Category: the big lie

  • Contractors working for Cyber Ninjas, who was hired by the Arizona State Senate, examine and recount ballots from the 2020 general election at Veterans Memorial Coliseum on May 1, 2021, in Phoenix, Arizona.

    Several (possibly illegal) missteps and the embrace of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories within an audit of ballots cast in Maricopa County, Arizona, for last year’s presidential election have led to one lawmaker, initially in favor of the inquiry, to describe the situation as “embarrassing” and “ridiculous.”

    The audit itself, several commentators have noted, gives undue credence to the “big lie,” the false notion that the presidential race was “stolen” by supposed election saboteurs in order to help Joe Biden defeat Donald Trump last year. Trump himself is reportedly paying close attention to the outcome of the Arizona audit, hoping that its outcome will help reinstate him as president of the United States even though he still wouldn’t have enough electoral votes to defeat Biden.

    Most people view the audit, which is being conducted at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, Arizona, as being unnecessary and a waste of time and taxpayer money. State- and county-wide audits have already been conducted, yet the Arizona legislature, which is run by Republicans, ordered yet another audit, run by a cybersecurity company called Cyber Ninjas, to pore over Maricopa County’s 2.1 million ballots cast last November.

    The company has zero experience in conducting such audits, and its founder, Doug Logan, has espoused pro-Trump and QAnon ideals, including using the phrase “Stop the Steal” in social media to signal support of unsubstantiated and false claims of election fraud in the 2020 race, which immediately puts into question the independence of his firm’s actions.

    Much like its founder, Cyber Ninjas has shown it’s willing to investigate unfounded conspiracy theories that many ardent Trump supporters have put forward. The company, for example, is scanning every ballot with ultraviolet light, looking for watermarks that were never placed on them. It’s also searching documents for traces of bamboo, indicating the company has endorsed a racist theory that alleges fake ballots were brought in from China in order to help Biden win the state.

    However, the actions taken by the firm, and others like them, are not what some Republican lawmakers apparently had in mind for the audit.

    “It makes us look like idiots,” State Senator Paul Boyer, a Republican who voted in favor of the Cyber Ninjas’ audit of ballots, said to The New York Times.

    Boyer seemed to express regret for his vote to allow the audit to proceed.

    “Looking back, I didn’t think it would be this ridiculous. It’s embarrassing to be a state senator at this point,” he said.

    The audit — and the embarrassment it appears to be causing among some lawmakers — doesn’t show signs of stopping anytime soon. Now entering its third week, the counting of ballots will soon have to be halted, as other organizations have events scheduled at the venue where it’s taking place. Counting will presumably restart after those events, mostly high school graduation ceremonies, finish up.

    Even then, the audit could last into mid-June, said Ken Bennett, liaison between lawmakers and Cyber Ninjas.

    Ballots will have to be stored in the meantime, though it’s unclear as of right now where or how ballots will be kept safe, another issue that critics have also brought up about the audit in the past few weeks. The overall lack of security in storing ballots has resulted in the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Pamela Karlan, head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, writing a letter to Arizona lawmakers demanding to know details of how the audit was being conducted.

    Karlan also rang alarm bells over the possibility that the audit was targeting voters of color.

    “Past experience with similar investigative efforts around the country has raised concerns that they can be directed at minority voters, which potentially can implicate the anti-intimidation prohibitions of the Voting Rights Act,” Karlan wrote. “Such investigative efforts can have a significant intimidating effect on qualified voters that can deter them from seeking to vote in the future.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Paul Roblyer of Portland holds a flag with the face of former President Donald Trump during a 2nd Amendment rally on May 1, 2021, in Salem, Oregon.

    A veteran pollster for Republican candidates and officials over the past several decades has a warning for his party: pushing President Donald Trump’s “big lie” about election fraud may cause a GOP midterm election loss.

    Midterm elections usually go badly for the political party associated with the president currently in office. Only two presidents since Franklin Roosevelt have seen gains in Congress for their own political party in a midterm race after winning a presidential election: Bill Clinton in 1998 and George W. Bush in 2002.

    On average, presidents can expect their party to lose 25 congressional seats in the first midterm after their inauguration. f this holds true in 2022, Democrats could lose control of the House, and perhaps the Senate as well. But there’s a wild card in all of this: Trump, and his influence on conservative voters next year.

