurely or filled out incorrectly.

That amount stands out within the battleground pronounce, because it’s increased than the razor-thin margin of about 22,000 votes that gave Wisconsin to President Donald Trump in 2016.

Wisconsin’s ballotrejection price within the April well-known turned into upright below 2%, which isn’t any longer unusually high when put next to old election years, primarily based utterly totally on the Wisconsin Elections Charge. But as absentee voting beneficial properties recognition within the age of coronavirus, a an analogous rejection price of two% in November could well well leave 35,000 ballots left uncounted.

Rejected mail-in ballots are no longer going to be the deciding element within the 2020 election — nevertheless they’ll even element in to the tip consequence, primarily based utterly totally on Mike Wagner, a journalism professor who works with the Elections Analysis Heart on the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Right here’s a form of elections where there are doubtlessly 19 issues that could well well pass a runt probability of votes in a technique or one other,” Wagner talked about.

“There could be now not any longer anyone element that is going to safe out the election,” he added, nevertheless rejected ballots are “surely one of many issues that could well well topic.”

It is no longer new for Wisconsin to give presidential campaigns and political junkies apprehension. In three elections since 2000, the winner there has been determined by a share point.

But this 12 months, the Wisconsin Elections Charge is making ready for a presidential election that will be tremendously plenty of: Whereas no longer as a lot as 10% of voters solid their ballots by mail sooner than 2020, over 60% did in April, primarily based utterly totally on the associated price.

“Having a anticipate the the relaxation of 2020, the WEC workers await continued high query for by-mail absentee voting, even though the COVID-19 pandemic begins to subside,” the associated price wrote in a 47-internet page assessment of its spring primaries.

“If voting patterns from April withhold appropriate, the pronounce could well well be taught about extra than 1.8 million requests for absentee ballots by mail [in November]. This design of quantity would fresh terrific challenges for Wisconsin election officials the least bit ranges,” the associated price wrote.

In a press liberate on Thursday, Meagan Wolfe, administrator for the Wisconsin Elections Charge, talked about the associated price turned into assured it had made the critical enhancements to its voting belief, given the challenges ahead.

“We want to be definite every voter who is eligible to vote this fall can operate so safely and securely,” Wolfe talked about. “We realized a critical deal from our elections in April, Can also and August and judge we now salvage got solid plans in location for November.”

There are challenges that comprise increased mail-in voting. Election fraud isn’t any longer surely one of them

Despite the challenges the Wisconsin Elections Charge anticipates with an amplify in mail absentee voting, none of it’s expected to lead to an amplify of the already-rare cases of voting-related fraud within the pronounce.

“Increased mail-in voting is by no means doubtless to negatively impact the integrity of the vote,” talked about Wagner. “Voter suppression efforts are far extra traditional and far extra harmful.”

Since 2016, clerks in Wisconsin salvage only reported 100 conditions of fraud conditions to the associated price in elections where millions of votes were solid. A mere 21 of those conditions fervent absentee ballots.

But the facts did no longer quit Trump from alleging “gargantuan doable for voter fraud” with expanded mail-in voting operations in a tweet the day after Wisconsin’s fraught April well-known. The president has continued to push that narrative for months, claiming with out evidence Saturday that lost ballots and fraud were “occurring all over the build.”

The president has no longer provided any evidence to support up the accusations, and there’s no files to undergo out fraud claims linked to mail absentee ballots in Wisconsin, either.

“Voter fraud is extremely queer,” Wagner talked about.

Some Republican officials salvage moreover warned about the aptitude for a blunted GOP voter turnout this 12 months within the occasion that they salvage no longer to have faith the mail. If Wisconsin sees a surge of COVID-19 conditions or voters feel unsafe on Election Day, they’ll even no longer head to the polls and can even unbiased salvage already overlooked their probability to vote absentee.

“I am hearing that from Republicans — that they’re concerned that Donald Trump’s assault on mail-in voting can even truly suppress his possess injurious,” talked about Charlie Sykes, a longtime conservative recount showcase within the Badger Exclaim.

On the choice hand, if extra Democrats than Republicans vote absentee, rejected votes could well well salvage extra of an invent on Biden than Trump, Wagner talked about.

“Assuredly, the partisan asymmetry in these methods are no longer so mountainous that rejected ballots could well well be a decisive element,” he talked about. “But in this election, the probability exists that the asymmetry, where Democrats are doing extra voting by mail, could well well salvage an actual invent on who wins in states which would be in actuality, in actuality intently contested.”

What Wisconsin voters desire to perceive within the occasion that they desire to vote absentee in November

It will doubtless be vital to sign that upright 1.77% of absentee ballots were rejected in April, a share that is on par with elections old to the pandemic. Nonetheless, staying instructed and making a name early is a crucial to avoiding a messy Election Day, Reid Magney, spokesperson for the Wisconsin Elections Charge, talked about.

“Time is our buddy here. The earlier you act, the sooner you originate a name, the simpler,” talked about Magney, who attributed about a of the ballotrejections to voters who didn’t send their ballots support on time to be counted.

“The enormous topic in April turned into other people requesting absentee ballots, appropriate up against the within the reduction of-off date and then no longer getting them in time so to return them,” he talked about.

One more well-known topic turned into voters filling out their ballotincorrectly. Per an investigation by Wisconsin See and APM Reports, extra than 13,000 votes were rejected in Wisconsin’s April primaries thanks to an most regularly-overlooked requirement for voters to salvage a behold signal the ballotenvelope with both a establish and address.

