I am sick and tired of the horse race approach to election analysis. Of course, in a winner-take-all system, every vote matters, but the carnival of every election season — the noise, the color, the razzle-dazzle — can create a spellbinding distraction. Both during and after each election, those of us committed to building the movement for social and racial justice must stay focused on the larger context and fundamental questions.
Capitalist democracy has always been “flawed” and fraught. Still, the right-wing alternative — authoritarian rule — is a frightening and threatening but all-too real alternative. So, we have to politically walk and chew gum at the same time, defend the political rights we have, leverage them as best we can, and simultaneously organize and mobilize for something better.
The past eight years have served to illuminate the fault lines in capitalist democracy, and this midterm election further clarified the challenges we face. There are many pundits bemoaning that “our democracy” is in jeopardy. Yes, but it has never belonged to all of us, and yes, it is “belonging” to fewer and fewer. Elites (initially landowning and slave-owning white men, but a more diverse cast of elites today) have had a stranglehold on government and the state from the beginning. The right to vote and hold office has expanded, and at the same time new obstacles to the full exercise of democratic decision-making have been erected.
In recent memory this includes Supreme Court decisions such as Citizens United that have allowed corporations and ultra-rich individuals to exercise autocratic power, and the current wave of voter suppression bills: FL SB90, TX SB1, GA SB 202 and the list goes on. And when legal obstacles to voting fail, more ruthless measures prevail.
Black southerners know this all too well from the Jim Crow days of night riders and white vigilantes threatening Black voters, or landowners threatening to evict Black sharecroppers if they dared to even register to vote. Civil rights movement legend Fannie Lou Hamer was the victim of one such threat and more. She was beaten and left with permanent disabilities for daring to assert her right to vote. The rise of racist militias threatening to monitor the polls or worse, defend the pre-ordained outcome of right-wing victories, are reminiscent of fascist dictatorships more than anything else.
So, there was a dark cloud over this year’s midterms that overshadows even the still looming threat of a GOP numerical victory in the House of Representatives. We already have Lindsey Graham suggesting there will be riots in the street if authoritarian tyrant Trump is ever convicted and jailed for the multitude of crimes he has seemingly committed. That is only one of many indications that the current right-wing movement, elected and unelected, is prepared to use extralegal means to hold power. January 6 was a clear and powerful wakeup call on this very point.
In the 2022 midterms, there were mean-spirited gun-toting xenophobes on the ballot. Climate denying anti-choice zealots and foul-mouth fear-mongers. Racism and misogyny were also on the ballot this time around, more explicitly than ever before. Racist and sexist tropes and stereotypes were deployed widely to instill fear and dread in isolated white voters. Television ads featured scenes of violent mayhem and shadowy out-of-control figures pillaging and plundering. In these moments, the fig leaf was removed: “crime” was openly portrayed as young Black men on a rampage.
Plucked out of context, and played over and over, these scenes were portrayed in campaign ads as if they were daily occurrences. The message was: Violence and crime will come to your suburban community if you do not elect a GOP candidate. “Safe” white communities were juxtaposed against violent cities full of violent Black and Brown criminals.
The past eight years have served to illuminate the fault lines in capitalist democracy, and this midterm election further clarified the challenges we face.
Unlike in past elections when the proponents of anti-Black policies were all white, Black candidates and women candidates were also deployed in the service of these racist, sexist and reactionary platforms. These Black right-wing candidates include Jennifer-Ruth Green in Indiana, Richard Irvin who ran in the GOP gubernatorial primary in Illinois, and of course, the poster child for Black reactionary opportunism, Herschel Walker in Georgia, who aims to unseat Senator Raphael Warnock.
So, even though John Fetterman won by a slim margin in Pennsylvania and hopefully Warnock will do the same in Georgia in the runoff, we still have a lot of work to do to derail dangerous movements that threaten our very lives, and that transcend electoral politics. Right-wing hate groups are going to push for their agenda whether they win at the polls or not. So, this electoral season is not only about winning more ballots but winning the ideological struggle that is far more complicated.
To say that we need to look beyond the ballot box to understand and respond to this moment is not to say elections don’t matter. All my reservations about an over-emphasis on electoral politics notwithstanding, elections do matter. There have been few revolutionary pivots in modern history that have not on some level involved polling citizens on what people and ideas they want to lead. Moreover, there is a qualitative difference between authoritarian proto-fascist rule and a flawed and fractured capitalist democracy.
For those on the left who want nothing to do with the “sellout politics” of bourgeois democracy, I ask, do you know anyone who has lived, organized, and struggled under a full-blown dictatorship? I do. People are held without charge, jailed, tortured, exiled and killed on a routine basis and in large numbers. There are no rallies outside the police station to demand the release of arrested comrades. Dissidents were routinely disappeared under dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Haiti under Duvalier and elsewhere. Today in the Philippines, Turkey and Russia, protest and dissent can yield a life sentence. So, protecting even a slender semblance of “rights” helps determine the terrain of resistance and struggle. A corollary to this fact is the equally important fact that “democratic rights” have long been in short supply in Black and Brown immigrant communities. For example, a DUI can get you deported, and an angry response to an unjust arrest can get you killed.
For this reason, it matters if there is a Cori Bush, a Rashida Tlaib, or an Ilhan Omar in Congress, or a reasonable person versus a proto-fascist in local office. Keeping the far right out of elected office can at least ameliorate some suffering and give organizers room to breathe. Whether the Republicans or Democrats hold the House and the Senate matters. Whether we build a broad-based progressive movement to fight for what our people need and deserve matters even more.
The ominous clouds of authoritarianism are still hovering. They will not just blow over. Most Germans did not predict, or even believe possible, the full-fledged horrors of the Third Reich. Most Chileans did not foresee the overthrow of the elected president, Salvador Allende.
The current political situation in the U.S. is different situation and unique, but there are also parallels between it and the years leading up to those horrific historical moments. We cannot stumble around with “it can’t happen here” blinders on.
The divide between the right and left in the U.S. on critical questions, and even on what is factually true, is palpable and ominous. Similar divides occurred in past historical moments that resulted in major breaks, such as the U.S. Civil War. States are at odds with federal law on key principles like women and trans people’s rights to bodily autonomy. The New York Times is doing a series on political violence highlighting the rise of extralegal armed groups as documented by Southern Poverty Law Center, Political Research Associates and the ACLU. These are serious times. Freedom-loving and justice-seeking people need to continue to vote, strategize and organize with a clear understanding of how high the stakes really are.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) cautioned Twitter followers on Tuesday not to trust in lies that the Republicans Party will likely amplify on election night that election results aren’t valid unless they’re called the same day — a part of their strategy to attack mail-in voting and throw doubt into the election process.
“Many states don’t allow mail-in ballots to be counted before Election Day,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “But many races can’t be called until mail-ins are counted, which can take over 24 [hours]. This is normal, but some GOP are laying ground to claim any race not called tonight is suspicious. Don’t fall for it.”
It is, indeed, normal for ballot counting to take several days after the election, though some races are called the night of due to decisive margins. Because mail-in ballots can be postmarked on Election Day and still be valid, it takes a few days for all of the votes to even be available for election officials to count.
A variety of other factors — late closing times for polls on the West Coast, an increase in mail-in voting, and many particularly close races — mean that this election will be no different in that many races will have to be called later this week. In 2020, eight states didn’t call results of elections until after election night; several states, including crucial swing states, took a week or more.
Republicans are ignoring this reality, however, instead taking the opportunity — as they have with almost every other aspect of the election process — to attack voting and erode public trust in elections.
In recent weeks, Republicans have already been saying that, if vote counting takes several days, then that means that election officials are getting the “fix in” on the election, as Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano baselessly said in October. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) also added to the lie, saying, “Why is it only Democrat blue cities that take ‘days’ to count their votes? The rest of the country manages to get it done on election night.”
Both of these statements are plainly false, and these politicians likely know that. There has been zero evidence of elections being “fixed” in the U.S. — if anything, Republicans are the ones that are working toward rigging all future elections to ensure the party never loses again.
Cruz’s comment, meanwhile, is meant as an attack on Democratic votes and is not true in any sense; even aside from the point that large cities, which lean Democratic, have far more votes to count than less-populated Republican-leaning areas, many Republican counties also take days to count votes.
If election officials stopped counting ballots after Election Day, as Republicans seem to be suggesting, it would leave many votes uncounted, likely particularly affecting mail-in votes. According to the United States Election Project, about 25 million people have returned mail-in ballots as of Tuesday, with a total of over 58 million mail-in ballots requested across the country. If even a fraction of the mail-in ballots that have been returned or will be postmarked on Election Day arrive later this week, that would amount to millions of ballots that wouldn’t be counted at all.
On the flip side, if election officials simply called elections on election night while disregarding other votes that may come in, it could give Republicans an undue advantage. In 2020, for instance, early vote counts created a perception that Republicans were ahead — a phenomenon that political commentators dubbed a “red mirage” followed by a “blue shift.”
This could happen in Pennsylvania, for instance. Democratic-leaning Philadelphia typically takes a long time to count votes, and that process will be even further delayed this year as the GOP has worked to question the validity of thousands of votes in court. Other states like Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan may also see a “red mirage,” with many Democratic votes coming from mail-in ballots or large cities.
What Republicans are likely truly trying to do with comments about the length of ballot counting is set the stage for Republican candidates to reject the results of the election if they lose, as many Republicans have already threatened to do. If they lose, such candidates may point to statements like Cruz’s to say that the election was rigged against them — a blatant lie.
It’s unclear what the power-grabbing strategy of rejecting legitimate election results will lead to, but political scholars and insiders have warned that right-wing militants are planning more attacks like the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Congressional Republicans have, after all, spent the last two years defending the attack and rejecting attempts to prevent future similar attempted coups.
Far right Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is attempting to bar federal monitors from being able to enter polling places in Florida to ensure federal election laws are being followed in some of the state’s most Democratic-leaning counties, saying that only his administration’s supposed election monitors will be allowed in.
Due to uncertainty and fear around election safety as armed right-wing vigilantes have swarmed early polling places, the Justice Department (DOJ) announced that it would be increasing the number of polling places it will send officials to monitor from 44 in 2020 to 64 this year. The DOJ’s list of polling places includes three counties in Florida — Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach — that have among the highest concentrations of Democrats in the state.
The purpose of the DOJ officials’ presence, the agency says, is to “monito[r] elections in the field in jurisdictions around the country to protect the rights of voters.” It says that the agency has monitored elections in the field in some capacity since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
But DeSantis’s administration sent an aggressively-worded letter to DOJ officials on Monday night, signed by Florida Department of State Chief Counsel Brad McVay, saying that Florida officials will not allow federal monitors to enter the polling sites, even though Florida does give other “law enforcement” officials access to polling places.
Instead, the letter said, the Florida Department of State — which is under DeSantis’s jurisdiction — would “send its own monitors to the three targeted jurisdictions” to supposedly ensure “there is no interference in the voting process.”
The DeSantis administration’s definition of “interference” with voting is likely vastly different from that of federal officials. Republicans have spent the last two years loudly spewing lies about vast amounts of election fraud across the country — despite there being zero evidence of such fraud — to justify disenfranchising voters and destabilizing elections.
Claims of so-called election interference from the right have been used as an excuse for armed vigilante groups to show up to polling places in Arizona to intimidate voters or for lawmakers to pass dozens of voter suppression bills. This is all in the service, it appears, of ensuring that Republicans never lose elections again so the U.S. can be under a fascist one-party rule.
Over the past few months, DeSantis has been at the forefront of some of the most aggressively fascist anti-voting initiatives among Republicans nationwide; earlier this year, for instance, Republicans in the Florida legislature passed a bill at DeSantis’s behest that allows him to appoint his own election police force.
Those police have been used to intimidate voters who have been convicted of felonies — even if they are still eligible to vote — as a way to scare away formerly incarcerated people from attempting to vote or register to vote.
Earlier this year, DeSantis also ousted an elected official from office for criticizing him, appointing a far right ally in his place. The decision is being challenged in court, but even if it’s overturned, the move is a show of DeSantis’s willingness to exercise his power in increasingly undemocratic ways to chill dissent in his state.
Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. and U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman filed a lawsuit in federal court on Monday challenging a court ruling last week that has resulted in thousands of mail-in ballots being discounted.
Last week, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in a split decision that mail-in ballots with the wrong date on the mailing envelope should be set aside and not included in vote counts. People who vote by mail in Pennsylvania are required to sign and date the outer envelope containing their ballot.
The ruling was the result of a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee, the Republican Congressional Committee and the Republican Party of Pennsylvania, as part of a deluge of election-related lawsuits that Republicans have filed to challenge mail-in voting.
Fetterman and Democrats are suing to get the ballots counted, arguing that the decision goes against the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits election officials from denying voting access based on an error on a document that is “not material” in determining a person’s voting eligibility. The lawsuit also says that not counting the ballots violates the First and 14th Amendments.
The requirement to date the envelope “serves no legitimate purpose,” the lawsuit reads, saying that ballots received before the deadline are “definitionally timely.”
“The Date Instruction imposes unnecessary hurdles that eligible Pennsylvanians must clear to exercise their most fundamental right, resulting in otherwise valid votes being arbitrarily rejected without any reciprocal benefit to the Commonwealth,” Fetterman attorneys and the Democrats wrote. “It furthers no governmental interest, and, consequently, the burden it imposes on voters — including Plaintiffs — violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”
It’s unclear how many ballots have been set aside by election officials. But polls show that the race — between Democratic candidate Fetterman and Republican Mehmet Oz — is incredibly close, and the mail-in ballots could determine the result of the election.
“As we fight this latest Republican attack on Americans’ democratic rights, Pennsylvanians should check their ballot status to ensure their vote is counted,” Fetterman and the Democrats said in a joint statement about the suit. “We are committed to using every tool at our disposal to protect Pennsylvanians’ constitutional right to participate in this election, including defeating the GOP in court.”
The Republicans’ lawsuit sent Pennsylvania voters scrambling to ensure that their ballots were cast. Voters were informed that their ballots were invalidated on Monday — just one day before Election Day. One voter told The Washington Post that she was in Colorado when she found out and decided to fly back home at her own expense in order to cast a ballot.
Many went to Philadelphia City Hall, where they were met by a two-hour line as voters eagerly waited to cast new votes. Some voters reported that they were still waiting in line when City Hall closed and police told the remaining people in line to leave.
Election volunteers said others who had cast mail-in ballots would simply be unable to cast a ballot due to the Republicans’ lawsuit because they have a disability or didn’t have transportation. And in many parts of Pennsylvania, counties don’t require officials to notify voters when their ballots are deemed invalid, meaning that many voters may never know that their votes weren’t counted if the state Supreme Court ruling stands.
Leola Scott recently decided to become a more active citizen. The 55-year-old resident of Dyersburg, Tennessee, was driven to action after her son was stabbed to death and nobody was charged.
In August, Scott tried to register to vote. That’s when she learned she’s not allowed to cast a ballot because she was convicted of nonviolent felonies nearly 20 years ago.
One in five Black Tennesseans are like Scott: barred from voting because of a prior felony conviction. Indeed, Tennessee appears to disenfranchise a far higher proportion of its Black residents — 21% — than any other state.
The figure comes from a new analysis by the nonprofit advocacy group The Sentencing Project, which found that Mississippi ranks a distant second, just under 16% of its Black voting-eligible population. Tennessee also has the highest rate of disenfranchisement among its Latino community — just over 8%.
While states around the country have moved toward giving people convicted of felonies a chance to vote again, Tennessee has gone in the other direction. Over the past two decades, the state has made it more difficult for residents to get their right to vote back. In particular, lawmakers have added requirements that residents first pay any court costs and restitution and that they be current on child support.
Tennessee is now the only state in the country that requires those convicted of felonies be up to date on child support payments before they can vote again.
The state makes little data available about who has lost the right to vote and why. Residents who may qualify to vote again first have to navigate a confusing, opaque bureaucracy.
Scott says she paid off her court costs years ago. But when she brought a voting rights restoration form to the county clerk to affirm that she had paid, the clerk told her she still had an outstanding balance of $2,390.
“It was like the air was knocked out of me,” she said. “I did everything that I was supposed to do. When I got in trouble, I owned it. I paid my debt to society. I took pride in paying off all that.”
Scott does not have receipts to verify her payments because she made them so long ago, she said. And there is no pathway for her to fight what she believes is a clerical error.
She is now a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the Tennessee NAACP challenging the state’s voting rights restoration process. In court documents, the state denied allegations that the restoration process is inaccessible.
Overall, according to The Sentencing Project, about 470,000 residents of Tennessee are barred from voting. Roughly 80% have already completed their sentence but are disenfranchised because they have a permanently disqualifying conviction — such as murder or rape — or because they owe court costs or child support or have gotten lost in the system trying to get their vote back.
Over the past two years, about 2,000 Tennesseans have successfully appealed to have their voting rights restored.
Those convicted after 1981 must get a Certification of Restoration of Voting Rights form signed by a probation or parole officer or another incarcerating authority for each conviction. The form then goes to a court clerk, who certifies that the person owes no court costs. Then it is returned to the local election commission, which then sends it to the State Election Commission for final approval. (Rules on voting restoration were revised multiple times, so older convictions are subject to different rules.)
Republican Cameron Sexton, speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, said people convicted of felonies should have to pay court costs and child support before voting.
“If someone’s not paying or behind on their child support payment, that’s an issue,” he told ProPublica. “That’s an issue for that child, that’s an issue for that family, not having the things that they agreed to in court to help them for that child.”
When asked about Tennessee being the only state to require that child support payments be up to date before voting rights can be restored, Sexton said, “Maybe Tennessee is doing it correctly and the others are not.”
A 2019 report from the Tennessee Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that the requirements for repayment have been especially burdensome to women, the poor and communities of color. The report also noted that Tennessee has increasingly levied court charges “as a means for funding the State’s courts and criminal justice system.”
Georgia previously required payment of restitution and fines in order to restore voting rights. But in 2020, the office of Georgia’s secretary of state clarified that anyone who has completed their sentence may vote, even if they owe court costs or other debts that were not incurred as part of their sentence.
Disenfranchisement does not solely impact the lives of individual voters — it can have consequences for elections, too. This is particularly true for multiracial communities in Tennessee, according to Sekou Franklin, a political science professor at Middle Tennessee State University. He pointed to county-level races that have been decided by a few dozen votes.
“There are real votes that are lost that can shape elections,” Franklin said.
Black Tennesseans, even those who were not enslaved, have been disenfranchised for centuries. In 1835, the new state constitution took away the right to vote from free Black men, who had been able to vote under the previous constitution. It also stipulated that anyone convicted of an “infamous” crime — a list that included robbery, bigamy and horse stealing — would lose their voting rights, often permanently.
The civil rights laws of the 1960s opened up voting again for Tennesseans. But soon lawmakers began adding back in provisions that disenfranchised people convicted of felonies. Legislators updated the statute every few years, adding to the list of crimes that permanently disqualify someone from voting. The result is a convoluted list of eligibility criteria for voting rights restoration that depend on what a person was convicted of and when the conviction took place.
The reality of disenfranchisement in Tennessee received some national attention recently around the case of a Memphis woman, Pamela Moses. Three years ago, she got her probation officer’s signoff to vote again. The next day, the Tennessee Department of Correction asserted the officer had made an error. Prosecutors then charged Moses with lying on an election document. She was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison, but a judge later threw out the conviction.
Tennessee lawmakers from both parties have tried, unsuccessfully, to make it easier for residents to get their vote back.
In 2019, two Republican lawmakers sponsored a bill that would have automatically restored voting rights to people upon completion of their sentence. It was supported by a bipartisan coalition of civil rights advocates, including the libertarian group Americans for Prosperity and the Tennessee American Civil Liberties Union. But it never gained traction among legislators.
In 2021, two Democrats sponsored another bill that would have granted automatic vote restoration, but that bill also died. The sponsors said that the Republican supermajority in Tennessee’s legislature simply doesn’t have an appetite to take it on.
“We said we wanted to do criminal justice reform, but all we’ve done is really nibbled around the edges,” state Sen. Brenda Gilmore told ProPublica, referring to a bill she co-sponsored with a fellow Democrat.
Dawn Harrington, the founder of Free Hearts, an organization that supports formerly incarcerated women, also advocated for the 2021 bill.
On a trip to New York City in 2008, Harrington carried a gun that was licensed in Tennessee. Because New York does not recognize permits from other states, she was convicted of a gun possession charge.
After serving a yearlong sentence on Rikers Island, she returned to Tennessee and set out to have her rights restored. Tennessee requires the incarcerating agency to sign the rights restoration form, but Harrington struggled to find someone in New York willing to sign it. After nine years, her rights were finally restored in 2020.
“I don’t know if you know the show ‘The Wiz,’ but I literally eased on down the road,” Harrington said about having her voting rights restored. “I danced. I was so happy I cried. I was feeling all the emotions. You never know how much something means to you until it’s taken away.”
Maj. Gamaliel Turner was more than upset. Assigned by the Pentagon to the Naval base at Port Hueneme, California, Turner had called his hometown registrar in Columbus, Georgia, to find out about his missing absentee ballot.
The soldier’s ballot wasn’t missing. They hadn’t sent the ballot because, he was told, “Mr. Turner, you have been challenged.”
Challenged? Under a new law — SB 202 — signed by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp last year, self-appointed vigilante vote fraud hunters have, for the first time, the right to challenge an unlimited number of other voters: “There shall not be a limit on the number of persons whose qualifications such elector [voter] may challenge.”
Unlimited means unlimited. The man who challenged Turner successfully blocked 4,000 other voters in Columbus. So far, the 159 counties in Georgia have sent the Palast Investigative Fund a breathtaking 149,168 challenges filed against voters.
Our investigators contacted several hundred of these accused voters and they are, overwhelmingly, like Major Turner, Black or young.
And in fact, despite the governor’s hoo-ha that SB202 prevents voter fraud, not a single one of these hundreds of thousands of allegedly fraudulent voters has been charged, let alone convicted, of the crime of attempting to vote illegally.
Gamaliel Turner, challenged voter, at Port Hueneme naval air station in California.Zach D. Roberts for Palast Investigative Fund
Who Challenged Maj. Gamaliel Turner?
The challenge against Major Turner was issued by Alton Russell, the chairman of the Republican Party of Columbus, Georgia, and a close ally of Governor Kemp on the party’s state committee. Russell likes to dress up like, well, a vigilante, with pearl-handled six-gun, cowboy hat, boots — the whole get-up. Russell impersonates his hero, Doc Holliday, the gunman from the OK Corral shoot out. The gun, he assured us, is loaded.