    Frank Luntz, a pollster famous for teaching Republicans how to use language in the 1990s to win elections in arguably Orwellian ways, commented on the possible outcome of GOP lawmakers and candidates pushing Trump-fueled election fraud myths into the 2022 midterm races. Doing so, he said in an interview with The New York Times’ “Sway” podcast, could cause supporters to view the voting process with distrust, resulting in losses across the board for the party.

    “This could cost the Republicans the majority in the House in 2022. What Donald Trump is saying is actually telling people it’s not worth it to vote,” Luntz said. “Donald Trump single-handedly may cause people not to vote. And he may be the greatest tool in the Democrats’ arsenal to keep control of the House and Senate in 2022.”

    Luntz added that GOP losses in the midterm races could also cause a Republican backlash against Trump.

    “If the Republicans lose the majority in the House, they will lay the blame at the feet of Donald Trump for telling people it’s not worth it to vote,” the pollster said.

    Luntz’s fears for the GOP echo similar concerns that were raised earlier this year by Republicans, who warned that Trump’s insistence on spreading baseless claims about fraud in the presidential election played a significant part in reducing voter turnout in the runoffs for Georgia’s Senate seats, particularly damaging Republican incumbent candidates Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. More than 752,000 voters that participated in the first round of their races in November failed to show up in the January runoffs, according to reporting from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which noted that most of those voters were white and from rural areas, constituencies that typically favor the GOP.

    Trump’s insistent and baseless voter fraud claims are not the only factor threatening the GOP’s chances in the midterm elections: recent NBC News survey finds that a plurality of voters, 47 percent, currently want Democrats to retain control of Congress, while 42 percent say they want Republicans to run things halfway through Biden’s first term.

    For comparison, at the same time in Trump’s first term (in April 2017), that same NBC News Survey showed similar numbers, with 47 percent saying they wanted Democrats to run Congress (which was then controlled by Republicans) and 43 percent saying they wanted the GOP to do so.

    The midterms are a long way away, so it’s still anyone’s guess what will happen a year and a half from now. But beyond Trump’s influence in the race (and his potential to depress turnout for Republican candidates across the country with his continued pushing of the “big lie”), experts are also saying outcomes will depend heavily on how successful the Democrats are in delivering what Biden promised to the American people during the 2020 campaign.

    “The last four or five months of next year will be key, especially evaluating Biden’s performance, Democratic enthusiasm (which will help determine turnout), and the degree of lingering Republican disillusionment (which will determine their participation rate),” veteran analyst Charlie Cook wrote in February.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Cameras stream live footage from the Arizona vote audit in Maricopa County, Arizona, on May 4, 2021.

    Nearly six months after voting ended in the 2020 presidential election, Republicans are leading an effort in Arizona to throw undue doubt into President Joe Biden’s win in the state — and they’ve hired conspiracy theorists to help lead the charge.

    Republican legislators in the state, who hold a majority in the legislature, successfully subpoenaed 2.1 million ballots earlier this year. Senate Republicans demanded the ballots from election officials in Maricopa County, which put Biden over the top and then didn’t have anywhere to put the ballots once they got them.

    The GOP obtained the ballots with the goal of completing their own audit of the election results, despite the fact that the state’s own audits, as well as Maricopa County’s audit, found no evidence of voter fraud.

    Still, Republicans think that they can conduct a better audit — perhaps one with different results — and have hired a company with zero experience with elections to do so. As Judd Legum of Popular Information wrote, “The counting will continue until results improve.”

    The company Republicans have hired, for $150,000 of taxpayer money, is called Cyber Ninjas. Cyber Ninjas is a Florida-based cybersecurity company which has been described by its founder, Doug Logan, as a “Christian company.” Logan has espoused views supporting the conspiracy theories put forth by “Stop the Steal” groups and QAnon-affiliated Ron Watkins, who propagate the false claim that it was Donald Trump, not Biden, who truly won the election.

    Arizona is not Logan’s first rodeo in challenging election results. He was previously listed as an expert witness in a lawsuit in Michigan where the plaintiffs claimed that voting machines were rigged.