Come November, Wisconsin voters can support assessment any mistakes within the occasion that they apply up with their native clerk’s place of work as soon as their ballotis delivered. Ballots will be given “intellectual barcodes” that let clerks and voters observe them by the mail.

Voters can moreover fall their ballots off at polling areas or vote early, in-person at a clerk’s place of work, which would allow the clerk to use any mistakes within the 2d and salvage them fastened.

“We desire electorate to salvage the probability for voting that works most effective for them. For voters who salvage to vote absentee by mail, we want to originate definite they’ve the tips they desire to navigate that process,” Wolfe, the elections administrator, talked about in a press liberate. “In point of fact, every voter who is eligible to vote within the pronounce can moreover vote early or in person on election day.”

Some consultants, including Wagner, suggest the extinct — in-person early voting — as the most effective route for avoiding balloterrors or postal carrier delays, while moreover minimizing doable time spent internal a polling location.

“In-person, early absentee is, I’d hiss, the most safe for correctly being and democracy,” Wagner talked about.

But it’s moreover “extraordinarily burdensome for voters,” he warned.

The early voting period could well also be plenty of reckoning on where Wisconsin voters reside. That period could well well begin as early as Oct. 20 and quit as leisurely as Nov. 1, nevertheless voters desire to assessment with their person clerk’s offices because it varies.

Early voting moreover requires transportation, which is ready to be a barrier for low-earnings voters. Thanks to that, Wagner talked about, gather entry to to early voting within the pronounce tends to be divided alongside racial and socioeconomic traces.

“In be taught we now salvage carried out, we chanced on that it’s white, correctly-skilled voters who most regularly have a tendency to withhold out this style of element, whereas Murky and Hispanic voters in Wisconsin have a tendency to face extra boundaries to having the flexibility to vote,” Wagner talked about.

The Wisconsin Elections Charge, for its phase, has begun a voter files campaign that objectives to showcase every voting probability to all registered voters, including a mailer that will trail out to 2.6 million Wisconsinites in September.

“That mailer is on occasion announcing for November, that you just too can unbiased salvage three solutions to vote. First is going to the polling location on Election Day. The 2d is going to your clerk’s place of work or satellite tv for pc location within the two weeks sooner than the election to solid an in-person absentee ballot. And the third probability is to demand an absentee ballotout of your clerk by mail,” Magney talked about.

While Wisconsin voters can interrogate for an absentee ballotup till the Thursday sooner than the election, the U.S. Postal Service has warned that could well well no longer be ample time, advising that it takes no no longer as a lot as seven days for ballots to gather by the mail. The Wisconsin Elections Charge recommends requesting an absentee ballotno later than Oct. 27. The within the reduction of-off date for Wisconsin voters to return their absentee ballots is 8 p.m. on Election Day.

The upshot: “Return your ballotas rapidly as that you just can. Attain no longer wait,” Magney talked about.

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[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

the voting ends today but the fight almost certainly does not

Republicans are filing increasingly desperate and ridiculous lawsuits trying – emphasis on TRYING – to have votes thrown out because they’re big old losers who know they can’t win legitimately.

If you’re the kind of person who can get into the weeds of federal court filings on elections, you probably already have your hair on fire. If you’re not, I don’t recommend picking up the habit right now. It’s just going to make your head swim. These are so incoherent and meritless that even our corrupt federal judiciary and plenty of conservative state judges have frequently brushed them off. I get the sense that Trump’s lawyers are more hoping to win those cases than trying to win them. What they seem to be trying to do with these lawsuits is some mix of the following dishonest things:

depress turnout by making people feel like he can just have their votes thrown out so why bother;

set something, anything, up on track for the Supreme Court, which Trumpworld is (not unreasonably) confident they have sufficiently corrupted;

create a general sense that there’s some authority other than the voters who get to decide this election.

That is what makes me think Trump’s plan to barricade himself in the White House and tweet out a declaration of victory the first moment Fox News reports a good exit poll for him is only mostly about his pathetic need to self-soothe with an autocratic display. He’s also making one last go-for-broke play for the public narrative. He thinks – again, not unreasonably – that if he says he won, then he’ll get a bunch of “Trump Declares Victory” headlines and chyrons, which puts a thumb on the scale in terms of how people frame any resulting developments in their own minds. It’s not a good strategy, it’s more of a hail Mary, but it’s the only potentially helpful option he’s left for himself.

All of this has, once again, summoned the specter of the 2000 election.

We can’t look one day into the future. But we might be able to prepare ourselves for it if we look about twenty years into the past.

There’s kind of a fable that’s built up around the 2000 Florida recount that Republicans were just tougher and savvier and wanted it more, while Democrats clumsily Ned Starked everything up. It’s important to reject that premise as fundamentally abhorrent. In a functioning democracy, campaign strategy is irrelevant after Election Day, because voters are in charge. The Gore campaign, to its credit, was buying into the basic premise of democracy, and had therefore planned their campaign around trying to win an election fair and square. When you punish or condemn people for that, you are ceding ground to the fascists and agreeing to fight on their terms.

The Bush campaign was just fundamentally not operating from the premise of democracy, but from the premise that elections are merely a weak opening bid from the electorate. Before anyone even knew there would be a recount, they had already gamed out a scenario where they could win even if they lost. The contingency they’d planned for, that struck them as most likely, was actually that Gore would win the Electoral College but Bush would win the popular vote. They planned out a whole pressure campaign to create enough of an uproar to give some friendly Republican state legislatures somewhere just enough of an excuse to award electors to Bush even if their constituents had voted for Gore. That wasn’t the scenario they ended up facing, of course. But when you do those kind of war games, you have to think about what your opponent would do, which means the Bush team was ready to hit the ground running with a whole bunch of things they had been expecting Gore’s campaign to do. The core point of whatever they were going to do was always to create an excuse for the nuclear option of having Republican state legislators send Republican electors to install George W. Bush no matter what their voters wanted.