“My name is Alton Russell and I’m the Georgia Tale Teller,” he says. “And I’m a toilet paper salesman is the way I make my living. Wiping up!”
Governor Kemp’s vigilante voter law does provide targeted voters a way to challenge the challenge. The voter can request a court-like hearing at their county registrar’s office where they can prove their citizenship and address. They are guilty until they prove themselves innocent of what is, after all, a felony crime.
Turner, stationed in California, said he replied to the Muscogee County (Columbus) bureaucrat, “So you’re telling me, 2600 miles away… that if I want to vote that all I have to do is show up and prove that as an American citizen that I have the right to vote? AGAIN? You talk to fools like that! I’m not a fool!”
GOP Chairman Russell picked on the wrong voter. Turner retained high-powered lawyers who went through a lengthy court process to get his ballot counted, an extraordinary effort, and in Major Turner’s view, a very expensive “poll tax,” the fee charged to Black voters in the era of Jim Crow segregation.
Turner considers the blockade to his vote a new version of Jim Crow. “I know, because I was there,” he says. Indeed, he was there. His father, the Rev. Harold Turner, was assistant pastor to Reverend Abernathy and a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference alongside Abernathy and Martin Luther King Jr.
Alton Russell, Republican Party chairman for Columbus, Georgia, “The Georgia Tale-Teller,” performs as vigilante Doc Holliday. Russell challenged 4,000 voters in his county.Zach D. Roberts for Palast Investigative Fund
Confronting Alton Russell
Alton Russell was in for a surprise. He had agreed to perform his Doc Holliday vigilante schtick at a large home near Fort Benning, Georgia. The vigilante did not recognize, nor did he seem to know, that he was in Major Turner’s house, the very home Russell claimed the Major did not live in.
Russell told us how Doc Holliday was said to have shot some “African American boys” in cold blood. (We checked: The Black “boys” were Union soldiers of the post-war occupation.)
Then we introduced Russell to his host, Major Turner.
The Major explained to Russell how painful it was for a Black man to once again have to prove that he is a citizen even while he’s serving his nation. Russell stammered but refused to apologize for the expense — and heartache — he imposed on the Major even after Russell admitted he did not contact Turner to check on the truth of Russell’s accusation.
Alton Russell wasn’t a lone ranger. I met with another vigilante, Pam Reardon, who was running for Vice Chair of the state Republican Party. Reardon personally challenged an astounding 32,000 voters. She admitted she never met a single one nor called any. She defended herself by saying, “I did not speak to the 32,000 people.” True, but she did challenge their right to vote.
I showed Reardon a picture of a Black neighbor of hers whom she did not recognize but whose vote she challenged. In response Reardon told me to get out — in language too salty to print here. I didn’t argue because her husband lunged for me — and she had a shotgun ready at the door.
Rev. Harold Turner and son, Maj. Gamaliel Turner, at the reverend’s home in Atlanta.Zach D. Roberts for Palast Investigative Fund
Voter Hit Lists
So where did these Republican challengers — and so far, they’re all Republicans — get this list of “fraudulent” Georgia voters? Reardon’s and Russell’s hit lists were created by True the Vote, the Texas organization that put out a laughable but incredibly influential film, 2000 Mules, which claims hundreds of Black Georgians cast thousands of illegal votes.
True the Vote obtained their lists, they claim, at least in part from the National Change of Address (NCOA) registry, which is publicly available from the U.S. Postal Service. Most states use the NCOA to purge their voter rolls of people who’ve moved. But the states also, at least in theory, check to see if someone simply put in a change of address for temporary purposes, like the major, a soldier on assignment. In fact, the State of Georgia had already purged those who moved from Georgia. So True the Vote challenges are aimed at people that the state approved and left on the rolls.
True the Vote’s leaders are currently in prison in Texas for contempt of court — refusing to reveal their supposed source that supports their claims of a massive criminal voting ring.
Notably, True the Vote’s website includes praise for the vigilante attacks from Georgia’s chief voting official, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. In a December 18, 2020, news item on the site, entitled “True the Vote partners with Georgians in every county to preemptively challenge 364,541 potentially ineligible voters,” Raffensperger is quoted as saying:
“Though federal law restricts our ability to update our voter registration lists, the Elector Challenge is a vehicle under our law to ensure voter integrity.”
Raffensperger’s statement seems to encourage vigilantes to do what federal law prohibits the state itself from doing.
Raffensperger is running for reelection against Democratic State Rep. Bee Nguyen. “What we are seeing is these vigilantes who are conspiracy theorists and are far right and they are challenging the eligibility of Georgians en masse.” Nguyen told Palast Fund reporter Zach D. Roberts that SB202 has created a “workaround” to avoid federal law which prohibits removing voters from registration within 90 days of an election.
To “work around” federal law may itself be a crime. Collusion by a state with a private party to deprive citizens of color of the vote violates Section 1983 of the US Code. Barbara Arnwine of the Transformative Justice Coalition, who taught at Columbia Law School, and attorney Gerald Griggs, president of the state NAACP, say this vigilante attack appears to violate several federal laws, including the Civil Rights Act, the National Voter Registration Act and even the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.
Lawsuits are already flying, but Brian Kemp is unmoved. Courts are unlikely to act before Kemp’s Tuesday gubernatorial rematch with Stacey Abrams.
The Palast Fund has created a website, SaveMyVote2022.org, where Georgians may go to see if their name is on a challenge list. But warning: according to University of Georgia law professor emeritus Al Pearson, even if you aren’t on the list now, you could be challenged on Election Day — or the day after.
In Atlanta, Major Turner introduced me to his 95-year-old father, holding Rev. Turner’s hand at the very dining room table where the modern voting rights movement was born. The major was more than upset that, decades after the Voting Rights Act, he still has to fight for his ballot. “The law says we have the vote. But no one ever said you have to count the vote. Neither I nor any of my people have the assurance that our vote was actually counted.”
Note: Through Election Day, you can see Greg Palast’s film, Vigilante: Georgia’s Vote Suppression Hitman, at VigilanteMovie.com. Narrated by Rosario Dawson and introduced by Martin Sheen.
Millions of Americans are facing voter suppression during this election season, with consequences ranging from disenfranchisement to prison time. New and old tactics to make it harder to vote disproportionately target many groups, including people with felony convictions as well as Black, Latino, Native American and working-class communities.
On top of the pre-existing barriers to voting, the 2022 election cycle has seen a number of new laws and tactics designed to make it more difficult to vote. According to The Guardian, “the proliferation of election crime legislation represents the most intense voter suppression threat in decades and comes in direct response to former president Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was fraudulent.”
Forty-two state legislatures have considered at least 130 bills collectively that would make law enforcement more involved in the voting process, and 28 have passed. One law in Utah stipulates that election officials must check if voters vote twice and tell police or prosecutors about suspected voter fraud.
Voting restrictions disproportionately affect Black and Latino communities. Strict voter ID laws, long wait times, difficulty voting by mail and polling place closures can make it difficult to vote. A study published in the academic journal Politics, Groups, and Identitiesfound that between 2012 and 2016, “the gap in turnout between more racially diverse and less racially diverse counties grew more” in states that enacted photo ID laws.
Historically, Black and Indigenous voters have faced many of the same obstacles. In Arizona, a proposition would eliminate the possibility of voting without a photo ID. Under current law, a person can provide two forms of identification that do not have photos. This disproportionately affects Indigenous voters, who often use tribal ID cards to vote, which sometimes do not have photos. The proposition would also add stricter requirements for mail-in voting, such as demands for date of birth and voter identification number.
There are only four offices where a person can get an ID in Navajo Nation, which is over 27,000 square miles — greater than the size of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont combined. Many people living there do not have access to a vehicle. Older Indigenous voters may not even know their government birthday, or can have conflicting information from different government agencies, creating yet another barrier to receiving identification.
Arizona Democratic Party Deputy Political Director Rachel Hood toldTheArizona Republic that the proposition “places an undue burden on voters, especially those who already have a hard time voting. For Native voters, anything that requires address-displaying forms of ID are harder to access because they typically do not live in areas with traditional street addresses.”
Last month in Montana, a state court overturned three laws that would have targeted the ability for Native Americans to vote. The laws would have prevented ballot collectors from being paid, prevented people from registering on the same day that they vote and challenged use of a student ID.
In 1948, Native Americans in Arizona won the right to vote when the state Supreme Court overturned a case where Native Americans had sued for their rights but lost. Other states recognized Native Americans’ voting rights in the years after. In 1965, the Voting Rights Act guaranteed all Americans accessibility to vote and banned discrimination against people who did not speak English. In the 1970s, the U.S. outlawed literacy tests for Native Americans that discouraged non-English speakers.
The working class faces obstacles to voting as well. Many states mandate paid time off to vote, but they may not allow enough time to wait in line. Twenty-one states do not mandate any time off from work to vote, making it difficult to reach the polls. In 2020, the Brennan Center for Justice found that voters of color self-reported longer wait times compared to white voters. Georgia even banned handing out food and water to voters waiting in line. Absentee voting is a possibility, but voters still face many challenges.
People with felony convictions, who are disproportionately Black men, face significant obstacles to voting. According to the decarceration advocacy group the Sentencing Project, approximately 4.6 million people are barred from voting due to prior convictions; this translates to 1 out of every 50 American adults.
In Washington, D.C., Maine, and Vermont, incarcerated people and those with a felony conviction are not stripped of the right to vote. In addition, people who have served their sentence do often regain the right to vote. However, many are not made aware of this change, and states frequently require people to pay all their court fees before they are eligible to vote.
Crucially, an error can send someone back to prison. In August, 19 people were arrested in Florida for alleged voter fraud. At least 13 were Black, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Many of the people arrested had received confusing or bad information about their eligibility to vote.
“They’re going to pay the price,” said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis during a press conference. The individuals were identified by DeSantis’s new Office of Election Crimes and Security.
Brad Ashwell, the Florida director for the nonprofit group All Voting is Local, told the Marshall Project: “These actions are really about striking fear in a voter’s minds and intimidating them.”
In 2021, Oregon began counting incarcerated people where they are incarcerated instead of where they lived previously, even though people in prison cannot vote. This gave more power to many majority-white districts where prisons are located.
Legislation to allow incarcerated people to vote will be reintroduced in Oregon, according to Zach Winston, director of policy and outreach at the Oregon Justice Resource Center. This would also make it easier for people who are incarcerated while awaiting trial to vote.
“When you start picking and choosing who can and can’t vote, you create all sorts of problems,” Winston told the Center for Public Integrity. “If we can re-enfranchise those in prison, we can build out some structure for corrections as a whole.”
In addition to dealing with law enforcement, voters may encounter illegal vigilante intimidation. On November 1, a federal judge issued a restraining order against Clean Elections USA, a right-wing voter-intimidation group, barring them from “visibly wear[ing] body armor,” carrying weapons openly or yelling at voters. The group had been stationed at ballot drop boxes in Arizona, taking photos of voters. Influenced by former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, the group has also been banned from making inaccurate claims about voting rules in the future.
In some cases, vigilantism has been legalized and encouraged by state governments. In Georgia, conservatives have taken advantage of a 2021 law that allows voters to challenge other people’s voter registrations in the state. According to the voter rights group New Georgia Project, more than 64,000 registrations have been challenged and at least 1,800 people have had their registrations taken away since the law was passed.
“The intensity around election administration has not subsided since 2020,” Jonathan Diaz, senior legal counsel for voting rights at the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center, toldCNN. “It’s not just voters, but state and local election administrators are really feeling the pressure from these organized outside groups who have organized these challenges or … taken it on themselves to monitor drop boxes.”
As armed vigilantes have taken it upon themselves to allegedly intimidate voters at ballot drop off locations across several states, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) is warning that the right wing in the U.S. is creating an “environment of fascism” — and that the only way to combat it is to build a strong movement to defend democracy.
“There is absolutely no doubt that the data shows that the vast majority of incidents of domestic terror come from white nationalism, and that we are really truly facing an environment of fascism in the United States of America,” she said. “This type of intimidation at the polls brings us to Jim Crow. It brings us back and harkens back to a very unique form of American apartheid that is not that long past ago.”
“We have never fully healed from [Jim Crow] and those wounds threaten to rip right back open if we do not strongly defend democracy,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Federal officials have warned about the heightened potential for violence and threats in the days surrounding the upcoming elections. On Friday, DHS, FBI, U.S. Capitol Police and the National Counterterrorism Center released a report warning that “perceptions of election-related fraud and dissatisfaction with electoral outcomes likely will result in heightened threats of violence against a broad range of targets.”
As early voting rolled out last week, right-wing groups began watching polls and ballot boxes. The most widely publicized incident took place in Arizona, where heavily armed vigilantes allegedly threatened voters at drop boxes, though voter intimidation incidents and threats have also surfaced in states like Pennsylvania and Oregon.
The watchers are seemingly motivated by debunked right-wing conspiracy theories that took hold on internet forums that there are people stuffing ballot boxes for Democrats — claims that are based on fabricated evidence. They are also motivated by people like Donald Trump and the Republican Party, who have been waging a years-long campaign to throw doubt into the election process altogether.
Later in the interview, Ocasio-Cortez discussed how Republicans and conservatives have presented a false dichotomy in their political messaging, which claims that voters have to choose between advancing social issues or having a strong economy and democracy.
“This idea that it’s either or is very dangerous,” she said. “The idea that emphasizing social equity is somehow a detriment to our democracy is playing into the hands of the folks who don’t want us to talk about either.”
This week, a group of “election monitors” in Arizona, called Clean Elections USA, garnered national headlines by sending out armed vigilantes in tactical gear to stand watch over — and film — ballot drop boxes in a number of locations around Maricopa County, Arizona. By week’s end, six cases of intimidation had been identified. The images were shocking, showing heavily armed, camera-wielding men stalking voters at drop boxes. The images wouldn’t have been out of place in Ukraine’s Donbas region, where gun-wielding Russian soldiers and paramilitaries recently watched over voters in the supposedly free and fair “referendums” on whether to join the Russian Federation. And, of course, the images would have been familiar to the victims of KKK violence, as well as those who endured White Citizens Council efforts to exclude non-whites from the voting process, in the post-Civil War and Jim Crow years.
But while Arizona represents a frontline site of out-and-out voter intimidation, it is by no means the only locale grappling with this tactic as election deniers, still nursing their Trump-fueled grievances from 2020, look to make their mark on the 2022 election process.
Last week, a far right group in Colorado called FEC United sent out an email urging supporters to hold “ballot box parties” that would involve groups of seven or more individuals congregating around drop boxes and directing their car headlights at the voting place. In response, the Colorado secretary of state felt compelled to issue a statement warning that intimidation or harassment of voters would not be tolerated.
In Oregon, reports also surfaced this week of plans by groups to “watch” drop boxes, leading local elections officials to issue statements asserting that they would work to protect the right to vote free of intimidation. So, too, in Washington State, a group called the Election Integrity Committee seeded plans over the summer to monitor drop boxes around King County, home to Seattle. And in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, last spring, the conservative local district attorney roused the wrath of his state’s election officials and the ACLU by ordering his detectives to monitor ballot drop box sites during the primary elections.
The growing rash of voter intimidation projects, vaguely masquerading as attempts to ensure the “integrity” of elections, is part of a larger GOP effort — the modern heir of violent voter suppression methods from decades past — to sow chaos and discord around the voting process.
A majority of GOP candidates running for state and national office in 2022 are, to one degree or another, 2020 election deniers. Indeed, a recent tabulation by the Washington Post found 291 election deniers running for office this election cycle. Meanwhile, recordings of conversations between GOP operatives and local right-wing activists from earlier this year indicate a coordinated effort to systematically challenge votes in Democratic-leaning precincts in Michigan and other key battleground states.
The New York Times reports that right-wing activists around the country are gearing up to challenge elections officials — demanding access to voting machines, and trying to follow officials into secure areas during vote counts.
It’s hardly a stretch to say that intimidating voters and attempting to snarl up both the voting and the vote count processes are now standard operating procedures for much of the GOP. In Florida, Governor DeSantis even went so far as to create an Office of Election Crimes and Security police force, which seems to be little more than a uniformed intimidation mob, and which recently made high-profile arrests, targeting people with prior felony convictions who had registered to vote despite being excluded, by the category of their crime from the vote-restoration process passed by Florida residents in a citizens’ initiative a few years back. Not surprisingly, the police disproportionately targeted Black voters. Given how much confusion there is around this law, it’s by no means clear that any of these men and women knew they could not register to vote — yet they are facing years in prison as a result.
The GOP’s doubling down on making it harder to vote and to count votes is a huge problem. Elections only work to the extent that all parties buy in to the process; that they agree to accept the framework; and that they abide by the results. Pry open the pandora’s box of challenging each and every vote that doesn’t go one’s way, and that process starts to corrode remarkably quickly.
In early 2021, as Congress prepared to certify the Electoral College results, Trump pled with elections officials in Georgia to carry him over the election-winning line, arguing that “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.” A few days later, on January 6, he ginned up an insurrectionary mob by doubling down on his Big Lie that if only the votes had been counted correctly he would have won.
Two years later, the toxic consequences of these utterly undemocratic actions are metastasizing. In state after state, right-wing groups are working to intimidate either voters or elections officials. Earlier this year, the Brennan Center polled local election workers. It found that one in six had been threatened because of their work, 77 percent felt that threats had increased in recent years, and more than half reported feeling afraid for the safety of their colleagues. One in five election workers said that they planned to quit their jobs before the next presidential election.
When they leave, elections will be that much harder to conduct fairly; and into that void will likely ride deeply partisan figures, concerned far more with securing victory for their side than with keeping the complex machinery of democratic governance well oiled.
Arizona may, in that regard, be a harbinger of what is to come. In July, two elections officials in Yavapai County quit after months of threats from Trump supporters. In conservative parts of the state, local Oath Keepers chapters claim to be coordinating with sheriffs’ offices to monitor drop boxes in the run-up to the election. (The sheriffs’ departments have not confirmed such coordination is occurring.) The Arizona legislature is rife with Trumpists proposing outlandish “reforms” such as allowing state politicians to select their own electors over the will of the people. And the top three GOP candidates for state office — Kari Lake, the gubernatorial candidate; Abe Hamadeh, running for attorney general; and Mark Finchem, the extremist candidate for secretary of state — are all avowed election deniers.
With such a stew of conspiracy theories and extremism, it’s no surprise that groups are now donning tactical gear and weapons and heading off to the front lines to defend what they see as the American way of life by intimidating people attempting to cast their ballots and those whose job it is to count those ballots. Trump and his acolytes have greenlighted such vigilantism. It’s simply the latest chapter in their ongoing assault on the support pillars of the American democratic system.
In August 2020, Guillermina Fuentes was trying to get out the vote in her small Arizona community. Outside a polling place, she handed a few absentee ballots to another volunteer to drop off. A conservative activist secretly filmed her and reported her to local authorities. In the eyes of the law, she’d just committed a felony.
Dropping off someone else’s mail-in ballot, known as ballot collecting, became a crime in Arizona in 2016, and Fuentes would become the first person prosecuted for it. Reveal reporter Ese Olumhense travels to San Luis to report on Fuentes’ case and finds she has gone from being a well-known local politician in her community to the face of right-wing campaigns against voter fraud.
Fuentes’ arrest and prosecution show the beginnings of an alarming trend shaping the future of how elections are surveilled and policed. Olumhense and Reveal’s Melissa Lewis built a database to track all election-crimes-related bills introduced in the country since the 2020 election. They found a national push to punish what is considered in many states to be typical voting practices. Fueled in part by politicians who falsely claim voter fraud stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump, bills are being introduced that create new election crime investigation agencies, establish criminal penalties for election offenses or empower law enforcement officials to investigate such crimes.
While there was no proof of anything resembling widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, there is one way in which elections are rigged: gerrymandering. Mother Jones senior reporter Ari Berman delves into how Republicans redrew voting maps in Wisconsin, helping them cement control of the state Legislature. Republicans’ strong hold on power has allowed them to keep in place deeply unpopular laws like an abortion ban that dates back to 1849. But this isn’t about just state politics: It’s also about the next election for president in 2024.
Since the 2020 election, lawmakers in all but eight states have attempted to pass laws that would create new election investigation agencies, establish criminal penalties for election offenses or further empower law enforcement officials to investigate such crimes, according to an analysis by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.
The proliferation of election crime legislation represents the most intense voter suppression threat in decades and comes in direct response to former President Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was fraudulent.
In the last two years, at least 130 bills have been introduced across 42 states that would increase the involvement of law enforcement in the voting process, the analysis shows. Of those bills, 28 have passed in 20 states.
Some of these efforts have grabbed attention individually, like Georgia’s law making it a crime to hand out food or drinks – even water – to voters waiting in line or Florida’s creation of an entirely new law enforcement agency to police elections, the Office of Election Crimes and Security, which has already been criticized for bringing flimsy prosecutions.
Reveal’s first-of-its-kind analysis shows those bills were part of a larger movement, mostly led by Republican state lawmakers and fueled by conspiracy theories. While some of those efforts have so far failed, they show no sign of relenting, as the myth of voter fraud has become a central GOP platform.
Three trends from the analysis stand out:
In 14 states, lawmakers have tried to empower law enforcement officials, such as prosecutors and police officers, to investigate suspected election crimes, arming them with new powers and requiring them to more aggressively pursue alleged offenses. In Tennessee, for example, Republican lawmakers in both legislative chambers filedbills that would have required at least 20% of investigators in the state Bureau of Investigation’s Criminal Investigation Division to be designated as election crime specialists, along with the same share of prosecutors in every district attorney’s office. While that effort didn’t succeed, others did. That includes Georgia laws giving a statewide investigative agency new subpoena powers and creating a new hotline for the attorney general to receive voter fraud complaints; a New Hampshire law requiring the state attorney general to investigate alleged misconduct by election officials, with power to revoke those officials’ voting rights; and a Utah law requiring election officials to look for possible cases of a person voting more than once, and to report any suspected fraud to police or prosecutors.
Republican lawmakers have focused in particular on ballot collecting, a practice at the heart of false claims of fraud in the 2020 election. They’ve been inspired by Trump and the conspiracy theory film “2000 Mules,” with both falsely claiming that leftist groups rigged the 2020 election by exploiting what they call “ballot harvesting.” Ballot collecting, long legal in many states, allows a person or group to return other voters’ absentee ballots. Nineteen states introduced bills to criminalize it after the 2020 election, and six passed them. Iowa, for example, has made it a crime punishable by up to one year of imprisonment to turn in an absentee ballot for someone else, with a few exceptions.