    Though the company has tried keeping their audit methodology under wraps, they’ve been ordered by a judge to disclose documents with procedures for the audit. The procedures “[don’t] make any sense, and I’ve seen a lot of audits,” Tammy Patrick, senior elections adviser for Democracy Fund and former Maricopa County elections worker, told USA Today.

    The documents detailing procedures for “forensics” are vague and unclear. One such procedure evidently being employed by Cyber Ninja is using UV lights to check for watermarks on the ballots. Arizona’s ballots don’t have watermarks, and the Brennan Center for Justice has warned that the lights could make the ballots deteriorate, but that hasn’t stopped conspiracy theorists from believing that using the UV light might reveal a secret watermark.

    Observers and election experts have also caught the auditors making basic mistakes like using blue pens that might alter the vote on a ballot or not securing the area where ballots are being counted by locking the doors.

    Cyber Ninjas has also recruited former state lawmaker Anthony Kern to help validate ballots. Kern is a Trump supporter who was at the Capitol on January 6 with the mob trying to get the election results overturned.

    State Republicans are also evidently trying to raise funds beyond the $150,000 from the government for the audit effort, Legum reports. The Arizona Senate is soliciting donations to raise $2.8 million for the effort on a website, Fund the Audit.com, owned by an organization created by former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, also a known Trump supporter.

    Trump himself has been bragging about the audit, despite the fact that Arizona lawmakers don’t have the authority to overturn election results. Still, he’s been telling Mar-a-Lago guests that the audit will perhaps help reinstate him — although, even if the legislators could overturn the result of the state’s election, and if there were any evidence of fraud, the 11 electoral votes it would give the former president would still not be enough to give him the win he wants.

    So then why are Republicans still chugging along to overturn Arizona’s results? It’s unclear, but the audit is already likely having harmful effects. Most Republican voters still believe that the election was rigged; and the very fact that Republicans are conducting an audit may indicate, to some, that there are legitimate reasons to believe that there was fraud, no matter how spurious the real reasons for the audit are.

    Political observers warn that the results of the audit, even if they’re falsified or based on flawed methodology, could end up adding fuel to the Republicans’ voter suppression fire in Arizona and across the country.

    “The idea, obviously, is to create a new truth for Republicans,” wrote MSNBC’s Steve Benen, “at which point pro-Trump forces can exploit the lie to justify new voter-suppression efforts and perhaps even related efforts in other states, where Republicans can hire Cyber Ninjas of their own.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The former president not only inspired his supporters to fight for him; he urged them to send money to defend his election in the courts. Continue reading

    The post “He wants us to make it WILD” appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

    This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.

  • Biden’s prospective attorney general, Merrick Garland, reaffirmed that the AG should be the lawyer for the people of the United States, not for any one individual. Continue reading

    The post Don’t Look Away — The Big Lie is Still Out There appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

    This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.

  • President Trump gestures as he speaks during a rally in Dalton, Georgia, on January 4, 2021.

    Donald Trump may be spending his post-presidency golfing at Mar-a -Lago but he remains front and center in the hearts and minds of millions of Republican voters, as evidenced by the 46% who said in a new Suffolk University/ USA Today poll released over the weekend that they would join a Trump Party if he decided to split off from the GOP. A whopping 80% of Republican respondents said they support punishing any Republicans in Congress who voted for Trump’s impeachment. He is still their Dear Leader even in exile.

    So the GOP still has a Trump problem. If it loses 20-30% of its voters, it will prove difficult to win any elections whether it’s called the Trump Patriot Party or the plain old GOP. That is because the polarization that powers the extreme right-wing under Trump depends upon having every last self-identified Republican vote their way. There are no more crossovers when it comes to Donald Trump.

    This is the dilemma now Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., finds himself trying to navigate as he tries to take back the Senate in 2022. So far, he’s tried to have it both ways. Perhaps he and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham are playing some elaborate game of “good cop-bad cop” with Graham ostentatiously currying Trump’s favor while McConnell writes op-eds in the Wall Street Journal desperately trying to assuage big money donors and appalled suburban voters with reassurances that the Republican establishment hasn’t gone completely mad.

    It’s impossible to know how any of that will work out but whatever happens, the GOP is taking advantage of one major aspect of Trump’s legacy: The Big Lie. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 76% of Republicans still say they believe there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election and that Trump was the legitimate winner. Republican lawmakers in states across the country are now rushing to pass various draconian vote suppression schemes.