One major difference between then and now is that generation of Republicans knew what they were doing was abnormal and wrong, so they kept it under wraps. Now they’re so high on their own supply that they brag about it to The Atlantic, because they genuinely don’t realize that people will object and try to stop them if they give up the element of surprise.

In 2000, the nuclear option of state legislatures just ignoring their voters to install Bush was not something the Gore campaign could have reasonably foreseen, and even if they did have an in-house psychic to warn them about it, it’s not something they could have realistically stopped except by winning with the biggest margin possible, which they were already trying to do. In 2020, Republicans are basically trying to run the same play, but against Democrats who very much are as prepared as they could possibly be, and by “Democrats,” I mean Democrats at every level. Inside the campaign, Biden campaign senior adviser Ron Klain ran Gore’s recount effort in Florida, and is therefore the last person to have any illusions about the opposition. Their lawyers are fucking beasts. Outside the campaign, Democratic voters have already voted, dragged their friends out to vote, and are amped for whatever fight tomorrow brings.

And, unlike 2000, any formal government processes are going to have to go through House Speaker Nancy D’Alessandro Pelosi, and honey, she is not having it. Remember, Pelosi has already thwarted not one but two Trump regime connivances to steal elections. In 2018, she successfully deterred any attempt to undermine Democrats’ midterm victory. And with her crisp, digestible, precision strike impeachment strategy, she neutered the HUNTERGAZI plot that Trump had every intention of using to sabotage the election this year. (God only knows what other schemes she headed off by making an example out of the pressure campaign against Zelensky. Any foreign leader or official who might have been tempted to cave under similar pressure by Trump got put on notice that trying to appease him quietly was not going to make their lives any less complicated.) No wonder she felt emboldened to tell the Trumpist wing of the Supreme Court to sit their asses down if they know what’s good for them.

What Democrats – and other small-d democrats and progressives – can do, we’re doing. You need to take heart from that, and brace yourself for a couple of stressful weeks.

Unfortunately, we can’t control everything. We can’t control what Trump will do to seize the narrative, and we can’t do much about how the press responds. And again, I’d point back to 2000 as a cautionary tale. Did you know that most of the networks actually called the race right, and they did it pretty fast? It’s true! Early-ish that night, they called Florida for Gore. And, as a subsequent investigation showed, Gore got more votes in Florida! But the ballot count was tighter than it should have been – a lot of registered voters who were likely to have preferred Gore were kicked off the rolls in a racist purge – so they did a reasonable thing and retracted the initial analysis to say the state was too close to call.

I did say most of the networks. I’ll give you one guess which was the outlier. John Ellis – head of the decision desk (ie, the decision of when to call a race for one candidate or the other) at Fox News and first cousin of candidate George Bush and Florida Governor Jeb Bush – somehow knew something about the Florida vote count that the Associated Press didn’t. Late that night, as Gore’s numbers were actually ticking up, Ellis called Florida for Bush. (I might’ve been more circumspect making those implications five years ago, but these people have forcefully rejected the benefit of the doubt.) The other networks, embarrassed by the earlier retraction and exhausted after a long night, leapt after Ellis like lemmings in five minutes flat.

This created a narrative that seamlessly dovetailed with the Bush campaign’s evolving strategy: a Bush win was a fait accompli, so why was sore loser Gore insisting on this recount, wasn’t it taking way too long? Of course, the truth was that nobody actually wins an election before the votes are counted, so if Bush really wanted to get this over with, why was he so resistant to having so many votes counted even once?

Because, of course, while Bush’s top campaign people were out in front of the press loftily insisting that this recount was an irrelevant waste of the country’s time and attention, Republican lawyers were down in Florida doing everything they could to run out the clock. Deadline after deadline loomed and then passed with a bunch of Federalist Society hacks badgering and haggling over every single ballot. Said Federalist Society hacks included John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

So legal correspondents and voting rights advocates, unfortunately, aren’t crazy to have their hair on fire about the Supreme Court once again doing what happened next in 2000: the court ordered all the counts to stop until arguments that it scheduled for the day before an arbitrary deadline. Then they handed down a decision that even they knew was so incoherent and indefensible that they said it wasn’t supposed to be used as precedent in any other case, even though the Supreme Court’s job for over two hundred years had been to hand down rulings that lower courts could use as precedent.

(Seriously. Guys. If Doc Brown ever tosses you the keys to his DeLorean, your mission is to go back to 1999 and run Chief Justice Rehnquist over with it. Then – and this is important – back up and run over him again. Twice. Then you can go buy stock in Google or feed Trump to zombie vampire bats or hit up a Borders or whatever.)

If you’re not really familiar with this story, you’re saying “wait, what? Why did people stand for this bullshit?” FAIR QUESTION. There are a lot of reasons, though no excuses. One reason that’s been previously underrated, I guess, is that Bush hadn’t spent the week before the election running around telling everyone who would listen that “what we’re gonna do is, we’re gonna make ourselves a huge pain in the ass while people are trying to count votes, and then we’re gonna whine about, ‘why is it taking so long to count all these votes?’ Heh heh heh.”

If he had … well, I’m pretty sure at least 538 Floridians would have been alarmed enough to make a better choice than they ultimately did.