In 12 states, lawmakers sought to increase the penalties for existing election crimes, changing the classification of some to felonies from misdemeanors. This could mean the difference, in some cases, between charges punishable by fines and probation versus prison time or loss of your voting rights. In April 2021, South Carolina lawmakers introduced a bill that would sharply increase penalties for existing election crimes, including fraudulently voting or registering to vote. “Upon conviction,” the bill read, violators “must be imprisoned not less than thirty years without the possibility of parole.” The bill never gained traction, but in May, lawmakers succeeded in changing those and other voting offenses from misdemeanors to felonies, punishable by up to five years of imprisonment. It is one of five states that passed such laws.
The bills represent the latest chapter in the long history of U.S. voter suppression. Throughout the Jim Crow era, Black Americans encountered poll taxes, literacy tests, state violence and intimidation if they wanted to vote. In the last decade, as the Voting Rights Act has been weakened, the suppression has appeared in more subtle ways as lawmakers have instituted voter ID requirements and closed polling places. Research shows these things make it more difficult for voters of color – particularly Black, Latino and Indigenous Americans – to cast a ballot.
Leslie Proll, senior director of voting rights at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said the nascent criminalization push is more intense than even the Jim Crow era.
“This criminalization of the vote is a very concerning new form of suppression that certainly has roots in history,” Proll said. “But we’ve not seen it in the way that we’re seeing it now.”
The wave of legislation is being propelled by a phantom problem: Study after study has shown that there is no widespread voter fraud, and Republican-led lawsuits and audits have failed to prove the claim that the 2020 election was stolen.
However, with the midterms approaching, conservative groups, militias and sympathetic law enforcement officials are ramping up plans to surveil voters. Those plans, combined with the new laws and enforcement powers, are setting the stage for a prosecutorial campaign this Election Day and beyond, one that doesn’t root out widespread fraud but instead punishes individuals for mistakes or small infractions.
The criminalization push could also deter people from voting at all.
“They’re tapping into an ancestral fear of the whole process,” said Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, a Georgia-based election law attorney at Lawrence & Bundy.
Reveal used records from LegiScan, which catalogs virtually every bill introduced by state-level lawmakers in all 50 states, to identify and classify every proposal related to election crimes following the 2020 election.
At least 65% of the proposed bills were introduced by Republicans or Republican-majority committees. When Democrats have advanced legislation, it has often criminalized election interference, in response to reports of harassment and threats against voters and poll workers.
In many cases, the proponents of the harshest laws are also purveyors of the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers (R-Flagstaff) speaks at a January rally for former President Donald Trump in Florence, Ariz. Credit: Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press
In Arizona, state Sen. Wendy Rogers introduced a bill this year to create a multimillion-dollar agency devoted to investigating election fraud. The Arizona attorney general’s office already has an election integrity unit that does just that.
Speaking to a crowd last year about the 2020 election, Rogers was clear about her goal.
“I want to see arrests,” she told a cheering audience. “I want to see perp walks.”
Attorney general candidate Abe Hamadeh has said he will “prosecute the crimes of the rigged 2020 election.” That’s despite a GOP-led audit of the 2020 results in Arizona’s largest county that found no evidence of fraud. Mark Finchem, the Republican candidate for secretary of state, has encouraged surveillance outside ballot drop boxes – and armed men have already been spotted monitoring the boxes at night.
In their zeal to pursue election crimes, Arizona officials have often been ahead of the curve.
The state outlawed ballot collection back in 2016. Earlier this year, lawmakers there considered a bill targeting election workers. It would increase penalties for election officials who send an unsolicited absentee ballot – boosting the potential prison time from two years to 10.
The Post-2020 Push to Crack Down on Voting
In Wisconsin, the Republican-led Legislature got to work almost immediately after the 2020 election, as Trump and his surrogates obsessed over absentee ballots being a vector for voter fraud.
In March 2021, a group of state senators introduced a bill that would have made it a felony to return another voter’s absentee ballot, with limited exceptions for relatives and guardians. State Sen. Duey Stroebel, the author of the bill, described it as an effort to “safeguard the return of another person’s absentee ballot.”
That summer, legislators sent that and other election-related bills to Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, who vetoed it. “This bill adds no additional security or fraud prevention beyond what our state laws already provide,” he said. “One can easily imagine the ways that the measures proposed in this bill would result in voters being deprived of their fundamental right to vote.”
But the state’s Republicans didn’t relent. Early this year, they introduced another wave of bills that would make it harder to vote.
Among them was legislation that would make it a felony for nursing home employees to force residents to vote or prevent them from voting. The bill was a response to a conspiracy theory about Trump’s 2020 loss in the Badger State: that pandemic-era changes to voting at nursing homes had led to widespread fraud.
Evers is now locked in a tight reelection race against Tim Michels, who is endorsed by Trump and as governor would be in a position to enact the GOP’s legislative priorities ahead of the 2024 election. Meanwhile, because of redistricting in Wisconsin, Republicans could gain a supermajority Nov. 8. That would give them the ability to override Evers’ veto even if he wins reelection.
While Wisconsin presents a heightened example of the emerging threats to democracy, Reveal’s analysis shows attempts to criminalize voting have been wide reaching across the country.
For example:
Lawmakers in Minnesota’s divided Legislature have considered a half-dozen election crimes proposals over the last two years, many of them introduced more than once. A Republican-sponsored proposal would have given county attorneys the power to investigate alleged “suspicious activity in a voter registration application.” The legislation did not define suspicious activity, but it would have required a county attorney to present charges to a grand jury – or risk losing their office. The state’s Republicans have also tried to criminalize ballot collection by making it a felony to fail to “immediately” return another person’s ballot. Those bills, introduced in 2021, didn’t make it very far, but lawmakers this year made efforts to create different felonies, such as pressuring someone to vote a certain way, which was previously a misdemeanor. Democrat-led bills included efforts to make it a felony to spread lies that would deter another person from voting or to intimidate an election worker.
In April, Georgia’s Republican lawmakers passed a bill that gives the state’s Bureau of Investigation subpoena powers over select election crimes. Civil rights groups such as the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund criticized the law, saying, “We know that excessive law enforcement presence at the polls or involvement in elections generally can be intimidating to voters, and this is especially true in Black communities that have felt the brunt of well-documented abuse.” That came about a year after lawmakers there made it a crime to offer food or drinks to someone standing in line to vote. The Georgia House of Representatives also passed a bill that would have made it a felony to watch someone vote, but it did not make it through the Senate.
In January, Alaska legislators filed a bill that would have required police officers to be trained on election crimes. It would also have established a hotline to report election fraud and official misconduct. This was lawmakers’ fourth attempt over the course of one year to create such a hotline. The state Legislature has also considered four proposals to criminalize ballot collecting.
In Maine, Democrats passed a law this year that increases the punishment for violently threatening or intimidating election officials. The local chapter of the ACLU opposed the measure, saying it would increase penalties for something that was already a crime, without evidence that doing so would make workers safer.
In late August, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called a press conference to celebrate the first prosecutions of his new elections investigation team. A presumed 2024 Republican presidential candidate, the governor said officials arrested 20 Florida residents who voted in the 2020 election despite having felony convictions that made them ineligible to vote.
Surrounded by uniformed officers, DeSantis issued a warning: “Today’s actions send a clear signal to those who are thinking about ballot harvesting or fraudulently voting. If you commit an elections crime, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is joined by law enforcement officers in August as he announces the arrests of 20 state residents for voter fraud. Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
He revealed scant details about the arrests. But it soon became clear that the prosecutions had problems. It turned out that in some cases, election officials – who were responsible for checking voter eligibility – had sent the voter in question a registration card. (A Miami judge has already thrown out one of the cases.)
DeSantis also touted a different part of the law that created the elections police unit: a provision on ballot collection. State lawmakers had first criminalized the practice in 2021, making it a misdemeanor to deliver more than two ballots on behalf of anyone other than a family member.
In less than a year, it had become a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison.
How Arizona’s Ballot Collection Law Played Out in 2020
For years, Election Day in San Luis, Arizona, was a festive event. Whenever an election rolled around, parties – with music and carne asada – would pop up outside polling places in the small city tucked into the southwest corner of the state.
Guillermina Fuentes, the onetime mayor of San Luis and a fixture in the community, was always close to the center of the celebration. “In San Luis, people know two things: beans and Guillermina,” said Pastor Manuel Castro, who runs the local Gethsemani Baptist Church and has known her for more than three decades.
Pastor Manuel Castro, a longtime acquaintance of Guillermina Fuentes, at the food bank he runs out of Gethsemani Baptist Church in San Luis, Ariz. Credit: Ash Ponders for Reveal
If the 66-year-old Fuentes was not running for office – she’d been a local City Council and school board member, too – then she was out helping others vote, friends and family members said. In San Luis, which is 95% Latino, absentee voting can be particularly difficult. There is no home delivery mail service, and residents have a long tradition of assisting friends and neighbors with voting.
That’s how she spent Primary Election Day in 2020.
It was Tuesday, Aug. 4, and Fuentes was stationed just outside the polling place at the Cesar Chavez Cultural Center, supporting a slate of City Council candidates, answering voter questions and handing out campaign literature.
“Juntos saldremos,” read the blue shirts of the other volunteers: We’ll get out of this together.
Unbeknownst to Fuentes and others, they were being surreptitiously recorded by a man in his car, Gary Snyder, a Republican write-in candidate for the San Luis City Council.
He had been dispatched by fellow Republican David Lara, a perennial candidate for local office who knew Fuentes through his involvement in the local political scene. Lara, who owns a water and ice supply company, had run for City Council, mayor and county supervisor numerous times. He ran for constable once. “Every two years, I was losing elections,” he said.
The reason, he said: voter fraud, specifically vote buying and absentee ballot fraud. Lara often complained about this, filing multiple reports with local and state officials, he said.
David Lara (right) and Gary Snyder worked together to record Guillermina Fuentes outside a polling location in San Luis, Ariz., in August 2020 and file a complaint of vote tampering. Credit: Ash Ponders for Reveal
Nothing ever came of these grievances. But on the day of the 2020 primary, he decided to try something different. He asked Snyder to secretly record Fuentes and the others to collect evidence of a conspiracy.
“You are going to witness fraud like you’ve never believed before,” Lara said he told Snyder, who declined to be interviewed. “You wouldn’t believe it. But I’m going to disappear. I’m gonna pull away, because these people know me well. And if I’m around, they’re careful. You’re the newbie, so they’re gonna drop their guard. And just take as many pictures and videos as you can.”
As the day progressed, Snyder shared pictures and video with Lara.
In a video Gary Snyder shot from his car, Guillermina Fuentes (right) reaches into a folder for a stack of ballots, which she then handed to Alma Juarez (left) to carry to a nearby ballot box in San Luis, Ariz. Credit: Screenshot from video recorded by Gary Snyder
Then, a potential hit: At one point, Fuentes’ neighbor Alma Juarez approached the table of volunteers. Dark sunglasses shielded her eyes from the bright August sun. She was there briefly, just long enough to hand a ballot to Fuentes. Fuentes looked at it closely, appeared to write something on it, then handed it back to Juarez, along with a few other ballots that were sitting on the table.
Almost as quickly as she arrived, Juarez walked into the polling place with the ballots.
The interaction appeared unremarkable. It took less than 20 seconds. But to Lara and Snyder, it was evidence that Fuentes was part of the wide conspiracy they’d been trumpeting.
And now there was a law in Arizona to do something about it. Four years earlier, before Trump popularized “ballot harvesting” as a conservative talking point, Arizona lawmakers had passed a bill that prohibits anyone from collecting and returning someone else’s ballot, with limited exceptions. People who violate the “ballot abuse” law, as it became known, could face felony charges, punishable by up to two years in prison and a $150,000 fine.
The law was “designed to go after large-scale, knowing, massive collection of ballots that threatens the integrity of the system,” said Eric Spencer, then the election director at the secretary of state’s office. It was engineered to target criminal syndicates attempting to cheat the vote, not individual voters, he added.
The Democratic National Committee immediately challenged it in court, arguing that the law was meant to suppress the vote in Native American, Latino and Black communities. A federal appellate court agreed and struck down the law.
However, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority decided to uphold the law in 2021, further weakening the protections of the Voting Rights Act.
The first person to be targeted under the new law: Guillermina Fuentes.
The Sheriff Gets the Video
The “Snyder video,” as it became known, quickly made it to Yuma County Sheriff Leon Wilmot’s office.
Yuma County Sheriff Leon Wilmot in his office in 2020. In August of that year, his office launched a door-to-door investigation into alleged vote tampering in San Luis, Ariz. Credit: Randy Hoeft/Yuma Sun via Associated Press
Two days after the 2020 primary election, his armed officers launched a door-to-door investigation into alleged vote tampering.
In body-worn camera videos from the investigation, obtained by Reveal through public records requests, officers peppered residents with questions about how they voted and whether anyone came to collect ballots from them.
At one woman’s home, officers asked how she had returned her early voting ballot.
“Are we in trouble for something?” she nervously asked. No, the officers said; they were “just making sure everybody’s vote actually gets counted.”
Body camera footage from the Yuma County Sheriff’s Office shows officers knocking on Guillermina Fuentes’ front door. Credit: Yuma County Sheriff’s Office
In a separate interaction, officers asked a man if he knew what was happening in San Luis with regard to voter fraud or ballot harvesting. “Do you have any knowledge of Guillermina Fuentes?” one of the officers asked.
The man, who did know Fuentes, said he believed that the people filing complaints were “targeting” San Luis voters and that police visiting residents at home would be “making those people fear for even voting.”
“I am shocked,” he told the officers. “There’s so much more that you guys should be doing.”
Eventually, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s office took over the case. Investigators tried to figure out whose ballots Fuentes had been handling, even sending her fingerprints to the FBI for analysis at its Quantico, Virginia, headquarters. But they couldn’t find evidence that she had handled any ballots in a box from the polling location. One of the ballots belonged to Hilda Juarez, Alma Juarez’s sister, court records show.
In the end, investigators didn’t appear to find any evidence of a wider conspiracy and built their case around the Snyder video. In early December, the state charged Fuentes and Juarez with ballot abuse for handling four ballots.
Neither woman was accused of voting illegally or of buying or selling ballots, according to court records.
Officials had scrutinized the ballots, comparing the signatures to the ones in the voters’ registration files. The votes were ultimately counted.
Earlier this year, bothwomen pleaded guilty, admitting to having touched and later deposited the ballots. Juarez pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor offense of ballot abuse.
Fuentes’ plea, meanwhile, was for a felony. Both Fuentes and Juarez declined to comment.
But in court records, Fuentes told state investigators that she had not completed a ballot for any of the voters and said she never forced community members to give her their ballots. She dismissed claims that she was a “ballot harvester” as politically motivated.
“I’m not a criminal,” she said. “For so long, I would help people with their right to vote.”
Guillermina Fuentes (right) speaks to supporters after her presentencing hearing in October 2022. In a plea agreement earlier this year, Fuentes pleaded guilty to a felony charge of ballot abuse for handling four ballots from the August 2020 primary election. Credit: Ash Ponders for Reveal
Lead prosecutor Todd Lawson said Fuentes abused her prominent position in the community to illegally collect the four ballots.
Fuentes “appears to have been caught on video running a modern-day political machine seeking to influence the outcome of the municipal election in San Luis, collecting votes through illegal methods, and then using another person to bring the ballots the last few yards into the ballot box,” Lawson wrote in a sentencing memo. He sought a one-year prison sentence for Fuentes.
Her lawyers have pointed out that the one-year sentence was harsher than penalties Lawson sought for some others in the state charged with illegal voting.
In 2020, Tracy Kay McKee voted on behalf of her dead mother. His recommendation: 30 days in jail. That’s a fraction of what he recommended in Fuentes’ case.
McKee is a White Republican. Fuentes is a Latina Democrat.
Chapman, Fuentes’ attorney, raised the disparity in an October hearing ahead of her client’s sentencing.
“The attorney general asked for 30 days of jail time in a case involving a White woman who voted an actual fraudulent ballot for a Republican candidate,” Chapman said.
“In this case, all of the ballots were signature verified and voted. There was no fraudulent ballot voted,” she added. “What are the differences in these cases that would call for a sentence requested by the attorney general’s office that is 12 times harsher than that requested for a White woman who voted a false ballot of a dead person?” (The court ultimately sentenced McKee to two years’ probation.)
Lawson did not respond to Reveal’s request for comment. In court, he said it was “patently untrue” that the state was seeking steeper penalties for Fuentes for “racist purposes.”
“This is a case about integrity of campaigns, integrity of the ballot and the handling of ballots,” Lawson said.
For his part, David Lara said in an interview with Reveal that the state should use capital punishment to deal with people who violate election laws.
“If it was up to me, voter fraud should be death penalty, because people should not mess with a vote,” Lara said. “That is sacred to me.”
When pressed on whether Fuentes deserved a penalty that strict, he walked it back. A year’s incarceration would be an appropriate sentence in her case, he said.
A Chilling Effect in the Arizona Desert
The sun sets outside San Luis, Ariz. Credit: Ash Ponders for Reveal
As part of her plea agreement, Fuentes lost her voting rights and is barred from holding public office. She had to give up her school board seat earlier this year.
At her sentencing hearing Oct. 13, Judge Roger Nelson called Fuentes a criminal. “You committed a criminal offense,” he said. “I don’t think you recognize that.”
He sentenced Fuentes to 30 days in jail. Some people in the courtroom started to cry.
Lizette Esparza, Fuentes’ daughter, said in an interview that the last two years have been especially taxing for her family. “It’s very heartbreaking to see what my mom has to go through for something that has been a common practice,” said Esparza, a local elementary school superintendent.
“To me, it’s not only unfair, but I really think that this is political – I even wanna say it’s a persecution,” she said. “It’s gonna trickle down to the community.”
Luis Marquez met Fuentes when they both worked the fields as teenagers. A retired San Luis police officer, he testified in support of Fuentes. He said the case has seeded fears about voting in San Luis.
“Every time you talk about a ballot, people are like – they get nervous about it,” he said.
“It deterred a lot of people from helping anybody else,” he added.
The surge in new election crimes bills is troubling for communities like San Luis, said Andy Gaona, an elections attorney at Coppersmith Brockelman, a Phoenix law firm. He handled an appeal in Fuentes’ case and is a member of the Arizona Voter Empowerment Task Force.
“As someone who operates in this space, it’s very concerning and it sets a dangerous precedent going forward,” Gaona said. “What it demonstrates is that the Big Lie has intensified the efforts in certain states to criminalize voters and to discourage them from voting.”
Meanwhile, the local sheriff and state attorney general are continuing to investigate election cases in San Luis. This past spring, the sheriff announced that his office is investigating 16 cases of alleged voting fraud involving ballots cast in 2020 and voter registrations ahead of this year’s August primary election.
Wilmot’s office has provided limited information about the investigations, but public records obtained by Reveal show that none of the cases point to widespread fraud.
In one case, a sergeant visited an elderly woman. He told the woman that the signature on her ballot did not match her voter registration and that officials suspected the signature was forged. Her response: “I’m an old lady and I’m shaky.”
The Sheriff’s Office has not yet filed any criminal charges in relation to the open investigations.
But Wilmot’s been recognized by the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association – a nationwide movement of sheriffs who assert that they are the ultimate authorities on U.S. law – for his investigations in Yuma County. The association has teamed up with the nonprofit True the Vote, which has a history of making baseless voter fraud claims and questionable financial transactions, to draw up plans to police the upcoming election.
“We’re gonna make sure that we have election integrity this year,” Mark Lamb, an Arizona sheriff, said at a July Trump rally in the state. “Sheriffs are going to enforce the law. This is about the rule of law. It is against the law to violate elections laws – and that’s a novel idea, we’re going to hold you accountable for that. We will not let happen what happened in 2020.”
A week after Fuentes’ sentencing, Brnovich announced new indictments in San Luis, charging two more women with illegally handling ballots during the 2020 primary. Lara and Snyder celebrated the indictments on social media.
The cases have energized Lara in his decades-long crusade against voter fraud. He told Reveal that he collaborated with True the Vote early this year, providing the nonprofit with information on the San Luis prosecutions. Fuentes’ case ended up in its film, “2000 Mules.”
Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor, has amplified the Snyder video and his claims about Fuentes’ case on social media, giving his political profile a boost. Snyder is now running for state Senate.
As for Lara, he intends to be back out there on Election Day. “Same game plan,” he said.
Reporters Melissa Lewis, Cassandra Jaramillo and Jessica Pishko contributed to this story. It was edited by Maryam Saleh and Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
Since the 2020 general election, there has been a proliferation of new election laws and restrictions on voting. Reveal reporters would like to know how this is affecting you and the people around you. We won’t share any information you provide without speaking to you first and getting your approval.
Over two in five Americans polled over the past week say they are concerned about being subject to intimidation or violence when voting in the midterms, new polling finds, in an alarming show of the state of democracy in the U.S.
According to a poll from Reuters/Ipsos of over 4,400 U.S. adults, about 43 percent of Americans say they are worried about facing threats at polling locations. Democrats are more likely to be concerned about violence, at about 51 percent versus Republicans’ 38 percent.
Likely fueled at least in part by the far right’s attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Americans are also concerned that groups will carry out violence after the election if they’re unsatisfied with the outcome, the poll found, with over two in three Americans saying as such.
The poll comes as there have been reports of armed far right vigilantes intimidating voters in Arizona. Though there have not yet been reports of violence, the vigilantes have apparently been taking pictures of people using ballot drop boxes and threatening to post their information online.
The vigilantes appear to have been galvanized by debunked right-wing claims that so-called ballot mules are stuffing boxes with ballots for Democrats. While there is zero evidence of widespread voter fraud or anything resembling ballot stuffing, the belief appears to have become so entrenched that vigilantes are taking it upon themselves to supposedly “guard” ballot boxes.
Despite having no basis in reality, voter fraud has become a concern among the public as well. The Reuters/Ipsos poll found that nearly half of Americans think that voter fraud is a “widespread problem,” while only 40 percent disagree. Republicans are more likely to believe in this lie popularized by Donald Trump, with two-thirds of Republicans saying they believe that widespread voter fraud is an issue and about one-third of Democrats saying as such.
There have been other threats to voters from the right. In Florida, Gov. Ron Desantis’s fascist election policearrested 20 people earlier this month, claiming that they knowingly violated election guidelines — but like many others who have been prosecuted for election-related offenses, those arrested were simply unaware of their voter eligibility status.
In this case, some of the voters arrested were supposedly previously told that they were eligible to vote, but then were arrested for illegally registering. At least 13 of the people who were arrested were Black.
The fact that concerns of violence in relation to casting a vote are so widespread and that there are already reports of intimidation is an alarming show of the erosion of democracy in the U.S.