    It’s not that they haven’t been doing that all along, of course. That’s conservative electoral strategy 101, about which I’ve written many times. Having lost the popular vote seven out of the last eight presidential elections, they know very well that they do not have the support of a majority of voters in the country. Now that Trump conveniently persuaded GOP voters that the presidential election was stolen from them in broad daylight, the opportunity to curb voting in some new and ingenious ways has presented itself and they are going for it.

    So far this year at least 165 bills that would restrict voting access are being considered in state legislatures nationwide reports the Brennan Center for Justice. And the excuse Republicans are using is that they must do this to “restore trust” in the voting system — trust that was destroyed by the outrageous lies of Donald Trump and his henchmen. What a neat trick. Apparently, the only way they can restore trust is to “fix” problems that don’t exist but which also happen to suppress Democratic votes. Take Georgia, for instance, ground zero for Trump’s post-election machinations. According to the Brennan Center, the Republican legislature has proposed curtailing early voting — including on Sundays when historically Black churches have caravaned congregations in what is called “souls to the polls” — making drop boxes more onerous to access and requiring several new steps in order to vote by mail. One of the most counterintuitive restrictions is a new process that disallows dropping ballots off on Election Day and three days prior. It makes no sense. If you’ve forgotten to get your ballot in the mail you should be able to walk it in. What can possibly be a reasonable rationale against that?

    You can see how important this issue is right now by the fact that this week’s CPAC conference is featuring seven panel discussions on “election protection” with names like “The Left Pulled the Strings, Covered It Up, and Even Admits It.” “Failed States (PA, GA, NV, oh my!)” and “They Told Ya So: The Signs Were Always There.” Here’s one of the featured speakers, a lawyer who secretly helped Trump behind the scenes:

    It goes without saying that the right-wing media continues to flog this lie but it is spread far and wide by the the major networks as well which continue to feature guests who find subtler ways to poison the public’s mind. Take Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La, on ABC’s “This Week” dodging the question in a different way, suggesting that the “real problem” is that the states didn’t follow their own laws in the election, as some of Trump’s bush league lawyers argued at the time before being shot down by every judge who heard them.

    This version of the Big Lie is what MSNBC’s Chris Hayes dubbed “High Hawley-ism”, after the unctuous mewlings of Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo, during the post-election period, which Hayes says is a trial balloon for GOP state legislators to unilaterally award electoral college votes to whomever they choose. You may recall that was what Trump was trying to do up until the very minute his rabid mob sacked the Capitol. Hayes wrote:

    This dubious theory, that only state *legislatures* can make these kinds of changes also invites all kinds of mischief by federal judges to reach in and overrule state supreme courts. It didn’t work in 2020, but that doesn’t mean it won’t.

    Further, as Scalia memorably noted there is no constitutional guarantee of the right to vote for president; we vote for electors. Every state with R control could pass a law awarding all state electors to the candidate that won the most counties and basically guarantee R victory.

    As the New York Times reported at the time, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court gave plenty of signals during the election campaign that they were amenable to this idea, making it clear that they believe state legislatures have the right to enact strict measures against (non-existent) voter fraud. As Wendy R. Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Times:

    Even without the reasoning, it’s very clear that what the court has done throughout this election season has made it clear that federal courts are not going to be significant sources of voting rights protection in the lead up to elections. It’s the unique constitutional role of the courts to protect individual rights like voting rights, and they’re treating it like policy decisions.

    That’s what Trump put Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court to do for him last fall, but the cards just didn’t fall his way enough to put it to use. Even so, the Big Lie about the stolen election has opened the door for a wave of voter suppression not seen in decades with a Supreme Court ready to rubber stamp it. It may end up being his greatest legacy.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Senate trial also gave powerful proof of just how undemocratic the Senate has become. Voting rights journalist Ari Berman noted that the “57 senators who voted to convict Trump represent 76.7 MILLION more Americans than 43 senators who voted to acquit.” Continue reading

    The post Moving On? No. appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

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  • Bruce Castor and David Schoen seemed badly outmatched, rambling and unprepared. While the Democrats’ presentations were clear, organized, and illustrated with slick videos and graphics, the defense had none of that. Watching from Florida, the former president was allegedly irate. Continue reading

    The post Who Had the Best Presentation? appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

    This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.