I always want to be able to share an action item. This time, I can’t. (Unless you can vote but haven’t yet, in which case, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING ON TUMBLR, GET YOUR ASS IN LINE AND STAY THERE.) I don’t know what the world is going to look like six hours from now. It’s entirely possible that there’s a Biden blowout big enough that Trump just gives up and flees the country. But assume we’re not going to get to take the easy way out of this. Get organized and stay fired up. WE RIDE AT DAWN, unless Florida and/or Texas breaks our way by 10:30, in which case, WE DRINK AT 10:31.

[vinayv224]

Even as Donald Trump railed about voter fraud, Arizona’s elected leaders mostly kept their cool.

Democrat Kyrsten Sinema has been elected the next senator from Arizona. It was a close race against Republican Martha McSally — almost as close as the Florida Senate election between Republican Rick Scott and Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson.

Arizona’s elected leaders handled the emerging electoral consensus with comparative grace, though there was still fear-mongering to be found among GOP loyalists while the state kept counting votes. Still, it was nothing compared to what we’ve seen from the top Republicans in 2018’s other hotly contested Senate election, who have taken a much more aggressive and ultimately unsettling approach.

Scott, the governor of Florida, and his ally President Donald Trump have resorted to the most extreme rhetoric imaginable about voter fraud and electoral theft to attack Democrats while Florida tries to sort through yet another closely watched recount.

By contrast, Arizona’s foremost Republicans managed to wade through a heated election with their dignity in tact, remaining more measured and subdued. The president and Washington Republicans pressured McSally to turn up the heat, and her campaign did oblige at times, but the candidate herself never took up the fight with the same vigor that Scott has in Florida.

And almost as soon as the Associated Press called the race in Sinema’s favor, McSally conceded.

Congrats to @kyrstensinema. I wish her success. I’m grateful to all those who supported me in this journey. I’m inspired by Arizonans’ spirit and our state’s best days are ahead of us. pic.twitter.com/tw0uKgi3oO

— McSally For Senate (@MarthaMcSally) November 13, 2018

That sounds like a low bar. But when the president of the United States is cavalierly trafficking baseless allegations of voter fraud, some prominent Arizona Republicans set an important example if the country is ever to regain some sense of normalcy and trust in our elections. Trump’s outlandish comments earned a rebuke from retiring GOP Sen. Jeff Flake, who defended the integrity of the franchise.

There is no evidence of "electoral corruption" in Arizona, Mr. President. Thousands of dedicated Arizonans work in a non-partisan fashion every election cycle to ensure that every vote is counted. We appreciate their service. https://t.co/Xtd5Vd0gSu

— Jeff Flake (@JeffFlake) November 10, 2018

Voters have to trust the process for self-government to work. That means you must keep your cool, even when the margin is maddeningly close.

Arizona Republicans versus Florida Republicans during Election Week

There has been no caveating, couching, or restraint on the part of Rick Scott and Donald Trump as the Florida Senate election heads to a recount. The president has outright called it electoral theft.

As soon as Democrats sent their best Election stealing lawyer, Marc Elias, to Broward County they miraculously started finding Democrat votes. Don’t worry, Florida - I am sending much better lawyers to expose the FRAUD!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 9, 2018

Scott — the sitting governor of the state now trying to figure out if he will become its next senator (and, to be clear, he almost certainly will be, barring a historic recount) — echoed the president’s comments.

I am asking the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate this election immediately. No rag tag group of liberal activists or lawyers from D.C. will be allowed to steal this election from the voters in the state of Florida.

— Rick Scott (@ScottforFlorida) November 9, 2018

All of this, despite no allegations from Scott’s own appointed election watchers or other state officials of any voter fraud or election rigging. A Florida judge reaffirmed on Monday that no evidence of wrongdoing has been presented, the Associated Press reported. As Vox’s German Lopez has detailed, some Florida counties have a history of bureaucratic incompetence when counting votes, but that is a very different thing than manufacturing them:

That doesn’t mean there haven’t been any problems. Going back to the 2000 presidential election (which came down to a small number of votes in Florida), heightened scrutiny of close Florida elections has repeatedly revealed big issues with how elections are conducted there.

But these problems are, as seems to be true in 2018, about human error and incompetence, not any apparent incidents of voter fraud.

That’s how Republicans behaved in an election where they were and remain ahead. Yet even when McSally fell behind once more votes were counted, Arizona leaders still resisted (for the most part) the temptation to cast the election results as illegitimate.

Arizona’s Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, who won his own reelection quite easily, set the tone.

We often hear the phrase: Every vote matters. And the #AZSen race is proof. So let’s get this right. All legally cast votes MUST be counted. Lawful votes in EVERY county in the state MUST be counted. 1/2

— Doug Ducey (@dougducey) November 10, 2018

Let’s follow the law, count the votes, prevent any cheating, and heed the will of the voters. 2/2

— Doug Ducey (@dougducey) November 10, 2018

That was a perfectly reasonable position: Count the votes, be vigilant against any mishaps or malfeasance, and respect the results.

Part of the reason Arizona’s votes took so long to count is many voters vote by mail. But rather than use that as a basis for undermining the results, Arizona’s Republican Secretary of State Michele Reagan wrote a whole blog post explaining the process for tallying votes to help the public understand it better.

“Arizona takes elections seriously — from the poll workers to the county elections officials, and the Secretary of State’s office and everybody is working diligently to tabulate all of the election results in a manner that Arizonans can be proud of and, most importantly, trust the results,” she wrote in conclusion.