The far right has been ramping up voter suppression efforts in recent years; between the Republican Party’s gerrymandering, plans to mass-challenge election results and infiltrate Democratic-majority polling places, or bills to flat-out allow Republican officials to overturn election results, experts say the GOP is setting the stage to rig elections so that they never lose — or effectively lose, despite voters’ will — again.
We speak to law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw and civil rights attorney Barbara Arnwine, who are on an Arc of Voter Justice bus tour of 26 cities across the country to increase Black voter turnout at critical midterm elections in November. They discuss fighting voter suppression and racial gerrymandering, and the high stakes in states where Republicans have instated bans on what they describe as critical race theory. “African American voters are key to all these races,” says Arnwine. “They’re going to vote what’s in the best interests not only of their community, but the entire nation.” Crenshaw says she is handing out banned books and education to voters because “when racism is unspeakable, then democracy — a full multiracial democracy — is unachievable.”
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
The midterm elections, less than three weeks away, will determine the balance of power in Congress, and Black voters could play a key role. Black voters helped Democrats flip two Senate seats that gave them control of the Senate in Georgia’s 2020 special runoff election. Democratic Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock of Georgia now faces Republican challenger Herschel Walker. This comes as Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp is fighting for reelection against Democrat and voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams in a rematch, after he signed into law new restrictions that disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color. It was one of many voter suppression efforts in Republican-led states.
In Florida, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’s election police unit — that’s right, he has set up an election police unit — has arrested people for voting. Florida law allows formerly incarcerated people to vote unless they were convicted of murder or felony sex offenses. Those arrested say Florida officials encouraged them to vote, and didn’t know about the exclusion. This is police bodycam footage of Tampa resident Tony Patterson and his arresting officer, recently obtained by the Tampa Bay Times.
POLICEOFFICER 1: Apparently, I guess you have a warrant.
TONYPATTERSON: For what?
POLICEOFFICER 1: I’m not sure.
POLICEOFFICER 2: It’s for voter stuff, man.
POLICEOFFICER 1: For voter —
POLICEOFFICER 2: It’s — what it is, it — I think the agents with FDLE talked to you last week about some voter fraud, voter stuff, when you weren’t supposed to be voting maybe.
TONYPATTERSON: This here is crazy, man. Y’all putting me in jail for something I didn’t know nothing about. Why would you all let me vote if I wasn’t able to vote?
AMYGOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by two guests who are on a 26-city Arc of Voter Justice bus tour. They’re joining us from Jacksonville, Florida, on one of their tour stops. Barbara Arnwine is a civil rights lawyer, president of the Transformative Justice Coalition. And Kimberlé Crenshaw is distributing banned books en route as part of “From Freedom Riders to Freedom Readers: The Books Unbanned Tour.” She’s also executive director of the African American Policy Forum, a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Barbara Arnwine, your hashtag is #10MillionMoreBlackVotes. How are you doing this?
BARBARAARNWINE: Oh, we’re doing it in two ways. One is we’re registering new voters. There’s something like 6 million unregistered African American voters in this country. And we’re also saying to those who are registered, the 35% who don’t vote, that you’ve got to show up and show out every election. Don’t only vote presidential. Vote in the midterms. It’s so critical. Vote the whole ballot; don’t only focus on the top positions. But no matter what you do, vote. No matter what you do, make sure you’re registered. No matter what you do, vote.
AMYGOODMAN: And can you talk, Kimberlé Crenshaw, about how you’re linking these two issues, the banned book tour, From Freedom Riders to Freedom Readers, and why that’s so critical when we’re talking about voter turnout and voter registration?
KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW: Well, Amy, it’s no secret that our democracy is in crises — the efforts to suppress Black voting, the efforts to gerrymander districts. This is all part of a democracy that’s in deep trouble. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that the same people who are trying to gerrymander our districts are trying to gerrymander our history. The same people who want to change the outcomes of elections want to change the story of us, the material, the books that tell the full story about America.
So, we’ve decided that because there is no daylight between racial justice and a fully multiracial democracy, we were going to join this tour to provide the information, the books, that those who are anti-Democrats don’t want us to know. So we’re passing out 6,000 books, titles that have been banned in many of the states that we’re in, ranging from the autobiography of Ruby Bridges, the 6-year-old who integrated schools in New Orleans, to classics like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye or Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me.
People need to understand what is behind this effort to ban what they call critical race theory. What they’re essentially doing is banning the telling of our history and its contemporary consequences. We think when voters know exactly what they’re trying to do, they will show up, and, as Barbara said, they will show out.
AMYGOODMAN: And so, can you talk about the response? I mean, you’re right now actually in Jekyll Island, Georgia, headed to Jacksonville. Georgia is — to say the least, all eyes are on this state, when you have this race between Herschel Walker and Reverend Raphael Warnock. Reverend Raphael Warnock just won two years ago but now will run for a full Senate term — all of the attention on this. Can you talk, Barbara Arnwine, about the significance of this race and some of the other ones that you’re tracking?
BARBARAARNWINE: Well, obviously, African American voters are key to all these races, because — and, you know, we’re nonpartisan, and we believe that if African Americans vote, they’ll vote correctly, because they’re going to vote what’s in the best interests not only of their community, but the entire nation. That’s one thing we know about African American voters: They think broadly. Especially African American women voters have a real sense of social justice for all. So, it’s really important to mobilize this bloc.
And what we’re seeing already in Georgia is an incredible, unprecedented, historic turnout of African American voters. They are 37% of the current early voting percentages. That’s an increase, significantly, from being 29% in the 2018 midterm elections. So, African Americans are hearing us. We’ve been going to communities that have the lowest voter turnout and saying, “Your vote matters. It doesn’t matter if all the candidates don’t come to see you because they don’t consider you high propensity voters; we consider you the most important voters. Register. Vote.”
So, yesterday, when we did our votercade and we went through some of the poorest, most depressed areas in Brunswick, you should have seen the people. This was like what we’ve been seeing everywhere. They came out. They were clapping. They were giving the power fist. They were yelling. They were screaming. They were so excited that somebody considered them important. Somebody was coming directly to them and saying, “Vote. It matters.” It was just beautiful.
That is the experience we’ve had in Richmond, where we were on motorcycles driving through the city with the Buffalo Soldiers in a long, six-block-long motorcade. It’s been amazing. When people see the John Lewis buses, they honk on the freeways at us. They honk as we roll, because people get the message. They’re so happy to see somebody saying “vote” in a positive way, not about candidates, just about the fact that as Americans and the fact that we care and love our democracy, that it demands that we participate, that we vote.
AMYGOODMAN: Kimberlé Crenshaw, you are in Georgia. That other key race is the rematch between the longtime voting rights activist Stacey Abrams and Brian Kemp, the governor, for the governorship of Georgia. The significance of this race? And you’re visiting these sites of white supremacist terror, from the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, to — talk about the places that you have been.
KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW: Yes. We visited Wilmington, which is the site of a racial coup in 1898. And one of the reasons that was just so significant to us —
AMYGOODMAN: In North Carolina.
KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW: — at the African American Policy Forum — yes — was that, when we had the January 6th attempted coup, there were a lot of pundits, including our president, who said, “This is not who we are.” And it is evidence of the fact that when our history has been erased, we don’t know that we’re heading in the same direction. In fact, violent coups are exactly who we’ve been.
But when we went to Wilmington and looked at the site where the coup began, where a newspaper was burned to the ground and countless numbers of African Americans were killed and a duly elected biracial government was deposed, there’s no marker there. There’s no placard. There’s no “this is what happened.”
And that same sentiment, that erasure of our history, is what is behind these book bans and behind the effort to challenge The 1619 Project. It is, in fact, an effort to make racism unspeakable. And our position has been that when racism is unspeakable, then democracy — a full multiracial democracy — is unachievable. There is no daylight between the two. Even though when people think and talk about “Is our country going to the edge? Can it happen here?” a lot of people say it can’t, but that’s just telling us that they don’t realize that Black history and American history are one and the same. It has happened here. And unless we understand its legacy and its implication today, it’s on the way of happening here again. And that’s what we cannot allow to happen.
AMYGOODMAN: Talk about your plans in Florida. In that video we played in the introduction, astounding story of what the governor has done in having arrested — with his election police, arresting people who were attempting to vote. They said, these men who were in prison and came out, that they can register, and if they qualify — because they didn’t know they did, because they had served time in jail — they will be allowed to vote. And then they were handcuffed and arrested for voting. Your response?
BARBARAARNWINE: Well, they were handcuffed and arrested for voting while they had in their hands their voting cards. Now, if you’re sent a voting card by your county registrar, wouldn’t you assume that that means you have the right to vote?
So, the fact that DeSantis — you know, people here call him DeSatan — has decided that he wants to use and play the race card by having mostly Black — look at who he’s arresting. It’s not just, you know, whites, because more whites have been affected by these felony disenfranchisement laws than Blacks, but he’s mainly arresting Black people, that he’s playing the race card because he wants to be president. Doesn’t that say something ill about the concept of our democracy, the concept of who we are, that we want a —
AMYGOODMAN: We have —
BARBARAARNWINE: — person who is using race? Because it worked before, right? With Trump. So they’re saying, “OK, we’ll do it again.”
AMYGOODMAN: We have to leave it there, but I want to thank you so much for being with us, Barbara Arnwine, civil rights lawyer with Transformative Justice Coalition, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, executive director of the African American Policy Forum and professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University, speaking to us from Jekyll Island, Georgia. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much.
More than 200,000 voting-eligible transgender Americans may find it difficult to cast a ballot in the upcoming midterm elections because of voter ID laws,according to a recent report from a think tank thatresearches sexual orientation, gender identity law and public policy.
The report, released last month by the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, estimates these people could be challenged by poll workers or other election officials because their voter registration information does not match their ID or other documentation.
From that figure, more than 64,000 trans people could face additional barriers because they live in states with strict photo ID requirements that may require them to cast a provisional ballot to vote. Those votes might not count unless the voter can later provide acceptable information.
“As we think about election policies and the rules that we put around how and where people vote — and especially when the topic of voter ID comes up — I think it’s important to separate out the stated intent of these laws and what their actual impact is,” said Kathryn K. O’Neill, a policy analyst at the Williams Institute and one of the report’s authors.
The report highlights the ongoing challenges that trans people can face as they attempt to participate in daily life. The process for obtaining identification documents that reflect a person’s correct name and gender marker can vary by state, creating an uneven system.
Thirty-five states require voters to show a form of identification to vote. Some states (18) require a photo ID; other states (17) accept non-photo IDs. Some states allow voters to present other identification information, like a utility bill or a bank statement, if they don’t have ID to vote, and others require voters to cast a provisional ballot.
In 2021, Jey’nce Poindexter of Michigan reached out to an attorney about the cost of legally changing her name.
A community organizer, Poindexter, a transgender woman, had long wanted to ensure official paperwork matched her gender identity. Poindexter eventually wanted to buy property. She wanted to vote without facing questions about mismatched identity information. (Michigan requires a photo ID to vote, but the Williams Institute considers the state to have a non-strict law because it allows a voter without ID to sign an affidavit.)
But simply having updated identification paperwork was important to Poindexter.
“It may be trivial to someone else. But I pay my taxes. I pay my bills. I manage and run my household. I’m there for my family. So if all of these ways lead up to humanity, and to being a human being — I’m certainly having documentation and ID and personal documents align with my presentation,” she told The 19th. “That means the world to me.”
But the attorney that Poindexter contacted offered a steep estimate: $3,600 for a retainer, and more for any court appearances and filings.
“I just thought that was ridiculous,” she said.
Most states and the District of Columbia require voter registration to match a legal name;some statesrequire proof of gender affirmation surgery to update the gender marker on a birth certificate. Inothers, a person may be required to publish an announcement in the newspaper to change their name — a practice that advocates worry can put a person at risk of physical harm or harassment.
Thirty percent of trans people reported verbal harassment when they show identification in general with a name or gender that does not match their gender presentation, according to an estimate byHeadCount, a nonpartisan organization that conducts voter registration drives.
The Williams Institute has tracked the potential impact of voter ID laws on trans people each election year since 2012. But its methodology for measuring impact has evolved, including how it categorizes states with different policies. It makes it difficult to compare the latest report to previous ones.
“The biggest change over time in this field has been data availability. It’s the constant issue,” O’Neill said. “It’s something that has been getting a lot better recently.”
Poindexter had already begun looking into the process for a legal name change in 2020,but the pandemic paused her efforts. After her experience with the attorney, she figured she could restart the process herself. Through her community, she was connected with someone from VoteRiders, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that helps people obtain identification to vote. An organizer with the group has more recently helped Poindexter with paperwork.
Poindexter, who plans to vote by absentee ballot this year, declined to share more specifics about her case, to reduce the likelihood of public harassment. But she expressed gratitude to VoteRiders and concern for others who may not know to get a second opinion on something like potential legal costs.
“I see how it would intimidate another young lady or young man or person, period,” she said.
Lauren Kunis, CEO and executive director of VoteRiders, said the group works primarily on voter ID education and voter ID assistance. This election cycle, they’re focused on eight states with voter ID laws or pending ID policy, or that they deem competitive: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin.
Their voter ID assistance can include pro bono legal help to people who need to get a name change or update a gender marker to get identification. The group also pays for rides to and from identification-issuing offices.
“We want to make sure that any legal or bureaucratic or financial barrier that a voter might face in obtaining an acceptable ID is removed and they’re able to make their voices heard at the polls,” Kunis said.
That includes not just trans people but others who may face paperwork hurdles. The group believes voter ID laws have a disproportionate impact on women because many change their name when they marry. That means they can have conflicting name information on a driver’s license or voter registration.
The Williams Institute report notes research that shows trans people of color, who are elderly, homeless or have lower incomes are less likely to have identification.
Still, efforts to measure the impact of voter ID laws on voter turnouthave been mixed, in part because many studies have occurred before states enacted the strictest kind of identification requirements — often rules that require photo ID with few or no alternatives available. Not all voter identification rules are the same, and some do offer flexibility so that a voter may still be able to cast a ballot if they do not have identification.
Most importantly, there has not been close examination of the effect of voter ID laws on trans people. Kunis with VoteRiders said her staff of two dozen work around the country and talk with people about voter ID daily.
“What we know through the feedback that we get from the communities we serve is that these laws confuse voters, they intimidate them, and they deter them from casting a ballot,” she said. “That’s the kind of thing that’s hard to quantify.”
The vast majority of Republicans running for Congress or in major statewide races believe — at least to some extent — former President Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, representing an alarming “new normal” for the party, a New York Times report finds.
Out of more than 550 candidates analyzed, more than 370 GOP candidates for Congress, governor, secretary of state or state attorney general doubt or outright deny the results of the 2020 election, according to the report. This represents about two-thirds of these Republican candidates and about 70 percent of those running for Congress specifically — people who could soon be put in positions of great influence over the way elections are conducted and results are tallied.
According to The New York Times, voters in every state will see at least one candidate who has questioned the results of the 2020 election on the ballot. Hundreds of these candidates are projected to win their races, the report finds.
That this sentiment is so widespread across the party — despite and perhaps because of the fact that there is a mountain of evidence disproving Trump’s election lies — is an alarming indication that the baseline of truth has shifted among the GOP. It could also shape elections to come, as the Republican Party has waged a nationwide effort to destabilize elections and make it easier for their candidates to win or outright steal them.
Such candidates “are the new normal of the Republican Party,” the New York Times wrote. “These candidates represent a sentiment that is spreading in the Republican Party, rupturing a bedrock principle of democracy: that voters decide elections and candidates accept results.”
This is a more dire outlook on the proportion of election deniers in the GOP than has previously been found. Similar analyses from The Washington Post and FiveThirtyEight have also found that there is a large proportion of GOP candidates who question or deny the election results. But those analyses didn’t find as large a number of election deniers, nor did they appear to have done as comprehensive an analysis of candidates’ speeches, social media posts, fundraising emails, interviews, and other campaign materials to find evidence of their denial.
The number of GOP candidates who have questioned the 2020 election results has grown over time, the publication found. Of the candidates who were public figures on or before January 6, 2021, when the election results were certified by Congress and Trump militants broke into the Capitol, only 74 publicly agreed with Trump’s Big Lie. Over the past couple of years, however, more and more candidates have embraced the conspiracy.
This indicates that many of these candidates likely view fealty to Trump as a winning strategy — or perhaps that they fear being isolated by the party if they choose to stand in line with reality.
Republicans have coordinated effective campaigns to shun those who denounce Trump; they successfully primaried Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), one of Trump’s loudest Republican detractors in Congress, for instance, and are seeking to replace her with Trump-backed, anti-environmentalist candidate Harriet Hageman this fall.
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Ever since claims of election fraud arose in 2020, Wisconsin has seen its share of quixotic attempts to taint the presidential results.
A group of phony electors tried to claim the state’s electoral votes for Donald Trump. Wisconsin’s top lawmaker launched a yearlong inquiry led by a lawyer spewing election fraud theories. And its courts heard numerous suits challenging the integrity of the 2020 election and the people administering it.
All those efforts failed, sometimes spectacularly.
But on a more fundamental level, the election deniers succeeded. They helped change the way Election Day will look in 2022 for crucial midterm elections in Wisconsin — and they are creating an even more favorable climate for Trump and Republicans in 2024.
This summer, the conservative majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court banned most drop boxes for ballots, which had provided another quick and convenient method of voting during the pandemic, rather than relying on the mail. Until a federal judge intervened, the ruling also meant that people with disabilities could not have help delivering their ballots to their municipal clerks.
More recently, in Waukesha County, a judge sided with the Republican Party in a ruling that barred local clerks from fixing even minor errors or omissions — such as a missing ZIP code — on absentee ballot envelopes. The clerks could contact the voter or return the ballot to be corrected. In a state already known for limiting voter access, this was another example of a push toward more controls.
And the Wisconsin Assembly and the Senate, both dominated by Republicans, have passed a raft of bills that would tighten voting laws. Each was vetoed by Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat. But Evers is in a close race for reelection against Republican Tim Michels, who has said that “on day one” he will call a special session of the Legislature to “fix the election mess.”
Philip Rocco, associate professor of political science at Marquette University in Milwaukee, describes a dynamic he has seen across the country playing out on a large scale in Wisconsin. An onslaught of attacks on the voting process, he said, produces “an atmosphere of procedural chaos going into Election Day.”
“Just in general, it’s created a dangerous environment for elections to occur in.”
Republicans, who often benefit from lower turnout, frame the battles around issues of law, while Democrats argue that the fight is over voting rights. Neither side sees any benefit in giving in.
The seemingly daily news of legal machinations, legislative committee hearings, proposed laws or official investigations of Wisconsin’s election system have left many voters worried about what to expect when they next try to cast a ballot and unsure of whether their vote will count.
A swing state with 10 electoral votes and a history of razor-thin margins, Wisconsin will once again be a key prize in the 2024 presidential race.
Just how important the state is became clear in August, when the Republican National Committee announced that it will hold its 2024 convention in Milwaukee, a typically overlooked, Democratic-led city. The convention will saturate the state’s largest media market, reaching the conservative-leaning suburbs and the quiet towns and farms beyond.
But first comes November’s midterm election, with a chance to consolidate Republican power in the state and shape oversight of coming elections. Both ends of the political spectrum are keenly aware of the stakes.
“What can happen in 2024 is largely going to be determined by what happens this November,” said Wisconsin attorney Jeffrey Mandell, president of a progressive firm dedicated to protecting voting rights.
Endless Legal Battles
Nine attorneys, a parade of dark suits and briefcases, descended on a Waukesha County courtroom in southeast Wisconsin in September. Once again, the extreme minutiae of Wisconsin election law was being litigated.
The question before them: how to deal with absentee ballot envelopes that arrive with only partial addresses of witnesses?
Until then, municipal clerks had been able to simply fill in the information. Now, the Republican Party of Waukesha County argued that was unlawful and wanted to prohibit clerks from doing so. For some voters, that could mean having their ballots returned and figuring out how to fix them in time to have their vote counted.
A lawyer for the GOP-controlled Legislature favored a prohibition. Lawyers for government regulators, Democrats and the League of Women Voters argued against it. Ultimately, the GOP side prevailed.
In his ruling, Circuit Judge Michael J. Aprahamian added his voice to the doubts about absentee voting in Wisconsin and about the oversight provided by the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, which has seen its every move scrutinized since Trump and his allies started questioning the 2020 results in Wisconsin.
Aprahamian excoriated the commission, saying that “it is little wonder that proponents from all corners of the political spectrum are critical, cynical and suspicious of how elections are managed and overseen.”
As court scenes like these play out elsewhere in Wisconsin, a healthy slice of the litigation can be traced to one man: Erick Kaardal, a Minnesota lawyer and special counsel to the anti-abortion Thomas More Society, a nonprofit law firm.
Despite some high-profile setbacks in Wisconsin, Kaardal told ProPublica he plans to keep scrutinizing the fine points of Wisconsin election law, a subject that takes up at least 122 pages in state statute.
His ongoing targets include the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which interprets laws and gives guidance to municipal clerks around the state; the Electronic Registration Information Center, a voter roll management consortium; and the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonprofit that seeks to improve turnout.
“We’ll be litigating with the WEC and ERIC and CEIR for years to come,” Kaardal said.
Kaardal’s persistence is not appreciated by everyone. A federal judge admonished him for “political grandstanding” and filing bad-faith litigation against then-Vice President Mike Pence in December 2020 to prevent the counting of electoral votes. And in May, a judge in Madison said it was “ridiculous” for Kaardal to label pandemic-related grants to election offices as bribes.
In defending his tactics, Kaardal cited his years of legal experience and investigative abilities. He said he merely wants to hold government accountable and make elections fair.
Among Kaardal’s most passionate causes is his ongoing effort to document election fraud at nursing homes. During the pandemic, Kaardal alleges, an unknown number of cognitively impaired people ruled incompetent to vote under court-ordered guardianships somehow voted, perhaps with illegal assistance. He believes the voter rolls are not being updated to accurately reflect the court orders.
Kaardal brought lawsuits against 13 probate administrators across Wisconsin to force the release of confidential documents revealing the names of individuals under guardianship who have had their right to vote stripped by the court. His petition was denied in one case, but the others are ongoing.
Dane County Clerk of Court Carlo Esqueda worries that Kaardal’s quest is giving people the wrong impression. He points out that a person under guardianship can still vote. In some instances, that right is taken away because of extreme cognitive issues.
“Talk radio is saying everybody under guardianship should not be able to vote. That’s simply not true,” he said.
Election clerks, too, cite disinformation as they face mounting pressure over how they handle absentee ballots.
Celestine Jeffreys, the clerk in Green Bay, was forced to defend her integrity when a local resident represented by Kaardal filed a formal complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission this year, accusing her of “ballot harvesting” in the spring 2022 municipal elections by accepting multiple absentee ballots from an individual voter. The complaint is still pending.
Matt Roeser, the resident who filed the complaint, told ProPublica that the heavy reliance on absentee voting during the pandemic “opened up a door we’ve never had opened before. It created a lot of suspicion.”
Jeffreys said in a court filing that she had the discretion at the time to accept multiple ballots if they involved someone delivering their own ballot and a ballot for a disabled person.
Her legal brief called the complaint “another attempt by Attorney Kaardal to court scandal where there is none — intentionally undermining public confidence in legitimately-run elections in the process.”
Energized Activists
Wisconsin resident Harry Wait drew national attention in July when he announced that he’d gone on a state website and arranged for absentee ballots in the names of the Racine mayor, the state Assembly speaker and several others to be sent to his home.
The site requires only that voters enter their name and date of birth, and Wait claimed it had insufficient safeguards to prevent fraud.
The antic angered the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which held that it was a serious breach meant to undermine the state’s election system. Authorities charged Wait with election fraud, a misdemeanor, and misappropriation of ID information, a felony.
Notwithstanding the charges, Wait was treated like a hero a week later at a meeting of the right-leaning group he leads inside a Racine dive bar.
Wait formed H.O.T. Government, which stands for honest, open, transparent, four years ago over perceived government misconduct in Racine. It’s now focused on rooting out what it sees as widespread election fraud throughout Wisconsin and is taking special interest in absentee ballots. The group even briefly considered a plan to steal leftover drop boxes in southeast Wisconsin to ensure they couldn’t be used after the state Supreme Court ruling.
Wait has made it clear he’s no fan of the Wisconsin Elections Commission. “I’m going to make a declaration today that WEC is our enemy,” he told the crowd inside the bar.
He was proud how, in his view, he had exposed the flaws in the state government’s MyVote website, set up to help Wisconsinites find their polling place, register to vote or order an absentee ballot. The website, he said, “really needs to be shut down.”
Wait said in an interview that he plans to defend his action in court on the basis that, in his view, the MyVote system is “not a legal channel to order a ballot. It’s a rogue system.”
The administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, Meagan Wolfe, has defended the online system. It “requires a person to provide the same information or more information than he or she would have to provide if the person made the ballot request through traditional mail,” she said at a commission meeting.
Still, the commission agreed to a new safeguard: When it gets a request to send an absentee ballot to a new address, it will notify the voter via postcard. The commission also asked clerks to be on the lookout for unusual requests.
At a preliminary hearing on his case, in September, Wait was represented by Michael Gableman, a leading figure among Wisconsin election deniers.
A former state Supreme Court justice, Gableman was special counsel for the Wisconsin Assembly, tasked with investigating the 2020 election. While spending more than $1 million in taxpayer money, he lent oxygen to election-fraud theories — including Kaardal’s accusations about nursing home irregularities — but couldn’t prove any. Attempts to reach Gableman for comment for this story were unsuccessful.
Even after being dismissed from that role by the Assembly speaker, Gableman has continued to exert influence within the state Republican Party to stoke the anger of citizens. Among hard-right activists, Gableman’s view of Wisconsin as a hotbed of election fraud is now taken for granted, as is the belief that voting options should be restricted, not opened up.
“I want it back to in-person, one day,” said Bruce L. Boll, a volunteer with We the People Waukesha, one of numerous groups supporting tighter controls. “Voting should not be a whim. It should be something you plan for and you do. Like your wedding day.”
Responding to this new atmosphere of distrust, the Wisconsin Elections Commission has proposed creating an Office of Inspector General to help it investigate the growing number of complaints and allegations of impropriety.
Chaos and Controversy
The chaos and controversy around voting rules has caught some Wisconsinites off guard. The drop-box ruling was especially disconcerting to people with disabilities and their relatives.
Before the August primary, Eugene Wojciechowski, of West Allis, went to City Hall to pay his water bill and drop off his ballot and his wife’s at the clerk’s office. A staffer asked him for ID and then told him he could not deliver his wife’s ballot. Not even spouses of the disabled could do so at the time, thanks to the state Supreme Court decision.
“I said: ‘What do you mean? She’s in a wheelchair,’” Wojciechowski recalled. He noted that the ballots were “all sealed and witnessed and everything.”
The voting constraints were “stupid,” he said, but ultimately he decided he would just mail his wife’s ballot for her, even though it was unclear at the time whether that was permitted.
He has filed an official complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission and weeks later remains exasperated.
“I mean, what the hell is going on in this city? I’ve lived here all my life,” Wojciechowski said.
“They’re stopping people from voting, that’s all it is.”
The state Supreme Court decision came in response to a suit brought by a conservative group, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. An attorney for the group, Rick Esenberg, argued that regulators had issued unlawful guidance allowing ballots to be delivered on behalf of others, including potentially “paid activists, paid canvassers who go around and collect ballots and place them in a mailbox.” Those allegations echoed a widely circulated conspiracy theory about people, labeled mules, delivering heaps of fraudulent ballots.
Esenberg conceded in his oral arguments that he had no evidence of that type of activity in Wisconsin.
Four people with disabilities sued in federal court, including Martha Chambers, of Milwaukee, who was left paralyzed from the neck down after being thrown from a horse 27 years ago.
“Here they are making things more difficult for me, and my life is difficult enough,” she said.
A federal judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and ordered the state elections commission to tell local clerks that voters with disabilities must be allowed to receive help from someone of their choosing to return their absentee ballots. The clerks do not have to confirm that the voter is disabled or ask the emissary for ID.
Still, it’s not at all certain that the ruling will be followed uniformly.
The state has approximately 1,850 local clerks who administer elections in cities, towns and villages. Even before the federal ruling, practices were wildly inconsistent, said Barbara Beckert, director of external advocacy for Disability Rights Wisconsin.
“There is continuing confusion in Wisconsin as voting practices and policies continue to change in response to litigation as well as action by the Legislature,” Beckert said.
Political observers say there’s increased trepidation among all kinds of voters over whether their ballot will count and who will be watching at the polls.
“People are afraid,” said Milwaukee native Bruce Colburn, a union activist and lead organizer of Souls to the Polls, a traditional get-out-the-vote drive in Black communities. “Are they going to do something wrong? Then you have all these lawyers and people making complaints in the court system for nothing. And it makes it more difficult. It scares people. If they get something wrong or they don’t do it exactly right, something’s going to happen to them.”
Jeffreys, the clerk in Green Bay, described poll watchers on primary day this year as “aggressive and interfering.” Rather than being cordial and unobtrusive, she said, some observers were repeatedly questioning voting officials and disrupting the process.
“That, I think, is a really big change with elections in Wisconsin. There’s just a lot more of a gaze, and the gaze is not always friendly and cooperative.”
Unlike poll workers, who carry out official duties and must be local residents, poll watchers can come from anywhere. They are not required to undergo training.
“Observers are a very important part of the process,” Jeffreys said. “They lend transparency; they help educate people. They themselves become educated. But sometimes observers have anointed themselves as the people who will uncover problems. And oftentimes observers are not equipped with the information in order to do that.”
The result, she said, can be baseless allegations.
Pointing Toward 2024
If Republicans in Wisconsin want to find a way around the Democratic governor, Evers, and his veto pen, they have two choices.
They can unseat him in November or bulk up their legislative advantage to what is called a supermajority. Achieving supermajorities in both the Assembly and the Senate, which would make bills veto-proof, is considered the longer shot. Winning the governor’s race is not.
Michels, the Republican nominee, is the owner of a construction company and has never held public office. He was endorsed by Trump in the primary.
Michels has embraced the idea that the 2020 election was not run fairly, even though a state recount showed Biden won and multiple courts agreed. Asked if the 2020 election was stolen, Michels told the “Regular Joe Show” on the radio in May: “Maybe, right. We know there was certainly a lot of bad stuff that happened. There were certainly illegal legal ballots. How many? I don’t know if Justice Gableman knows. I don’t know if anybody knows. We got to make sure. I will make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Among the bills passed by Republicans and blocked by Evers were proposals that would require the state to use federal databases to check citizenship status; remove voters from the rolls based on information submitted for jury selection; make it harder to request an absentee ballot; and classify it a felony to incorrectly attest that a person is “indefinitely confined” so they can vote absentee (a provision widely used during the pandemic).
Wisconsin already is a place that researchers have identified as difficult for voters to navigate. The Cost of Voting Index, a Northern Illinois University project that studies each state, lists it near the bottom, at 47th, because of a strict voter ID law, limits on early voting and proof of residency requirements that affect registration drives.
“Over the last several election cycles, other states have adopted policies that remove barriers to voting,” one of the researchers, Michael J. Pomante II, now with the election protection group States United Action, said in an email.
But Wisconsin, he added, “has continued to pass and implement laws that create barriers to casting a ballot.”
In 2024, all these factors — from who is able to vote to who runs the executive branch and who runs the Legislature — will play a role in determining which presidential candidate gets Wisconsin’s electoral votes.
The governor and the Wisconsin Elections Commission are part of the state’s certification process, with the secretary of state making it official by affixing the state seal. And the state Supreme Court stands ready to rule on election law disputes.
The Nov. 8 midterm election will determine which party holds the office of governor and secretary of state when voting occurs in 2024. Michels has proposed a “full reorganization” of the Wisconsin Elections Commission if he is elected.
He hasn’t explained what that would look like, other than to say in a primary debate that he envisioned replacing it with a board made up of appointees named by each of the state’s congressional districts. Wisconsin now has eight seats in the U.S. House, five held by Republicans and three by Democrats.
Evers, by contrast, backs the commission in its current form. He noted its origins in the state’s Legislature seven years ago.
“Republicans created this system, and it works,” he said in a statement released to ProPublica. “Our last election was fair and secure, as was proven by a recount, our law enforcement agencies, and the courts.”
Iowa eliminated nine days of early voting. New Hampshire took away ballot drop boxes. And Georgia made providing water to voters waiting in line a crime.
In many states, nearly all controlled by Republicans, it will be more difficult to vote than it was two years ago. That’s especially true for lower-income Americans and people with disabilities, voting-access advocates warn. They stress that new restrictions target methods of voting used disproportionately by people of color.
In those states, voting has also been reshaped by rulings from conservative judges and newly drawn districts that favor Republican candidates.
A review of voting laws in the 50 states and Washington, D.C. by the Center for Public Integrity paints a stark picture of the state of voting in America — one in which states are taking two different paths. While several states passed bills that grabbed headlines and created barriers to the franchise, states controlled by Democrats made access to voting easier and more equitable. Some states with split-party control went one direction and some went the other.
We found:
Twenty-six states worsened equity in voting and representation.
Twenty states and Washington, D.C., improved it.
Four states have made little change in either direction.
Our review found that 160 million Americans live in the states reducing equity, and 151 million live in the places expanding it. About 20 million Americans live in the states where the situation did not change substantially.
The rollback in voting access has been fueled by falsehoods from former President Donald Trump and his allies about the 2020 election — an election that officials in his own administration, elections experts and state and federal judges have affirmed was secure and accurate. “Instead of celebrating that, what we saw was a rush to enact legislation on the false premise that the 2020 election, and elections generally, are riddled with widespread voter fraud,” said Jasleen Singh of the Brennan Center for Justice.
The attacks on access have targeted methods disproportionately used by people of color and younger, more Democratic-leaning voters. “These are direct attacks on voters that legislators think will vote for the other party,” said Sylvia Albert of Common Cause. “It is clearly an attack on Black and brown and low-income voters.”
The restrictive state laws have come as the Supreme Court has dealt severalblows to the Voting Rights Act. The court will consider significant cases about gerrymandering and state legislative powers over elections in its current term, which began this week.
The Democratic and mixed-party-control states that made voting and registering easier since the 2020 election span the country: New Mexico created protections for polling places on tribal land; Illinois made vote-by-mail accessible to all voters permanently; Maine made it easier to participate in primaries.
In a handful of states where voting rules have barely budged since 2020, Democratic governors thwarted GOP legislation withvetoes, an establishment Republican blocked restrictive voting measures, or court challenges paused or prevented legislation from taking effect. In those states, the status quo could easily be shattered by a flip in control over the governor’s office or a handful of politicians retiring or losing primaries.
Voting laws, and the way they’re interpreted by election officials, depend on where you live. Voters in different states — and sometimes even neighboring cities or counties — can face sharply different options for casting their ballots.
In Utah, for example, all voters receive a mail ballot and can track its status online. If the voter wants to register and vote in person at a polling place, the law allows for them to do that on Election Day.
In Mississippi, meanwhile, voting in person on Election Day is the only option available to all voters. Excuses for voting absentee are limited, mail voting ordinarily requires multiple notarized signatures, and a voter must register 30 days before an election.
The varying rules make for a disjointed, unequal landscape of voting in the United States.
“We should all have equal access to the ballot. Otherwise, we don’t all have the same freedom to vote,” said Danielle Lang of the Campaign Legal Center.
Our team of journalists took a close look at the details of voting across the United States, reporting on the registration process, voter-roll purges, redistricting and more. As Democracy Fund’s Tammy Patrick, a former elections official in Arizona, put it: “In elections, the details matter.”
Millions of Americans face challenges to exercising their right to vote, even if they live in a state that has increased access. For voters with disabilities, Indigenous voters living on reservations and eligible voters with felonies on their records, barriers have been especially high.
Many voters will also find that their influence in state legislatures and the U.S. Congress has been diluted by a round of partisan gerrymandering. Political districts are redrawn each decade, with the most recent round based on the results of the 2020 Census.
In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that partisan gerrymandering is a political issue beyond the reach of federal courts. Politicians — who draw the maps in many states — took the cue.
Across the country, states have drawn maps in ways that reduce the number of competitive congressional districts nationwide. Republican leaders in Indiana created a congressional map an expert called “one of the most extreme gerrymanders in history.”
Many states’ redistricting maps have been contested in court, with plaintiffs alleging that their state’s constitution bars partisan gerrymandering or contending that the maps discriminate against Black or Latino voters. Judges have ordered maps in some states, including New York, to be redrawn. Ongoing litigation in several states means that district boundaries could change for some voters again before 2024.
Districts for some state legislative, city council and school board seats have also been redrawn, often with little of the public attention that maps for congressional seats receive. Battles for the future of democracy are not restricted to statehouses and Washington, D.C. — they are taking place at city halls, county government buildings and school board meetings across the nation.
“Democracy isn’t just about voting rights, pulling a lever for your candidate. It’s the idea that everyone matters, that we’re in it together,” said Micah Kubic of the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas.
Fights over access to the ballot box raise fundamental questions, he said: “Who counts? Who matters?”
Record Voter Turnout and Conspiracies
Absentee voting surged in the 2020 election, conducted in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. States scrambled to craft policies that allowed more voters to cast a ballot without visiting a polling place on Election Day. When the dust settled, 2020 proved to be the highest-turnout election in 120 years.
“Voters responded to expansions in access in 2020 by coming out in record numbers,” said Common Cause’s Albert.
Falsehoods about Trump’s loss, many of which focused on mail voting and election results in racially diverse urban areas, became motivating forces for Republican candidates and elected officials at all levels — from Congress to sheriff’s departments.
On Capitol Hill, federal voting rights legislation stalled. Senate Democrats couldn’t break a filibuster to act on what President Joe Biden has called “the single biggest issue.”
Lawmakers in states where Republicans control all branches of government have run into no such gridlock. They seized on Trump’s rhetoric about fraud to pass a flurry of election-related bills in 2021 and 2022 that make voting more difficult.
“These changes are saying back to voters, ‘Oops, we don’t actually want you to vote,’” Albert said.
“This past session was spent on what I consider voter suppression bills,” said LaVon Bracy of Faith in Florida, a longtime voting rights advocate in the state.
In Virginia and Florida, Republican officials have created units to investigate and prosecute election fraud, an issue that is vanishingly rare in the United States. Florida’s election police recently made high-profile arrests of 20 people for voting with felony convictions, which the state allows in some cases but not others. But reporters quickly found major flaws, including evidence that state officials and even the head of the election police were involved in approving those Floridians’ efforts to register.
Beyond specific policies making voting more challenging, advocates fear that the headlines about arrests and criminalization of election violations will keep some people from even trying to vote.
And then there are the battles over mail and absentee voting. In places where these options have long been popular and uncontroversial, such as Utah and Arizona, the practice has come under attack by right-wing activists and elected officials. Republican legislators in Arizona passed a law to purge people from the state’s list of voters who automatically receive a mail-in ballot. They will now be removed if they fail to vote for two election cycles and don’t respond to a notice sent by mail.
Even proposals that haven’t become law concern elections experts. “We have never seen the number of restrictive laws being proposed,” said Singh, who tracks voting legislation at the Brennan Center for Justice.
The misinformation about voting has also upturned the lives of the professionals who run elections. Many have received threats and now fear for their safety. Others have quit.
“In that absence, you get the loss of institutional knowledge. But then you also have this void that can be filled by bad actors,” said Democracy Fund’s Patrick. “And that’s a concern by many election officials in the field: Who’s going to fill those roles?”
Patrick added that if the attacks on election officials continue, the profession could see another wave of resignations before the 2024 presidential election.
Disenfranchisement and Barriers to Voting as Old as the Country
Changes in state laws are written in language that is race-neutral, but their impact is anything but.
“Racial discrimination in voting has been a particularly pernicious and enduring American problem,” a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report stated in 2018. The commission pointed to voter ID laws, voter-roll purges, challenges to eligibility and proof of citizenship measures as “voting procedures that wrongly prevent some citizens from voting.”
Legislatures in states around the nation debated and passed precisely those types of measures in 2021 and 2022, often invoking voter fraud and election security.
The current wave of election legislation comes less than a decade after the nation’s strongest tool for battling disenfranchisement was gutted.
Previously, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 required jurisdictions with a history of discrimination in voting to “preclear” changes with the Department of Justice or a federal court in D.C. Several southern states, along with Arizona and Alaska, fell under the preclearance requirement. So did counties in states including California, Florida and North Carolina.
All are now free to make changes without federal approval because of the 2013 Supreme Court ruling in Shelby County v. Holder.
Many of those jurisdictions began making major changes to elections well before 2020, with Texas alone closing over 700 polling places. Recently enacted laws in states including Texas and Georgia would have previously required preclearance. Now they don’t.
“There is a direct attack on Black voters,” said James “Major” Woodall of the Southern Center for Human Rights.
Woodall and other voting access advocates say that the restrictive laws make their work even more difficult. Jerry Gonzalez of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials said the state’s 2021 law, SB 202, “leaves undue pressure on local organizations like ourselves that work to help people navigate the gauntlet of trying to cast your vote. It shouldn’t be that difficult to vote in our democracy.”
The Center for Public Integrity’s reporting documented inequities in access to voting and representation in every state and D.C., regardless of which party controlled state government. In some cases, voting laws are governed by state constitutions that date back to the era when Black Americans, Indigenous people and women were denied the right to vote.
In many Democratic-controlled states, Black and Latino voters wait in long lines simply to vote — sometimes because their communities lack the resources to open additional polling places, staff additional early voting sites or provide language assistance.
Yet our review also found that in states controlled by Democrats, and some whose control is split between the parties, voting has become easier. Kentucky opened vote centers, allowing residents to cast ballots at any voting site in their jurisdiction. California made 2020’s universal vote-by-mail effort permanent, while Connecticut expanded access to absentee voting.
Voting access doesn’t always break down cleanly on red-blue lines. Voting in the United States is in many ways regional. Western states like Colorado, Washington and Utah have long embraced mail voting, among the biggest equalizers in access to elections. In addition to Washington, D.C., the two states that allow people incarcerated for felonies to vote are in northern New England and among the least diverse states in the country: Maine and Vermont. Southern states, where Black voters make up a significant share of the electorate, and conservative Midwestern states have enacted many of the strictest voter identification laws.
But in the aftermath of the 2020 election, with a weakened Voting Rights Act, national politics are playing a powerful role in the rules determining how Americans do — and don’t — cast their ballots.
More than a dozen GOP-controlled states adopted bans on outside funding for elections. Money from the nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life was a lifeline for underfunded elections offices in 2020 but became the subject of right-wing conspiracies centered around its ties to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
“Those policies were being driven by a national narrative,” said the Campaign Legal Center’s Lang. “That came straight from the top in 2020, from President Trump.”
In Idaho, League of Women Voters President Betsy McBride said she’d never previously heard concerns about voter registration drives or people delivering absentee ballots for their elderly neighbors.
That changed after national Republicans and right-wing media targeted both. “This list of bills all over the country look pretty much the same, the talking points are the same,” she said.
The Idaho League of Women Voters fought hardest against a proposed bill, similar to laws passed in other Republican states, that would have made it a crime to “knowingly collect or convey another voter’s voted or unvoted ballot.”
“It was a felony with a big fine,” McBride said. “So it was clear that a lot of the work that the churches were doing and other groups was just going to come to a halt. We have a huge veterans home. And whether or not they have a living spouse is quite problematic.”
The proposal was passed by the Idaho House along with a slew of other voting restrictions, but they died in the state Senate, where a single Republican legislator, State Affairs Committee Chairwoman Patti Anne Lodge, refused to give them a hearing. Lodge did not seek re-election, and McBride worries that there will be no stopping similar bills next year.
In the coming months, the Supreme Court will consider Moore v. Harper, a case that could give state legislatures nearly unchecked power to set election laws — even if those laws violate state constitutions or create extreme partisan gerrymanders. If the justices side with the “independent state legislature theory,” it will open the door for further restrictions in voting access in dozens of states.
The court also agreed to take up Merrill v. Milligan, another case that could weaken the Voting Rights Act. If the court’s conservative majority sides with Alabama’s attorney general in the case, they could make it possible for states to draw districts in a way that dilutes the power of voters of color. That would gut one of the last remaining voting rights provisions of the law.
Advocates for voting access say their work has never felt more urgent. “It’s pretty terrifying how fragile our democracy is right now,” said Davis Hammet, the president of Kansas-based civic engagement group Loud Light.
Project team
Reporters: Aaron Mendelson, Jared Bennett, Karen Juanita Carillo, Gina Castro, Kimberly Cataudella, Ileana Garnand, Alan Hovorka, Lindsay Kalter, Robby Korth, Lizzie Mulvey, Pratheek Rebala, Hayley Starshak, DeArbea Walker, Jordan Wilkie, Peter Winslow
Editors: Matt DeRienzo, Jennifer LaFleur, Mc Nelly Torres, Jamie Smith Hopkins
Audience engagement: Lisa Yanick Litwiller, Janeen Jones, Ashley Clarke, Vanessa Lee and Charlie Hsing-Chuan Dodge
Fact-checking: Yvette Cabrera, Kimberly Cataudella, Ileana Garnand, Melissa Hellmann, Kristian Hernández, Aaron Mendelson, Corey Mitchell, April Simpson, Peter Newbatt Smith, Maya Srikrishnan, Joe Yerardi, María Inés Zamudio
Following the overturn of Roe v. Wade by far right extremists on the Supreme Court this summer, new polling finds that trust in the federal judicial branch, which includes the High Court, is at its lowest level in at least 40 years.