The Arizona Republican Party did sue over the process for matching voter signatures to validate their ballots, a move that prompted the same election-stealing rhetoric from Trump that he had already directed at Florida.

Just out — in Arizona, SIGNATURES DON’T MATCH. Electoral corruption - Call for a new Election? We must protect our Democracy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 9, 2018

But in a marked contrast from Florida, where litigation is still ongoing over a similar issue, Arizona Republicans and county elections officials reached an agreement on how to handle voter signatures — an agreement that could end up benefitting the GOP if more rural voters have their votes counted, as the Phoenix New Times noted.

Still, the Arizona GOP became the glaring exception to the otherwise relatively civil proceedings in the Grand Canyon State. They personally attacked the top elections official in Maricopa County — and came close to alleging outright fraud, though they were forced to rely on innuendo rather than hard evidence.

If he can’t be trusted to follow the law as a lawyer, why should we trust @Adrian_Fontes to count our votes? #FontesFailhttps://t.co/8CWLA9ZcCd

— AZ Republican Party (@AZGOP) November 10, 2018

McSally herself stayed pretty quiet over the last week. When her campaign did comment on the vote count, they did not, with a couple exceptions, raise the specter of fraud or election stealing. They insisted they believed she’d come out ahead in the end, just as any campaign in their position would have, though their candidate ultimately fell short.

“We will continue our effort to make sure all lawful ballots are counted,” the Republican campaign said on Sunday to conclude an update on the vote count.

One stain on McSally’s record, however, was a fundraising email from her campaign that said Democrats would “do whatever it takes to change the results of the election.” Her campaign also urged voters on Facebook to be mindful of any voting irregularities, a similar gambit that played into fears of fraud even if it managed to stop just short of alleging actual wrongdoing.

Other Republican officials were not nearly as measured in their comments either, as the New Times documented, warning of “suspicious” activity with no evidence. McSally did not do enough to combat the fear-mongering from her allies.

But at the top, Arizona Republicans pointedly never engaged in the same coordinated, systematic effort to undermine the Senate election there. Flake flatly contradicted Trump’s claims of fraud. A number of deceased Arizona Sen. John McCain’s former aides also defended the state’s integrity in counting votes. Ducey and Reagan were steady hands at the wheel as the count continues, likely toward a Sinema victory.

The dangerous Republican rhetoric delegitimizes election results

GOP cries of voter fraud aren’t new. They’ve been used to justify voter restrictions in Republican-led states across the country over the past decade. Trump himself falsely claimed he actually won the popular vote in 2016 if you disregarded a couple million “illegal” votes in California; he even set up a fruitless voter fraud commission to prove it.

And Republicans are surely sensitive to the Democratic charges against Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who held up tens of thousands of voters’ registration applications weeks before the 2018 election, during which he was running to become the state’s next governor. Alleging voter fraud against Democrats in high-profile races creates a perception that, hey, both sides do it.

But what is most worrying might not even be Trump’s tweets. Rather, White House and Republican National Committee officials were reportedly pressuring McSally to allege some kind of fraud or electoral malfeasance.

From James Arkin and Alex Isenstadt at Politico:

At the highest levels of the national party, there’s frustration with McSally — and a sense that she’s not being aggressive enough throughout the process.

While Florida Gov. Rick Scott has lashed out at election officials over the vote counting in his state, McSally has been largely silent. Top officials with the White House and Republican National Committee, who’ve been prodding the McSally campaign to amp up its efforts, have expressed frustration that the Arizona congresswoman hasn’t tried to drive a message that there’s something amiss with the vote count.

Trump and leading Republicans are willing to sacrifice their short-term political gain for the long-term erosion of faith in American elections. US elections have plenty of problems already (widespread voter disenfranchisement, for starters), and only half of Americans said earlier this fall that they thought America had “fair and open” elections.

With the president of the United States now deeply invested in tainting election outcomes in the eyes of voters, it could still get much worse. But some of these Arizona Republicans showed an alternative path forward, one that might serve to restore a little bit of faith in American democracy.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2RSUvCL

[theconservativebrief]

As vote counting continues from Tuesday’s midterm elections and three states have a handful of elections with razor-thin margins, the fight has become about whether all the votes should be counted.

The races for Arizona’s US Senate seat, Florida’s US Senate seat and governor, and Georgia’s governor are all extremely close — close enough that under some state laws, a recount is warranted.

As of this writing, Arizona’s Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (D) is ahead of Rep. Martha McSally (R) by a mere 2,000 votes; Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) leads incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson (D) by about 15,000 votes for the Senate seat; Rep. Ron DeSantis (R), whom the Associated Press declared the winner, is ahead of Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum (D) by about 35,000 votes in the Florida governor’s race; and Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp (R) is ahead of former state House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams (D) by 63,000 votes in the governor’s race there.

In Arizona, the recount margin is extremely narrow — one-tenth of 1 percent difference between the top two candidates (some exceptions apply). In Florida, races can go to a recount if they are within half a percentage point — a range the Senate race appears well within and one that the governor’s race is inching toward as votes continue to be counted in Democratic-friendly areas. In Georgia, where the recount margin is 1 percent, the circumstances are a bit different: The question is whether Kemp will fall under 50 percent to force him into a runoff election with Abrams.

Each race in each state has been subject to unique circumstances — in Georgia, Kemp was in charge of administering the election while also running in it. He’s engaged in a number of moves to purge voters, of which voting rights academic Carol Anderson wrote in the Atlantic, “if the Georgia race had taken place in another country — say, the Republic of Georgia — U.S. media and the U.S. State Department would not have hesitated to question its legitimacy.”

The question, however, is what each state does now. Republicans in each state have filed lawsuits to stop or slow the counting of votes.

Some, like Scott, are even leaning on conspiracy theories to halt the counting of votes: He mentioned Hillary Clinton, who was not involved in this election, twice in the announcement of his lawsuit because his opponent’s elections lawyer worked for Clinton in 2016. President Trump echoed this on Friday when he took questions from reporters.

The stakes of each are enormous: the outcomes of each could determine if Senate Republicans have an extremely narrow majority or a comfortable one. Both Democrats running for governor could have huge policy impacts on people in the state — and potentially weigh in on the maps the states redraw in 2020.

Arizona is among the states that are heavily dependent on mail-in ballots, which enable residents to vote early or physically drop off their ballots at designated locations on Election Day. As Vox’s David Roberts has written, mail-in ballots are often way more convenient for voters, who can make their decisions at home and simply send them in once they’re done. In a number of places where mail-in ballots are used, studies have found that they streamline the experience so much that they improve voter turnout.

Currently, 27 states use mail-in ballots in some capacity, and Washington, Colorado, and Oregon use them for all elections, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The downside of mail-in ballots is that they can take much longer to count compared to votes that are submitted the more traditional way on Election Day.

This issue is exactly what’s playing out in Arizona, and one that California has often had to deal with as well. As of Wednesday, there were still 600,000 mail-in ballots — of more than 2 million total ballots cast — that Arizona officials were waiting to process in places like Maricopa County.

Part of the reason processing mail-in ballots takes so long is that these votes need to be verified. One way officials do this is by making sure the signatures on the ballots match up with residents’ signatures on file. If they don’t, officials reach back out to voters to confirm the ballots’ authenticity.

Because some of the mail-in ballots don’t arrive until very close to Election Day, this verification process can take place afterward and make tabulating the votes much, much slower.

This process, in addition to delaying when results are announced, is now the focus of a Republican lawsuit. The Republican parties of four Arizona counties have filed a suit against the Arizona secretary of state and all county recorders over how mail-in votes are verified, the Hill reports.

The GOP plaintiffs argue that various counties are verifying votes differently and note that the process should be more consistent. Some counties call voters after Election Day to verify their ballots, while others don’t, they say. They’re asking for an injunction so that all ballots verified after Election Day can be omitted from any final vote tally — and they’re specifically calling out multiple counties that are seen as Sinema strongholds.

But late Thursday night, a federal judge rejected the lawsuit, allowing the count to move forward.

Plainly, a recount means that every vote cast will be retabulated. In Florida, if the margin of victory is 0.5 percent or less, a machine recount is ordered. If that margin is 0.25 percent or less, the state will trigger a manual recount, where the “over votes” and “under votes” are counted by hand.

This matters, particularly in the Senate race. For example, in Broward County, of the 695,799 people who turned in ballots, only 665,688 voted in the Senate race, according to the current count — less than almost every other statewide race on the ballot. Broward County is a Democratic stronghold in Florida.

Why there have been so many “under votes” in Broward County remains a mystery. Some have said it’s because of how the ballot is formatted, putting the Senate race on the bottom of the page under a long block of voting instructions. But Nelson’s lawyer thinks it’s a machine error that would be rectified with a hand recount.

A recount also means that provisional and overseas absentee ballots — all of which are typically counted after Election Day — are counted, a process that can at times take more than a week.

This is where the process gets tricky.

There are always mail-in ballots and provisional ballots that aren’t counted — due to a lack of ID or matching address — that can be counted if they are rechecked. Typically, voters are notified of errors and have to sign an affidavit “curing” the mistakes before Election Day. But there are always ballots turned in on Election Day that can’t be re-checked, and people that cast provisional ballots.

According to Daniel Smith, a political scientist with the University of Florida and an election watcher, of the mail ballots returned on Election Day, more than 13,000 had issues.

My database yesterday revealed that of the 126k VBMs ‘returned’ on Election Day (in FL, VBMs (except overseas) must be received by SOEs by 7pm on Election Day), over 13.4k had problems.

— daniel a. smith (@electionsmith) November 8, 2018

Voters had until 5 pm Eastern time Thursday to make sure their vote counted, or “cure” their votes of any errors, and county supervisors must submit the results from provisional ballots by Saturday.

In a recount, the latter deadline could change. For now, campaigns are in a mad dash to contact voters and verify their ballots. This is a struggle — in past elections, fewer than half of cast provisional ballots actually get counted. But based on where provisional ballots have been cast so far, it looks like if they are counted, they’d overwhelmingly go toward Democrats. Overseas and military ballots still haven’t fully come in for this election, and those typically strengthen Republicans’ leads.

It’s worth noting that in 2016, Marc Elias, currently Nelson’s elections lawyer, was general counsel on Hillary Clinton’s campaign and said that Clinton’s chance of winning through recounts was next to none.

“The number of votes separating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the closest of these states — Michigan — well exceeds the largest margin ever overcome in a recount,” he said then.

Rick Scott filed a lawsuit to halt vote counting on Thursday, saying that Elias “is here to try to steal the election, and to try to thwart the will of the voters of Florida.”

Trump echoed a similar sentiment on Friday when answering questions on the White House lawn:

Kemp resigned as Georgia’s secretary of state on Thursday, two days after a group of five Georgia voters sued him to force him out of that office. The voters, represented by the Protect Democracy nonprofit, argued that it was a conflict of interest for him to remain in office as votes were counted. The lawsuit sought to have Kemp barred from having anything to do with counting votes, and from overseeing a potential recount or runoff.