According to a Gallup poll published on Thursday, only 47 percent of Americans say they have a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in the federal judicial branch. This is down 20 points from 2020, and is the lowest amount of confidence that Gallup has recorded since it began measuring confidence in the federal judicial branch in 1972 (though there appears to be a gap between the late ‘70s and ‘90s in which the pollster didn’t measure this particular indicator).
Much of this distrust appears to come from disapproval of the Supreme Court. The poll found that disapproval of the Court is at a record high of 58 percent, while approval is tied with its record low of 40 percent, last seen in 2021.
The disapproval seems to stem directly from the Court’s decision to overturn federal abortion protections in the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling it handed down in June.
Forty-two percent of Americans — also a record high, according to Gallup — think that the Supreme Court is too conservative. For the first time in Gallup’s nearly 30-year history polling this question, the proportion of people who think the Supreme Court is too partisan has exceeded the amount of people who say that the justices’ ideological leanings are “just right.”
The polling follows other findings from Gallup published last month, which demonstrate that approval of the Supreme Court among Democrats has also hit an all-time low at a mere 13 percent.
Gallup’s findings demonstrate the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the decades-old precedent set by Roe establishing the right for pregnant people to decide what to do with their own bodies.
That the decision has hurt the public’s view of the Court is no surprise considering that other polls have found that most Americans think that abortion should be legal in most or all cases — and that the consequences of revoking such a right are dire and life-threatening for many.
Only three months after the Dobbs decision was handed down, abortion bans have already impacted people across the country. Children, sometimes victims of rape or incest, have been rejected for an abortion or have had to travel across state lines for the procedure. Meanwhile, people wishing to get medications for reasons other than an abortion have reported being rejected or having to leap through hoops to get their medication, even if the medication is crucial to keeping them alive.
Previous polls have found that the public is eager for Democrats to act to protect abortion rights. Last month, Pew Research Center found that abortion is now a top priority for registered voters in this fall’s midterm elections.
The Supreme Court also handed down a number of other right-wing decisions in this past session that may be driving distrust in the institution, including limiting federal regulators’ jurisdiction over the climate crisis, striking down a New York law regulating concealed gun carry, threatening Native sovereignty, and more.
The Court’s next session, which starts next week, has the potential to be even more consequential and could threaten the fabric of U.S. democracy, judicial analysis warns. The justices are set to hearMoore v. Harper; their decision in this case could completely undermine voting rights by clearing a path for politicians to nearly unilaterally draw gerrymandered district maps. The Court’s ruling in another upcoming case, Merrill v. Milligan, could potentially allow politicians to draw racially gerrymandered maps that discriminate against Black and Brown voters.
Other cases that the High Court has chosen to hear this session could result in the weakening of the government’s ability to protect the environment, the end of affirmative action and the weakening or end of a law that prevents Native children from being forcibly taken away from their families and tribes.
Lawrenceville, Georgia — One by one, the speakers approached the podium at the elections meeting to air their grievances.
One person asked about alleged “phantom” voters who may be registered in Gwinnett County, their community just northwest of Atlanta. Another suggested officials count ballots by hand to avoid fraud. And yet another questioned whether the results of the 2020 election, the most secure in history, should have been certified in Georgia — and then cited the penalties for treason.
“I highly recommend that each of you take your responsibility very seriously, because that time is quickly approaching,” that person said.
The dozen or so speakers were gathered Wednesday night to watch local election officials discuss the fate of more than 37,000 voter registrations in the county after a group of election deniers challenged them last month. Similar challenges have arisen in counties across Georgia, as people who have embraced debunked conspiracy theories about the security of elections deluge officials with questions. They are eating up time and resources as election officials — a workforce predominately run by women — are finalizing the logistics for November’s midterms in a state that is in many ways the center of the country’s political universe. The elections they are running here could determine party control of the U.S. Senate, and include a historic governor’s race and other key statewide and legislative races.
Most states allow private citizens to challenge someone else’s eligibility to vote, though the rules vary by state. In many instances, such challenges are related to claims that someone has moved from a county or state and so is no longer eligible to vote there.
Until recently, these challenges had been relatively limited. Now there has been a surge in some pockets of the country, fueled by conspiracy theories about the 2020 election perpetuated by former President Donald Trump. They’re brought by people who believe the lie that Democrats stole the last election, whether by having people vote places they shouldn’t or otherwise fixing the results. Multiple audits, investigations and litigation have found no proof of widespread voter fraud of the 2020 election.
“It’s all born out of the Big Lie,” said Vasu Abhiraman, senior policy counsel at the ACLU of Georgia. “It’s all born out of this idea that there’s something really inefficient about our election system that needs private actors doing this kind of stuff to fix. It’s born out of misinformation.”
Georgia has the potential to be particularly chaotic with its public challenges to voter rolls, according to voting rights groups in the state. A 2021 law, known as SB202, has a unique provision that now allows people and groups to submit an unlimited number of challenges to the eligibility of voters. The ripple effect of that on the state’s 159 counties, each of which has its own board of elections, is still being sorted out.
Dele Lowman Smith, chair of the DeKalb Board of Registration and Elections, said the increase in challenges to voter registrations has been “a huge headache” for the volunteer board and its limited staff. They have to review the challenges, consult attorneys and schedule hearings for the public.
“It’s been a burden to have all these unexpected and unpredictable meetings,” she said.
Smith said there has been no formal guidance from the state — either the secretary of state’s office or the state board of elections — on how to handle the challenges. She said election officials in other counties have reached out seeking help.
“Everybody has had to figure this out on their own,” she said.
Mike Hassinger, a spokesperson for the office of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who is also running for reelection this year, acknowledged some of the realities that officials are facing.
“The challenge review and hearing process can put a burden on county election officials, especially if there are a large number of them,” Hassinger said in an email. “However, county election officials need to continue to follow both Georgia and federal law regarding registration challenges based on individualized research.”
William Duffey, chairman of the Georgia State Board of Elections, echoed that the board is aware of the large number of recent challenges and noted they must be done in accordance with the law. He said the board may evaluate the process and basis for considering challenges “if circumstances dictate.” He did not specify how, but said it would include “input from all interested parties and the public to guide counties in considering proper challenges.”
This year, at least 64,000 voters have had their eligibility to vote challenged in the state, according to an estimate by New Georgia Project, a voting rights organization. As of late July, at least 1,800 voters have been removed from the rolls in Chatham, Cobb, Dekalb, Fayette, Fulton, Gwinnett and Spalding counties.
Aklima Khondoker, chief legal officer for the New Georgia Project, said most of these counties are in the metro Atlanta area, which are home to many people of color and helped boost President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to the White House in 2020.
Voting rights groups worry these challenges will disenfranchise voters in communities with large populations of Black, Latinx and Asian American residents. Gwinnett County is considered one of the most diverse counties in the United States.
“Unlimited challenges is a huge power to give people,” said Lana Goitia Paz, state campaign manager for the Georgia chapter of the national group All Voting is Local, an organization that advocates for removing barriers to voting. “Without providing any guardrails or guidance on that process, it sows a lot of chaos into our very overburdened system.”
The bulk of the challenges have been in Gwinnett County, where a group called VoterGA with ties to Trump allies submitted challenges in late August to more than 37,000 voter registrations. The group has denied allegations that it’s targeting people of color.
Garland Favorito, who leads VoterGA, held a news conference a few weeks ago at which he encouraged people to look into alleged voter registration discrepancies in other Georgia counties.
“Let us know, we’ll get you hooked up.… This is going on in other counties,” he said at the event.
On Wednesday, Gwinnett County elections supervisor Zach Manifold told the local board of elections that 15,000 to 20,000 challenges tied to the 2020 election are not expected to proceed because the registrations had been validated by statistical analysis.
Manifold said an additional 6,000 challenges had also been withdrawn. Election staff were still sorting the remaining challenges into various categories for further review. As election officials tried to determine when to hold a potential public hearing for people to defend their voter registration, they noted the time crunch: The deadline to register to vote for the upcoming election is October 11. They want people to have a chance to register if they’re kicked off the rolls.
Alice O’Lenick, chair of the Gwinnett Board of Registrations and Elections, was at the head of the dais in Lawrenceville on Wednesday. She told The 19th after the meeting that the challenges had been unexpected for the staff. But she believes staff could get through the work.
“It will be time-consuming, but we’ll handle it as best we can,” she said.
Khondoker called the debate Wednesday over the challenges a “zoo.” SB202 requires local boards of elections to hold hearings within 10 days of a challenge or face sanctions.
“What I heard was a very cautious board trying to navigate what it means to go through 30,000-plus challenges and figure out what each of them mean while they are trying to apply the correct code section of Georgia law,” she said.
The challenges are being challenged themselves. The ACLU of Georgia submitted a letter this month asking Forsyth County to restore the eligibility of the 300 voters that it removed or flagged from its rolls. Abhiraman said the ACLU is monitoring what happens next in Gwinnett County and how election officials apply the law.
Smith said she had big plans for the board as chair. She wanted to update internal systems to ensure elections in the county could run more smoothly. The voter roll challenges have made that aspiration more difficult.
Smith also worries what this law will mean for the sustainability of committed election administrators.
“It’s going to make it harder to fill these positions in the future,” she said.
Voting rights groups say it’s also unclear what will happen if private citizens continue to challenge voter registrations up until Election Day. Some impacted voters may be able to cast a “challenge ballot” that is then separated for review. The voter would need to return before officials certify the elections a few days later.
Khondoker said she worries others may fall through the cracks and be unable to register to vote if they’re kicked off the rolls. She urged election board officials not to remove voters from the rolls based on flawed data or speculation and to allow voters to at least cast challenge ballots.
“Bringing all of these layers of confusion to the system puts enormous burden on the voters and on the counties who are responsible for election administration,” she said. “And really, the entire nation at large is looking at Georgia and how they’re handling their elections as a battleground state.”
A controversial group of right-wing sheriffs that has spread false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election and propagated Donald Trump’s Big Lie is now vowing to monitor this year’s midterm elections through surveillance of drop boxes and a hotline for reporting purported election fraud.
The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) supports the far-right fringe belief that under the U.S. Constitution county sheriffs have extensive power that supersedes all other federal, state or local authorities. It has recently partnered up with a Texas nonprofit called True the Vote, which has peddled conspiracy theories about voter fraud. Now the two groups are promising to keep on investigating allegations about a “stolen election” in 2020 and also to police future voting. For election authorities and voting rights advocates, the combination is ominous.
This partnership provides an insight into the role the “constitutional sheriff” movement is playing in sowing doubts about the election process and monitoring how voters cast their ballots. Such efforts amount to voter intimidation and voter suppression in many cases, advocates say.
Having county elected officials spreading conspiracy theories “makes it more difficult to break down the walls of voters that we’re talking to,” said Natali Bock, co-executive director of Rural Arizona Action. “There is a cynicism that takes root when you have these outlandish stories.” That kind of “misinformation spreads like wildfire,” she continued, “and instead of just being able to present facts, now we are have to do a lot of relationship building.”
Sheriff Mark Lamb of Pinal County, Arizona, has emerged as a prominent figure in the movement that is lending law enforcement credibility to false election fraud claims. He helped found Protect America Now, a coalition of almost 70 sheriffs from different parts of the country who say they are working together to protect America against “an overreaching government.” In partnership with True the Vote, the coalition has raised more than $100,000 toward a goal of $1 million for grants to fund sheriffs surveillance of ballot drop boxes and an anonymous hotline for tips about voter fraud. Lamb’s office did not respond to Salon’s request for comment.
“Sheriff Lamb is the continuation of every other [form of] voter suppression that has happened,” Bock said, “only now it’s the more dangerous form because he carries a badge and a gun and is seated at an elected position of power.” Bock’s organization does advocacy and outreach work in Pinal County (which is south and east of Phoenix) as well as other parts of rural Arizona.
Lamb’s rhetoric is dangerous, Bock adds, because it may embolden other far-right extremists to the point of violence, which can endanger voters and election workers. There’s also the danger of perpetuating a “cycle of cynicism” among historically marginalized communities that have faced voter suppression, which may prevent them from participating in the democratic process.
“Communities of color are experiencing apathy around voting and the democratic process,” she said, before asking: “Is it apathy? Or is it the conclusion of generations of oppression?”
Lamb promoted his coalition’s partnership at a July rally in Prescott, Arizona, saying that “sheriffs are going to enforce the law… We will not let happen what happened in 2020.” A fervent Trump supporter, Lamb also endorsed a slate of election-denying candidates backed by the former president. Lamb continues to recruit sheriffs from counties across the United States, and has published ads defining his coalition’s mission as “fighting back against a liberal takeover.”
County sheriffs in at least three states have launched their own supposed investigations of election fraud, fueled by the right-wing conspiracy theories in circulation since the 2020 election. In Michigan, Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf has been under state investigation for allegedly tampering with voting machines. Last year, Leaf seized a Dominion voting tabulator from Irving Township and allegedly “tore it apart,” later returning it with a broken security seal, the county clerk told News 8.
Leaf’s lengthy investigation into election fraud has been fruitless, with the Barry County prosecutor finding no evidence of any wrongdoing. His is just one example among dozens of others launched by election deniers across the country. These efforts have failed to expose any instances of voter fraud, but voting rights advocates say they are negatively impacting voter turnout.
Law enforcement’s role in policing the election can dissuade voters from casting their ballots, said Sharon Dolente, a senior adviser at Promote the Vote Michigan. That “chilling effect” won’t just impact individual voters, but also entire communities, especially those that have historically been disenfranchised.
“There were many instances after the 2020 election where individuals who were questioning the result were only questioning the results specifically in Black and brown communities in the state of Michigan,” Dolente said. “I don’t think that’s an accident, right? I think that is a response to the political power and will those communities expressed, and it’s an effort to dampen that.”
Catherine Engelbrecht, the founder of True the Vote, has played a pivotal role in recruiting sheriffs, lawyers and conservative activists to the purported crusade against voter fraud movement. When federal and state law enforcement dismissed her group’s claims, she turned to county sheriffs for help.
Engelbrecht was featured in “2000 Mules,” a documentary by right-wing pundit Dinesh D’Souza that claimed to provide new evidence that the 2020 election had been stolen. In it, Engelbrecht made unfounded allegations about the widespread abuse of ballot drop boxes, charges she has repeated many times on right-wing media.
In July, Engelbrecht joined CSPOA founder Richard Mack, a former Arizona county sheriff, to announce their partnership at a training event in Las Vegas. Mack said that investigating election fraud was his group’s top priority, referring to it as a “holy cause.” He has also served on the board of Oath Keepers, the militia group some of whose members now face seditious conspiracy charges for their role in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
An extensive 2021 report by the Anti-Defamation League describes the CSPOA as an “anti-government extremist group” and outlines Mack’s extensive ties to “militia and sovereign citizen movements” and his associations with white supremacists. (He has said he does not share their views.) He has led training sessions on many occasions that the ADL says are meant to indoctrinate law enforcement officers into extremist movements. Some of those have been led by KrisAnne Hall, a far-right activist who believes that the 14th, 15th and 19th amendments are unconstitutional.
Although it’s too early to gauge the effects of this new far-right movement, Florida and Georgia have passed restrictive laws on absentee voting and the use of ballot drop boxes, two principal targets of Trump’s false claims about widespread voting fraud.
In Georgia, where Black and brown voters came out in record numbers, Joe Biden won by about 12,000 votes, and Democrats later won two narrow runoff elections for U.S. Senate seats. Even though Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has repeatedly said there was no widespread fraud in the state’s elections, lawmakers enacted sweeping changes to its voting law that advocates say are likely to harm minority voters.
“By creating these new bureaucracies and this new red tape,” said Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, lawmakers are “creating a cycle of voter intimidation.” This is “a relic of the past”, she went on, and too close to “what we saw in Jim Crow, with folks coming to people’s doors with guns and pitchforks, trying to ask, ‘Are you the registered voter here?’”
Her group has developed an election protection program meant to help dispel any doubts voters have about the election process and to ensure they don’t encounter barriers while casting their ballots. But Dennis says Georgia’s new law, SB 441, which authorizes state police to launch a probe into any allegations of voter fraud, worries her. Such unfounded allegations, she says, can create a “domino effect,” damaging voters “who are not in areas that are inundated with news and disempowering their voices at the ballot box,” Dennis said. “I think in Georgia particularly, [there] is a coordinated effort to purposely do that.”
Dolente, who has been doing voting rights work in Michigan for 20 years, strikes a similar note. Alongside efforts to restrict voting access for people from historically disenfranchised communities, she says there is also a coordinated effort to spread misinformation in these communities. But despite dozens of lawsuits launched in 2020 and 2021 to look for election fraud in her state, she said, authorities couldn’t find any.
“The system is safe and secure and the voters of Michigan know that,” Dolente said. “They can concoct as many investigations as they like and it’s never going to come up with a different result.”
From record inflation to attacks on reproductive rights, to an unfair and inequitable redistricting, it can feel like all hope has been lost this year. But many voters are not giving up.
My state of Louisiana has faced multiple challenges, particularly when it comes to the electoral process. Historically, we have seen literacy tests, brutal attacks on persons seeking to register to vote, the elimination of voting sites, changing polling sites without notification, and other efforts to deny and abridge the right to vote. We have experienced voter suppression in all its forms, including its newest more insidious form, racial and partisan gerrymandering.
In 2022, the Louisiana state legislature drew unfair congressional district lines. Voters, including those reached through my organization, the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, testified throughout this year’s redistricting process, which saw unprecedented, historic citizen participation. This fight then pivoted to asking Gov. John Bel Edwards to veto the maps. He did so, and then the legislature overrode his veto. we took our case to court in the Middle District and initially won. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s ruling and temporarily halted the drawing of a second minority-majority district until the high court rules in Alabama’s redistricting case in October. (A minority-majority district is one in which the majority of the constituents are racial or ethnic majorities.) Presently, we have one minority-majority district although Black population growth warrants a second minority-majority district. As our legal counsel has noted, the current congressional district “severely dilutes Black voting power by packing Black voters from New Orleans and Baton Rouge into a single U.S. congressional district.” We have been temporarily delayed in the fight for fair maps — but not permanently denied.
There have been multiple efforts to silence the voices of the growing majority minority. At every turn, and before every election, a new tactic has been introduced to abridge some voters’ ability to participate in our nation’s democracy. Democracy Docket summarized research detailing over 100 years of voter suppression in Louisiana — from restricting who could register, closing polling sites, limiting when people could vote, permitting felony disenfranchisement, the efforts to curtail access to the ballot in Louisiana have been ongoing. These barriers, obstructive as they are, do not alter our drive, our passion, and our hunger for pro-democracy action.
We have been deferred but we will not be deterred. In fact, more than 250 Black Louisiana voters to showed up at our state capitol during the opening of the redistricting special session on February 1 and 2 and to make their voices heard during the redistricting session. They filled the state capitol and showed that our community is concerned and engaged. Many voters came even though a second minority-majority district would not impact their part of the state.
All Black people are impacted by the lack of a second congressional district. A second person voting in their interest on key issues is critical. Moreover, a second congressional district would give Baton Rouge and the Delta parishes an opportunity to have a voice. This is important for a host of reasons, including the fact that Poverty Point (in the Delta) is the poorest place in the country and it is 80 percent Black. They have experienced a failure to thrive because they’ve not been a priority. It seems that this region is an afterthought given the current configuration of the districts. That is why all Black people understand that having multiple African American leaders in Congress would strengthen democracy and make it more likely that legislation important to Black voters, such as the John Lewis Voting Rights Bill, could advance.
While we have faced setbacks in our efforts to secure a second minority-majority seat, we are not without hope. We have not resigned in defeat. Defeat only occurs when we refuse to believe that victory is possible. Defeat comes when we refuse to fight, and in communities across the country, many people are fighting for a future for which our children can be proud. We believe better is possible and attainable.
This year has been tough, but we cannot lose sight of the progress we’ve made and the possibilities for our future. For instance, since 2015, my organization has focused on building infrastructure, celebrating many wins in the process, including:
Ensuring naturalized citizens could vote like every other voter in Louisiana;
Reenfranchising formerly incarcerated people with our founding and anchor partner VOTE, as well as a ballot measure ending the racist practice of convicting people with non-unanimous juries;
Expanding Medicaid, which provides more than 350,000 Louisianians with health care;
Expanding voting rights for the last two years as the rest of the country was going the other way.
But there are other wins which may not seem “sexy” but are incredibly important. We built trust through our advocacy work, created space for deep listening and the centering of directly impacted people and built momentum that will support our advocacy work in the future.
It is impossible to overstate that progress doesn’t happen overnight; it is a gradual process. We are working right now to prepare Black voters in the 5th District to elect their candidate of choice because this fight isn’t just about this year, but about the next 10 years. As we head into the 2022 midterm elections, we do not have to hang our heads. Freedom is a long game. It is also a perpetual struggle. We will never get to the point where we can shift into cruise control. That is not what our ancestors fought for — this moment requires no less than to hold the line on what they fought for and to continue to position future generations for success.
For nearly 10 hours on Georgia’s primary day, Olivia Coley-Pearson tracked down every potential voter she could find, working two cellphones as she paced the parking lot outside the polls, repeating the same message: “You need to tell all your cousins, your brothers, your sisters, your aunts, your uncles — everybody you know — to come on down here to vote.”
A third of her neighbors in Coffee County struggle to read at a basic level, and she wanted to make sure they had help navigating their ballots. In the late afternoon, she slid behind the sparkly pink steering wheel of her SUV for her final push of the day, heading down a long stretch of road where buildings gave way to fields and thickets of pine. She turned in to the Kinwood Estates mobile home park and stopped at the edge of a familiar dirt driveway just as Shondriana Jones, 30, bounded down the steps of a trailer.
“I can’t find my ID and Mama, she’s still at work,” Jones said.
Coley-Pearson has helped the family vote for years — she’s known them since she and Jones’ mother, Sabrina Fillmore, were young. Now 60, Coley-Pearson serves as a city commissioner in Douglas, the majority-Black county seat. Fillmore, 54, works at the local poultry plant cutting chickens. Neither Fillmore nor her daughter can read beyond a first-grade level, but they rarely miss an election, believing their votes can influence everything from their electricity costs to the way police treat them.