During a press conference on Thursday, Kemp said he was not concerned about the suit and was stepping down to begin his transition to governor. “We’ve won and now I’ve got to move on, but the process is true and has been for many, many years in Georgia,” he told reporters.

Soon after, lawyers for Abrams’s campaign held their own press conference, where they explained why the candidate would not be conceding the election and blamed Kemp for a number of issues on Election Day, which saw voters in a handful of precincts with large nonwhite populations deal with hours-long lines, an insufficient number of voting machines, and a dearth of provisional ballots.

Abrams’s campaign also noted that ballots were still being counted in some counties, despite these countries previously reporting that all votes were in. As an example, Abrams campaign manager Lauren Groh-Wargo mentioned Cobb County, which reported some 300 additional votes this morning. Groh-Wargo and other members of Abrams’s campaign also said they had spoken with college students living out of state who sent back absentee ballots well before the deadline but have yet to receive confirmation of their ballots being counted.

The campaign has encouraged voters who cast provisional and absentee ballots to report these issues with a voter protection hotline. Counties are required to verify their results by 5 pm on November 13.

Abrams’s team also announced they are preparing to file legal action in Georgia’s Dougherty County, which was affected by Hurricane Michael in October. According to Kurt Kastorf, a member of Abrams’s litigation team, absentee ballots were sent to the county late due to a language error and were further delayed due to the hurricane, with some mail eventually being routed through Tallahassee, Florida. The campaign says it has heard from people who received ballots in final days before the election, leaving them with too little time to file and return their ballots by the deadline. Others never received ballots at all. The suit will ask that any ballots received after the deadline be counted.

For most election watchers, the idea of a Florida recount gives Democrats flashbacks to the 2000 presidential election, when George W. Bush beat Democrat Al Gore by 537 votes in Florida after a partial recount that was ultimately halted by the Supreme Court. One report after the race found that if the entire state had had a thorough recount under certain rules, Gore likely would have won.

That was a highly unique case. That said, it’s also unusual for a recount to change the final results of an election.

As FiveThirtyEight reported in 2016, between 2000 and 2015, there have been 27 recounts in statewide general elections, only three of which actually changed the final result:

Al Franken’s win in Minnesota’s 2008 U.S. Senate race, Thomas M. Salmon’s win in Vermont’s 2006 auditor election and Christine Gregoire’s win in Washington’s 2004 gubernatorial race.

Whether any of these three election results change this time around remains to be seen.

Original Source -> The Arizona, Florida, and Georgia election recounts, explained

via The Conservative Brief

[reseau-actu]

Lebanon's parliamentary elections: here's what you need to know

New election law seen as a step towards a more inclusive parliament (MEE/Ali Harb)

BEIRUT - Lebanon has scrapped its winner-take-all voting scheme for legislative elections on 6 May, implementing instead a proportional system that opens the door for smaller parties to make it to the parliament in areas where representation had been exclusive to the dominant political forces.

The move is widely hailed as a step towards an inclusive parliament that reflects the population more accurately. However, the new election procedure consists of several legal stipulations, including the preferential vote and sectarian allocations, which make it the most complicated in the country's history.

A delicate balance

The new scheme has to take into account the country's delicate sectarian balance, where seats across districts are assigned to various religious sects.

Lebanon has 15 districts in which candidates are competing for 120 seats.

Candidates cannot run on their own. They have to be part of a list - with a number of other candidates - that covers no less than 40 percent of the number of seats allocated for that district.

For example, in the northern Third District, which is allocated 10 seats, a list cannot have fewer than four candidates.

Another change is that the interior ministry will be solely responsible for ballots on election day. In previous elections, ballots were handed to voters by campaigners for various political parties.

In past elections, less popular candidates were able to slip their names onto the lists of other parties in a phenomenon known as "booby-trapped ballots".

The new law does away with this practice, but it also deprives voters from casting their ballots for candidates from various lists.

Money has become a major factor in the electoral process. It has made it nearly impossible for poor candidates to win

- Moussa Khoury, a civil society candidate

A voter can only select a slate in full with a preferential vote for a single candidate.

The individual vote must go to a local candidate from the voter's small district. Each large district has two or three small districts.

For a slate to win a spot in parliament, it would need to reach the electoral tally - the number of votes in a district divided by the number of seats.

After excluding the votes for slates that did not make the threshold, the votes are recounted. Each list gets as many seats as it has tallies - for the most part - and the list left with the highest fraction gets an extra seat.

Names of candidates on winning lists are then placed from the highest to the lowest preferential vote, regardless of what slates they are on.

Individual seat assignment then follows. Those who receive the most preferential votes are allocated sectarian seats for their district, which also covers seats won by their list. Religious quotas get filled first.

Poster pledging to answer Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah's call for participation in the elections (MEE/Ali Harb)

Hence, top preferential vote getters from lists that cross the threshold do not necessarily make it to the parliament.

Take a 10-seat district with two spots allocated to Maronite Christians as an example. If Maronite candidates from List A get the top preferential votes, List B's Maronites lose automatically, even if they get more individual votes than their colleagues on the list.

After the two Maronite seats are taken by List A, List B's share would go to the next highest preferential vote getter for available seats.

Technically, a candidate with one preferential vote can make it to parliament.

If the last available spot is for a Druze MP and List B did not field a Druze candidate, the slate would lose out on that seat, which would go to the next top Druze vote getter from an opposing slate.