Coley-Pearson urged Jones to track down a utility bill to prove her identity at the election office just as Fillmore returned from a 10-hour shift, exhausted. With the women aboard, Coley-Pearson started the car, anxiety brewing in her mind.
Even though federal law guaranteed the two women the right to have someone help them vote, Coley-Pearson knew too well that this right was under attack. For all of the recent uproar over voting rights, little attention has been paid to one of the most sustained and brazen suppression campaigns in America: the effort to block help at the voting booth for people who struggle to read — a group that amounts to about 48 million Americans, or more than a fifth of the adult population. ProPublica analyzed the voter turnout in 3,000 counties and found that those with lower estimated literacy rates, on average, had lower turnout.
“How the system is set up, it disenfranchises people,” said Coley-Pearson, who blames Southern political leaders for throwing up hurdles. “It’s by design, I believe, because they want to maintain that power and that control.”
Conservative politicians have long used harsh tactics against voters who can’t read — poor, often Black and Latino Americans who have been failed by the U.S. education system and who conservatives feared would vote for liberal candidates. Some states have required voters who needed help to sign an affidavit explaining why they need assistance; some have prevented voters who couldn’t read from bringing sample ballots to the polls and limited the number of voters that a volunteer could help read a ballot. Time and again, federal courts have struck down such restrictions as illegal and unconstitutional. Inevitably, states just create more.
Over the last two years, the myth of election fraud, supercharged by former President Donald Trump in the wake of his 2020 loss, has fueled a barrage of new restrictions. While they do not all target voters who struggle to read, they make it especially challenging for voters with low literacy skills to get help casting ballots.
To appreciate the impact of voter suppression, consider that recent elections have been determined by a narrow sliver of the electorate:
Despite losing the popular vote, Trump secured the presidency in 2016 by winning Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan by a margin of just under 80,000 total votes.
President Joe Biden prevailed in 2020 by winning Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin by just over 40,000 votes combined.
Coley-Pearson recognizes the importance of this moment for Georgia, which is no stranger to close elections. Republican Gov. Brian Kemp faces another challenge from Democrat Stacey Abrams, and Sen. Raphael Warnock is attempting to hold on to his seat in a race that could tip the Senate back to Republican control. But to Coley-Pearson, helping people vote isn’t only about politics or even just about their rights as individuals. It is about the future of democracy at a time when it seems like the views of the majority are being marginalized by the actions of the few.
As a child in the 1970s, she’d watched as her mother, Gladys Coley — who stood just above 5 feet and had only an eighth grade education — rose to the helm of the local NAACP and challenged the discriminatory school system and police department. Her mother begged her not to return from college in Atlanta, but Coley-Pearson wanted to fight for the people of Coffee County, too. As she headed to the polls on primary day this past May, though, she couldn’t subdue her fear that by helping Jones and Fillmore, she was putting a target on her own back.
Over the course of several years, she’d become tangled in an investigation of supposed voter fraud, which took aim at her attempts to assist voters who requested help. She had pleaded her case to television cameras and at a hearing before the state’s highest election official. She had even wound up in jail.
“Intimidation is real,” Coley-Pearson said. “If we don’t continue to vote, they’re going to have us right back where it used to be.”
Coley-Pearson was born in an era when Southern states forced convoluted literacy tests on voters to keep Black people out of the polls. In those days, local voting officials often made exceptions for white people who couldn’t read. In 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act prohibiting racial discrimination at the polls. That didn’t stop white conservatives, especially in the South, from continuing to discriminate against voters with low literacy skills, who, due to centuries of oppression, were disproportionately Black.
Conservatives argued that removing barriers for voters who couldn’t read would allow the federal government to overrule states’ decisions on how to run local elections and would hand more votes to liberal candidates. Clearly, they said, voters with low reading skills would be easily swayed by anyone assisting them, leading to rampant fraud.
“Today the bureaucrats are issuing certificates to vote to people who cannot read the ballot nor even the instructions on a ballot or on a voting machine,” segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace declared in late 1965. “The left wing liberals need as many illiterates as they can get to vote in order to keep them in power.”
By 1981, voters of color, including those with low literacy levels, still faced “white resistance and hostility,” according to a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report. “For many minority voters, the kind of assistance that they receive at the polls determines whether they will vote,” the report stated. “If minority voters who do not speak English or who are illiterate receive inadequate assistance, they may become too frustrated and discouraged to vote or they may mark their ballots in such a way that they will not be counted.”
Congress amended the Voting Rights Act in 1982 to affirm that voters who need help due to an “inability to read” could bring someone, other than their employer or union representative, to assist them in the voting booth. A string of subsequent lawsuits shows this federal action again failed to eradicate the discrimination.
In a 2001 case, the federal justice department claimed that white poll managers in Charleston County, South Carolina, were intimidating Black voters who requested assistance. According to testimony given in the case, the poll workers launched a barrage of questions at these voters, such as, “Can’t you read and write? And didn’t you just sign in? And you know how to spell your name, why can’t you just vote by yourself? And do you really need voter assistance?”
A federal judge found that there was “significant evidence of intimidation and harassment,” but said evidence of the mistreatment was too “anecdotal” to take direct action.
In 2012, the chairman of Coffee County’s board of elections filed a complaint against Coley-Pearson and three other residents, alleging that they’d assisted voters who didn’t legally qualify for help. Georgia law only allows voters to receive assistance if they are disabled or cannot read English. The secretary of state’s office, then under Kemp’s leadership, initiated an investigation.
The following summer, a 52-year-old line cook named Alvin Williams answered his phone to find a state investigator on the other end. The man had questions about the 2012 election. “It looks like you were assisted by Olivia Pearson,” said state investigator Glenn Archie, in a recording obtained by ProPublica. (Archie did not respond to a request for comment.) “It’s not marked why she assisted you and I was wondering why you needed assistance.”
The tone of the man’s voice made Williams nervous. “Because I can’t read. I’m illiterate,” Williams told Archie. He’d dropped out of school at 16 to work full time catching chickens and selling them to the local poultry plant, a job he’d skipped classes for since he was 11 to help support his family.
“I’m sure she read the candidates to you,” Archie said. “Did you get to pick the people you wanted to vote for?”
“Yes, sir,” Williams said. “I can’t read. That’s why she was helping me.”
“That’s no problem,” the investigator assured him. “She can assist you if you have problems reading.”
But the call left Williams humiliated and fearful of how his vote could be used against him or Coley-Pearson. “I don’t fool with the law,” he said in a recent interview. “And I don’t do nothing for them to fool with me.”
Some other voters told investigators that they had requested and received help even though they could read. The investigation found that Coley-Pearson and the other volunteers neglected to verify whether some voters qualified for help and incorrectly filled out forms indicating why voters needed assistance. It also found that election workers failed to include required information on many forms and turned them in without making sure they were accurate.
Testifying at a 2016 hearing chaired by Kemp, Coley-Pearson maintained that she hadn’t broken any laws. In response to a poll worker’s claim that she’d touched the voting machine, Coley-Pearson said she’d merely accompanied voters who had requested her assistance and stood by to answer questions about the process or read names on the ballot. She said she followed the instructions of the poll workers, signing forms when directed.
“If someone asks me for help, I felt an obligation to try to assist if I could,” she testified at the hearing, stressing that she never told anyone who to vote for. Coley-Pearson suspected there was a deeper significance to the investigation and told the board, “Sometimes things are done to try to maybe dis-encourage, or whatever, other people from voting, and I don’t feel like that is fair.”
The state election board chose not to recommend her case for criminal prosecution, but a local district attorney’s office prosecuted her anyway, which made national headlines in BuzzFeed. It charged her with two felonies for improperly assisting a voter and for signing a form that gave a false reason for why a voter needed assistance. The trial ended with a hung jury. One of two Black people on the jury told a local reporter that she was the only holdout; everyone else voted to find Coley-Pearson guilty. She was tried again in a nearby county and, after about 20 minutes of deliberations, the new jury acquitted her of all charges. The district attorney’s office did not respond to ProPublica’s emailed questions.
Three other volunteers took plea deals in which they admitted to making false statements on forms indicating the reason that a voter needed assistance; in exchange, they got probation, after which any fines would be waived. One of them, James Curtis Hicks, said that if he had fought his case and lost, he could have faced jail time or a mountain of fines. He didn’t want to take any risks. “Around here, to me, they target the leaders, the people that are standing up for the rights of the minority,” he said in a recent interview. “To shut me and Ms. Pearson down, it would stop a whole lot of people going to the polls.”
For years, the 59-year-old truck driver had kept tabs on Coffee County voters to see if they needed help reading the ballot. But after the settlement, he stopped. “I didn’t want a focus on me to suppress anyone else,” he said. “I really felt intimidated.”
But the charges didn’t deter Coley-Pearson.
Before Jones could vote that May afternoon, she needed to get temporary identification. Dodging the pouring rain, she and Coley-Pearson scuttled into the elections office shortly before it closed. At nearly 6 feet tall, Coley-Pearson towered over the woman sitting behind a plexiglass barrier.
“She needs a voter ID, sweetie,” Coley-Pearson said, leaning in. The woman handed Jones an application.
“You need me to do it, baby?” Coley-Pearson asked softly.
Jones nodded, “Yes, ma’am.”
The woman at the counter emphasized that Jones had to complete it on her own.
“She has trouble reading and writing,” Coley-Pearson said.
After a tense moment, the woman agreed that Coley-Pearson could fill out the form. She read the questions out loud and filled in Jones’ answers, pointing out which lines to sign and date.
Jones is in the third generation of her family that is not able to read. Her grandmother never learned how, and her mother, Fillmore, left high school in her sophomore year, after frequently being disciplined for fighting. As an adult, Fillmore briefly attended an education program to help her learn how to read, but she felt discouraged and left.
Jones graduated from high school in Coffee County but says she reads at the same first-grade level as her mother. She remembers attending special education classes with more field trips than written assignments and says teachers never diagnosed her with a learning disability or gave her one-on-one assistance. School administrators also frequently suspended her for fighting, she said. “They were trying to get rid of me.”
Coffee County has long failed to provide an equal education for students of color. In 1969, federal officials sued its school board for refusing to integrate white and Black schools. Even after the school system was integrated, Black students continued to receive fewer academic resources and harsher punishments than their white peers. A decade ago, the district acknowledged its shortcomings in reading instruction and the need to rectify its problems with literacy, which were more pronounced for Black students.
The county’s lower literacy rate is related to its high poverty rate, and since integration, the district has worked to increase opportunities for students of color, Coffee County School District Superintendent Morris Leis said in an email; he added that the district does not use discipline to “push out” children who have academic challenges, and it has reduced racial disparities in discipline after it initiated a new program in 2014. By that time, Jones had graduated.
She aspires to learn how to read through an adult education program and to eventually work at a child care center, but she cannot do so without steady transportation. She has not applied for a driver’s license; though she could take the written test orally like her mother did, she hasn’t been able to find someone who has time to help her study the examination booklet.
Ordinary tasks are often insurmountable for her. She owns a smartphone, but mining the web for information is daunting. After she fell several months behind on her electric payments, she could not read the notice that warned her lights would be cut off. She likely qualifies for low-cost internet, but she cannot navigate the instructions for accessing it. When she takes her son to the doctor’s office, she prints his first and last name on the forms but asks the staff for help with the rest. Unable to decipher her most valuable documents, like her birth certificate, she entrusts them to her aunt, who can read and helps determine what she needs for appointments and applications.
Jones worries most about keeping up with her 4-year-old son as he grows. She can read beginner books to him, but she knows his knowledge will soon surpass her own.
For Jones, the voting process itself is like a literacy test. If she changes her address, she cannot easily update her registration. If she enters the polling booth alone, she may recognize a few names on the ballot, but any unfamiliar words could confound her, particularly when it comes to the often-confusing constitutional amendments. She prefers voting by mail, which allows her more time to process her choices, but Georgia’s new election law is making that more difficult. The law has banned outside groups from mailing out absentee ballot applications that have the resident’s information already filled in, and it has limited who can submit the applications on voters’ behalf. The law does include exceptions for people helping “illiterate” voters, but experts say its limit on assistance could still discourage those voters from requesting help.
“Any law that limits assistance is going to have an impact on voters with limited literacy,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, acting director of voting rights at the Brennan Center for Justice. “Whether or not that’s the intention of the lawmakers, that’s always a difficult thing to say. But I do think sometimes it may very well be the intention.”
It is impossible to say precisely what role literacy plays in voter turnout. There are many other factors that contribute to lower participation, including some closely intertwined with literacy, such as income and education level. But to put the importance of reading ability in perspective, ProPublica analyzed data on turnout from the three most recent national elections and compared it to average estimated literacy levels for over 3,000 counties. (Read more about our analysis, and the data used, in our methodology.) Our analysis found that if low-literacy counties had turnout similar to high-literacy counties, they could have added up to about 7 million votes to the national total for each of those three elections.
Across the country, people like Jones are stumbling through inscrutable election processes fraught with poor ballot design and rigid registration rules. Some are choosing not to vote at all. (Read more about how some states are trying to make voting more accessible.) “We know in general that the more barriers we put in front of people, the lower the participation rate,” said Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University. “Even if someone with lower literacy has the same desire to vote as someone reading this article, they have to overcome more barriers.”
In 2014, for example, Ohio legislators began requiring voters to fill out more complicated versions of absentee and provisional ballot forms while at the same time limiting the assistance they could get from poll workers. Minor errors in the paperwork could lead to people’s votes not being counted. In a lawsuit, the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless claimed that the laws disproportionately harmed poor, nonwhite and low-literacy voters who would be more likely to have their ballots rejected for minor errors.
Data submitted as evidence shows that thousands of forms were tossed in the 2014 and 2015 general elections for simple problems such as incomplete addresses and birthdays. Poll workers refused one form because the street name “Cuthbert” was misspelled as “Cuthberth.” Several others were rejected because birth dates were listed as the current date, an indicator that voters may not have understood the instructions.
In 2016, a federal judge struck down the measures, concluding they disproportionately harmed Black voters. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that state rules requiring perfect completion of absentee ballot forms posed an undue burden to voters. But the panel said the other measures were minimally disruptive and left in place regulations that limited the assistance voters could get from poll workers and the amount of time voters were given to correct errors on absentee and provisional ballots.
“What the case demonstrates is the indifference of officials from one political party, and of unfortunately many federal judges, to voting rights and to the need to make voting not only secure, but relatively unburdensome,” said Subodh Chandra, an attorney for the plaintiffs.
A similar law in Georgia suspended voter registration applications when the information on the form didn’t exactly match a driver’s license or social security record. (If voters didn’t correct the information within 26 months, Georgia could cancel their registrations.) When then-Secretary of State Kemp ran for governor against Stacey Abrams in 2018, his office suspended the applications of an estimated 53,000 voters, most of them Black, due to these discrepancies. Kemp won the election by about 55,000 votes.
Kemp press secretary Katie Bryd disputed the allegations and noted that Kemp had implemented automatic voter registration through the state’s department of motor vehicles in 2016, which added hundreds of thousands of eligible voters to the rolls. “Politically driven, irresponsible accusations of voter suppression alleged at Governor Kemp have been repeatedly found void of basic facts and validity,” Byrd said in an email.
Today, voters flagged for minor discrepancies in their registration paperwork can no longer be removed from the rolls, but they do have to show a photo identification before they vote.
As Coley-Pearson parked at the polling station, her thoughts flew back to a similar day not long ago when she wound up handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser.
In October 2020 — more than two years after she was cleared of the felony charges — she was standing in a voting booth helping a young woman with low literacy skills read a ballot, as is allowed by law, when the county’s election supervisor, Misty Martin, confronted her. Martin yelled at Coley-Pearson to not touch the machines and told her she was barred from returning to the polls. Coley-Pearson said she wasn’t touching any machines. “We’re done,” she told the young woman after she finished voting. “Let’s go.”
Martin, who also has used the last names Hampton and Hayes, called the police to report that Coley-Pearson was disruptive, and the department issued a trespass warning barring her from the polls indefinitely. Later that morning, when Coley-Pearson returned to drop off another voter, she was arrested in the parking lot and charged with criminal trespassing. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is looking into election interference claims in Coffee County, including an incident in which Martin allowed several computer experts connected with Trump’s efforts to challenge the 2020 results into her offices, where they may have had access to election systems; Martin resigned from her county post under pressure last year. She did not respond to ProPublica’s questions related to either incident.
The charge hung over Coley-Pearson for nearly two years; this past June, a state judge agreed to drop the case if she signed a consent order agreeing to follow election law. “There was no evidence of any crime here,” Coley-Pearson said. “It feels like you’re fighting a losing battle.”
Her daughters see how the last several years have worn her down. AiyEsha Coley said she would sometimes wake up at 4 a.m. to feed her newborn and would find her mother on Facebook, reading through disparaging comments. Her daughters have long campaigned for her to retire from city commission, scared that the stress might eventually kill her. She’s starting to come around, and she plans to leave her post next year.
Now peering into her back seat, Coley-Pearson worried her presence could interfere with Jones and Fillmore’s ability to vote. “I did not want any type of confrontation, I did not want any kind of accusations, I just didn’t want any hassle,” she said.
She told them she would not be going in with them and instructed two close friends to help them instead. “When you get through, you all come down there to the tent,” she said, motioning to where her volunteers were sitting out of reach of the rain.
Coley-Pearson watched the women shuffle into the building and fretted as she waited, leaning on her mobile walker at the edge of the parking lot with a group of volunteer canvassers. She had reminded her friends of the rules, but she knew that sometimes, following them was not enough. “They might try to look for anything they could use against them,” she said.
After nearly an hour, Jones and her mother emerged, beaming.
Coley-Pearson’s nerves settled, at least for the moment.
This episode explores two stories of fights over the right to vote.
Texas-based nonprofit True the Vote claims to have evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election—an idea Trump loudly echoes as part of “the big lie.” But True the Vote has never shown any proof. The lack of evidence hasn’t stopped the group from netting millions of dollars in donations. As reporter Cassandra Jaramillo explains, True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht and board member Gregg Phillips took home hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal loans and payments to companies they’re associated with. Despite this grift, True the Vote’s influence is still expanding. The group provided “research” for a new film called 2000 Mules that promises to expose widespread voter fraud—with no evidence to back it up.
The big lie sparked the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, an event that is now part of the nation’s election history. But this was not the first time that a violent mob tried to challenge election results. In 1898, a group of armed white supremacists carried out a coup in Wilmington, North Carolina, and seized power from legally elected Black leaders. The Wilmington coup created a blueprint for taking voting rights away from people of color—a legacy of voter suppression that the country is still grappling with today. Host Al Letson pieces together the story with help from the grandson of a prominent member of the Black community in Wilmington.
Recent years have marked a period of deep uncertainty and danger for the health of American democracy, and a new report reveals one major reason why attempts to protect democracy could be failing: the Senate filibuster.
According to a new report from Common Cause, the Senate filibuster has been at least partially responsible for blocking the passage of 17 out of 18 pro-democracy legislative texts that have come to a vote in Congress before the House or the Senate in 2021 and 2022, according to the group’s analysis of votes for each piece of legislation. The analysis was first reported by Insider.
The 117th Congress has considered a number of pro-democracy bills and resolutions, ranging from the For the People Act, which tackles dark money in campaigns and expands voting access, to the impeachment of Donald Trump, for his attempt to stoke a violent overturn of the 2020 election.
None of these bills have passed Congress, likely because they were either blocked by the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold or never came to a vote because of their likelihood of being blocked by the filibuster.
Many of these bills, like the For the People Act, have been hailed by voting rights advocates as crucial to bat off Republican attempts to suppress voters. Since 2021, and as of May, lawmakers in 18 states have passed 34 laws aimed at suppressing voters — many of which disproportionately affect voters of color.
Only one of the measures that Common Cause analyzed passed Congress: the Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act, which passed unanimously in the Senate and strengthens requirements for Supreme Court and other federal judges to disclose their financial holdings and stock trades.
“In the end, with high levels of support in Congress and an overwhelming outpouring of public support, Congress ran into one of the reasons our democracy needs to be modernized: the filibuster,” Common Cause wrote of Democrats’ attempt to pass the For the People Act last year.
Even if conservative Democrats Senators Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona) and Joe Manchin (West Virginia) had been on board with the bill and given it a majority of 51 votes, “the arcane Senate procedure known as the filibuster requiring super majorities just to debate an issue, prevented the Democrats from passing major democracy reform and voting rights legislation or the Republicans from considering negotiating in good faith to get to 60 votes,” the group wrote.
The report lends evidence to the argument that progressives and some Democrats have been making for years now: the Senate filibuster is an arcane and dangerous procedure that prevents lawmakers from effectively legislating against attacks on democracy, which currently largely come from the right. Opponents of the filibuster also saythat it is used to block climate action that is crucial to keeping a livable planet, action to stave off white supremacy, moves to workers’ rights, advance protections for abortion rights, and more.
In their analysis, Common Cause also tracked votes for various pro-democracy measures for each individual member of Congress. Of the 535 voting members of Congress, only 101 members earned a perfect score, voting for each measure. All 101 of those members were Democrats or progressives.
Soon, the U.S. Supreme Court will once again rule on whether multiracial democracy has a future in the United States.
The highest court is expected to rule on Moore v. Harper by June 2023, and the stakes of the case couldn’t be higher. If it goes the wrong way, this case could unleash widespread purges of voters from voting rolls, dramatic restrictions to popular early voting hours and locations, discriminatory barriers to voting access, and fewer protections against voter intimidation.
How we got here begins with North Carolina’s last redistricting case to make it to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019, when the justices themselves laid out a path for voters to pick their leaders — not the other way around.
Its ruling in that case, Rucho v. Common Cause, arose after North Carolina’s lawmakers put politics over people and rigged our voting maps so that, in the Old North State, Republicans would always come up winners.
I was one of the lawyers from North Carolina who argued the Rucho case in front of the court. We were joined by voters in Maryland who faced the same kind of manipulations from Democratic lawmakers.
In the majority 5-4 opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts told us that partisan gerrymandering was “incompatible with democratic principles” but that federal courts weren’t the place to bring lawsuits about partisan gerrymandering because it was a “political question” better left to the states. The chief justice told voters they could take challenges to unfair voting maps to state courts, tasked with protecting fundamental rights under state constitutions.
So, when North Carolina lawmakers in 2021 unfortunately once again carved up our state’s maps for partisan gain — disenfranchising primarily Black voters to give Republicans an advantage in coming elections — we asked state courts to intervene.
In response, the North Carolina Supreme Court issued a historic ruling, declaring partisan gerrymandering illegal in our state. The landmark ruling favored voters and the responsive districts they deserve and served as vindication for the hundreds of thousands of advocates who marched, testified and used their voices to demand fair maps.