Being left with seats for which they have no candidates is a real risk that incomplete slates face in several districts.

Awkwardly drawn districts

While gerrymandering is not uncommon even in Western democracies, some awkwardly drawn Lebanese districts stand out.

For example, the two small districts in the larger First South District are not geographically connected.

Beirut is divided into two districts separated by the old frontlines of the 1975-1990 civil war when the capital was split between Christian and Muslim militias.

Marwan Tibi, a journalist who is running in Beirut's Second District on the "Kelna Beirut" slate of civil society activists, called dividing the capital along sectarian lines a "catastrophe".

However, he praised the move to a proportional system, saying it provided voters with an opportunity to make choices based on political agendas, not personalities.

Another sign that the new law is lacking is how electoral tallies vary radically between districts. In the mostly-Christian First Beirut District, only 7,000 votes are needed to make the slate, whereas in some districts in the south and the north the number is more than 25,000. 

The new rules have also raised the cost of running for office. All candidates must now pay a non-refundable fee of $5,300.

Campaign truck with speakers promoting former PM Najib Azmi Mikati (MEE/Ali Harb)

Moussa Khoury, a civil society candidate in Tripoli on the "Kollouna Watani" slate, said the fee puts a burden on aspiring politicians of modest means.

For a list of 11 candidates, the cost of merely appearing on the ballot would exceed $55,000.

The law has also failed to curb campaign spending, which Khoury said could run to up to $1m per candidate.

Several candidates have complained that media outlets, particularly TV stations, have exploited lapses in regulations to charge for normal coverage and interviews, which are usually considered free content.

"Money has become a major factor in the electoral process. It has made it nearly impossible for poor candidates to win," Khoury told Middle East Eye.

"The money factor was not taken into consideration when the current law was written; or it was taken into consideration to favour certain candidates over others."

Also, there are concerns over the state's ability to properly enforce the law, especially since the interior and foreign ministries, which oversee the elections, are both headed by current candidates.

"This ruling political class has proven to us its failure as an executive branch," Tibi said.

He pointed to complaints of lack of organisation in at Lebanese embassies where expatriates voted on 27 and 29 April.

"We don't trust this authority; if we trusted it, we wouldn't have run and burdened ourselves," Tibi told Middle East Eye.

Article complet: Middle East Eye - RSS Feed — http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/guide-lebanons-election-law-1826934387

[thetrumpdebacle]

Over 120 delegates to the Republican National Convention are suing the GOP to be free from voting for Romney on the first ballot for Presidential Nominee, and are arguing they have been illegally coerced into choosing Mitt Romney for the party’s presidential nominee and demanding they be “unbound” to vote for another candidate instead.

The federal lawsuit, filed this week in U.S. District Court in California demands the delegates be freed to “vote their conscience” for presidential nominee at the party’s August national convention in Tampa, Fla., rather than being “bound” to vote for a certain candidate, as many state party bylaws require, based on the primary elections and other delegate selection procedures. Courthouse News Service reports at least another 40 additional national convention delegates have asked to join the lawsuit which would bring the total to 160 Delegates. The delegates claim the party violated federal law by forcing them to sign loyalty affidavits, under threat of perjury, to vote for Mitt Romney, though he is not yet the official nominee.

“They don’t want to be bound to any candidate, or even be forced to vote for the nominee,” Richard Gilbert, of Gilbert & Marlowe, attorney for the delegates, told Courthouse News. “To have a real convention; the delegates must have free will so that when they meet, they can persuade each other and then decide who to vote for.”

The courts have typically allowed political parties leeway in the nomination of their candidates, but this case asks the court to consider the choice of presidential nominee a “federal election,” subject to laws that would free delegates from party procedures to vote their conscience. Beyond merely asserting delegates’ “right” to vote their conscience, however, the lawsuit asserts the GOP has engaged in a racketeering-like scheme to push Romney as the candidate.

“The Republican National Committee and its chairman have been aiding the Governor Romney campaign for at least six months,” the lawsuit asserts. “The RNC and its chairman, defendant Reince Priebus, have … combined with a particular candidate with all of the aid the RNC can possibly, but improperly give … to obstruct, intimidate and harass delegates from voting their conscience.”

Specifically, the lawsuit charges Republican officials and operatives have used threats of violence, certified unlawful slates of delegates, demanded affidavits of loyalty to Romney under penalty of perjury and have even altered ballot results to make sure the national convention is stacked with delegates who will vote for Romney

“Some campaigns act like organized crime syndicates – and I mean organized crime, no doubt about it,” Gilbert told Courthouse News. “In Arizona, the voting machines were rigged so that Ron Paul votes were counted as Mitt Romney votes. It was so intentional that a Romney delegate refused to certify the vote count, and for that, he got thrown off the convention.”

The plaintiffs are asking the court to order the RNC to inform delegates they can vote for the nominee of their choice, to reinstate delegates who lost their seats at the convention because they refused to sign loyalty affidavits and to recount ballots by hand or hold another convention in areas “where the sanctity of the ballots are untrustworthy.”

Yet striking down party rules that bind candidates to vote in accordance with the primary process could suddenly open up the nomination to another campaign season, as presidential hopefuls could attempt to sway the elected delegates to their side, a potentiality Gilbert recognizes.

“If the judge rules in our favor, I won’t be surprised if three or four new candidates, say Sarah Palin, jump in and say they want to be considered,” Gilbert told Courthouse News. “It will be the most interesting national convention in my lifetime if the judge rules for us on this.”

via The Trump Debacle