Unwilling to relent, now these same North Carolina lawmakers are making a desperate bid to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking a majority of justices to betray the promise of Rucho and tie the hands of those who would seek reform on the state level.
In this current case, Moore v. Harper, my organization, Southern Coalition for Social Justice, represents the nonpartisan advocates at Common Cause, in what many are calling one of the most consequential voting rights case since Shelby County v. Holder (2013).
In Moore, North Carolina lawmakers, led by Speaker of the House Tim Moore, are relying on a fringe legal idea espoused by a handful of politicians called the “independent state legislature theory.” Using an illogical and ahistorical reading of the U.S. Constitution — already dismissed by the Supreme Court as recently as 2015 — state politicians claim they shouldn’t be subject to the checks and balances we all expect from 3 co-equal branches of state government. Instead, they demand unchecked power to draw Congressional maps and run federal elections.
Should five of the justices side with the lawmakers’ scheme, Moore would create a chaotic election system, pitting state and local elections against new federal election rules. Legislators would be free to violate voters’ rights, and state courts couldn’t stop them.
Specifically, this case could give state lawmakers justification to restrict our votes, draw rigged maps, and cast doubt on our election results — all in the name of partisan gain.
It’s clear that a bad result in Moore could disproportionately harm Black, Native, Asian American and Pacific Islander, and Latinx voters, but they aren’t the only ones at risk here — Americans of all races and political leanings would feel the repercussions of such an extreme outcome. Voters seeking fair representation through the checks and balances of state courts would suffer in Republican and Democratic states alike.
An extreme outcome in Moore is a lose-lose situation for Americans and it would only make it more difficult for voters to turn public sentiment into public policy. From abortion access and Medicaid expansion to closing the digital divide and expanding disaster relief and recovery, Moore would mean voters would have even less input on the issues driving us to the polls.
Those who oppose the threats to election integrity and democracy posed by Moore have joined together in a national campaign led by Southern Coalition for Social Justice and Common Cause to engage our communities, tell our stories, and organize hundreds of thousands of new advocates through town halls, rallies and voter registration. Over the next few months, we’ll educate the public about this full-throated attack on multiracial democracy from a few rogue legislators — felt everywhere from church basements to busy boardrooms to the neighborhood ballot box this November.
Over the last decade, North Carolinians have defeated continuous attempts to rig election districts, delegitimize our courts and disenfranchise Black voters. Not only did we beat back efforts to gerrymander our congressional districts as recently as 2019, but our people stopped plots to gerrymander judicial districts, pack our courts for partisan gain and pass racist barriers to voting access, like photo voter ID requirements. As in those cases, in Moore, we have a strong case to make with history, legal precedent and common sense on our side.
As the date of Supreme Court’s momentous ruling on Moore approaches, let’s all work together to signal to our elected leaders that people, not politicians, are worth the fight for multiracial democracy. That means having Congress pass comprehensive voting rights reform, such as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, so we can build an inclusive democracy where everyone in the U.S. can thrive, participate and have their voices heard.
Ahead of Tuesday’s primary election in Florida, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’s new Office of Election Crimes and Security made its first arrests of people it alleged engaged in voter fraud in the 2020 election. Almost all those charged were people who were formerly incarcerated and mistakenly thought they were eligible to vote. People of all political affiliations “are now being dragged from their homes in handcuffs because all they ever wanted to do was participate in democracy,” says Desmond Meade, president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, who spearheaded an initiative to reenfranchise people with prior felony convictions, before it was overturned by Republicans.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN:This isDemocracy Now!, democracynow.org,The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
We turn now to Florida, where the newly formed Office of Election Crimes and Security has made its first arrests of people it accuses of committing voter fraud tied to the 2020 election. The arrests come just as voters are set to go to the polls Tuesday in the state’s primary. The office was a pet project of Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who announced the arrests Thursday.
GOV.RONDESANTIS:The state of Florida has charged and is in the process of arresting 20 individuals across the state for voter fraud.
AMYGOODMAN:Many of those arrested were people who were formerly incarcerated. The state said they did not have their voting rights properly restored or were ineligible due to their convictions.
For more, we go to Orlando, Florida, to speak with Desmond Meade, president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, which works with returning citizens on restoring their voting rights. They’re helping some first-time voters hitting the polls for the primary. He’s also chairman of the Floridians for a Fair Democracy, spearheaded Amendment 4, which reenfranchised more than 1.4 million Floridians, but then Republican lawmakers overturned that. His latest book is titledLet My People Vote: My Battle to Restore the Civil Rights of Returning Citizens.
Welcome back toDemocracy Now!, Desmond. If you could start off by explaining what is going on? Who were these people arrested? What message was being sent? And go back to when you really spearheaded this movement, that got overwhelmingly approved in Florida, that returning citizens, as you say, formerly incarcerated people, can be able to vote again.
DESMONDMEADE:Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me on again, Amy. It’s always a pleasure to speak with you.
You know, when I look at this situation, what I see more than anything is that we’re in dangerous times right now. And I do believe that we’re at a moment where we may have to just shift some of our dialogue — right? — and engage in a more holistic and a deeper conversation about what democracy really means to us. Right? What we’re seeing here with these individuals who were arrested was the state actually crossing a line, and a very important line, when you talk about democracy and when you talk about criminal justice reform.
These individuals arrested was, in some way or another, given assurances by the state that they were in fact able to vote, able to register to vote. The onus is on the state to determine whether or not an individual is eligible or not. And when these individuals actually reached out to the state — or, in some cases, the state reached out to them to encourage them to register to vote — once they did that and they was able to participate in an election, guess what: Now they’re getting arrested.
And it’s very disheartening. You know, we’re talking about, just like in Amendment 4, we led this effort to enfranchise people from all walks of life and all political persuasions. Right? We fought just as hard for the person who wanted to vote for Donald Trump as the one who wished they could have voted for President Barack Obama. In these arrests, we’re seeing Republicans, we’re seeing Democrats, we’re seeing NPAs, that are now being dragged from their homes in handcuffs, because all they ever wanted to do was participate in democracy.
AMYGOODMAN:So, I want to just be very clear for people. You spearheaded Amendment 4, this historic ballot initiative that restored the right to vote to most state residents with felony convictions. Until then, Florida had been one of only four states — the others were Iowa, Kentucky and Virginia — where people who had committed felonies needed to petition the governor to have their voting rights restored — a grim 19th century legacy of, really, ultimately, slavery, of 19th century laws that passed after the 15th Amendment granted African American men the right to vote. But the Republican-dominated Legislature overturned that and said that people, like you, yourself, Desmond Meade, had to repay every penny of what was owed. Explain what that was and how this leaves — how do people even know what they owe?
DESMONDMEADE:Yeah, that’s something that we’ve been talking about for quite some time, after the passage of Amendment 4. It was a major subject in a lawsuit that followed the enactment of the legislation, the fact that the state does not have a centralized database — right? — to be able to ascertain exactly how much a person may owe, or give someone assurances that, “Listen, you owe so much amount of money, and if you pay that, you’re good to go.” Right? But —
AMYGOODMAN:And what do you owe it for?
DESMONDMEADE:Well, for outstanding fines and fees, such as maybe court costs, restitution, and all various types of fees that the Florida Legislature have allowed the courts to use to collect revenue to keep the doors open. But, Amy, I think that this really speaks to a deeper issue. And the deeper issue is, at the end of the day, if a citizen cannot rely on the state to determine their eligibility, if a citizen cannot rely on the state to determine how much they owe, then that citizen should not be held criminally liable. That citizen should not be drug from their homes in the middle of the night — right? — in handcuffs in the middle of an election.
And it’s very concerning not just to returning citizens, but over the last several days I’ve been receiving calls even from conservatives that are concerned about even the timing of this. You know, if there are people out there who are concerned about the raid on Mar-a-Lago two years from a presidential election, then they should definitely be appalled at what is happening in the middle of an election here in Florida.
AMYGOODMAN:So, why did they think they could vote? If you could explain that? What role did the state play, as you said?
DESMONDMEADE:They played a very important role. Let’s be clear: The burden is on the state to determine whether or not an individual is eligible to register to vote. If I believe that I am eligible to vote, I would go to the supervisor of elections, and I would fill out a voter registration form. The supervisor of elections would then take that form and send it to the secretary of state, where they conduct whatever investigations they need to conduct, they run it through whatever systems they need to run it through, and then make a determination as to whether or not I’m eligible to vote.
In the case of Alachua County, you had an individual who was approached by the supervisor of elections office and said, “Hey, write your name on a piece of paper. We’re going to check to see if you’re eligible to vote. And if you are, we will send you a pamphlet, and then you can go and register to vote.” Well, guess what: This individual, days later, received the pamphlet from the supervisor of elections office saying that that person can vote, and that person registered to vote.
At the end of the day, the burden is on the state. We go to the state, and we fill out an application, and the state needs to make those determinations prior, prior to issuing a voter identification card. And so —
AMYGOODMAN:In the end, do you think these arrests are just going to be thrown out, but what matters is the message that’s sent for tomorrow’s, for Tuesday’s primary, making people, perhaps over a million people, terrified to dare to go to the polls, because what if they’re wrong? What if they somehow don’t have the right to vote?
DESMONDMEADE:Amy, this is unprecedented. And what I’m concerned about is it’s a message that’s not only for Florida, but for this country. It’s a message that is really compelling us to have this conversation, right? And I’m talking about a conversation on both sides of the aisle. This is a time where we can’t be throwing innuendos back and forth, and really look at the deeper question: Is this how we want our democracy to be, where in the middle of an election American citizens are being drug from their home in handcuffs? Right? This is totally unacceptable. Right? And this is happening to both Republicans, it’s happening to Democrats, it’s happening to people that are registeringNPA. And so the timing couldn’t be worse than what it is right now. And if it can happen in Florida, it can happen anywhere in this country. And every citizen, no matter what their political persuasions, needs to be very concerned.
There’s also a criminal justice element here. Right? Removing someone from the roster requires the lowest burden of proof, right? And that is the preponderance of the evidence. But when you start talking about taking a citizen’s liberty, I mean, that’s the worst thing that you can do to an individual, is to take their liberty. The burden of proof, the standard of proof is at its highest, and that is beyond a reasonable doubt. Right? And a critical element to these charges is that a person knowingly and willfully registered to vote and voted. Right? In all of these cases, these individuals relied on the state to determine their eligibility, therefore there is no willingness or knowingly element that’s present. But yet these individuals are drug from their homes. Most of these individuals were interviewed by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and were not even aware that they were the subject of a criminal investigation.
And here’s the kicker, Amy. This list that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement is relying on was given to them back in July of 2021. And so, if the state was given a list of people who may not have been eligible to vote or to register to vote over a year ago, why would they wait until the middle of a primary to start making arrests?
AMYGOODMAN:Desmond Meade, we want to thank you for being with us, president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition — congratulations on your 10th anniversary — and chair of Floridians for a Fair Democracy.
As the Supreme Court prepares to hear a case that could fundamentally change how elections are run in the U.S., Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) is sounding the alarm about extremist justices’ apparent intentions to stage a “judicial coup.”
On Thursday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Moore v. Harper, a case in which right-wing plaintiffs argue that the North Carolina Supreme Court did not have the jurisdiction to strike down gerrymandered maps that gave the GOP undue advantage in state elections. If the Supreme Court rules for the plaintiff, it could completely undermine the democratic process and empower politicians to draw gerrymandered election maps nearly unilaterally.
In response to news of the Moore case, Ocasio-Cortez said that it is time for political leaders to take decisive actions to stop the far right Supreme Court from further eroding Americans’ rights.
“We are witnessing a judicial coup in process,” she wrote. “If the President and Congress do not restrain the Court now, the Court is signaling they will come for the Presidential election next. All our leaders – regardless of party — must recognize this Constitutional crisis for what it is.”
“At this point we should be well beyond partisanship,” continued Ocasio-Cortez. “Members of Congress have sworn an oath to the Constitution. It is our duty to check the Court’s gross overreach of power in violating people’s inalienable rights and seizing for itself the powers of Congress and the President.”
Just in the past eight days, the Supreme Court has ruled to: (1) limit the enforcement of Americans’ Miranda rights; (2) shoot down a New York law that restricted the ability to carry concealed guns in public; (3) wrench bodily autonomy from millions of Americans who can get pregnant; (4) allow public school employees to lead students in prayer; and (5) severely limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to regulate greenhouse gasses.
With the Moore case on the docket and extremist justices demonstrating their willingness to overturn long-held Court precedents, the Supreme Court’s next session starting in October is shaping up to be equally severe. Right-wing politicians have begun fantasizing about which rights they can target next since Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the Dobbs v. Jackson decision to overturn Roe that gay marriage and contraception should also be reconsidered in the wake of the decision on abortion rights.
In response to these rulings, Ocasio-Cortez has called for Supreme Court justices to be impeached. Lawmakers have accused at least three justices of lying in their confirmation proceedings; Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett all said that they would be willing to uphold precedents like Roe. Lawmakers say those three justices essentially lied under oath in order to secure their spot on the Supreme Court. Ocasio-Cortez has also called for Thomas to be impeached over his wife Ginni Thomas’s ties to the January 6 attempted coup.
“Catastrophic,” the New York progressive said in response to the Court’s EPA decision. “A filibuster carveout is not enough. We need to reform or do away with the whole thing, for the sake of the planet.”
Organizers of a Republican-backed Michigan petition to enact voter restrictions to combat would-be voter fraud missed the state’s filing deadline on Wednesday after discovering tens of thousands of fraudulent signatures.
Michigan Republicans are backing the citizen initiative petition known as Secure MI Vote, which would impose strict voter ID requirements, restrict absentee voting and ban private donations that help keep polling places open. The petition drive was launched after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, vetoed a slew of voting restrictions passed by the Republican-led legislature. Though the petition is ostensibly a citizen initiative, voters are not expected to see the measure appear on the ballot. Republicans have openly plotted all along to exploit a bizarre provision in the state constitution that allows the legislature to adopt a citizen initiative and pass it with a simple majority that the governor cannot veto.
Organizers had planned to submit the petition to the state by Wednesday’s deadline but abruptly backed down after discovering that around 20,000 signatures were fraudulent. Organizer Jamie Roe insisted that the effort had gathered 435,000 signatures, more than the 340,047 required, but said the group did not submit the petition out of an “abundance of caution.”
“The fact of the matter is our volunteers, our supporters had put in too much hard work for us to end up getting bounced off the ballot due to some technicality,” he told reporters at a press conference on Wednesday.
The announcement came just days after the state’s Bureau of Elections and Board of Canvassers disqualified five of the 10 Republicans running for governor, including frontrunners James Craig and Perry Johnson, after discovering that thousands of the signatures on the petitions they circulated to qualify for the ballot were fraudulent. The Bureau of Elections identified 36 petition circulators who submitted at least 68,000 fraudulent signatures in the gubernatorial primary, as well as in nine other nominating contests. Craig and Johnson argued they were victims of the fraud, not its perpetrators, but a court upheld both of their disqualifications this week.
Roe similarly argued that petition circulators victimized the Secure MI Vote effort.
“We would also be filing today if it weren’t for some people who tried to defraud the process,” Roe said while standing beside boxes of petitions. “This is all fraud – what we believe is fraudulent petitions. Petitions that were circulated by fraudsters similar to those who have victimized some of the gubernatorial campaigns in the state.”
Roe said he was not sure whether fraudulent circulators caught by the campaign are the same ones that were caught in the gubernatorial primary but said “I would bet that they are.”
Roe said the committee would turn over the petitions to law enforcement.
“There’s just a huge financial incentive to participate in fraud,” Roe said, “which is why it has to be punished.”
Other organizers who have led petition drives in the state took issue with Roe’s explanation.
“At the end of the day, you have to take responsibility for who you hired to collect your signatures,” said Nancy Wang, executive director of Voters Not Politicians, a nonpartisan advocacy group that successfully backed a citizen initiative to reform redistricting.
Wang accused the campaign of trying to “abuse” the citizen initiative process.
“They’re trying to use it as a way to do an end-run around the voters,” she said. “In fact, they’re supposed to be using it to demonstrate that they have a level of support, that they have the right to be on the ballot. They haven’t been able to do that.”
Roe suggested that the petition circulators had faked the signatures. But long before Wednesday’s announcement, the Secure MI Vote drive was plagued by allegations that petition circulators were misleading voters. Numerous reports on social media and in local news outlets alleged that petition circulators made blatantly false statements to Black voters while trying to convince them to sign a petition that could “risk their own disenfranchisement.”
State Rep. Amos O’Neal recalled his own run-in with a Secure MI Vote petition circulator at a Saginaw County barbershop.
“All he said was, ‘Hey, can you guys sign my petition? It’s going to help improve voting.’ When I asked him exactly what it was he was petitioning for, he couldn’t articulate,” O’Neal told MLive.
When O’Neal urged others in the barbershop not to sign, the petition circulator “became irate,” he said.
“He said — and these are his exact words — ‘You’re messing with my money.’ I took that as meaning, he’s being paid to go around — particularly in Black communities — to get signatures,” he told the outlet.
Voters Not Politicians launched a tool allowing voters to report deception or misinformation by Secure MI Vote circulators, and heard many similar complaints.
“We’ve been collecting stories from people who really have signer’s remorse,” Wang told Salon. “The accounts we’ve been getting are sort of consistent: Petition circulators have been saying, for example, ‘However you think about voting rights, this is just to put the question to the voters.’”
When one voter pressed circulators on what was in the actual petition, “they refused to say anything else about the petition, about what’s in it,” one account said, according to Wang.
“It just illustrates the fact that they don’t have any policies in there that they can publicly and openly and proudly discuss, even with the people they’re trying to get to sign. They’re playing this game where they’re trying to mislead voters into signing the petition.”
This trend has played out in several other petition drives as well in the Mitten State. The 2020 Unlock Michigan petition, which aimed at repealing Whitmer’s powers to lock down businesses, was plagued by allegations of forged signatures and misleading language. Petition circulators for the Let MI Kids Learn petition, a Betsy DeVos-linked initiative aimed at boosting funding for private schools, were also accused of misleading voters. Fred Wszolek, a spokesman for the Let MI Kids Learn campaign, told Axios that the group also did not plan to submit its petition to the secretary of state and would instead rely on the legislature to pass the proposal, “which was going to happen anyway.”
Wang said Wednesday’s announcement drops the pretense that Secure MI Vote is actually a citizen initiative.
“It’s never been their plan to qualify for the ballot. The reason they were collecting signatures was to give these voter-suppression measures to the legislature, which would pass them and do an end-run around both the voters and the governor,” she said. “This legislature has already passed a number of measures that are on the Secure MI Vote petition, and they’ve been very clear that they’re willing to use their power in an anti-democratic way to keep themselves in power at the expense of our democracy.”
Roe on Wednesday insisted that the group plans to submit the signatures to the Bureau of Elections “within a couple of weeks,” although since the filing deadline was missed, the bureau may delay the review of the petition until 2024.
“We hope that we can count on the professionalism of the Bureau of Elections to — when we do submit it — promptly go through and certify the results,” Roe said, adding that the extra time will help ensure “they are going to have no choice but to approve us and move on to the next step of the process,” which would be submission to the state legislature.
Despite mounting allegations of misleading or fraudulent practices by petition circulators, lying to get petition signatures is not illegal in Michigan. State officials have increasingly warned voters to be careful about what they’re signing.
State Attorney General Dana Nessel urged “anyone who is approached by a petitioner to carefully read and make every best effort to understand what you are agreeing to sign.”
Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson called on the legislature to ban petition circulators from lying.
“For decades we’ve seen Michigan citizens intentionally deceived about ballot petitions, and particularly our most vulnerable populations,” Benson said in a statement. “The recent increase in complaints demonstrates it’s high time for the Legislature to act to make it a crime to intentionally mislead a voter into signing a petition.”
Democrats in the state Senate have pushed to enact new restrictions on petitions, but have been blocked in the GOP-led legislature. Democrats previously introduced a package of bills that would hold ballot organizations liable if their circulators intentionally mislead voters, ban groups from paying per signature and allow voters to remove their name from a petition.
“Ballot proposals are critical for citizens to have a say in how our democracy operates, but the process is sullied when bad actors use deception as a tool to obtain signatures,” state Sen. Jeremy Moss, a Democrat who led the legislative package, said in a statement. “Petition gatherers should not be lying to the public to promote their cause.”
Those kinds of measures have drawn pushback from groups like the ACLU over free speech concerns, however, and Wang also expressed worries about the “ramifications” of legislation cracking down on petition gatherers.
“I think the solution is that campaigns shouldn’t be putting petitions out there trying to get signatures based on misleading statements,” she said.
Allies of former President Donald Trump sought to have voting machines seized by armed private contractors in the weeks after the 2020 election, according to new reporting.
As the Los Angeles Timesreported Saturday, draft executive orders dated December 16 and 17, 2020 regarding the seizure of voting machines appear to have started as an “authorizing letter” written on November 21.
The letter was written by “supporters on the fringes” of Trump’s circle to three people who were involved in the former president’s numerous failed attempts to find evidence that President Joe Biden’s victory in the election was fraudulent.
The document sought to grant authority to three companies — including two which were also involved in auditing the election results — to send armed workers to seize all voting machines and election data at will.
The letter called for the U.S. Marshals to be involved in the effort and for people involved to be armed “since most of the operations would be conducted under hostile conditions.”
The request “implies that whoever drafted this… views this as some sort of warlike event,” Christopher Krebs, the former U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director who Trump fired for affirming that the election had been secure, told the Times.
The Times reported on the previously undisclosed letter less than a week before the congressional committee investigating the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol is scheduled to begin public hearings.
The document is likely to be among the previously unseen material that will be revealed in the primetime hearings, according to the Times.
The draft executive order which was ultimately presented to Trump on December 18, 2020 by attorney Sidney Powell, former national security advisor Michael Flynn, and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne shocked government watchdogs when it was reported earlier this year.
That draft did not include language regarding armed workers from private companies seizing the machines and election data, but did call for assistance from the military.
Trump ultimately did not sign the executive order.
Still, the existence of the letter showing how the former president’s allies approached their efforts to circumvent the democratic process was called “chilling” by Krebs.
“You’re talking about issuing letters of marque effectively to a private sector organization to go do some sort of activity on behalf of that executive office of the president,” Krebs told the Times. “A private sector organization has no authority to go and seize state government equipment. The federal government doesn’t even have that authority, particularly in the context of administering elections. And we are looking at a document that says that’s okay.”
Aimee Allison, founder of pro-democracy group She the People, said the letter is new evidence that the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol when lawmakers were certifying the 2020 election results, was “a failed coup.”
